Ashbringer

"The powers" here are the two Shards Taravangian has, Odium and Honor. But that doesn't give much insight into what the "another" is, unless Honor's a liar and protected Dalinar. ... which wouldn't be the strangest of things, considering that's essentially what Honor did to Tanavast.

I believe Odium did specifically swear an oath not to directly affect people who were not given to him, as a condition of him being present on Roshar. So yes, he was capable, just doing so would let Cultivation kill him. But that's gone now. One other thing not mentioned - Hoid has specifically lost / is missing certain protections that would protect him from other things. I believe even pre-Retribution, he wasn't covered under Odium's no-influence policy, which is why he needed a specific safeguard in the Contest of Champions terms and why Taravangian could get at his Breaths. But that's also gone now, regardless. I am curious if this is actually the case - I think it is, personally, but I wonder if that's how the Shards end up working. (Or on a similar note - if Ati and Rayse had taken each other's Shards at the Shattering, would they actually have ended up with Passion and Destruction instead of Odium and Ruin.) I think we'll see soon, with Little Honor, how much it's capable of change.

In addition to Ruin losing part of his power in the atium - which is probably the main reason he can't just smite - it may also be tied to Intent. Ruin is much more associated with Decay and Entropy than it is outright Destruction. Similar to how Cultivation seemingly can't just give answers to Dalinar because that would be contrary to her Intent focused on slow growth, Ruin may not be able to just annihilate someone because his Intent is more about slow-but-inevitable Decay. Granted, if he'd gotten the atium he would have destroyed the planet, but we don't know the vector for now (if it would be a bang or a slow cracking from tectonic forces, or something). It may also be an agreement that Ruin had with Preservation. We know they had one, because they worked together to make people - wouldn't be too surprising if they agreed to limit their influence for a certain amount of time before Ruin got to ultimately destroy. Meanwhile Smitey Endowment has no such agreement because there's no other Shard on Nalthis.

It doesn't (besides Black) - just generally the Ajah are sorted by color in both the series and in prior Wheel of Time SE games. Which leads to some of us having prior attachment to one Ajah or another.

I think "plants can't grow without sunlight" is the biggest issue. However, Retribution also gains very little from having several nations starve to death. I'd expect that anyone can gain Warlight by asking for Retribution's blessing, and the non-Azir nations are all ruled by the singers now anyway, so they'd have growth magic to use as well. The humans in those nations might have some issues, though.

Basically - although sometimes replace "knew what you were doing" with "supply an obscene amount of energy". I'm not sure it's been done before, but the methods I think would have been done would need a particle accelerator or something heftier than that. Maybe possible - but also the god metals we've seen have had different chemical properties or appearances, even excluding the alkali-ness of harmonium. Atium is lustrous (specifically a platinum-esque metal), while raysium is golden and trellium is weird and rusty. But how much impact the Spirit has on that could depend on several things, and the god metals' chemistry is already impossible (based on the spectrographs Wax made) and strangely inconsistent (harmonium reacting with water but not hydrochloric acid, which is in water)

The Very-Very-Dark-Grey Ajah

I had tried to map this out at some point, with doing one color pair / mono color per Shard with Autonomy being the odd one out. It didn't quite work, as I made patterns up until I was left with Virtuosity and Green/Black (Golgari), which... I don't think so I had Invention has Red/Blue, as that's more in line with what the Izzet's chaotic steampunk-like invention tends to actually be in addition to the idea around it, but they could also just be Blue or Green/Blue. Depends to some degree how chaotic versus planning Invention tends to be, and how much you try to read into Simic vs Izzet - Simic things tend to be very Bio-focused, which doesn't really translate to Invention as a core concept Shard. (TL;DR, both Reason and Invention are indeed very Blue but in very different ways) I had Mercy as Green/White. I think of any Shard, that fits Mercy best, but also that color pair doesn't really translate well to a specific Shard, though. Its core idea is summed up in Community (or Unity, anyone?) which no one Shard hits very well - same with Blue/Black being all about Deception, or White/Red being all about... Valor, but a Valor that actually does things. IMO Mercy could also be mono-White or mono-Black depending on the Shard's Intent or interpretation, but not White/Black mostly because the pair doesn't really take from each other what Mercy's looking for. Or, honestly, Mercy could be Green/Black as a Shard of Life and Death in similar measure, but any piece of Black is going to have a bit of ruthlessness to it. I'll also note - I'm only tangentially knowledgeable of Orzhov and the fandom's perception of Dominion, but I think the pairing makes sense. I don't innately read Dominion as a hostile Shard, just one that values power and keeping what it has (with "Dominion" meaning both having control and the actual area where you have control). Sure, the Shard may be once named Conquest, but imo Sanderson avoided that word for a reason, so, eh. But Dominion is Order, even more so than Honor tends to be. That's very White/Black.

So on one hand - the Dawnshards being something that you need to need to put together to Create, like how Ruin and Preservation could only create together, is interesting... but also the 4-shard theories and Invention/Virtuosity make me think that Create could be a Dawnshard in and of itself.

Bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuue!

I may have to recheck, but I think I gathered the differences as Adolin had them. For one, I think Adolin came to the same conclusion that Dalinar to some degree did - that the spirit of an oath is more important than the letter, while Honor really only cares for the letter. But the other one - a Rosharan Oath is something that is sworn on something. Oaths to spren for Radiance are judged by the spren, and to some degree the Stormfather. Oaths of power are judged by Honor. Adolin doesn't want his promises to be oaths, where they are enforced by some outside power or threat if he breaks them. He just wants to keep his promise solely because it's his promise. How much it worked, not entirely sure. The distinction seemed contained to Adolin (and to some degree the other Unoathed, like Notum) while other characters use them interchangeably, which makes sense but is confusing.

Mark me down for Blue. Lady Raashe is probably going to try and stay a little more undercover after last time but she'll be around

Another day, another thread I'm wondering why nothing is happening because I forgot to actually follow it. It's good to be back

I think you can actually burn a diamond - it's just far harder than burning coal. Retributium(?) would probably be split via the same trellium method, unless trellium was specifically made for that purpose, but Rosharans may also find a more Invested and less chemical way of doing so. We haven't seen how Tones interact with the god metals. Warlight doesn't even have a real life analogue in the form of metal - it acts like a gas but also really doesn't at all. But I think it's the easiest one to solve, based on how antiLights seem to act. (Also, on the topic, don't forget the Well of Control - liquid Investiture. Wouldn't be surprised if the listeners or Mishram figure out something to do with that.) Honestly, one thing that I hope we see in late cosmere is god metals being valued not for their Invested power but for some inexplicable-but-mundane chemical property they have. Imagine lerasium being a room temperature superconductor or tanavastium being used for bulletproof vests.

On the subject of the Codes: Dalinar clung to the Codes of War in the earlier Stormlight books largely for one reason - because Gavilar told him to follow the Codes the night he was killed, Dalinar didn't, and Dalinar feels the guilt of that failure. WaT revealed Gavilar told him to follow the Codes specifically to manipulate him into getting drunk so he wouldn't be a bother. The power of the Codes was a lie, and always was.

Godmetals are technically elemental metals. I believe there is a WoB that harmonium is indeed its own element and not an alloy, and thus can't be separated into atium and lerasium using normal chemical methods, but can via semi-Invested methods. We never saw Navani or Raboniel break Warlight back down into Stormlight and Voidlight, but theoretically it should be possible. Based on how easy the method is to create anti-Lights, it should be even pretty simple (perhaps inverting only the Voidlight aspect of the Warlight?).

Yeah, I don't imagine Mercy would go as entirely safely planned for me... and Ambition certainly wouldn't. But hey, does it really matter

No, I mean a vast majority of Moelach's references to a specific detail of an event with little to no visible context later are confirmed to be correct. Is that strategically useful? Maybe, maybe not, but Moelach is also capable of being more specific (Scholar with a Spear) if some conditions are met. And Odium would be better at retrieving that context.

Preservation I think is a great example of why even "good"-sounding Shards are almost never going to be Good. Preservation was thoroughly aligned with the Final Empire as it existed in Mistborn Era 1 / TFA, even with all the atrocities it did, because it was keeping Ruin at bay and keeping Scadrial in stasis. I don't think it's a coincidence that the 4 Shards with more than 3 votes (Reason, Invention, Mercy, and Devotion) are ones we've never actually seen. Never meet your heroes

For those who missed it: Weasel was a Cheating Swimmer, initially under control of Wandering Wizard (my teammate). I was in Beagle, who claimed LG92's Referee, but really was an Official, who could disqualify people who did crimes. TUF strong-spirited out Wizard D1, commented on my being a Referee, and then tried to cheat with Weasel and I busted him for it But the reason I then swapped out of Beagle was, in large part, activity. Wiz and I were fairly active, Lord Spirit somewhat less so, Weirdo... kind of disappeared. Meanwhile, Spirit was our Saboteur (who for a while I thought was a much better variation of Official, because while they could be caught as breaking the rules, it didn't rely on the target breaking the rules - but then I learned that the Sabotage only lasted a single turn), and Weirdo was our Strong Spirit, and neither really moved. So Wiz and I had to move a lot between some roles that I would have liked to keep on hand. Not sure how much that's an issue with the game versus just the woes of having an inactive team (which I've been there... I tried to grab Dingo this run but it never ended up working). I like this change a lot, and I agree with a lot of your other points. Some method of thread engagement would be good. One other thing perhaps - less rules being hidden might also be helpful. I know I at least had several misunderstandings about how certain rules even worked (such as auto-actions of uninhabited bodies, the Sabotage, and point values) and if there's not a particular reason to keep things hidden, it might be nice to know them ahead of time.

I'm not sure if the Heralds are still trapped on Roshar as Cognitive Shadows (which Kaladin technically is now), or if they're free to go like the spren are now that Honor has left the building. But it would be interesting to see. One of the things that came up in Sunlit Man was Sigzil thinking Wit was Kaladin, briefly. So he could be very well going around being immortal and saving the worlds.

I wonder which team Swan was on… Thanks for running! This was a very fun return game. I do to some degree have Thoughts but the mechanism was a very cool way of running an SElympics. Also being a Referee for real was a very nice welcome back moment

I'll join! Question - are Unanimous Ajah actions decided in-Doc, or in GM PMs? I.e. does it have to be unanimous decision in the doc (and thus visible to the other Ajah) or in GM PMs (where you could say something different than what was said in the Doc)?

Hmm. Fair. I tend to think of Perpendicularity as either the Shardpools or something specifically emulating them. But still, my point is that he can do Physical realm time dilation. We also know Wit warns Shallan about anyone who can see the future. And that Odium tends to give powers that do see the future. I thought there was one, maybe not, I don't really want to dive through all of OB looking for one. iirc we know Cultivation is better than Honor, Preservation's better than Ruin, Ruin is bad at it. Odium's certainly quite capable of it, which is a few steps above Ruin at minimum. But he's widely considered to be good at it. ... do I have a source that a fragment of Odium's power would probably be worse at futuresight than the remaining whole of Odium's power? ... mathematics? I'd consider "Connecting a dying soul to Fortune" to be futuresight. Accessory to futuresight, at worst. For all we know also, Moelach could be directly relaying every Death Rattle he causes to Odium. It should be within Odium's power, and wouldn't be the first time Odium directly leveraged one of the mindless Unmade to achieve specific ends - he did so with Nergaoul in OB. I think also, most Unmade tend to exist on all three realms unless they're strange (Yelig-nar). But we've gotten pretty far off the thread topic anyway.

Raboniel was dying in the first place because Navani stabbed her with the anti-Voidlight earlier.