Pagerunner

Poll's over here. I'll link it in the OP.

The way he phrased his response is very interesting. "I can't confirm yet." Makes me recall how he does have all 16 planned out, but reserves the right to change his mind if he comes up with a cool new Shard. I think that means it can't be involved with any of the books we've seen so far, then. My mind went to the Iriali; when I think "divine Anguish," I think of some verses in the Bible: the famous shortest verse "Jesus wept," and verses about how he's suffered in every way we do. Stuff tired to incarnation, to experience, which then reminded me of The One. But if they are indeed tied to one of our six unknown Shards, could Brandon up and change it? Has what we've seen from the Iriali locked their Shard in, as far as continuity? Although, it could be like the Aethers, which are canon and at least one has appeared on screen, but their backstory isn't locked in and could be rewritten since it hasn't been explicitly mentioned. But that's a similar argument people use for Vax being the Aether's home planet (which I think that would be too invasive a retcon based on the Elantris Ars Arcanum to change what magic system belongs to Vax). But maybe there's enough wiggle room to come up with another Shard that fits The One. The next thing that came to mind is another Shard I've proposed before, Tribulation. Anguish that is necessary because it makes you stronger. The struggle each butterfly must go through to escape its cocoon and fill it's wings with... blood, I think? My interpretations of divine attributes will always be based on Judeo-Christian concepts; but what if this Shard is drawn from something more Eastern? Someone else will have to fill in there; how else do people see anguish and pain from a religious or philosophical perspective?

Huh. The result I got isn't in your poll.

Brandon's team has released an official personality quiz to identify which type of Knight Radiant you would be: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/official-knights-radiant-order-quiz/ You can also just read up on the blurbs of all the Orders. https://www.brandonsanderson.com/the-ten-orders-of-knights-radiant/ I think the quiz is broken, though, because it gave me Skybreaker. Take it yourself, and post your results below! EDIT: Site's crashing. There are too many Radiants, Odium won't know what hit him. I also recall, from a JordanCon online panel Isaac did, that they recently formalized primary/secondary/tertiary colors for all ten Radiant orders. I suspect the blurb page has the first official uses of them. (Which don't always work, in my opinion, especially the Dustbringer, Elsecaller, and Stoneward symbols. EDIT2: Go vote in the poll.

Here's ten years of forum staff, which I put together from either being around, or poking through old threads scattered around the forums, or looking at the forums in the WayBack machine. Graphed, because I don't know any other way to express myself. This does not include subforum staff (like Reading Excuses or any of the RP/SE forums), Arcanists, or Keepers (although you can get the latter from the wiki logs). And I unfortunately was able to locate no information on Kar, the Inquisitor on a treadmill.

My favorite part about this community is how well-cited all the theories and discussions are in terms of books and WoBs. It's a rare thing around the internet (I've been a part of many fandoms where tribal knowledge and word of mouth were the only ways to keep abreast of the latest news and tidbits.) And it hasn't even always been this way on the Shard; the time in between the ending of the Wheel of Time and the unveiling of wob.coppermind.net were (relatively) dark times, between Theoryland and Arcanum. There were quite a bit of Reddit WoBs that weren't formally collected anywhere for the longest time, and the phrase "I know there's a WoB that says X, I just can't find it" was entirely too common for my liking. Of all my activity in the fandom, I'm most proud of my contributions to making that particular phrase anathema on the Shard. (You may have noticed that was my 1000th post special, and I'm getting awfully close to 2000 posts. I've got something neat planned for that, too, but I've got too much work left on it, so that's why I'm laying low these days.)

If you believe there is a mistake in capturing a WoB, you can create an Arcanum account and make edits you feel are appropriate. That being said, all suggested edits are reviewed by an Arcanist before they get approved for the site, and I can say that your suggestion would be reverted. The sentence as written makes sense - the company that was printing the posters was trading emails with Brandon. But there's no harm in making edit suggestions; worst case scenario, it just gets put back to how it started after a little while.

Yes, he is:

I'm not sure when the name first started appearing as a photo attribution, but we've known the name "Nazrilof" since at least 2014: I don't think that's the "real name" Brandon was speaking about in the Shadows for Silence postscript, since it doesn't sound "Puritan": And that postscript was a new addition to Arcanum Unbounded; my ebook version has a preface which contains some of that similar information, but no information about Nazh (but a few interesting bits about the development of Threnody). So by the time Brandon talked about Nazh's "real name," we'd already known his full name of Nazrilof for a number of years. If you're interested in the out-of-universe history behind the name "Nazrilof," there was an interview with Isaac Stewart published a few days ago where he talks about it some: https://www.tor.com/2020/05/07/the-art-of-the-cosmere-an-interview-with-isaac-stewart/

There were two different spren in the flashback in question. First was Sja-Anat's spy, which was described as a face with red eyes or as a small red dot while it was moving. And second was its "escort," a shadowy humanoid figure, six feet tall, which is the one that dove into the ground and became a thunderclast.

This is a phenomenon that reappears in every Surge's applications. I've gone into some of them in this thread. To melt stone and make a staircase like the Aharietiam Stoneward did in OB, you need to fundamentally alter the coefficients of molecular bonding between all molecules in an specified area, apply energy balance effects to maintain system temperature, and then generate an infinitely complex field of forces to act on each molecule individually to shape your object's boundary. Even a relatively straightforward force-manipulating Surge like Gravitation has its funkiness: the "half-lashing" leaving you weightless and the way the Reverse Lashings work imply changing the direction of existing gravitational forces; but nothing's shooting off into space due to the rotation of the planet, so the magic's math is always balancing that out. And there's the "spiritual link to the ground" mentioned in the Ars Arcanum as a fuzzy explanation of what exactly is affected and why. Rosharan magic is fundamentally more complex than many of Brandon's magic systems. It's the idea of "causes" vs "effects." Allomancy from Mistborn is an excellent example of "causes" - a narrowly specified magical phenomenon which can be applied in different ways. Steelpushing may be tough to sort out, but at the end of the day, it's the addition of an new force within the existing system of kinematics. Surgebinding is an "effect" - it's going to accomplish something particular, as it is defined, and anything that stands in its way is going to be accounted for in the background. TVTropes even has a page for this concept: Required Secondary Powers. Brandon hangs a lampshade on all of this with Surges being based in perception, not just in-universe fundamental physics: Mistborn's magic systems are like Microsoft Excel. You get your library of functions, and you can use them individually or in combination to build your nice spreadsheet. But you need to know how all of Excel's functions work to use them. Allomancy has steelpushing, Feruchemy has weight-changing; they're both handy individually, but put them together, and there you go, you've got tricks built up from these building blocks. Stormlight's magic systems are like Facebook. You can upload pictures, create groups, etc.; but you don't need to know how Facebook is coded or how its databases work. There's a user interface that has been built into the website that lets you accomplish what you need to. Surgebinding's "user interface" was, first and foremost, developed by the author; there must be an in-universe mechanism for accomplish it, presumably from the magic's Shard, but the concept is required by the kind of magic Brandon wants to put in his books. I wouldn't say Stormlight's magic is necessarily limited by this contrast. Dalinar, especially, has been doing... browser extensions, I guess? I don't know how to continue the analogy. There are ways to break the system, but the existence of the system itself means that you can do biology-related effects without being a molecular biologist, or gravity-related effects without being a quantum physicist.

We’ve (somewhat) recently received the first of our official information about Rhythm of War. Here’s the publisher’s summary, from Amazon: An arms race was not what I’d been expecting, for sure. It caught me a little by surprise; had this been foreshadowed at all? We’ve seen bits and pieces of human advancement with fabrial science, but it seemed like the Fused worked with different tools entirely. (Thunderclasts vs Shardbearers, Fused vs Radiants, Voidlight vs Stormlight, Unmade vs... well, there’s no real analogue on the human’s side that I can see.) So what’s this arms race going to look like? After thinking a little more about it, I decided that there must be some hints in the first few books about the Fused side of the fabrial arms race. That’s just how Brandon rolls. So, what were they up to in Oathbringer that might be a portent of this? And there is one big mystery to their actions: the collection of Shardblades and Shardplate. They track down Eshonai’s body, they steal them from Moash and Graves. Perhaps they’re behind the request from the Iriali to recover Adolin’s Shardplate; now that Iri has aligned with the Fused, there may be more to this request than meets the eye. But we don’t see anyone using them in battle. The Fused wouldn’t be able to use the Plate; it would interfere with their magic. But we don’t see any of them using Blades, either. How does that tie in with fabrials? As I listed above, the Fused and the humans don’t simply copy each other; they have competing advancements. The Red Queen hypothesis, so to speak. Every Desolation, each side needs to come up with new tools and tactics to stay ahead of the other side’s tricks. This go-around, the Fused already unleashed the Everstorm. We’ve seen our hints of the Coalition developing more advanced fabrials, like flying ships (from one of the OB artwork pages). How are the Fused going to counter? I think they are going to make fabrials out of Shardblades and Shardplate. The essence of fabrial science is through trapping spren. We know that Shardblades are spren, and we have some pretty strong hints that Shardplate comes from lesser spren, as well, which I won’t dive into in this thread. What if the Fused are trapping unwilling deadeyes and making them run some powerful new fabrials? How does this “reveal the secrets of the ancient tower”? This gets down to the fabrials suffusing Urithiru and the gemstone pillar in the center. I suspect that it’s supposed to use an intelligent spren to power the city: specifically, the Sibling. (Another quick aside I won’t dive into: I believe Melishi was the Bondsmith of the Stormfather, and that the Sibling was not bonded, but their retreat caused the shutdown of the Urithiru tower’s fabrial system before Melishi brought about the Recreance. Lots of epigraphs I could quote, but I don’t want to lose focus from the theory just now.) As the humans try to understand what the Fused are making new fabrials, they’ll realize that it’s how the Sibling used to interact with Urithiru. There’s one more loose end that I think this ties up: the missing Blades and Plate. From Dalinar’s Feverstone Keep vision: That is just Stonewards and Windrunners who have achieved Blade and Plate (fourth Oath for Windrunners, presumably the same for Stonewards). I assume these were all the fourth-Oath-ers and fifth-Oath-ers; on top of them, you’ve definitely got third-Oather-ers running around somewhere with Blades and no Plate. And you’ve got the other six Orders with Shards. (No Bondsmith or Skybreaker blades). We can get a sense of scope from the modern Skybreaker order. From one of Szeth's tests in Oathbringer: That’s about a hundred total Skybreakers, a hundred fourth-Oath Stonewards, and two hundred fourth-oath Windrunners. If the other Orders are around those numbers, I’m gonna pull some numbers out of my posterior and estimate a thousands sets of Plate and two thousand Blades. That’s a lot of missing Shards. We know those Blades are still in the Physical Realm, at the very least: I’m wondering if this “arms race” is also going to be a literal race for armaments: there’s a stash of Blades and Plates somewhere on the continent, Katana Fleet style, and the heroes and Fused are racing to find them first. Where could they be, and who has them? I’d lean towards a Herald; there are a few of them still entirely unaccounted for, and of the parties to potentially collect and hide Shards, a Herald would be my top candidate to never use them and just bury them. TL;DR: in the “arms race,” the Fused will be using captured Blades and Plate to make new fabrials. The missing Blades and Plate from the Recreance will be found... but by whom?

He would spoil Oathbringer. If you look at where specifically that WoB came from, Brandon was giving an introductory address to an entire convention. https://wob.coppermind.net/source/audio/450/edit/. It's standard practice, for large group Q&A sessions like this, for questions and answers to be kept "spoiler-free," where they won't ruin plot points for listeners who haven't read all of Brandon's books. If Brandon had said "I wrote a scene with Bridge Four flying Dalinar around the world," that doesn't ruin anything for readers who haven't gotten to Oathbringer yet, but those who are up to speed on Stormlight have enough clues to know what to look for.

You'll want to watch his social media - either Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BrandSanderson) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/BrandSanderson) are pretty reliable. (I believe he has an Instagram, as well, but I don't watch it, so I can't say how well it's managed.)

The WoB about Brandon enjoying writing Navani is an excellent cross-reference! Another interesting tidbit: Navani was at one point intended to be a flashback character: Brandon changed this up while writing Words of Radiance; Eshonai, Renarin, and Lift were slotted in instead of Navani, Taravangian, and Adolin. But it makes me think that there will be correlations between Radiant Orders of these characters (and the associated speculation as to Ash's eventual initiation into the Dustbringers, of course). Adolin has an Edgedancer blade, so he pairs naturally with Lift. That leaves a 50/50 if Navani is tied to Willshapers or Truthwatchers; I think her "exploring" the boundaries of fabrial science is very much in line with Eshonai's exploration of the real world. If this book is going to be the Willshaper book, I think it will work nicely for Eshonai (who attracted a Willshaper spren), Venli (who is currently a Willshaper), and Navani (who I suspect will become a Willshaper) to be the three main characters.

Brandon has explained that you do tap nicrosil when using a medallion; it's something special about what's been stored in that metalmind. Emphasis mine:

Well, that saves me from having to dig up what I've posted before about these murals. Brandon's explanation has always seemed obvious to me, and I've never understood why other explanations were being floated. This also kills the connections between the moons and the Sibling, since they're entirely based on the perpendicularity mural. Full text of Brandon's response, for those too lazy to click to Reddit: There was a big worldhopping hint that had gone unnoticed for a while in Elantris: Which Brandon later clarified as having to do with the murals: Here is the passage in question: There two murals are extremely similar - a blue, round object depicting a perpendicularity, open arms (which I believe is a depiction of Intent required to use the perp), and the hovering (which I'm less sure on, but I suspect it's about how using a perpendicularity is a form of transportation).

If the password recovery process doesn't mention your username anywhere, then @Mestiv will need to help you out; you should DM him your email address, and he'll be able to access the user database and give you your username.

You can try the password recovery page, which requires your email address. I'm not sure if it will include your username in the recovery email or not, but it's worth a shot. https://wob.coppermind.net/auth/password_reset/

Thanks for sharing. My confirmation email was sent to my spam folder; everyone should check theirs after signing up.

Brandon snuck in another AMA last night while signing Warbreaker Leatherbound reprints. A few really good questions in there!

I'll take the easy answer: Call to Adventure! A Magic: The Gathering expansion has been tossed around by quite a few fans, and even Brandon himself: My favorite card game is Dominion (which isn't a TCG; it's a deckbuilding game, a board game that happens to be played with cards), and there are a few mechanics that could work quite well with cosmere themes. For those who are familiar with the game, you could have Adventures' Travelers reskinned as Knights Radiant (you already have five levels). Feruchemists could do fun stuff with coin tokens or action tokens. I feel like a Mistborn card you need to Snap to get (reveal your hand; there must be at least one Curse) could be an interesting new design space, too.

Did you read my theory? What you said in your post doesn't run counter to anything I posted; in fact, they align quite well. The long-term inefficacy of the Heralds' Oathpact doesn't preclude the creation of another Oathpact, with different goals and new conditions. You suggested that: And I'm saying we've gotten a clue, through Dalinar's glimpse of the future at Thaylen Field, of the ten individuals who will come together and use Honor's power to accomplish that very thing.

I'm hesitant to extrapolate more; I've gone as far as I think is a reasonable exploration of the clues Brandon is intended to write (failures of the Oathpact leading to New Covenant), and at this point trying to get any more specific would be essentially fanfiction masquerading as a theory. Some very cool possibilities; a ten-part Vessel with each of the Radiant Oaths helping to balance out Odious tendencies; freezing all the main characters in some form of stasis to trap them and Rayse until the final Misbtorn books; or even something that winds up with a Splintering of Odium. I haven't been able to pick up any clues as to what, though. I'm sure there are a bunch of clues in Death Rattles that haven't been deciphered yet, but I've been extremely unsuccessful in trying to interpret those beforehand. The name is the biggest giveaway, in my opinion. But Syl's explanation in Oathbringer chapter 87 is pretty telling, that the Honorblades were something from Honor:

When it comes to the God/individuals connection, you're exactly right. But Honor is definitely a party in the Oathpact: The power the Heralds utilize for the Oathpact is divine, and that power is from Honor. As the Stormfather said in one of the passages I quoted above: "THE HERALDS WENT TO HONOR, AND HE GAVE THEM THIS RIGHT, THIS OATH."