Duxredux

I'll add in another few thoughts as someone who grew up in suburbia and doesn't really know what it's like living on a farm. @agrabes can tell us how accurate this is, but it makes sense to me. First, subsistence farming even on Scadrial isn't as simple as just picking food off of the ground if you're planning on being entirely self-sufficient. The only thing that gets easier is maintaining crops, everything else is the same. Raising livestock, building and maintaining a homestead, processing crops (sugar, wheat, cotton, etc.), making your clothing and other amenities like soap or spices. that all takes hard work and/or equipment. Harvesting lumber still has the usual time constraints on growth and labor. Either you're willing to figure out how to do it by hand and make your own tools to do the job or you bow to Elendel and deal with the tariffs and taxes to and begin selling your produce to get income for equipment. For perishable crops, depending on where you settled, you may need to use the trains or canals in order to get your produce somewhere you can sell it. If you have to sell your crops, then you have to compete with the farms that are optimized for profit that set the prices, even if they aren't the megafarms we see today. Second, depending on how they have crops growing, farm owners who work with industrialized Elendel don't really need much by way of skilled labor. The crops themselves don't need to be cultivated, so they may only need to hire temporary laborers for the harvest. After they learn the changes to the world after the Catecendre, a harvester is a low-skill job and probably has very poor wages because you can almost certainly find a replacement for whomever you hire. In actuality, the ease of growing crops removes jobs for the same reason that automation removes jobs by taking away roles that humans originally filled. Third, if there is a surplus of food, then farmers will probably convert the land from growing crops to raising livestock or growing other cash crops such as tobacco, dyes, spices, cotton, things that in essence gain value from processing and trade with the city. Supply and demand would make crops or livestock that are harder to raise or process more valuable than crops that take no skill whatsoever than simply harvesting them, and so the agricultural sector would shift from what we see on earth. Historically, this is why you hear of massive sugar, indigo, tobacco, and cotton plantations, even though you can't subsist off of those. You can still get food shortages if a large enough event disrupts an expected crop, particularly if the agricultural sector has balanced itself so that food isn't in excess in Elendel, meaning that food is produced at about the rate it is consumed. I don't have my books, but I think this is what Bleeder did when she broke that dam in SoS causing food prices including apples to skyrocket in Elendel.

Apparently not, but this might be because they were directly powered by Honor and so had more direct access to Investiture, considering Brandon's phrasing of his answer. We'll see if this changed after Honor's death, though I think that they still are powered by Honor, considering Nale's Surgebinding during the Weeping in Edgedancer.

This seems relevant. Looks like Returned consuming Investiture is somewhat separate from possessing a Divine Breath and is instead related to being a Cognitive Shadow. The follow up question then would be if a Returned can then "expand their soul" to the point that they do not need to get their weekly Breath to persist as Cognitive Shadows? I'm not sure.

So I have a few questions about Feruchemical scenarios that we might not know the answers to, but I'm curious what people think. I have an idea about era 3 or 4 infrastructure, but I need to see if underlying principles work (I'm suspicious of the metal lines in Southern Scadrial ships and the Sovereign's Temple. Maybe this has already been postulated). First scenario - a Feruchemist sticks their hand into a bag of iron dust and begins storing weight. What gets charged? Does only the iron dust directly in contact with the hand get quickly filled and maxed out, leaving only a "glove" of invested metal, or does the Feruchemical charge spread through the whole bag of dust? Does it matter based on how the Feruchemist sees the metal, for example if they only thought of the individual grains would it only fill what they were directly touching or if they thought of the bag as a whole unit, would the charge spread from the non-contiguous yet still touching metal? Alternate first scenario - a feruchemist stores an attribute in a metalmind. They remove the metalmind and then take a rod made out of the same metal and touch it to the metalmind. Can they withdraw the attribute from the metalmind through the rod? If not, if they welded the rod to the metalmind would it then enable a withdrawal of the attribute through the rod, essentially making both units into a single metalmind? Second scenario - one Feruchemist stands at one end of a long iron rod. They completely store Identity in an Aluminum mind and then start storing weight into the rod. A Skimmer Ferring then touches the other end of the rod and tries to withdraw the attribute. Do they create a "potential/pressure" differential similar to electrical voltage? Can the Skimmer Ferring attempt to "pull" more weight than the first Feruchemist is attempting to store? Third scenario - two Ferrings hold an unkeyed metalmind and both try to withdraw. Does it run out at the rate that are withdrawing, or is there a "power suction" that the two Ferrings can feel? In essence, I'm trying to figure out if you can make an unkeyed Feruchemical power grid. By laying out Allomantic metal wires throughout the city and creating "power stations", can you create a system that distributes Feruchemical attributes throughout a city? With a few medallions to enable someone to store away their Identity and then compound unkeyed Feruchemical attributes? The issues I'm seeing deal with what you would have to do to add on new branches to the grid, and if it follows electrical potential differentials. That said, workers who have to sling on a medallion and the give up their identity to be a power a station plays pretty well into Scadrial's history of class and worker right's issues. "I'm just a soulless battery to them!" Thoughts?

I'm pretty sure only men were required to attend executions, and I'd guess they would exclude children below a certain age. That can make the population to be 2-3 times larger than was present for the executions. That might not be as high as 2 million, but it's a lot closer. There's also a fair chance that a large number of noble Mistborn and Mistings were killed either during the House war, the revolution, or the wars within dominances at the fall of the TLR. Those involved in those wars are most likely the high nobility, or the ones with the purest bloodlines to produce Allomancers, and so in a way ended up in most of the conflicts and casualties. Most of that was off camera. We do know of at least one Mistborn that Kelsier was busy framing while setting up the house war that we don't hear about after the war starts.

Vasher uses the Royal Locks as evidence that Vivenna has Returned blood in her, so at some level it's genetic. Sure he probably knows her heritage, but Vasher doesn't lie, at least not directly. I could see the Royal Locks getting passed down through a subconscious Intent if the royal personage knows that a child will legitimately be in the line of succession. The locks themselves react subconsciously, so I think it doesn't have to be consciously passed to follow the succession nonetheless (unless there is Awakening of a sort happening within the Royal Idrian family despite the heresy). If eligible, as people perceive it, the new child is endowed with power to become king simply by being born legitimately, and if people can make that distinction subconsciously perhaps there is an accompanying Endowment of Investiture. I could see this level of subconscious control over genetic bestowal of power only possible with Investiture specific to Endowment. Because people believe the story that only heirs can inherit the Locks, it becomes reality, with the tutoring/conditioning of the new princes and princesses. My guess is that a random scion not originally thought to be legitimate would not spontaneously gain the Royal Locks if all rightful heirs were to die. Alternately, someone not of the royal line with the locks is a great target for assassination to maintain a smooth succession...

TL:DR I think Brandon already uses soft magic systems, because to him it's a storytelling tool more than a world building tool. My next thoughts are mostly a summary of what he's said, but read Sanderson's Laws of Magic to get it in his words. Brandon is very, very aware of soft magic systems. His very first convention as a new writer and a panelist, the first question that he got asked "how should magic work?" To which he responded that it needed rules! The rest of his panel thought he was nuts and the next 30-45 minutes was spent with him arguing over if a rules-based magic system was stupid. Brandon has made such a big splash that he has shaped the genre to the point that other people do what he does and it seems to have become the norm, even though when he first became a writer most people thought you needed a soft magic system to create a sense of wonder. Brandon has talked about this quite extensively on Writing Excuses and in his BYU creative writing lectures that he posted on YouTube. An internet search of Sanderson's Laws of Magic will pull up his rules for why he does what he does, and for him a soft magic system versus a hard magic system is actually a narrative tool, not a worldbuilding tool. It's about how much the reader knows and if it's engaging a sense of wonder or engaging the logical mind that is trying to predict how the hero will use their magical abilities to save the day. You also can have both a soft magic system and a hard magic system in the same book and I'll give the Lord of the Rings example he uses: I'd say that most things a Shard does, we know they can do it, we can theorize how it works, but we don't reeeally know how Harmony reshaped Scadrial, other than he's a god. I'll probably get arguements from people who do understand the mechanisms, but when I read it, I wasn't thinking about the mechanics of how this worked, I got a sense of wonder that I think Brandon was trying to evoke. The Nightwatcher, we know you get a boon and a curse and so technically has "rules" but if we see another boon we have no idea what's gonna happen to the recipient, other than it won't be pretty. In contrast we have a good grasp of a typical Windrunner's skillset, and know more or less what they can do up to the Fourth Ideal. Probably. From a world building perspective, I doubt Whimsey will be a top-down intentional soft magic system. Brandon has been branded as The Magic Systems Guy and he's been published as such. The Cosmere has been branded as such. I'd guess he would just write a new non-Cosmere world if he wanted an entirely soft magic system to not disrupt his marketing.

I think about things. I'm kind of glad that Leras got more support than my shared comic on if pineapple belongs on pizza. On my last readthrough, with what we know now, the epilogue of The Way of Kings is stealthily a much, much sadder moment than we first knew. When we first see Taln stumble into Kholinar the ramification was of the impending Desolation that was signaled by the return of a Herald. However with what we know now from Oathbringer, and what has recently been revealed... Four and a half thousand years ago, Taln sacrificed himself on the battlefield. There his friends left him, with no help or support, no ally or comrade to be by his side on a moon entirely populated by prisoners that hated him. He fought, he was captured and though he could sacrifice himself on Roshar, he could not die on Braise (at least I assume he would not stay dead). So he was tortured far beyond what would kill him, this becoming his new existence, pain to protect friends and a people who had abandoned him. Taln was released to announce a new Desolation. This he did at the gates of Kholinar, the man who was never supposed to be a Herald, whose protection had been broken not by his lapse in honor. We know he was not the one to break. The worst part? Taln thought that he had failed and that this coming Desolation was his fault. I think somewhere in his tormented mind he feared that he had finally broken and given up his world to his torturers, even though he had done nothing wrong. To rub salt in the wound, he is met by people who thought him an insane imposter and Wit, who knew he was who he claimed to be, but let him be taken to be treated for insanity in the Alethi way while making pithy statements about novelty and timeliness. Oh, and at some point someone stole his Honorblade and gave him a screaming dead Shardblade instead. Ouch.

Investiture, even if the origin has Intent, doesn't necessarily have restrictions requiring adherence to the Intent for its usage. Szeth and Moash did some pretty horrendous stuff using Stormlight, things that they almost certainly would not have been able to do while bonded to a Honorspren. Mistborn are directly powered by Preservation and are insanely good at killing people. I'm guessing that yes, it technically effects things, but not enough to make an appreciable difference.

Leras's story to me is sad, made more so because we know so little of it. He is more or less a footnote in Scadrian history, completely overshadowed by Ruin, Kelsier, and Harmony. Of all the religions that Sazed held, I don't think any of them were about Preservation, as Ruin carefully excised all knowledge of his counterpart from history. Only the Kandra knew of him. Humanity had forgotten the being that gave them life and the spark of autonomy that let them choose for themselves. Leras witnessed every death, heard every thought that cursed deity made by people that never knew that their god had sacrificed his mind to protect them. Thousands of years later, he still felt immense pain at each passing, "Oh Senna... I'm losing this place. Losing them all..." The only people he could briefly talk to were the ones he couldn't preserve, comforting the dead as they passed into the Beyond. Some of his last words was advice that I think came from Leras himself, not just the Intent of his power, and it speaks of the kind of god he tried to be. "Kelsier! Do better than you have before! They called you their god and you were casual with their faith! The hearts of men are not your toys. Do better Kelsier..." Those words were spoken as he revealed himself to Elend, encouraging the disheartened emperor of men as he exposed himself to Ruin's final attack. Leras gave, and gave, and gave, and he died, forgotten and alone in the ash. When we talk of Leras, it is of the mythological backdrop of the conflict of Ruin and Preservation and the strategies employed, 17th Sharders scheming what they would do if they got their hands on a bead of Lerasium (nothing wrong with that), or as a close look at the death of a Vessel, but it's easy to forget that they were decisions made by a small unassuming man.

I have cast my lot. I think this sums up both parties. On the scale of zero to pineapple, where do you lie?

So, not general knowledge but likely known to natives, such as the original Vessels, Hoid, and Frost. If you could convince one of these to reveal the location, you could probably get there.

Originally the name Duxredux meant along the lines of "duck, again, duck" using the word redux. A silly name. Later on a friend thought it meant "Deduction and Reduction", and based on the way I think and operate, it fits. It doesn't capture the dorky origin though.

I could see A-Gold Savants being able to fine tune how far into the past they can look for branching decision points. With practice, they may be able to identify a specific past decision to see how they would have changed had they made a specific decision other than the one they did. Augurs are able to see the state of their clothing, so that can help them to gain contextual clues on wealth, status, occupation, and maybe they would be able to show specific items other than clothing. Another option, they may be able to see more than two shadows at a time. This is tenuous, but if you knew yourself and tried to personally develop this habit, if you always carried around a sign and marker, I wonder if you could get your gold shadows to hold up a sign with information? Particularly if you routinely asked yourself, what would I tell my alternate self if I could talk with them? I could see that mechanic being a cool skill for an Augur in a short story. Really builds tension when the Augur burns gold and one of the gold shadows is dead and holding a broken sign.

So... could this let someone effectively sign up to be a power donor like an organ donor? Their abilities get weaker, but once they die their ability remains preserved in the spike until the body can be recovered? If this actually works, painful it might be, this seems like an unusually ethical approach to Hemalurgy if done voluntarily (maybe while using a F-Tin/F-Gold medallion for healing and anasthetic). It's different from Spook's idea of getting volunteers from the terminally ill at least.

Based on the prompt, I think it depends on what you consider to be power and the context that it is used. For example, do you consider Ashweather Cett to have been powerful? Breeze as an influencer? Dockson as the organizer that helped make Kelsier's dreams become reality? Raoden's optimism and belief in the good in people? We have a lot of 1 vs 1 fights to the death but that isn't the only power. I wouldn't call her the most powerful but Maare's wish to see a flower and the picture she had loved influenced people who went on to remake the world of ash. In the end, I might choose Kelsier not because he is Fullborn, but because he has a knack for building himself a team and network of extremely competent allies. He is really good at motivating people to become their best, can convince seemingly random people to help him (Vin, Nazh, Fuzz), and he is fantastic at manipulating people into doing what he wants (Ire, Ati, the entire Luthadel Skaa populace). He learns fast, becoming a skilled enough Mistborn to defeat an Inquisitor in only two years, setting up Ruin to be taken down within a very short time of Ascending, and orchestrating the overthrow of the Final Empire with a few years of planning. His ability to take seemingly impossible tasks and breaking them down into manageable chunks and then get his team to believe that the impossible is possible, that ability to inspire is perhaps more powerful than his skills as a Mistborn. If he can't do it himself, he goes and finds someone who can. He's probably one of the best leaders in the Cosmere in that he inspires people to personally grow and innovate to make the Job possible. Being immortal and able to personally level a planet doesn't hurt either. Hoid... is less good at getting people to like or trust him.

Well... an easy and terrible solution to making permanent Forgery spikes for yourself is to craft a soul stamp to grant yourself Allomancy, then find a close associate and stamp them and spike them in the time before the stamp decays. Similar to how Shai used Gaotona as a reference for Ashravan, people near you will accept the stamp for a short time because of the familiarity of your soul if enough of the stamp's history is accurate to yourself, and you only need a few seconds to do the deed. Take the spike, use the same stamp to make yourself into an Allomancer, then burn the spike, grafting the forged version of your own soul to your soul. Caution, if you undertake this course no one will want to be your friend.

@kaladin x happiness,There's this Cosmere 101 post that is meant as a basic introduction with some minor spoilers. You can get some heavy-duty spoilers from the Coppermind, but if you're up to date, it's a fantastic resource of information that has been compiled over the years.

Are you talking about using your Nicroburst abilities on the spike or your victim, enhancing their ability to burn their metal? If the second, I'm guessing it won't work because Nicrosil only provides a temporary enhancement to the burn, and I'm glazing over how suicidal it could be to try to enhance certain Mistings while you try to kill them.

What happens if you intend to spike someone for Hemalurgy, pound the spike into their heart and then... just leave it there? The obvious answer is that they just die because you rammed a spike into their chest, but I'm wondering if activating it for Hemalurgy makes the spike partially interact with the Spiritual Realm, and if you just end up punching a hole into their soul. The spike would probably get Hemalurgically charged, but if you left it in and it was able to provide the host with the same attributes that got stolen (with some loss likely), would they survive or would you need to provide additional healing? I was looking at @Trusk'our our Hemalurgy enthusiast's Q&A post Do Highly Invested Spiritwebs Naturally Develop Powers? and wondered what would happen if you stabbed someone with a Raysium spike intending Hemalurgy and started pumping Stormlight into their soul. Could they survive it? Probably not, but I'm trying to find Hemalurgic approaches that we haven't seen yet for Lost Metal.

Well... how much Investiture are we talking? Ascension and Slivers are a thing right? Based on what Fuzz said, taking the power at the Well of Ascension expands the soul, allowing them to persist as a Cognitive Shadow. So... whatever "expanding the soul" means, it's a thing. We just haven't seen a Sliver on screen long enough in the Physical Realm to know what other changes there would be. It also depends on what you count as an invested power. Cram enough Investiture into anything and something will happen. Beyond that I have no idea, there's too many variables based on the vector of investment, type of Investiture, etc.

I'll give a cheater answer like Brandon and say that my favorite character changes based on which book I'm currently reading and which character I'd like to be more like based on what's going on in my life. A lot of my favorite characters have attributes that in one way or another I try to emulate. The ones with character moments that I end up going back and rereading include: Dalinar, Kaladin, Kelsier, Vin, Lightsong, Taln, Raoden, Elend, Leras, Spook... If I had to narrow it down based on number of rereads... Kelsier, Kaladin, Leras, Dalinar, Taln. I'm idealistic.

Agreed that this is a possibility. Redemption and the continual choice to change even against situations when willpower is crippled is a strong theme in Brandon's books (Elhokar, Teft, Dalinar, Marsh). If Dalinar falls to the agreement, I don't think he himself will be required to become a monster at his core anymore than Marsh (which is a pretty scary threshold). If this happens, I think we can guarantee that we will get closure, otherwise Brandon will get all the complaints. Given @Vin(Diesel)'s note, he likely would have a redemption arc. Besides, if he must fall, he'll rise again a better man.

Covering the safehand is a right of passage and mark of maturity when Vorin girls reach age 12. I'd guess that to Kaladin, Syl's simple dress without the sleeve emphasizes her child-like nature, at least early on (kind of like how you just ignore the naked toddler sprinting down the street, sometimes with a stressed parent in hot pursuit depending on where you live). As seen with Navani and Dalinar, touching with the safehand can also be viewed as familial intimacy (can't remember if the hand was uncovered in that scene, but I'd guess that gesture isn't only for a couple). And yes, seeing the safehand can be as salacious as *gasp* catching sight of a girl's ankles using an old earth analog. There's three possibilities for how an unclothed safehand can be viewed to a Vorin man. Take your pick for which is your headcanon for Kal and Syl. Growing awareness of the safehand custom is an indication in-world that Syl is maturing (or may be viewed as dress up). Further awareness that she isn't Vorin is another marker. If Kal and Syl start getting real awkward about Syl's hand, then we'll know what that means.

I honestly don't know, and that's why I didn't comment on your earlier thought. Identity manipulation is something that Brandon has kept pretty heavily under wraps, though he did ease up once he revealed Southern Scadrian tech. I did find a few WoBs that seemed relevant. I'm not sure if these are relevant to the question of if Returned can heal, because their self-perception directly influences their physical body. It looks like F-Aluminum by itself probably doesn't affect the physical body to this extent...? Again, this is really tenuous.