Pagerunner

It feels like I've answered this before, too. Good old Wal-Mart is where I go. I feel like the in-store price was significantly lower than what they're listed at online, but it's still not a ton to frame every poster. Quick note, the Allomancy and Feruchemy tables are just slightly too small to fill the entire window. If there's nothing else in, you see the cardboard back. I didn't like that, so I reversed the paper that comes in there, and added an extra white border. It fits well, but when one of them fell off the wall (because I suck at hanging posters), I had to pull it out and realign it. No big deal, just be aware that you need a trick for one-size-fits-all. (I think Constellations was a little short, too.)

Good questions. I'll put it on my list of things to keep an eye out for when I eventually do a detailed reread, whether or not living Shardblades dew up. Here's a crazy thought for you, though: Braize is farther away from the sun, and colder, than Roshar. Could Shardblades and Stormlight be drawing their power from splinters and Shards on Braize?

Update. I asked Kara if/when we were going to be seeing the star charts back in stock. Here was her reply: I assume this applies to the constellations, as well. Keep your ears to the ground, everybody...

Any chance someone can copy the text, for those of us whose places of employment block Reddit? (But, thankfully, not the 17th Shard!)

Yeah, I don't recall anything that explicit. We do have some quotes that say a Shard must Invest in a particular planet, but that's not quite specific enough to say that planets in the same system have different looking Cognitive Realms. Although, while I was searching, I did find some interesting WoBs on the subject. There is a threshold for planets appearing in Shadesmar, and they 'drop in' once there's enough of a presence on them. That seems to go against the idea that you could throw a piece of metal in the Scadrian system before there was a planet, and it would still glow, since there wouldn't be anything there yet. Planets also have something special about them Realmatically, but Brandon won't go into details yet. However, he might not be using the most precise language, like when he referred to Silverlight as one of Iyatil's home planets, before he had told us anything about Silverlight not being on a planet. I still agree that it is specific to the planet, don't get me wrong. But I don't think we can be dogmatic about it. And, ultimately, I don't think it goes against the bottom line of the theory. It is a very fun tangent, though.

Everything exists in three Realms. Here's a third option: I think it's the planet's Spiritual aspect that determines the focus, the Identity of the planet itself. Worlds without Shards aren't like Real-Life-Earth; they still have the three Realms, the inhabitants still have stuff like Connection, Fortune, and Identity in the Spiritual Realm. Some magic systems can leverage Connection to a region allows you to speak the language. I think the whole planet can be interacted with in the Spiritual Realm, and that when a Shard creates a 'bond' of a certain kind with a planet, you get a magic system (part from the nature of the Shard, part from the nature of the world). In the context of this theory, Ruin and Preservation wouldn't have just built the Physical component of this world, they would have built the Cognitive and Spiritual aspects of it, as well, which let them choose metal as the focus.

That's the question at hand, is that actually the case? Brandon himself hasn't spoke about Focuses; it's popular theory, and one that ties a lot of stuff together, but a theory nonetheless. Assuming it's true, we'll need to see if Braize and Ashyn have different focuses to confirm if it's a system-wide or a planet-wide phenomenon. If Voidbinding is actually of Braize, and the focus is still spren, then that would indicate that it's the planetary system, not the planets themselves, that determines the focus. (Or sound. I've also seen the theory that the Focus on Roshar is sound, that you have to 'speak' Oaths, that the cymatics of the various cities is integral to the planet's nature. Like I said, the very idea of focus is a theory, so there's a ton of room in it for different interpretations.) So, as a wise poster once said...

I'm not certain I understand the question. The focus wouldn't be designed while Shards are Investing in a planet; it would be an inherent part of the planet, even if there were no Shards there. (That much, I agree with you, although I think the phenomenon is catalyzed by planets themselves.) When the Shards 'built' the planet, they could determine its focus, but they would still have to select only one. To make an analogy, it's sort of like gravity. When Shards create a planet, they can choose it to be whatever size they want (to achieve whatever surface gravity they desire). It seems they modeled it after Yolen, specifically, at 1.0 Earth Standard gravity. They could have made it larger or smaller, but what they couldn't do would be have half the planet at 0.8 Standard and the other at 1.2 Standard. That just wouldn't work; to be stable, a planet needs to be round, and the gravitational constant does not vary. But is there a specific reason they'd create it at 1.0 Standard? So, the analogy is this: Ruin and Preservation still needed to create their planet with a single focus, like all other Shardworlds. (Universal law of gravity.) But they chose it to be metal (either through selecting an appropriate subastral, or through properly creating the Spiritual/Cognitive aspects of the new planet, it doesn't much matter to me) to be metal, because of how Shards commonly manifest as metal in the Physical realm. (Same way they might have created it at 1.0 Standard gravity to replicate Yolen's wildlife perfectly; intentional, but constrained by rules.) As far as 'Expanses' and whether or not they exist independent of inhabited planets, I'm not necessarily convinced either way. In Secret History, Kelsier saw strange plants growing when he left Scadrial's mists, so there is something going on in the Cognitive Realm in interstellar space. Furthermore, Hoid's term for an Expanse is a 'subastral,' which means something like 'below a star,' so the properties of an Expanse might have to do with the star, and not the individual planets in its system. Roshar could possibly give us more info on the subject, but we have yet to see the other planets in that system. (It's actually been a bit of contention as to where Ashyn and Braize are on the Shadesmar map. Lots of people have come up with explanations for which planets fit for the Expanses, but they exclude the other Rosharan planets, since we don't know a lot about them. Are they a Nexus, or a Sea? Are they one of the Expanses? Do they have beads in Shadesmar, or do they have a different phenomenon? I'm not sure we've seen enough for a definitive answer yet.)

It's a novel idea to me, that the cosmere itself has a sort of 'spirit-web' and planets tap into different parts of it for the nature of their magics depending on where they are. It's got a nice parallel with Hemalurgy, which shows how the Physical Realm can specify a specific piece of Investiture in the Spiritual Realm. I don't think it's entirely incompatible with this theory, though; we'd just need to say that R&P chose the Scadrian system because of its metal focus, rather than say that they devised the metal focus in the first place.

For most planets, that would be true. But key to this theory is that Scadrial is an artificial planet, created completely by Ruin and Preservation. So they could key in the planet's 'natural' properties to be something specific, like having a metal focus, to take advantage of a particular physical form of Investiture.

Now that you mention it, Amazon has a book description as well, which goes a little more in-depth:

I like it. Investiture manifesting in different phases across the Realms is something that's recently been of interest to me, (just like you've got metals/liquid/mist in the Physical Realm, maybe there are different 'spiritual' Phases; one form can latch onto SDNa to provide magic, while another form of Spiritual Investiture is the 'body' of a Shard), so I agree 100% that all Shards can manifest as metals. I like the idea that Ruin and Preservation specifically designed their planet to take advantage of this Shardic phenomenon, and how it makes god metals something unique to Scadrial (since we haven't seen that same phenomenon in other magic systems).

Sure, no argument there. (For now. I always reserve the right to argue.) But the point is that the Pits weren't the 'normal' state, that atium production was heightened because Preservation's actions against Ruin. I think that's one reason why the Pits don't exist the way they used to. (That, and I think the old Shardpool's are gone, replaced by Harmony's new one. But it's hard to prove a negative without WoB, so we'll need to wait to find out how many Shardpools there actually are on Scadrial.)

Check out the Broadsheets of SoS for a hint to Harmony's Shardpool; there's a story of an 'otherworldy monster,' which we now know is a Southern Scadrian using the pool to worldhop (some people thought it was a Parshendi, originally, but that description turned out to be a red herring). IIRC, it was described as blue, so it doesn't look like it's either Ruin's or Preservation's, but a new pool. It also raises the question of if the Southerners have their own Shardpool for worldhopping, or if they need to make their way to and from the pool by more mundane means. We don't know about where lerasium and harmonium come from (there was some in the well, but is that where it originally formed?), and the atium mines were a piece of Ruin that Preservation had hidden away to reduce Ruin's power, so it doesn't seem like a typical manifestation method of a god metal. I strongly suspect we'll learn the answers to some of your questions in the next Wax & Wayne book, tentatively titled "The Lost Metal," but for now, we're pretty much in the dark.

Can you go into more detail for your math? OP's math checked out when I did it. # of combinations ascended until I reached 8 Shards, of which I saw 12,870 combinations. (Just take a look at your proposal that there are only four 15-Shard combinations. But, we know there must be 16; each different alloy is excluding a single Shard, so you can define a 15-combo as a 'Ruin-absent Adonalsium,' or something like that. The pattern persists across all combinations that add up to 16; 0 and 16 reflect, 1 and 15 reflect, 6 and 10 reflect, 8 reflects with itself. (Ew.) Here's the detailed explanation for my math: For a double combination, you've got to choose two metals, one at a time. First one, you choose out of 16 options. Second one, you choose out of 15 options (because the first one is taken), for 240 options (16*15). But, then you need to account that the order isn't actually important; AB is the same as BA. So, you have to look at the different ways you can arrange AB, which is 2, so we need to divide our total by 2 for 120 options. (So far, so good, with your math. The technical terms are 'permutations' for order-specific, and 'combinations' for not-order-specific.) For a triple combination, you make three choices. 16*15*14. But, a combo ABC can be arranged in 6 ways (ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA), so we need to divide by 6 to eliminate all the many duplicates. That leaves 560 options. (Still good.) For quadruple, 16*15*14*13. Arrangements: ABCD, ABDC, ACBD, ACDB, ADBC, ADCB, BACD, BADC... well, I'm not gonna type them all out, but there are 24 in total. That math works out to 1820. (You're off by a factor of 4.) For 5, I got 4638, where you were lower by a factor of 12. The general form, for combining any number N Shards out of 16, is: (16!) / [(16-N)! * N!)], which is the equation that was provided originally, I believe. (The link isn't working for me anymore.) When we add up from N=0 (the 'normal metal' state) to N=16 (Adonalsiumiuim), we get 65,536 possibilities for each of the 16 Allomantic metals. (Which is why it's multiplied by 16 to get the >1E6 number.) Harmonium is already accounted for, supposing that harmonium-atium and harmonium-lerasium are not a thing. However, there is also a missing 'null state' that isn't shown: god metals that aren't alloyed with a regular metal. OP should have multiplied by 17 instead of 16 at the end, and then subtracted one for the no god metal and no regular metal.

I'm not convinced harmonium has alloys. It's not practical for an Allomancer to ingest, so maybe it's not a true 'Allomantic' metal, but just interacts with the metallic arts.

Yeah, I definitely want to support Brandon. But I'm not worried about him starving to death because no one is buying graphic novels (how does he put it? his house is paid off, his kids' college is already paid for, and he could retire right now if he wants to), so I don't feel bad in this case about sending a message through my purchasing. (The Mistborn RPG people, however, I'm a little more hesitant to pull the plug on. I'm not thrilled with what they've put out so far or the way they've handled some of their production obstacles, but I've given them one last chance to wow me with House War. If I feel let down by it, I'll stop purchasing their stuff, as well. It's hard to say that nothing is better than something that's low quality, but it's the only small influence I've got over these kinds of decisions.)

Objection! Without the Shard in question actively Investing in Scadrial, it's possible that a god metal is Allomantically inert. So, because Honor is on Roshar, an Allomancer burning a piece of a Shardblade might give you nothing at all, and same for all potential 'Tanavastium' alloys. Furthermore, we suppose that we have seen a new god metal on Scadrial in Shadows of Self. But, its Hemalurgic properties appear very similar to atium's. So, maybe the different god metals don't all do different things. And also, there is a distinct possibility that an alloy of god metals does not itself have alloys with regular metals. I speculate that harmonium is a nuclear combination of atium and lerasium, not an atium/lerasium alloy, but we don't even know if harmonium alloys exist. So, while the mathmatical potential is indeed there for an obscene amount of metals and alloys, I say we'll need to think much smaller than that. Brandon says the actual number of metals is closer to 50. But it can be a fun avenue to explore, although I wouldn't want to try to figure out over a million different powers. (Oh, and then you need to triple that for Feruchemy and Hemalurgy.) Oh, and by the way, welcome to the Shard!

No, there hasn't been anything revealed other than "eventually." Brandon talked about it briefly, back when the Allomancy chart was first released (he said he had plans to do Feruchemy and Hemalurgy once we knew more about them). There are still a lot of mysteries involving Hemalurgy, and we haven't been learning very much about it at all in the recent Mistborn books, so that's probably why he's held off. Best guess I can make, it will be published during the third planned Mistborn trilogy, which Brandon aims to write after Stormlight 5, which puts us almost 10 years away. So, I wouldn't worry about saving space on your wall for it; it'd be better to rearrange once it finally goes up for sale. (Although, you could fill the space with a nice Luthadel map, which was redone for the leatherbound and then made available as a poster, if you don't already have it somewhere.)

An Elend figure seems a little easier to come up with, since he doesn't need a mistcloak or anything that unique. I know of one company that's working on a Vin miniature: @Crafty Games unlocked it as a stretch goal for their Mistborn: House War Kickstarter. I don't think it will be out by April, unfortunately, and it will be less than an inch and a half tall, which might be a little shorter than what you're looking for. But, hey, there's no harm in heading over to their website and asking them if they'd be able to help you out in any way. Weddings are a good trump card when it comes to asking favors.

The prologue predates anything else we've seen written in the cosmere. Original Mistborn occurred 300 years before Stormlight (meaning Alendi's journey was only 1300 years before Stormlight, still 3200 years after the WoK prologue), and Elantris was less than a thousand years before Mistborn. White Sand was even before Elantris, but I'm not sure how much farther, but I doubt it was while the Heralds were still active. Some facts and assumptions that I think we can glean about the state of the overall cosmere at that time: Nearly all Shardworlds worlds had humans before the arrival of the Shards (with the exception of Scadrial, and one other world), so there were civilizations on all the planets. Shards were Investing in planets by the time Odium was trying to kill them (Aona/Skai in Sel, probably Ambition was Invested in a Threnodite world), so there were probably some early worldhoppers (since, for now, Perpendicularities are required for Worldhopping, so no one could have worldhopped until Shards began to visit planets). It's possible that Silverlight had been founded by this point, since Khriss was aware of where Ambition and Odium battled. I lean towards no on that front, but I'll admit it's a possibility. Depending on how long the Desolations lasted before the Heralds abandoned the Oathpact, it's possible that the people of Threnody and Sel were still dealing with ramifications from the destruction of their Shards. (This isn't the Chasm on Sel or the Evil on Threnody; those are both much more recent occurrences, so they're not direct effects of Odium's attacks. It's debatable whether they're long-term results.) The Terris people on Scadrial had prophecies about the Hero of Ages; I suspect they might go all the way back to before Preservation's betrayal, but we don't know exactly how many people held the power of the Well. Frost, a dragon from Yolen and apparently a very powerful individual, has taken an oath of non-interference. He has invited at least one other powerful person (Hoid) to join that oath, so it's possible that most of the truly cosmere-aware from this time, those from Yolen, are intentionally avoiding connections between planets. But, overall, since what we've seen of those worlds doesn't show much public connectivity in the present timeline, I don't think there was anything too crazy happening across the entire cosmere as a result of the Desolations. The worlds were most likely all doing their own thing, growing as civilizations, learning magic, fighting wars, and worrying about their own business..

Amazon lists White Sand, Vol 2, for sale on July 11, 2017. I'm not actually sure if I'm going to purchase this one. I did not enjoy the experience of the first graphic novel, and there were several large errors (sand behavior, speech bubbles) that made it difficult to participate in the community having only read the first graphic novel. So, I requested the prose form, and enjoyed it much more. The most effective way for consumers to speak is through their wallets, so I'm considering not purchasing further cosmere graphic novels (not a boycott, mind you, which wouldn't be about the product itself) to communicate that I would rather not see this style of adaptations (where the graphic novel is the canon experience) in the cosmere going forward. We'll see if my convictions hold come July, but I think that since I've got the manuscript, I'll be able to resist giving in.

Aon Ati was drawn from the name of a real-life person, 'cause it's the only combination of letters that fit the Aon linguistic pattern. The short story with Matisse was written while Brandon was working on Mistborn 2, so he had already named atium (and therefore Ati).

There's also an Aon Ati, which has no connection to the former vessel of Ruin. Sometimes, stuff just sounds similar - Brandon makes up a lot of words, and there are only 26 letters to work with.

Double-Posted Topic: 1 and 2. Error message in this thread.(No double-post, but I did see the "you can't post that often" error message when I added my reply.) EDIT: Also, it's doing it in this very thread.