Silus - Shard of Flame

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stlhood/storium-the-online-storytelling-game

 

This game is really cool.  It's basically an RP site with a few game-y elements to drive the plot somewhat.  It gives somewhat more of a flavor of tabletop gaming, yet still has the depth of creativity of an online RP.  You pledge 10 bucks to get into the beta immediately.  I just got into it and I'm really considering pledging more (it's got great rewards) since it's just got so much potential.  Wanted to get the word out here before the kickstarter ends.  Go check it out!

10844, I thought I won, but now I realize I had only made a Bondsmith, but my internet was going weird so I didn't even get to see it.

It seems that the Shards like to operate through champions for their conflicts since most of the time the only direct weapon they have is their own power, which, as we saw in HoA, rips them apart.

What we might see happen in SA is them try to create this sort of arrangement, with a champion of Odium and a champion of Honor, which would be very hard to do since Honor's, well, dead.

Just because the listeners are not inherently of any one Shard does not mean they weren't created by them.  Humans on Scadrial are part Ruin and part Preservation, but not inherently of either one because of the balance going on there.  The listeners could be a joint creation between two or all three of the Shards on Roshar.

The occurrence of magic does not coincide with the creation of the world, it seems that it actually takes a while for magic to develop after humans have been created.  Scadrial didn't have Allomancy until a little before the The Lord Ruler came to power and Feruchemy obviously wasn't there from the beginning or the Terrismen wouldn't be the only ones to have it.

Thank you, Link, that was most helpful!  However, the mystery becomes even more enigmatic.  If it only takes one Shard to create a world, then they can be distributed any which way without any sort of pattern.  The only "rule" we've seen on it is that it depends on the nature of the Shards involved, like how Ruin and Preservation, neither having a creative power of its own, had to work together to create.

That is true, not all Shards have a counterpart, he's specifically said that Ruin and Preservation are the only ones to be so perfectly matched.

 

One of the difficult things about it is that we don't know how exactly the Shards are located.  We don't know if Endowment is alone on Nalthis (unless there is additional info on that), or if you need more than one Shard to make a planet, which would mean that any other announced Shardworlds would imply another two Shards.  What would be even more complicated is if some of the books (written or simply planned) are so far spaced out that the Shards have actually switched "projects" and combined their abilities with other Shards with different results, thus creating multiple examples of the use of a single Shard.

There's some pretty heavy implication toward his boon and curse being related to his wife and why he can't remember her.  I would say that his healing you mention would be a hint toward his nature as a Radiant.  There's a lot of implication that future Radiants have traces of their abilities before taking their oaths, even years beforehand.

 

Though if he went to be healed, possibly his curse was having the memory of his wife taken away.

OH MY GOSH IT WAS SO AWESOME!!!

This easily leaps to my number one spot of favorite books.  It's official, Stormlight Archive has topped Mistborn for me.  There were many "shouting into a pillow so other people don't hear me freaking out at what just happened" moments in this book, most of them revolving around Kaladin's acts of sheer awesomeness.  If this series had a big scope before, that was nothing compared to what happened here and what it's set up to become.  Wow, just wow.

Just finished Steelheart, and thus I am caught up with Brandon books!  (Except that I probably need to go look for Legion at some point.)  Dan Wells will now follow!

I just finished the book, so I won't spoil it.  But I will say that I guessed it less than halfway through.  I doubted the accuracy of my guess several times throughout but turned out to be right.

The image popped into my head as I read of it simply pushing the pen out without clicking it.  Might that be a problem?

 

Also, his name is DAVID, not DANIEL.

I finished it about 10 minutes ago and want to get my thoughts down.

 

LOVED IT.

 

Brandon continues to be a master plotweaver and sets up his endings with lots of twists, but I think I'm getting better at guessing them.

 

I figured out about Steelheart's weakness fairly early on, though I doubted it several times throughout due to a lack of anyone who could actually DO it, and then Brandon turns it around on me by showing me that there's obviously one person that ISN'T afraid of Steelheart.

 

I knew that the Reckoner tech had to be power related in some way, it was just too power like when David used it to make it really feel like tech.  I just wasn't sure how until Prof said for him to do it anyway despite the broken device, and then it clicked that he HAD to be an Epic, and then that ensuing fight against the soldiers (and his change in personality after) nailed it down for me.  I didn't realize that the harmsway and the shield jackets were part of it until the end.

 

The one thing that just totally and completely took me by surprise was Megan, her "death" took me off guard, and I thought it just a THINGS GETTING SERIOUS death for a bit (I should have known better than to think that Brandon would do that).  I fell for the "she's just an illusion" thing in the stadium, and had no clue what was going on until David put the pieces together for me.  I had seen that the name of the sequel was Firefight and this just put whole new meaning to it for me.  I had been trying to figure out what the sequel name would mean and how it would relate to the structure of the series for just about the whole book.

 

I was really glad that Megan got to sort of live, since the blossoming romance between him and David was something I was actually really enjoying.

 

One thing that I didn't particularly like was Cody being both a Scotsman and a Southerner, I could never smooth out the dichotomy in my head and he always just had a scottish accent when I saw his lines.  He's a great character, and I liked him being a not real scotsman, but trying to connect the two accents was just weird for me.

 

Lots of different stuff, but it boils down to it being just a great book.  I like how it just had a very different tone overall to any of his other books.

I recently read The Emperor's Soul and The Rithmatist and am in the first hundred pages of Steelheart on my Brandon catch up.  Loving EVERYTHING.  Steelheart is sticking out to me as very distinct in tone to his other books, darker and pitches more toward a flawed humanity instead of the usually hopeful tone he has in the majority of his books.

 

I have the Dan Wells catch up next with Partials, Fragments, and The Hollow City.  Looking forward to everything!

I use a fire motif in all of my usernames, usually relating them to the fandom at hand.  For example, on BZPower, a bionicle related forum, I was Maru Nui - The Gauntleted Toa, a fan character I had made who was a warrior with great big armored gloves and had fire as his element, after that I was Maru Nui - Fire Incarnate.  It's a thing of mine.

Earth and air can be internal metals and fire and water can be external.  Air allows you to sense and change yourself to work with air currents and earth lets you sense through the ground and changes you so that you can burrow through it.  I think fire would be more interesting as a simple temperature up and down mechanism, but you can manipulate it around certain areas, like make a fire rage up in searing heat, but it doesn't let you make new fires.  Water can excite or calm local water, for example making pipes burst or creating a bubble of waveless sea in the middle of a hurricane.

Title's pretty self explanatory:  What did you get for Christmas this year?

 

My gift list was AWESOME:

Partials, Fragments, and The Hollow City by Dan Wells

The Rithmatist, The Emperor's Soul, and Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

Earbuds and a mouse for my laptop

A couple of little fleecy blankets and a drawn on cup from my sister (she's eleven, it's pretty adorable)

 

The best part was that the majority of my books were SIGNED!!!  This gets me considerably caught up on the important fandoms of my life.

What about you guys?

So this year's Doctor Who Christmas special, "The Time of the Doctor" just aired on BBC America.  This also is a benchmark episode in being the last episode of the 11th Doctor, Matt Smith.  This is a major episode and thus this topic WILL have spoilers.

 

I L-O-V-E-D this episode.  It has a way of getting at your heartstrings in one moment then making you laugh hysterically the next (or is that just me?).  It wrapped up arcs and questions that have been around for YEARS.  The cameo at the end was fantastic and just about made me cry.

 

What did you, other Sandersonian Whovians, think?

Born in Provo, Utah, but soon after birth moved to California, six years in a city close to LA, then two in a suburb of San Jose.  Moved to Utah again, three years in Murray, eight years in West Jordan, two years in Córdoba, Argentina, now almost three weeks in West Jordan, Utah again.

I threw this together in MPaint...because that is my imaging skill level.

I am most certainly there.  I thought I was going to miss the release of Stormlight 2, but I have not!  I intend to be there for every one of them.  It's gonna be FUN!!!  And if I can swing it, I'd like to be there all day or most of the afternoon at least.  We'll see how it goes.

Guys, the time has come. After tonight, I won't be on the internet, let alone 17th Shard, for two years while I serve an LDS mission to Argentina. This has been an awesome experience for me and leaving you guys now is something I wish I didn't have to do, but I do. I know that Cuaiir will do a great job with you guys. Please enjoy this project I put together while I'm gone, and hopefully it'll still be running when I get back.

Good luck, and know that I approve of you guys.

Have fun.

I would like to announce that I finished NaNoWriMo last night and my Farewell Talk tonight. I've hit most of my goals for things I need/want to do before I leave on my mission. *fist pump*

Now for the other ones.

EDIT: Just north of 1800 posts. If I just went nuts on here I bet I could hit 2K in the few days before I leave, but I won't.

EDIT AGAIN:

It's time, guys. The 30th is upon me. I get set apart tonight and go into the MTC tomorrow. I would like to announce that I will be back with a vengeance in 2 years. Thanks so much for your support in friendship so far and know that we'll pick up right where we left off. I'm just going away for a while. I'm jealous of all the stuff you'll get before I do, but I'm okay with that.

Happy reading.

-Silus

Goshdangit. How do I not see this until less than an hour until midnight?

I would place Shallan under Chach, Ruby, The Soul, Brave/Obedient. Partly because of the obvious connection between The Soul and Soulcasting, also because of its proximity to Smokestone as you mentioned, and also to Diamond, which is associated with the eyes, which fits her Memories ability to a tee. You may say that Creative/Honest fits her better, but I'd wager that Brave/Obedient are traits that we'll see become more prominent in her in her flashback book (which is next!). I'd also say that her connection to the Garnet is circumstantial at best, as the Garnet was a necessary item for Jasnah to save her from the poison. And if her first use of Soulcasting can be used as evidence toward her inclination essence-wise, I'd say the fact that she Soulcasts glass bears as much weight as using a Garnet.