Cocoa

Don't forget that, despite being a broadly intelligent and curious person, Sigzil's worldsinger training is in cultures, and also that what Rosharan magic has in raw power, Scadrian magic has in diversity of abilities. I can totally buy him being able to recognize and read Scadrian writing but failing to clock on to a specific sub-type of one of its magics, especially if it's being applied in a very unorthodox way.

We know incredibly, incredibly little about the Aether of Wind, only that it was an early prototype of Syl's character alluded to in an (unpublished) project that Brandon did a little bit of work on called Climb the Sky back in the early 2000s. Big props to @Pagerunner for having done the legwork to find and compile what we do know. That said, I really like your theory, especially since someone else has now gotten a "kinda" confirmation on the same theory I had up there, that the Essences and Aethers follow the same patterns. I've been puzzling over for a while now how the fluidization would work, since you'd need some sort of Investiture at play to avoid the planet from running out of pressurized air, and having wind-aligned spores that produce pressurized gas sounds like a very tidy answer to that question.

That makes sense. Though I do gotta say, I don't envy people in 'gap generations.' All of the knowledge that your family had you for the purpose of producing powerful heirs, and none of the benefits of being a demigod yourself.

I've seen a lot of magic systems over the years which rely on direct inheritability, with strong magic users being prone to producing children with strong magic, and weak magic users passing only weak magic on to their children, if any. The most common logical end result I see of this, at least in societies that value magical power, is magic slowly becoming concentrated into exlusive bloodlines as strong mages try to have children with other strong mages. That got me thinking about the potential opposite; a system where magic is hereditary (so you still need to be descended from someone with magic to use it), but your own magical power tends to 'wash out' that of your children. A strong mage will always have children with weak magic, the combined power of two sufficiently strong mages might snuff out the spark of magic in their descendants entirely, and two people with nigh-nonexistent magic might have a child with unrivaled power. What do you think the social effects of such a system would be like, where mages are actively disincentivized from having children with other mages (particularly powerful ones) if they want them to be powerful? Edit: For the sake of streamlining things, let's also say that a mage + a pure non-mage would produce mage children with about half the strength of the mage parent. That way 1) the setting presents a reliable way to produce extremes of magic by 'breeding low' over several generations and then 'breeding high,' and 2) you don't just have powerful mages having children exclusively with non-mages to get around destructive interference.

I'll happily concede to the plausibility of your other points, but I do want to clarify something. I actually don't see any particular reason for Feruchemists and Awakeners to develop other abilities on Roshar, because their abilities don't use bonds as a foundation, which is what I think is the important thing here. Seons and aviar, on the other hand, do work through forming bonds, just like spren do. Of course, as you pointed out the fact that aviar are biological rather than Type 1 entities could be a limiting factor, I just wanted to clarify that I'm proposing bond magic specifically has extra effects on Roshar, not just any kind of invested art.

Well, one of them anyway. I doubt we'll make it through the finale of the first Stormlight cycle without big character moments going off all over the place, but I think Lift's going to be especially significant. My reasoning is as follows: First and foremost, for me, is the fact that she's the only character who has a boon from Cultivation that we haven't yet seen come to a climax. We've seen the end result of her meddling with Dalinar in Oathbringer with him resisting Odium, and her plans for Taravangian when he killed Rayse and took up Odium in Rhythm of War, so it makes sense to me that we'll get a hat trick and see the big payoff of what she's done with Lift in this next book. Secondly, Szeth is going to be the big viewpoint/flashback character for book 5, and him and lift already have the foundation for a rapport on account of working together at the Battle of Thaylen Field. Szeth's fought Kal and talked with Navani, sure, but the only other radiant I can think of who he's got a stronger connection to than Lift is Dalinar, because he pledged himself specifically to his service. Thirdly, Lift currently has one of the more diverse powersets on Roshar. She's an Edgedancer. She's got a boon and a curse from the Old Magic. And as of RoW, she's bonded a chicken aviar. That last one might be doubly significant, since Brandon's said that a seon bond on Roshar would act like a Nahel bond, just not grant the same powers. This raises the possibility that not only will she get the abilities conferred by that species of aviar, but also more surgebinding or surgebinding-like abilities.

Glad I wasn't the only one who thought 'aethers,' especially when looking at the number 12 and the verdant spores acting a little like pulp essence in soulcasting. With that in mind, I'm bringing back my theory that the twelve aethers will line up with the Ten Essences + Light + Dark. Thank you for linking that video @Mazman, I was able to understand well enough from the description in the story what was going on, but the video really helped me visualize it. I do wonder where the air from the vents is coming from now, though. Either there's investiture at play, or it'd be doomed to run out eventually.

I'm listening to WoK again, and having gotten to the bit right after Shallan's theft of the fake soulcaster, I can't help but be struck by how lucky Jasnah is that she didn't soulcast around Shallan afterwards and how funny it would be, as a reader, if she had. She hadn't been especially shy about casual soulcasting up to that point, we find out about her using it just because she ran out of ink or needed a paperweight, so it really was pure luck that she didn't do something similar after the swap. And imagine you're Shallan when this happens. You spent all this time psyching yourself up to steal your boss' magic artifact, you're agonizing over what you've done, and then your boss just. Casually uses the broken artifact you swapped for her working one. I don't think she'd have any chance of making the Radiant connection, because nobody's seen a Radiant since forever, but she'd certainly be perplexed. Maybe perplexed enough to say something, if she wasn't careful. Or she might just be relieved and assume Jasnah has some way to make a broken soulcaster work without knowing it's broken. And with that in mind she'd hightail it back to Jah Keved, aaaaaaand things would probably end terribly for her and her brothers since Jasnah never actually had a soulcaster.

Alright so I've been browsing various book five theories and fitting things together in my head, and I've got a theory about how this is all going to go down. One recurring theme that we've seen, throughout the series but especially in RoW, is this idea that "Honor is not dead so long as he lives on in the hearts of men." Wit also talks about how the contest between Dalinar and Odium will be about the hearts of the people. And while I know this isn't speaking about hearts literally, I can't help but be reminded about deadeyes coming back a little bit alive by syncing up with the heartbeats of those who hold their blades. According to WoB, the Resonance of the Windrunners is "strength of squires." They're better at forming Connections with people that let them share their power. And we've been seeing Dalinar learn to sense and tinker with Connections, and he's hoping to learn how to better use this skill from Ishar. So what if that squire Connection Kaladin has gets taken, and then strentched out to a whole bunch of people? On one level, I can imagine this simply being the Windrunners. The Radiants closest to both Honor and to Kaladin himself. But imagine if Kaladin winds up connected to everyone. Not even just humans, but singers (after all, Kaladin has shown himself to be pretty empathetic when it comes to the singers, and there's been a lot of hints at reconciliation between them and Honor) and maybe even the spren. A thousand thousand people of Honor, each drawing in a little Stormlight, their hearts beating together and each bringing Honor a little closer back to life, all with Kaladin at the focal point. And then he swears the fifth ideal, gets his final big burst of stormlight, and ascends. There are a few different factors I can think of that can maybe get us to this point. The first is that Dalinar winds up being the one responsible. Kaladin's not the only big viewpoint protagonist, so it makes sense he'd get help on this one, and this is the sort of thing Dalinar has been readying himself for. Secondly, it could be that Kaladin faces down with Moash (or someone else does, but Kal makes the most narrative sense I think) and wins Jezrien's honorblade, letting him double up his Windrunner powers and therefore his Resonance. Third, he could wind up with Ishar's honorblade, making him both a Windrunner and an unchained Bondsmith, letting him set things up himself. The biggest hurdle I can think of with that one is that Kal doesn't really have any Bondsmith training and I find it unlikely we'll see Dalinar relegated to just a mentor role. Of course, it could quite easily be a combination of some or all of these possibilities. I think this would be a satisfying way to finish out Kaladin's character arc while also giving a way for all the peoples of Roshar to prove their Honor. Of course, I don't think it'll solve all the problems, seeing as we've still got all the back half books to be filled. In fact, I can picture this being something that averts a victory by Odium, with him doing some serious damage before Honor!Kaladin ascends and is able to put him in a stalemate. One last tangential possibility that still follows the same formula is that we wind up with this network of the hearts of the people of Roshar, still centered on Kaladin, but it's Syl who winds up ascending, since she's made of Honor anyway. Of course, by that point Kal would have a Nahel bond with a Shard-Spren, and the difference between that and actually ascending is probably mostly pedantic.

This is a little something I've been tinkering with in my spare time. I've seen a few people in the past talk about making a set of extra rules for running surgebinding with the Mistborn Adventure Game rules, but personally I think that the feel of both the Investiture and the setting are different enough from Mistborn that it can use its own system. As is, this is still very bare-bones, for example I still haven't hashed out at all the exacts of earning and spending XP, and I don't really have much by way of fabrials yet, but I wanted to show off what I've got so far and see what people's thoughts about it are. Character Stats Character Creation Feats and XP Combat and Rest

Yup, covered that in the original post. If they were all feruchemists (as we would expect), it makes sense that Harmony would relocate them elsewhere (quite possibly to another continent altogether) in an attempt to prevent a power imbalance between neighbors. I suspect it is just a reference to the bit where TenSoon tried donating a spike to ReLuur. Though, since he says it's mostly just cultural, I doubt there's anything preventing a 'newborn' kandra from using hand-me-down spikes, it's just that once the consciousness forms it becomes dependent on having the original two spikes. With that in mind, I wonder if (somewhat ironically, since they're scavengers that have no qualms about consuming the corpses of other sapient species) we're looking at the kandra equivalent of a cannibalism taboo if the spikes aren't being recycled.

We know what happened to the main 'peoples' of Scadrial from Era 1 during the catascendre: the human citizens of the Final Empire were gathered together in the Elendel Basin, with the adaptations that Rashek had built into them to survive the ash reversed and the damage to their bodies healed. The koloss were changed to be a pseudo-truebreeding race, giving birth to koloss-blooded. The kandra simply had their spikes and intelligence returned. Later, we find out that the Southern Scadrians also existed off-screen, and were not given any special adaptations we know of at this moment apart from Kelsier's aid (though how they have access to feruchemy in the first place is not yet confirmed). But what about the other fantasy trapping of the Final Empire, the mistwraiths? The few surviving kandra aside, mistwraiths are conspicuously absent from Era 2. It's possible that they were simply destroyed in the remaking of the world or couldn't adapt to the new environment since they weren't originally created to be a part of it, but that seems an unusual choice for Harmony considering all the care he put into Preserving what he could. So, where'd they go? Well, as we've seen with the Southern Scadrians, the residents of the Basin really don't know what's out there beyond the horizon, in no small part due to their hesitancy to explore and expand. And we also know that the first mistwraiths were created when Rashek transformed the then-current Feruchemists of the world to try to eliminate the possibility of there being other Fullborn who could challenge him. So what if Harmony turned them back into humans, and relocated them to a remote part of Scadrial where they wouldn't yet have been encountered by the people of the Basin (and, likely, not the Southern Scadrians either)? Problem: Why would Harmony turn the mistwraiths into humans, if he didn't do the same for the kandra and the koloss? Solution: Because unlike the non-sentient mistwraiths, the kandra and koloss had developed their own societies and identities in the time since they were created. We know from Bands of Mourning that an individual kandra's mind is reliant on their specific spikes, so it's quite possible that turning the kandra back into humans would have wiped clean their unique personalities and identities. And likewise, he might have considered restoring koloss to their pre-Hemalurgy forms and minds as 'killing' their current selves. The mistwraiths, meanwhile, would not have had any culture or individuality to erase or overwrite. Problem: If Harmony did return the mistwraiths' lost humanity, why didn't he put them in the South or the Basin with everyone else? Solution: There are a few reason I can think of. The first is that they didn't have their own culture or identity, so Harmony was curious to see how they would develop without outside human interference. Even if he gave them adult intelligence and basic knowledge, they would still be newborn as a people. The second is that, since all the original mistwraiths were Feruchemists, there's a solid chance that full feruchemy would be widespread if not outright omnipresent in the formerly-mistwraith population, and he didn't want to risk them out-competing the people of the South or the Basin. And the last possibility is a bit of a mix of the first two; the former mistwraiths would probably be one if not both of naive and powerful. With those traits, Harmony might have been concerned about other humans taking advantage of and oppressing them before they found their footing.

If you're not dead-set on having another type of chromine, I think you could slot radio and internet very cleanly into yellow. After all, radio waves are just a form light with a longer wavelength than the visible spectrum. So with the proper complex layout of, for example, yellow and red chromine, you could create an electrical radio.

I was thinking, Nalthian and and Selish invested arts both stick out to me for being command-based, as opposed to more purely intent-based (allomancy, feruchemy, surgebinding, sand mastery) or gadget-based (mechanical metallic arts, fabrials, possibly medallions). And then we have this gem: So, we've got two invested arts that function via commands, and Awakening can use loose Investiture to fuel itself as opposed to just breaths. With those facts in mind, I think you can 'easily' (bearing in mind that both systems require a high degree of mastery and knowledge to use) hack Awakening to run off the Dor, as long as you're aware of how to Awaken and capable of using a Selish art. To do this, you would form a command telling an object what to do and picture it in your mind, like when you Awaken, and then draw out that command using a Selish command system (AonDor, Soulstamps, Bloodsealing would probably work well for making lifeless, etc.). The Awakening then takes effect, drawing on the Dor and infusing its Investiture into the target as opposed to using your Breath. I'm unsure, but I think this process would still consume color from an object you're touching as a catalyst.

So, we know that if a woman was taken by the Shaod and became an incomplete Elantrian, her child would also enter suspended animation, a pregnant woman taking up a Shard would have some effect on her unborn child, and while I can't find it right at the moment I could swear I saw somewhere that tapping a goldmind could also extend healing to an unborn child. So it seems that investiture in a pregnant mother will often if not always extend the effect in part to her unborn child. So with that in mind, if a pregnant Nalthian woman died, but her child survived, and then she Returned a few seconds later, what would happen to the kid? Would they just be healthy due to being carried the rest of their term by a mother with literally superhuman health, but otherwise normal? Would they have a much stronger than usual non-divine Breath, making them a sort of Returned demigod? Would we get something like the Idrian royal line, where they have 'a piece' of Returned in them, letting them shapeshift? What are your thoughts?

Syl very explicitly wasn't created by Tanavast, but by the Stormfather, unlike most other pre-Recreance Honorspren. This is why the Stormfather refers to her as his daughter. And while the Stormfather has since merged with Tanavast's CS, she predates the shattering, so she's not Tanavast's daughter by virtue of a "the Stormfather actually counts as Tanavast" trick. So, yes, I believe you are wrong because the information you're using to draw your conclusions is wrong. My personal theory is that Kal is a "Son of Tanavast" for one of two reasons. If it's meant literally, then Tanavast sired one of his ancestors on Lirin's side of the family, which coud explain why both Lirin and Kal are both so devoted to their codes of honor and behavior. If it's only meant figuratively, then it has to do with how close Kaladin is to Tanavast's own self-sacrificing (and some might say self-destructive) ideal of what "Honor" is.

First of Snow, probably.

The general consensus I've seen is that he was (became) a genuinely bad person who nonetheless was more complex than first presented and had some sympathetic streaks in his backstory. I think that's not an unfair assessment. Now, one thing I am admittedly curious about is whether and to what extent he was under the influence of an Unmade or similar force. We now know via WoB, for example, that his son Balat's cruelty towards and desire to maim small animals is being magically enhanced somehow. What if, then, Lin was under the same effect, and this caused or worsened his abusive tendencies? Thematically, I doubt it would be presented as his actions being entirely outside his agency; Balat manages to restrain his maimings to animals instead of people, for example, and a crucial part of Dalinar's arc is that even though the Thrill greatly influenced his actions he refuses to let Odium take responsibility for what he did. But I do think it would cast a different light on his behavior.

Ah, wonderful, seems I'm not the only person wanting to know about that specific interaction then. And the fact that it was RAFO'd (and called a good question) has my hopes up that we'll see something neat relating to that.

So, I was reading back over (well, listening) to the end of Bands of Mourning, and some things stuck out to me. Emphasis mine. Now, at first I had just assumed that the Faceless Immortals were corrupted kandra a la Bleeder. After all, the two terms have been synonymous up to this point. However, what if these creatures, while both immortal and without a fixed appearance, are a whole different animal than kandra? The first thing that makes me think this is the usage of "A beggar stolen off the street." Sure, this could just be referring to the body, since a kandra could either kill a beggar or scavenge an already dead one to use their body as a disguise. But the word 'body' isn't specifically used here. Mild Oathbringer spoilers for this second point, but the glowing red eyes also bring to my mind the glowing red eyes of the possessed men in Amaram's army (and to a lesser extent, the Fused in general). Thirdly, the Set Faceless Immortal we see seems pretty unconcerned with blowing itself up along with Suit. Now, this could be fanaticism, but I have a different thought. What if these "Faceless Immortals" are bodysnatching cognitive entities, instead of kandra? I can't say for certain that they're Fused or voidspren, since I don't think we have a clear enough idea of Trell's identity, but they certainly seem to behave similarly and it would be a satisfying explanation to the three above observations.

This is rooted somewhat is Stormlight Archive speculation about the Honor shard potentially being un-splintered and taken up by Kaladin or Dalinar (who are bonded to Syl and the Stormfather respectively, both of whom I think could also be suitable vessels for Honor), but I want to ask it as a broader question. We know a single vessel can potentially hold multiple shards thanks to Sazed, but do you think two or more people can serve side by side as vessels of a single shard, provided they are both sufficiently connected to it? If so, what happens if they try to use the shard's power in conflicting ways? Does the answer change if the two have closely linked spiritwebs, such as in the case of a surgebinder and their bonded spren? If it is possible and two people took up the same shard, would the pressure of the shard's Intent bring their Identities closer together or even merge the two into a single entity given enough time?

If I had to guess, probably not, beyond Aluminum almost certainly doing something to them... Though now you've got me wondering, do the metal cages used in fabrials only apply to lesser spren captured in gemstones, or d the allomantic metals have direct effects on all sorts of 'Type 1 Invested Entities' in the Cosmere?

I don't think you're correct about a slower burn rate producing more attribute per gram; we're just told that compounding lets you get out what you put in tenfold. The burn rate, in my mind, has more to do with how fast you get that increased attribute out, not how much of it you get in total. I also don't think Marsh managing to survive so long says anything about the burn rate of atiumminds. Even if it's a 'slow burn,' it's like HSuperLee said, it'd be far more efficient if you're thinking in rationing terms to burn metalminds, store what you get out, then tap that at the necessary rate before repeating the process when your stores get low. To illustrate: Let's assume, just for for simplicity's sake, that the bag holds 100 beads of atium. Fill 1 atium bead to 100% capacity, or as close as you can get. This gives us our basic unit of age. Burn that bead and store the resulting 10 units of age in 10 new atium beads as you burn it. Set 1 unit aside, and then tap the remaining 9 as necessary until they're depleted. Once you've depleted them, burn the bead you set aside and fill up the 9 depleted beads plus 1 from your bag. Repeat until you run completely out of beads. Once you dip below 10 empty beads, you'll no longer be able to store all the units you get by burning, so those units will only be of any use to you for as long as you're burning. In total, this would give you 1000 units of age for your initial 1 unit investment, 55 of which at the end you'd be unable to store and thus would be the only ones actually limited by the atiummind burn rate. The other 945 units would have been stored in metalminds and so could be tapped at your leisure.

As mentioned, most metals have a crystalline structure, but it's also worth noting that most stones are also made up of crystals. So perhaps the fact that all three solids capable of being shifted are generally crystalline in nature is significant. Since lyfe is stored in moon crystals, is there anything stopping someone from using a bunch of smoke to make a bunch of moon crystals? What if you shifted a moon crystal full of lyfe into smoke? If there's something that makes moon crystals behave unlike other crystals when it comes to shifting, maybe change it to a non-crystal substance (or stone, or metal, for that matter) to avoid confusion. "Moon amber," maybe? It resembling solidified tree resin could tie back to the whole life energy idea. You say that visibility infusions affect the material's interaction with photons, but it feels like there's more going on. It just being photons wouldn't make people's attention be drawn to a more visible object, and less visible smoke would just be transparent instead of cloaking things inside it. So I'm not entirely sure what's going on there. If you change it so that visibility really is just a slider on transparency/opaqueness, consider what making something super opaque would do. I imagine it would absorb or reflect electromagnetic radiation outside the visible spectrum. If I have something invisible that should be producing light, what happens? For example, if I finagle things to get a sample of invisible magnesium, and then ignite it, do I still get a burst of bright light and heat? If not, what happens to the energy? What happens if I have a super-visible object that should be producing light? One really fun hack I can think of for this is that ice is a crystal form of water, and heat energy is a lot easier to come by and manipulate than lyfe. So you can save a lot of lyfe when working with B-group and C-group shifts and infusions. What about impurities? There's a little water vapor in air. A lot of the volume of what we think of as 'smoke' is air. There's air dissolved in water. Some stones have metal impurities in them. Do these impurities naturally convert over to their counterpart when you shift, unless you expend deliberate effort and lyfe to make the result a pure material? Does only the substance you're deliberately trying to shift convert, so for example could you extract metals from stone my converting only the stone bits to air? For lyfelack, why is Stage 3 a point of no return even if you have access to an external source of lyfe? I can understand that below a certain threshold you no longer have enough lyfe left to naturally digest food and make more lyfe, but wouldn't infusing more lyfe be enough to jumpstart the system and get it up and running again? And one last thing that's only tangentially related to the magic system but is a worldbuilding issue to consider, is how people keep infused air and smoke from just diffusing while working with it.

...or at least, unlocking AonDor. So, Selish arts being geographically locked is a result of Devotion and Dominion's combined investiture - collectively the Dor - having been shoved into the Cognitive realm by Odium after he splintered those Shards. Most end-poitive arts pull Investiture from the Spiritual Realm, Selish arts can't do that because it being in a location-dependent Realm keys parts of it to certain locations through Identity and Connection. Seons, meanwhile, are splinters of Devotion accidentally created as a side-effect of the splintering of Devotion. Which means that, while they do seem to be mostly-cognitive beings like spren, they weren't part of the central shardic mass of Devotion at the time it was trapped in the Cognitive. Now, Brandon has been cagey when asked about whether Seon communication is truly instantaneous, because if it's Spiritual in nature then it would be instantaneous since distance isn't a factor, but if it's Cognitive then there'd technically be a slight delay. The simplest means of achieving instant or near-instant communication, both over great distances and (Rhythm of War spoilers) between the Physical and Cognitive Realms using Cosmere mechanics that we've seen on-screen would be by manipulating Connection in a certain way. In the case of Seon-to-Seon communication, this would be the Connection between the two Seons, or possibly the two people speaking through them using Seons as a medium. So, quick recap: Shards can normally transmit Investiture at a distance because the live in the Spiritual Realm, and the reason this doesn't work on Sel is the Shards are in the wrong Realm. Seons were broken off of Devotion before it got moved to the wrong Realm. There is a good chance that Seons pull of their long-distance and inter-realm communication by manipulating Connection, just from what we know of Cosmere mechanics. Now, here's the kicker: So, you can use f-Duralumin - manipulating Connection - to hack AonDor and let an Elantrian use it at full power regardless of location. So, what if instead of having your Seon contact another Seon, you have it dial the Dor's metaphorical phone number? Could doing so allow you to use AonDor regardless of your location in the Physical Realm?