Argent

This is correct (thought Cosmere Discussion is also valid). I am moving the topic to the Oathbringer Spoiler Board, @Gray to, you can PM me if you prefer to keep it here. I'll delete all OB replies in that case.

@Gancho Libre, I had to edit your post because Oathbringer content should only appear in Cosmere Discussion and the Oathbringer Spoiler Board.

Wow, Cal, at least read my post. Jeez.

Yeah, I have just a little more work left.

Greetings, travelers, and welcome to another episode of the hottest show in the Cosmere, Argent Bothers Random Employees of Dragonsteel Entertainment until He Gets Answers: Karen Edition! This month we are talking Rosharan spheres - the currency that makes absolutely no sense, but I've been obsessing over forever! Those of you who have been hanging out on Discord may be aware that I've been working on updating the Spheres article (which, depending on when you read this, may or may not be updated). Kind of in the middle of my work Peter randomly dropped in Reddit and canonized the weight of the gems inside the broams - 2 carats (details in this thread), which would make marks 0.5 carats, and chips 0.1 carats. Invigorated by this, I redoubled my efforts on the article, only to grow being frustrated by what I felt was a mix of contradicting information, missing information, and misleading information. Ultimately I decided to email Karen (Ahlstrom), who maintains Dragonsteel's internal Wiki, and see if she can help me figure some things out, and boy, did she deliver! Before I spill the beans, a few quick disclaimers. A lot of this information appears to coming from Brandon's early notes, which means that: Canonicity is a little lower than that of your modern day WoB Some things may change in the future Some things have been changed since these notes. Book lore trumps early notes lore. All this being said, let's get to the good stuff! Karen first emailed me the following table, in response to my attempt to figure out whether all ten Polestones are used in spheres (because of an offhanded remark by Shallan in The Way of Kings where she uses "spheres of all nine colors and all three sizes" for illumination): So that's good! It's not a 100% confirmation that all ten Polestones are used in spheres, but the fact that Brandon, at least early on, considered amethysts and garnets to both glow a light red color, combined with the absence of a light green gemstone, could easily explain Shallan's comment and kind of verify what many of us thought made sense - that all the Polestones have a corresponding sphere, even if not all of them are mentioned explicitly. However, as I worked on integrating this information into my page, Karen one-upped herself and dropped this bombshell (which I've translated into a table, from her original list-like email): Look at that! Every sphere type, put into one of five price buckets, all named (though, admittedly, the names are kind of meh, so I wouldn't be surprised if Brandon either drops them completely in the future, or at least renames them; this is all early notes stuff, after all). For context, we only knew four of those before (diamonds, garnets, amethysts, and emeralds). Remember how Gaz has a bit of a gambling problem? And how his debt is 80 ruby broams? We never knew quite how much that was, but now - woah, that's a lot of money, Gaz, you've got issues! With darkeyed soldiers earning five clearmarks (equivalent to 25 diamond chips) per day, those 80 ruby broams (16,000 diamond chips) are 640-days worth of a soldier's salary! That's more than a year! So that's awesome, and I've been really excited to not only hunt down obscure references to sphere amounts (like how, in one of her flashbacks, Shallan wants to buy some candied fruit, and it costs one diamond chip, and she hands the merchant lady an emerald mark, 250 times more than what the fruit is worth!), but there's a little more I can share with you. In addition to all the values (mind you, this is all coming from a different part of Brandon's notes), it looks like Brandon may have changed the colors of some of the gemstones, because we now have this: The colors are just what I picked from the Wikipedia page on X11 color names. So it looks like garnet and amethyst may have changed from their (I assume) original light red to pale and deep purple respectively. Which makes fits with some small details from the books, such as how the Dustbringers were distrusted because their eyes reminded people of the Voidbringers; if amethysts, rubies, and garnets all glowed red, this distrust probably wouldn't be reserved just for the Dustbringers. But there you have it! I'll leave you with another reminder that a lot of this can, theoretically, change in the future, so don't you go betting 80 ruby broams on all this being final - because we now know that this is a lot of money! A few firemarks though? That wouldn't be the end of the world Cheers! P.S. If you want the... less curated version of this, here are Peter's Reddit comments in Arcanum, and here are Karen's.

I think this more accurately belongs to Cosmere Q&A, so I've moved it. I understand the rationale behind posting it in the Arcanum board, but this is a better place for it.

I wish you luck then!

I've moved this to Cosmere Discussion, as the Q&A forum is intended questions that generally have a single objectively correct answer, and are less focused on opinions.

Brandon is actually kind of lowkey unhappy with The List™, he prefers if you ask questions you personally are interested in. This being said, a link to my own list is in my signature, in case something catches your fancy. Recently, I myself have been interested in the following: Oathbringer spoilers Or, if you prefer something from outside of Stormlight: Can gemstones hold Investiture other than Stormlight? Were there mists in Southern Scadrial during the time of the Final Empire?

@Kalidar, posting the same thread multiple times (as well as replying to a thread multiple times in a row, though that hasn't been an issue) is strongly frowned upon, and I ask you to avoid doing that in the future. For now I've simply merged your subsequent threads into this and move it to the Oathbringer Spoiler Board.

I would check with Dragonsteel before doing something like this.

Oh hey, I am actually working on updating the Coppermind article on spheres, but I can give you the highlights so far: @RShara is actually slightly wrong, the weights of the gems inside the spheres are 0.1ct for a chip, 0.5ct for a mark, and 2ct for a broam. This, according to some Googling on my part, leads to gem diameters of 3mm, 5mm, and 8mm respectively. The actual spheres are a little bigger than a person's thumbnail, according to Shallan in WoK. According to a Google search for "average size of person's thumb nail" (which, I assure you, is not a combination of terms I would ever search for) and this website, we are probably looking at somewhere between 1.5cm and 2cm for the size of each sphere, glass bead included. That, according to the chart on this page, puts them somewhere between a US dime and a US quarter (except, obviously, spherical). I believe RShara's earlier image of a sphere with a flattened bottom is pretty accurate, but that's how I imagine them.

That's one theory.

I am afraid this is not something I can help you with, I wouldn't know where to begin.

That's a clever visual, I like it.

I doubt it would work with a singer, I think there's a lot of Connection stuff going on there to make this possible. A human, on the other hand... I mean, he had to get a body somehow, right?

Something like this would feel too Mistborn-y, I think. There might be a relationship there, but I think it's more roundabout than that. Since the Radiant Orders were set up after the Heralds, the attributes each Order was expected to exemplify (originally by the associated spren, and later - by people) would match with the Heralds' Divine Attributes. If the Heralds' plea for help to Honor and Cultivation was instrumental in the setting up of Surgebinding as an Invested Art, then it could make sense that the attributes intrinsic to this Art would be ones that fall in line with who the Heralds were. So, less of a secret message, and more of just how things are. Yeah but that's an easy explanation, and we don't do those 'round these parts

I am really liking the idea of Unity being one of Honor's Purposes, and Dalinar having to internalize all of them to Ascend, perhaps so he can form the necessary Connection. I am also wondering whether it is one of the ten names of the Almighty, with the names matching those Purposes.

Hype!

I like the first part (which, ironically, is the second piece). Given how little we know about the Shards in general, I can't afford to be as picky with the theories I espouse, just because there isn't a lot of evidence to go around; but this seems reasonable. The second part, I think it fits better than before - or at least I understand it better. There's still a little bit of mental gymnastics I need to do between b and c, but overall it works better for me. Reframing the whole things in the context of "this is how this Shard is reaching for divinity" helped a lot.

Interesting. I don't think I agree with much of this, but I find it very interesting, and also very valuable. We don't think about the nature of Shards much these days, so any shake-up to the paradigm is a good thing to have. High level thoughts aside, I wonder how you came up with these categories. Did you just look at the Shards we have available, examine what and how they interact with the world, and group them based on similarities? Because every time I see a group of four categories, I try to put them on a push/pull & internal/external kind of table, and while I haven't quite been able to make those fit (in the 3 minutes I spent trying), I was able put them on an internal/external & people/cosmos (or animate/inanimate) one, like so: Innate(A): The Shard affects the Vessels own self. This is an animate & internal Shard. Relational(B): The Shard affects the Vessel's relationship with others. This is an animate & external Shard. Intervention(C): The Shard affects how the Vessel interacts with the Cosmere as a whole. This is an inanimate & external Shard. Mandate(D): The Shard affects the Vessel's internal relationship with the Cosmere. This is an inanimate & internal Shard. Now, I'll be the first to admit this categorization is a little contrived. If I had been able to put these on a push/pull scale I would've been far more sold on the entire idea, but maybe putting your categories on a scale like this one will offer you a different way of looking at those categories, maybe refine some of them a little. In particular, I am not very happy with my own categorization of C and D - both feel more focused on the inanimate (which is fine), but both also feel external. Which, of course, mirrors how I find your C and D more similar than any two other categories. All this being said, I like the identification of how different Shards seem to affect their Vessels differently. I don't know if I am ready to agree that the Shards are inherently different in such ways (e.g. some change the way the Vessel is, while others change what the Vessel does), it may be that all of the Shards are capable of affecting their Vessels in all of these ways, but we see just one manifestation; Ruin, in the hands of another, maybe could've driven populations to seek the destruction rival nations and worlds, instead of focusing on a more universal, global kind of end of days. But the different interactions, the different categories, are good to pinpoint.

I've moved this to the Oathbringer Spoiler Board, as a lot of the Fortune discussion will inevitably lead there.

@robardin, try to avoid posting multiple times in a row (e.g. double-posting). You can edit your previous post to include any additional thoughts you may have missed the first time around.

I am not sure what you mean here. In the Cosmere, Compounding has a very specific meaning, and my tired brain is having a hard time ignoring that. Do you mean Ascending to multiple Shards? Holding them like Szeth does with Ruin and Preservation?