Pagerunner

There's a google doc being put together now with a transcription, but it's not complete as of yet. Here's the post with the link: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/53640-jordancon-this-year/?p=435666. It's good to get official confirmation - that's what I had suspected, since of the four Spiritual Feruchemical powers, Investiture was definitely present in other magic systems, and we have seen pieces of Identity (Breath) and Connection (Soultstamps) on other worlds, as well. I wonder if Fortune has to deal with mucking with probability. It's not an unexplored concept outside of the cosmere; the main characters in Wheel of Time (expecially Mat) would alter reality around them, making unlikely events more common and things like that. For a different example, in Bionicle, there was a mask that would let the user change the probability of an event from happening. So, it wouldn't be retroactively changing the past, but altering the likelihood going forwards. (What are the odds of there being a 20-dollar bill in this jacket pocket when I reach my hand in? Statistics aggregate many different instances: for your particular jacket, there's either one there or there isn't. Whether or not there's anything in your pocket has already been determined by the universe - unless you're wearing Schroedinger's Jacket. But buy a lotto ticket with that 20 bucks, and the future is in motion. What's the chance that your numbers will be drawn later that night? Fortune could change the drawing when it happened, so it would be more favorable to you.) I think it's interesting that the Ire used the phrase "drawing on Fortune," which sounds close to the Feruchemical terminology of "tapping Fortune." Makes me think that Fortune will act similar to Feruchemical Fortune, no matter where you are in the Cosmere.

Sorry for the double post, but I finally got a chance to go to Wal-Mart today. There were $10 frames, 18x24. Roshar map fits perfectly, although the top margin of mine is much shorter than the bottom margin, so I might wind up trimming that up at some point. Allomancy/Feruchemy charts would show about an inch of cardboard on each side if there's nothing behind them; I just flipped the insert the frame came with for a white background, which gives them a border that looks just like the Roshar one.

Here's a Brandon quote on the subject: Source: http://theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=622#107

Here's something from an interview that I found relevant to this conversation:

You know, we were just talking about something similar in another thread. I think you need to look at bigger parameters when discussing Preservation and Ruin - they are looking at the context of life and civilization on Roshar, not just individuals. Here's how I phrased it in the other topic: The Intent of Preservation isn't saving things for later, like strawberry preserves (which I have on my sandwich today for lunch, incidentally). It's a slightly different sense of the word, more like maintaining the universe. As any IT technician would tell you, there is work required for ongoing maintenance of a network or server - it takes work to 'preserve' the integrity of the company's computer system. Think of Scadrial as a system, and the Shards are using Investiture to maintain it. Preservation wants life on Scadrial to never stop, so it needs a constant influx of Investiture through Allomancy. Ruin wants life to end as soon as possible (first it was at the agreed-upon time, and after he was betrayed it was as soon as he could escape), so Hemalurgy removes Investiture from the system. Feruchemy just rearranges when you are getting the Investiture; it doesn't put it into the world or take it out of the world, so it doesn't match with just one of the Shards.

I just bought them last month myself, and haven't had a chance to go look for frames, either. I was just gonna go to Wal-Mart. It's a two-pack for 15 bucks. It will be Wal-Mart quality, though (but hey, you get what you pay for).

I thought half of the Vo-Dari had Illuminous (the 'public' Vo-Dari) and half had Night (the ones who were in the secret rooms). We never see the Patriarch use Illuminous; he can't, because he was from Amberite and had bonded Night.

Welcome to the forums! I can point you towards the Theoryland collection of Brandon quotes, where we have one that says Hoid is not a Shard, to answer your specific question. I'd encourage you to take a nice, long look through the interview database; there is a lot of information that was never released in the books, only in interviews, that is really eye-opening.

What is the spoiler policy for this forum? Is under the Cosmere Theories, no-spoiler-tags umbrella? Is it treated like a regular book sub-forum, where we're supposed to tag spoilers for all other series (a.k.a. everything that has actually been published)? I'm asking specifically about how to tag Secret History info.

Decay was an early version of Ruin, as officially confirmed here by Peter: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/21542-the-status-of-aether-of-night/. When Brandon was building Mistborn: The Final Empire out pieces of his unpublished works, he took Decay and the war-between-Shards and turned it into Ruin and the conflict with Preservation.

It's in there - you should double-check your spelling, or make sure it's not case-sensitive. If you've opened it up in your email client (like I did), you may need to wait until the entire document has loaded, or download a copy and open it in a word processor.

The password is just a fill-in-the-blank for a line from the book. If you look in the Unpublished Works forum (which is what the Aether sub-forum is in), you can find it in the description. Simply open up your copy of Aether, search for the passage given, and use the missing words as the password.

I don't feel that quote absolutely disqualifies the theory; at the end of his answer, Brandon even states that "each symbol is a metal," which seems to support what OP is saying. He describes why the alphabet needs more than 16 symbols, and why the in-universe inhabitants accept that not all of these symbols correspond to a metal. He does not go so far to say that the creator of the alphabet started with the 16 metal symbols, added the god metals and malatium, and then made more up because there were still more sounds. Brandon explains the current significance, not the origin. A subtle distinction, but an important one. EDIT: I've been trying to find a similar situation to compare to. (There's one floating at the edge of my mind where someone finally uncovered a long-time secret Brandon has been waiting for someone to find, but he didn't want to give blatant hints, about it. I can't quite remember what it was, though... it might have been Secret-History related.) Best I can come up with is Trell. He was mentioned in the original trilogy, and then after Way of Kings people began asking about perceived similarities between it and the Purelake religion. Brandon used the occasion to talk about similarities in religions that naturally arise on Shardworlds, like similarities between Nalthis and another Mistborn religion, but he didn't start dropping hints like "Pay close attention to Trell, it has significance to the future of the Mistborn series." That's what I think was happening here - a question was close to a deeply buried secret, so Brandon talked about in-universe linguistics instead. Just because his reply wasn't "Oh, there are more secret metals you haven't seen yet" doesn't mean that there aren't more secret metals we haven't seen yet. EDIT2: Here's another one, with BoM spoilers.

Actually, it was written after Elantris, White Sand Prime, and Dragonsteel Prime, so I think he had the mechanics of the Cosmere down fairly well at that point.

It looked to me like the Former was an early analogue to Preservation ("One who Forms," not "The First"). His power was split into two parts, however, in Chaos and Order, both essential parts of any creation. Each had their own separate Shardpool, and each had separate Aethers come from them. It seems like Agaris and Makkal were Slivers, who had held some of the Former's power, but didn't hold the Shards themselves. One used Chaos, the other Order, but they went by different names. If they were literally the Former's sons, then they might be from Yolen, and their lives were preserved by their nature as Slivers. While they were imprisoned within the wells, they could behave SH Spoilers: But then, at the end of the book, they were returned as mortals, as men in physical bodies - makes me think they haven't Ascended to be full Shards, just Slivers like the Lord Ruler or Vin.

Even a two-line explanation like that gets in the way of explaining the game, in my mind, since you have to get the players to engage with the story behind the game for the gameplay to make sense. You have mechanics that are built off the setting, so for players to understand how the game works, they need to understand the world it's set in. If I'm there to play a game, I don't care about the world; it's unnecessary information that will just get in the way of the gameplay. Like the Vin card - there's an extra connection the players need to make (Vin, she's a powerful rebel, if we don't deal with her she's gonna kill the Lord Ruler, that's where the game ends) that wouldn't be necessary if the card were phrased more generically (Open Revolt, if we don't deal with it that's where the game ends). Mithril, as I've seen it used in games and such, tends to be tacked on to the mechanics to say why an item is more powerful. (This mithril sword is more powerful than that crummy steel sword.) You don't need to know what mithril is to understand the mechanics of how it works; it's a thing that's more powerful than other things, nothing crazy about that. Why atium is a unique resource, or why there are challenges about tons of ash falling from the sky, or why there are shapeshifters running around, will most likely require an explanation of the setting to understand why the rules are the way they are. I saw something similar with Crafty Games' RPG, as well, with a total info-dump on the players about kandra, Allomancers, Feruchemists, Hemalurgy, ashfalls, nobles, skaa, Terris, all incorporated into the mechanics and essential to understanding the Core Rulebook. It makes it great for those who are already fans, but I know I won't be able to get my friends into it without some serious cutbacks of the setting and magic. I had a hard enough getting some of these guys to do a D&D Dungeon Crawl, even though D&D is designed to be archetypical and accessible, since they were struggling with comprehending all the rules involved. There's no way I would want to dump required info about setting on them, as well; it would just be too much to take in. The Mistborn world is different and unique, and it took Brandon a whole book to set it up adequately. And there isn't really any space to play outside the Final Empire, with its obligators and class structures, so I was working on setting something in an outer Dominance, where we could ignore the social and political structures, and limiting the magic to 8 Misting options or a full Feruchemist with those 8 metals, so it would take a minimum of 'homework' for the new players to get into character. (Alloy of Law expansion is a real game-changer, though; a much more accessible setting, Ferrings and Twinborn which means players will only have to learn one or two magical abilities. A very good move, and I think they should rewrite the Core Rulebook with that setting in mind.) A game, whether a roleplaying system or a board game, should be able to stand on its own mechanically. I've played Star Wars, Firefly, and Wheel of Time RPGs with people who had never watched/read them, and they were able to understand the system and build characters even if they didn't understand the world. (In the Wheel of Time campaign we were playing, my brother played a character who came from an undiscovered group of islands. His character had no idea how the world worked, which was fine because neither did the player. But he was still able to be a major contributor, shooting stuff and lying to people and literally stabbing another player in the back [ruh roh], because he could just skip the section on The One Power and build a character anyways.) The Mistborn RPG is not such a case, and it's not designed to be; despite what the introduction says, it assumes that you know about the world. I think that's a bad business plan, since it limits who will be interested in playing. And if a group in a comic store sees House War on a shelf and tries it, they have to learn about the world it's set in... but if that's what they wanted to do, they would be reading the books instead. They want to play games! It will make the game take longer to learn, and will be less likely to get new players excited about it. Now, if I want to play any Crafty Games Mistborn products with my friends, I could just tell them, "Read this book, and then we'll play a game based on the book." But they're not interested in reading books, they're interested in playing games. I can't force them to want to get into Mistborn. We'll just wind up playing Dominion or Small World or 7 Wonders, where the gameplay stands on its own. I'm concerned Crafty Games is making board games designed for Mistborn readers, not for board game players. It's kind of like all the different Monopoly versions, which don't sell well because they are good games, but because people like Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Chihuahuas/whatever. Anyways, that's a lot of shade for something for which I've only seen a few pictures of a prototype. It's possible they'll knock it out of the park, and that my friends will love the game and won't have to learn the names. I know there have been some major delays in the development, so maybe they've been addressing issues like this. But if it's a flop, then I may have to reconsider buying Crafty Games products; I was less than impressed with the inconsistent Allomancy dice manufacturing, and I've already expressed my issues with the RPG. They need a big win, and I really hope this is it.

I'm hoping the game is not inaccessible to those who aren't Cosmere fans. From the older previews, they're name-dropping specific terms from the books - Vin as a major event who signals the end of the game, atium as a resource that only House Venture can produce. I'm concerned that I'll have a hard time explaining it to my gaming group, if the rules of the game are too tied up in the story and setting. (No one I play board games with has read Mistborn.) Which is a shame, because we've had a lot of fun playing Diplomacy, a WWI war game where seven players form "alliances" (mine rarely lasted until the end of the turn they were made), where players are simultaneously working together and at cross-purposes. But in a case like that, you never have to explain what "atium" is, why it's rare, and why only one House can get it. There was another game I recently played that used somewhat similar concepts in a zombie apocalypse, where each player controlled small teams of survivors. You needed to work together to achieve a common goal, but each player had a secret goal as well. (One player's secret goal was sometimes to sabotage the common goal.) It was interesting in concept, but I think it suffered from a couple major flaws. (Lots of cardboard pieces - a long set-up time. Also, anytime one of your survivors did anything, they had a 1/12 chance of being instantly eaten by zombies. My team, of course, lost 6 people in 9 rolls. Dice are not my friends.)

I like the idea; those four extra symbols have bothered me for some time, and never seemed to make sense as just being extra letters for the alphabet. Their designs are simple, very similar to cadmium/bendalloy, and they follow after them in the order of chapter headings. It's possible that they could be other "alternates," metals that could be swapped in with additional powers, but currently inactive. Tag-team metals, if you will. This would preserve the Law of 16 (only 16 at a time!), while still giving Allomantic meaning to those symbols. A.Gold/A.Electrum don't seem terribly useful, and neither do A.Aluminum/A.Duralumin when there isn't a Mistborn present. (Although, I guess you would lose gold compounding if you could only get F.Gold. But that seems to only ever turn out bad, so I wouldn't miss it too much.) Also, since the Metallic Arts were designed with faster-than-light travel as a possibility, these symbols might be more pieces for the space trilogy. We've seen some early indications that A.Bendalloy and its time-warping effects will be a major part of how FTL is achieved; maybe the other unknown symbols are also future discoveries that will be necessary for space travel, hidden in plain sight in the Mistborn chapter headings. What I think is most likely is that these symbols could correspond to metals that can't be burned, but still interact with the Metallic Arts. So, they're not part of the 16 true "Allomantic Metals," but the symbols still indicate specific metals that have specific effects. Kind of like aluminum is Allomantically inert; these four metals might have their own unique properties, but not produce an effect when burned. BoM spoilers and speculation:

Yeah, it's been brought up before, and it's one of the leading theories as to who "Trell" could be. Brandon has also said that the metal in the spike Bleeder was using was from a Shard we've seen before, so that really narrows down the list of contenders. The red eyes at the end of BoM also seem to draw a connection between the two. There's an interesting WoB on the subject found here: Now, I can see how it would be taken as an implication that Lessie's spike was from Odium, but I actually think it points the opposite way. I think there's something more homegrown, something that's been affecting Harmony all 300 years (not just the past 15 or less). If you're going to "limit his knowledge," I wouldn't expect waiting 300 years to be a very effective method. There's also the Red Rip (as it's called on Scadrial) and Taln's Scar (as it's called on Roshar). The end of BoM makes it seem like the force opposing Harmony is coming from there. But that can't be where Odium is coming from - it's a stellar feature separate from Roshar. (Confirmed here.) So, yeah, it's a good thought, but there are some gaps. Just like all the other theories on who Trell could be. It's almost like Brandon intentionally gives us just enough information to be dangerous, but not enough to actually figure things out...

Wax had a Pathian earring in at the time. It could have given him A.Pewter, but, since he wasn't aware of it, he didn't consume any pewter to burn. The mists just powered the abilities the earring gave him - they didn't give him new abilities in and of themselves. (I think.)

The Ars Arcanum uses terminology such as "End-Positive," "End-Neutral," and "End-Negative" to describe the magic systems. I think it can be illustrated well by looking at how all three systems can grant an individual an increase in physical strength: In Allomancy, you get strength at the cost of consumed pewter. The benefit is greater than the cost. In Feruchemy, you get strength at the cost of that exact strength, taken from yourself earlier. The benefit is equal to the cost. In Hemalurgy, you get strength at the cost of a greater amount of strength, taken from somewhere else. There's a connection to entropy here. There's no such thing as a true perpetual motion machine - you need to add energy, or it will stop. Same principle here - Preservation needs to add Investiture greater than the cost, that of the metal consumed. Feruchemy, as End-Neutral, doesn't net you more energy over a period of time, just shuffles around when you get it. Hemalurgy, End-Negative, is accelerating the heat death of the universe. That's why Allomancy is of Preservation, since it helps to stave off stagnation. Another note, be careful not to confuse applications of the magic with the nature of the magic. Yes, as you mentioned, Ruin used Allomancers to sow chaos and disorder in the Final Empire and Inquisitors would reuse their spikes, preserving the Investiture in them over many lifetimes. But I don't think you can take the actions of magic users to learn about the nature of the magic. Magic systems are an interaction between a Shard (Intent) and a world (Focus) that define how Investiture is applied. They do not necessarily specify motives and lowercase-i intents behind using magic. (With Surgebinding on Roshar, yes, you need to act in accordance with your oaths, but that may be a specific property of Honor's magic system, not of all magic systems in general.) Pointing to what I said above, each magic system provides powers, but they have different costs, depending on the Intent of the Shard behind them. Lastly, it's been speculated that the interactions that create magic systems happen in the Spiritual Realm, which is not time-dependent. (Seeing into the Spiritual Realm, and the Connections therein, is how people see the future in the Cosmere.) I think it's possible that Feruchemy was, and has always been, of Harmony. Each Shard Invested in a world gets a magic system, and the power that would become Harmony was Invested in Roshar (even though it hadn't taken that form yet.) That's why we have a magic system that is of both Preservation and Ruin - because we have a Shard that is also both Preservation and Ruin. So, it's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't think magic systems are a sliding scale, where on one end we have mostly Preservation, and on the other end, we have mostly Ruin. Each Shard gets a magic system, which defines what the powers are (but not necessarily how they're used). However, I will definitely say that Mistborn is the only series where we've seen this much of an in-depth look into the magic systems of the world - Roshar has three magic systems with three Shards, and Sel has two shards that are possibly combining into one. As we get further along into each of those series, I'm sure we'll see more concrete information on the interplay between Shards and magic systems.

Eh, I think it's tough to have the discussion because we don't know the full extent of KR abilities. We don't know what Kaladin will be able to do once he's spoken all the oaths. I suspect that the way they're currently using Stormlight is analogous to people drawing on the Mists - the gaseous form of a Shard's Investiture, provided periodically in a weather phenomenon, "consumed" by users to power their magic. But was that always where Radiants got their Investiture from? There is a lot we're still waiting to learn about magic on Roshar... Also, I think we need some more definition on Vin's side of things, as well. When you say Vin is "using" the mists, is that distinct from when Vin was "absorbing" the mists? During the final battle at Kredik Shaw, she was Ascending, absorbing the mists, which is why she became as powerful as she did. But using the mists isn't necessarily that OP - Wax has drawn upon the mists (most likely in the final gunfight in AoL), but he didn't Ascend. BoM Spoilers: So, if you're asking about Vin when she absorbed the mists, then you're asking how a Shard would fare against a mortal. Pretty one-sided, as a lot of people have been saying. If you're asking about Vin when she can draw on the mists for extra power and doesn't have to worry about running out of metals, then I think that's a much more interesting discussion. Vin has a broader array of powers, including mental and temporal powers, but Kaladin has Invested equipment in the Plate and Blade, which can be a real game-changer.

I want to run with what Morzathoth said. We can harness sunlight, and turn it into electricity - sunlight can power the mechanical. Many times, "technology" and "nature" will harness the same resource in different ways. It's kind of like ethanol-based fuels - corn is food to people, but corn is also used to produce fuel for vehicles. Same resource, still harnessing energy, but it's naturally through digestion and mechanically through combustion. Furthermore, technology is all drawn from nature, just refined and modified to ensure it does what we want it to. Electrical charges accumulate between the sky and the earth, causing lightning; we figured out a way to store charge between two parts of a battery. Viruses reproduce in the human body, so we take small pieces of humans (cell cultures) and introduce viruses in bioreactors to create vaccines. Rubber and Glass occur naturally, but we produce them in controlled circumstances to get the best quality. So, if you develop a "natural" magic system first, you can step back along the "how" until you get to a place you can diverge to get "technology." To illustrate, here's a crazy idea that popped into my head (when I read the OP, before I'd actually seen Morzathoth's post): When I think natural, I think plants, I think fruits and flowers - different colors. When I think mechanical, I think lasers, I think lenses - different colors. "Magic" comes in through sunlight, but you have to filter out the right wavelengths to get the right kinds of power. You can harness it through photosynthesis (natural) or lenses (technological). So, if you have something with a specific power source in mind, and a specific end result in mind, you can have multiple bridges between the two, and that can give the conflict between "natural" and "mechanical." That's something we kind of see in the Cosmere - there is a source of power (Investiture), but different ways of accessing powers. One Aviar in Sixth of the Dusk can reproduce an ability like Atium in Mistborn; both provide some future sight. That's a good example of "natural" vs "mechanical," actually - you can go find a bird in nature, or you could ingest a specific metal, but both give you a power. Hope I gave you some good food for thought, without getting too specific. (There's no fun in worldbuilding if someone else does it all for you...)

Secret History Spoilers:

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