Shumei

Waiting a few weeks works for me. The X-Wing league night tomorrow will stretch my going-out-to-play-games credit with my wife as it is.

The Mistborn RPG, as well as the Terris and Alloy of Law expansions, are available as part of the Humble Ebook bundle currently running. It looks like the bundle will run until November 16th. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/fiction-faves-rpg-book-bundle

So I got to thinking: I've read some about certain characters converting their need for magic from Breath to Stormlight. While we don't yet have a way to measure how the various magic systems interact, or their relative proportions of Investiture, I propose that we standardize the units that Investiture is measured in. Obviously, Breath is the easiest to quantify, as it comes in units of 1 Breath. Stormlight-- while it clearly can be subdivided further, the amount that can be held by one (diamond?) chip seems to be a good unit. Metallic arts-- the amount of Investiture that can be held by a metalmind weighing 1 oz/g/something else? The amount of investiture held in enough Atium to burn for 1 second? Some thought here would be appreciated. Dor-- I don't have any idea how to measure these magic systems. Any thoughts?

Truthfully, the Heralds themselves (apart from Taln) are probably villains at this point. They have all abandoned their posts, and at least one is hunting down surgebinders.

Shallan specifically states that if her family got a working Soulcaster, they would make marble, opal, or jade with it, as these are the most valuable non-gemstone deposits that they could create with soulcasting. This implies that there are 1) gemstone deposits and 2) the ardents don't know/won't use this trick, since if they did there would be loads of these valuable rocks created.

The Shard of Misplaced Apostrophe's

... when you see the abbreviation "tl;dr" at the end of a long post and wonder if someone mistyped the ";d" in their abbreviation for The Lord Ruler.

Of course, she will probably have to relinquish her Blade eventually in order to progress as a candidate Knight Radiant, if Kaladin's bond with Syl is any indicator.

So, to sum up the discussion thus far: Physical properties of the gems in spheres: We can reliably come up with numbers about the luminance of spheres, but have no real idea of any other property of the gems within the sphere other than relative mass, which can be estimated via comparing luminosity. The color of the gems is, according to WoB, fixed, but the other properties (mass, clarity, cut) are unknown. Therefore, we cannot yet compare (or create an authentic-looking movie-prop glass replica) of a Rosharan sphere. I'd like to throw in the "fact" that my thumbnail is 15mm across, so that a sphere based on the size of my thumbnail would be ~16-18mm wide and contain a gem that is (especially when we consider chips) quite tiny, probably 1mm or less in size. Scarcity: Gems on Roshar appear to be rather more common than here on Earth. They are probably a renewable resource, grown by some kind of organ within many of the crustaciform life on Roshar. Monetary value: A clearchip is worth about one loaf of bread, which due to economic differences, is hard to equate to Earthly money, though it could be estimated to lie within the range of $1.00-$10.00. Any other points to be made besides these? Thanks to everyone for your thoughts on the matter so far.

This is my first post here, though I've been lurking for a while. I couldn't find an obvious answer to this question on the wiki, etc., so I thought I would pose it here: Does anyone know (or has anyone asked Brandon or Peter) how large the gem inside of each denomination of sphere is? I. e., how many carats to a broam, how many carats to a mark, how many carats to a chip? Do these values vary between the different gems? Are the sizes fixed exactly, or do they vary within a set range for each level of value? I don't expect that anyone has answers to these questions yet, but I thought I would pose them for future consideration.

I would be happy to win.