Tempus

A similar description to the under pressure scene you speak of is apparent when . Both scenarios occur when a certain type of magic hasn't been used in a long time. In Elantris, subsequent uses of the Dor are many times weaker as well than the first usage. It seems like when a power does not get used, it builds up.

1. Dissipate 2. Yes, by WoB 3. Unknown, but probably not. Consuming breaths is a property of the Returned, not the Divine Breath. 4. Yes 5. Unknown, but the Returned would probably die. 6. Probably, but it should be very high. Divine Breath are splinters, and other splinters (like spren) seem to be able to exist in very large quantities. Splinters are just masses of investiture, and in some ways shards are just masses of investiture. The scale is completely different - people are like sparks, splinters are like bonfires, a shard is more like a sun. 7. Yes. It is likely (but not confirmed) that just one breath would be sufficient as long as their Divine Breath remained intact and keyed to the Returned. Bonus Question: Yes. He does so in the last scene.

Except you don't have to know what the ideal stamp was. If you were required to know EVERYTHING about a subject, then Shai's essence stamps (especially the knowledge retention one) would be very useless, as she would have been required to know all those things before being able to stamp them. I'm pretty certain that forgery isn't about knowing the exact details of a thing, but instead about making the right connections. The knowledge you need isn't one of a creator of things, but more one of a jeopardy trivia master - knowing all about a thing without actually having the ability or experience to use that knowledge. In other words, a forger doesn't need to how to do something, but how to how to do something. They encode those connections onto their stamps, and it runs like a little program.

I've been looking at em'. Artifabrian ends at 399, and Envisager starts at 400. (confirmed via R`Shara) King's Testers ends at 474, and Vanisher starts at 475. (confirmed via Outis) Vanisher ends at 495, and Sons of Honour begins at 496. (confirmed via Gamma) Seer is at 821 (keep your eye on it, Awesomeness!) Truthless goes as low as 981 (Swimmingly) Waffle Cook ends at 1144, and Returned starts at 1145 (via Argent) Most Ancient is as high as 2634. One day I will make the top 50 too. *looks forlornly into the sunset*

We've cleared it all up, hammered out some general rules, and a 'Quick fix' format will be run midway through each main game. It will be lighter on role playing, have fewer special roles, and last no longer than a week. Meta will be posting the general rules in the first post here shortly. In the meantime, what would everyone prefer for the first setting? I've got one in mind now for every in text world except Nalthis, so if there is something tickling your fancy let me know and we'll start there.

That is a lot of maybes, but I can only make guesses with some basis in evidence. I've listed the clues we have, and what they could mean, and their implications, and the chance that the assumptions paired with them are correct. Unless you've got some more evidence or logic by which to improve the accuracy of our guesses, that's my best guess!

Yep. Could do it double like with Elantris. Didn't worry about it too much, we don't know enough about nighttime stuff.

Sorry, I wasn't aware that I was hijacking anything. Werewolf is a pretty popular forum and party game, I've run a number of games with my friends and didn't really think anything of it. I wasn't intending to supersede the main game. I shall send him a PM forthwith.

I missed the deadline for the last RP by a day, but it seems like it can be a long wait. I was wondering if anyone would be interested if I ran a mini-game, in a faster format? I'm thinking something along the lines of one-day combined day/night format, 8-15 people, where it would then take no longer than a week (one lynch and one murder per day). Simplified roles, no OOC as I'd build the game rules into a premise. I've got a couple ideas for premises that could be fun - a Jesker Mysteries premise, a Forger Premise (where you could make essence stamps change your forum display name and picture to make things super confusing =D), a Steel Inquisition premise, even a premise for Liar of Partinel which I probably wouldn't be allowed to run, haha. If there are about three or four people who are interested in a short game like this, I'll set it up and run the first one, and then anyone else who wants to can run another with the same rules and a different premise if they like afterwards, at least while waiting for the longer RP game to start another round. If you're interested, say so in a post and feel free to state the kind of premise you'd like to have for the game, out of the above or another if there's something that tickles you.

He's also said it is similar to other Shardpools though. The not what you think it is comment could be taken a couple ways. It could be that he means that the Shardpool doesn't normally destroy people (we think it does, but maybe it doesn't exactly). It could be that it's not Devotion's shardpool (we think it is, but maybe it's Dominion's, or a splinter shardpool). It could be a lot of things, really.

Gunpowder discovery is an accident, but many discoveries are. The key with discoveries of that sort are not 'how' they happened, but the probability of someone stumbling upon it. If you roll enough dice, you will eventually get a six, so to speak. No one set out and said "I'm gonna try all these weird powders until some mixture of them explodes". However, there are a number of factors which assist in the accidental discovery of gunpowder. The first of these is mining - sulphur is a common byproduct of early mining operations. Especially salt mining. It had a number of uses, but chief is that it burns hot and nasty and makes foul smoke that kills things, like bugs and rodents, but doesn't damage stuff like regular smoke. So you've got one component of black powder. Then you have charcoal. Charcoal is a common fuel for burning things nice and hot. It comes from trees. Mix charcoal and sulphur, and you get some incredible and nasty flames, much bigger than either on it's own. And you burn sulphur anyway, so sooner or later, it's gonna happen. The last ingredient to traditional black powder is an oxidant, usually saltpetre. Early ways to make it is basically take a bunch of poop, especially bat or bird poop, and then stick it in water for a while and saltpetre crystals will form. This occurred pretty normally with fertilizing. If some dude should think for whatever reason to throw some of these crystals into those weirdly strong sulphur/charcoal flames, you'd get a small explosion. Sulphur and saltpetre were occasionally used for some old ceramics and pottery (as firing and flux agents, respectively). They were both occasionally used for old medicines (because anything weird that makes things die or grows on poop is probably medicine, right?). Pursue these avenues and you'd soon find gunpowder. Roshar has the following issues: • Very little mining. Crystals are plentiful and more useful than metal in some ways, and metal can be soulcast. • Very few hardwood trees. The trees on Roshar are weird and jungly, and not necessarily suitable to make charcoal (it requires hardwoods). • Very few bird or batlike creatures. Saltpetre is more difficult to find via mining (and they're low on mining), so without high nitrate poops around, sources would be scarce. So basically, Roshar is not likely to find gunpowder because the ingredients are rare and thus the chance of them being used in collusion become very small. I actually feel that shardplate should bring military science in terms of fabrial weapon making to a more accelerated path, though. If you have these fabrials, and you know that shardplate is awesome and uses gemstones LIKE fabrials, why would you not investigate their use as weapons as much as possible? Make more things like the half-shard shields, fabrial powered artillery, fabrial traps, procurement devices, or simple fabrial engines for locomotion of siege equipment or gear. Lastly, I agree with you ideologically in general. I am concerned mostly with tech level when I talk about Renaissance. I'm honestly not qualified to talk about cultural anthropology except in the most vague and sweeping senses.

I have another thread about this, but basically, for 'Renaissance', I'm looking for Scientific Method (discovery of knowledge), printing presses (proliferation of knowledge), advanced navigation (proliferation of trade), and Muskets (application of knowledge to killing things) in order to declare a society 'Renaissance level'. Those being the key technology assets and discoveries that defined the beginning of that period of technology. Equivalent technologies would count, if they fulfilled that role. Roshar is well on it's way to developing the scientific method - Jasnah, Shallan, and Navani all demonstrate aspects of good scientific research. It still needs to be standardized as a discipline and codified, however. The other three major aspects are all missing, however. Most notable of those is military - Roshar seems to have no gunpowder weapons at all, and this could be because scarcity of materials and lack of need for metallurgy has stunted them in that respect. There should still be advanced military applications applied from the new sciences introduced, in this case, they should be fabrial based. But Navani has only just begun this process. Given those clues, and a large amount of other clues, I'm putting them in late medieval. By the end of the Stormlight Archive, I think we will see them advance further in the military respect (though why the war hungry Alethi haven't done so before beats me - they even mention that bizarity in-text, if I recall), bringing the military tech up to early Renaissance. If the Oathgates satisfy trade requirements, and Mr.T spreads and advances some of that learning (and hopefully figures out how to share it effectively), then we could see a full early Renaissance level society by the end of the Archive, or if not then I suspect it should arrive within fifty years or so. Providing of course that Urithiru provides as much providential information as could be hoped for, and that the tiny issue of the world-spanning cataclysm doesn't get in the way.

By Word of Brandon, White Sands is prior to Way of Kings. (A cast member is present as a Worldhopper) Also by Word of Brandon, many hints have been dropped that make Khriss likely to be the Ars Arcanum writer, placing White Sands before Mistborn with a high chance of being correct. The last Word of Brandon is that the books he's written were mostly chronological. This would place White Sand prior to Elantris, but according to the previous point, not hundreds of years prior to Elantris (else there would be an Ars Arcanum for it). This point is iffy, as there are exceptions, and the gap between Elantris and Mistborn is the longest known gap. So, 100% prior to Way of Kings, 85% prior to Mistborn, 50% less than a couple hundred years prior to Elantris. Also, none of these assumptions requires any knowledge of the book to have have deduced other than what Brandon has given out in interviews and signings, so it's exempt from unpublished spoiler laws.

Nightblood is indeed a splinter, and a very powerful splinter. This has been indirectly but clearly confirmed.

That is a very good point about the lady in Dalinar's vision. However, five generations is probably too short as a maximum - Roshar has evidently preserved the legends of the Desolations for 4500 years. The Bible, a nice text to use as a comparison given Vorin's similarities to the influence of Christianity on Western civilization up to an including the Roman Empire, is about 2900 years old, and went through a large number of revisions and additions during this time (especially during the first thousand years or so it was around). Given the apparent Rosharan excellence at preserving accounts and documents, and their equal negligence in developing technology (by far the laziest shardworld we've seen in that respect, but we'll cut them some slack because of the biweekly storms that wrack the planet), it's not inconceivable to hit the thousands of years mark as an upper bound. Here is the cool thing I just noticed, though. 4500 years since the last Desolation. 4500 is a perfect multiple of nine, yes? 500 each. If this True Desolation is the tenth Desolation, well, what we're looking at here is another symbolic clue based off the Roshar love of ten, and could place each Desolation gap at 500 years. This is by no means a certain deduction, it could just be general symbolism and non-indicative, but were this to hold true, 99 Desolations would have been about fifty thousand years, but nine would be the nicely symmetrical 4500 as you suggest. It's not conclusive, but is another small shred to add to the symmetry and symbolic tens pile.

Generally, we don't have enough details about the Oathpact to draw any conclusions, sadly. It could be that the Oathpact was signed with full knowledge of what it would entail - the name would certainly evoke some kind of willing and cooperative contract. I honestly can't imagine that any group of people would consent to being consistently tortured for eons on end without very good justification, though. And if they didn't know about the whole torture thing, why would they keep the oath so long? I'm working under the premise that the Heralds got together/were chosen to enter into the Oathpact as part of Honor's plan to counter Odium (Honor being all about Bondy/Oathy things), and were thus informed of what it would entail.

Brilliant. That said, there is another option. All the active gates could have been locked. The Shattered Plains was shattered on purpose, after all - it's very possible that it was uninhabited at the time of the Oathgate locking due to the fact that the city had been smashed to smithereens. The gate was not locked because no one thought to travel there and lock it.

1 & 2. Sure. My original estimate was 10-1000 years, with a higher likelihood of being closer to 50-300. I don't think we're disagreeing here, I was simply presenting the information which helped decide the possible bounds of the timeframe. 3, 4, & 5. We are in fact all speculating. I was just pointing out that to counter an argument with a few supporting points by presenting one with no supporting points is not helpful to the discussion. Certainly, there are other options which are possible, and this theory is not guaranteed to be the correct one. But there's no point in bringing up wild guesses, that's not helpful at all. There are plenty of good points to be made for and against with actual evidence and logic. Given the Theocracy, I see no reason to assume that the well known and documented theocracy of the Vorins was not the one which Brandon was referring to. Given the Mageocracy, agreed. Way of Kings was written by Nohadon, who was a king in a time very likely to be prior to Knights Radiant. Unknown if surgebinding was present, or if he was a surgebinder. 6. Roshar is approximately at late Medieval-era technology. They are very advanced in medicine, a little advanced in scientific theory (science is just getting started!), a little behind in navigation, and fairly behind in mechanics and engineering. If you want some more mushy squishy supporting points... • Brandon consistently offers unreliable in world information, and we know the Vorins tampered with historical texts and accounts in a variety of places. The unlikeliness of the Desolations lasting hundreds of thousands of years provides an indication that they may be one of those unreliable accounts. • Roshar is full of the number 10. The True Desolation being the tenth Desolation would work very well. There is also probably more to the Heralds leaving at exactly the number they did (either 9th or 99th) than just 'they were tired'. Because 99 or 9 are both immediately prior to the number 10 (or ten tens). This is another indication that there is something more going on with the Desolation count and the Oathpact breaking than we are being told. • The Vorins add symmetry to all sorts of things for kicks. Notably, the Herald's names all got symmetrified. Converting nine to ninety-nine to have a more symmetrically pleasing number is not outside the realm of possibility for a religious organization that wants to make everything symmetrical and is changing historical accounts to do so. • Having the Desolations last hundreds of thousands of years is really too long. We know Adonalsium shattered, and that sometime after that Honor, Cultivation, and humans arrived on Roshar. In the meantime, Odium has been around, and Hoid has been doing things, and there was the seventeeth shard. Did those organizations and people really sit around and do nothing for 100k years and then all of the sudden, Hoid starts searching, Odium starts breaking other shards, and the 17th becomes active, all during the span of a couple thousand years? Seems unlikely. I'm not even sure the Heralds could stay sane after 100k years of torture. I also want to add that I shouldn't be the only one upvoting here! This is a nice discussion, everyone should please go and upvote those people who have contributed here.

There is a WoB that Parshendi have live birth.

The longest Desolation lasted 11 years, as far as we know. If it had intersected with another Desolation, presumably that would have been noted, so it's logical to assume that at least at that time, the Desolation was 11 years apart from the next. In addition, the Heralds are given time to teach entire levels of technology between when they are tortured, and when the Desolation begins. Seeing as the Heralds arrive with no resources but knowledge, that means a nominal gap of anywhere from several months to several years (unless Dalinar goes and pushes things along with a storming war). Hoid has a timeskip ability, unknown in nature but similar in result to the Allomantic pulsers. He can skip forward in time, basically, so he's not that old. And it is true the destruction of Desolations is not absolute. However, we know they were frequent enough and consistently devastating enough to reset the tech level thousands of years back from Iron Age to Bronze or Stone often enough to make that occurance common and expected. Well, I like how you counter my supporting points with pure speculation =D. First off, we DO know a little about that WoB. The Vorin theocracy ruled prior to the Era of Silence until the time of the Alethi Sun King, in other words a couple thousand years after the Recreance and presumably a good deal of time after the beginning o the eighth epoch. No way that the theocracy is an epoch. The Mageocracy almost certainly refers to a time when Surgebinders or KR ruled, which could be during the Desolations, or between the last Desolation and the Recreance. Heralds are presumably exempt because they were off being tortured most of the time - a difficult scenario for a ruler. Either way, I don't think you can just make up some epoch names and then present that as a counter argument, even if the Third Epoch was so cool it wore a bowtie and a fez. I would personally presume that the ability to soulcast would advance the material sciences due to relatively easy supply and availability of otherwise rare materials. That said, Roshar is clearly highly advanced in medicine compared to the usual earth tech progression, a little ahead in the scientific inquiry, a little behind in mechanics and engineering. Also, be aware that the Alethi are not the only culture on Roshar. Just pointing that out.

Yes. Those Rosharans need a nice forum like this where they could finally talk to each other like sane people.

New Theory: The Focus on Roshar is being Emo Proof - surgebinders are always depressed or moping about. =D

Yeah, I wrote this post and thought the very same thing, had a brainwave, made a theory. It's quickly sunk to the bottom of the list, though. That's what I get for naming my topic spoiler-freeish rather than just doing what everyone else is doing, haha.

As far as explosives go, I do agree. The Chinese had gunpowder weapons like exploding arrowheads and small cannons back in their Bronze Age. While on Earth any sufficiently advanced culture has discovered gunpowder, it is indeed reliant on availability of materials. As far as complex siege towers - siege towers had winches, cranes, and crankshafts throughout the iron age. They stopped being in use by the Renaissance period. So this actually supports the Iron Age hypothesis. Deepwater navigation is likely to suffer on Roshar, but the true value of the navigational tools is for trade routes, not exploration. As highstorms are predictable, imagine bulk trade to Shinovar from Aletha at speed! The main things I feel we are missing from the Renaissance are the Printing Press and the Scientific Method. We're also lacking things such as springs, gears, crankshafts, parachutes, dry docks, and other important Renaissance tech. The Scientific Method is beginning to be founded by the people in Kharbranth, and by the artifabrians, but it's all very much still self study and observation. That's still the only indication to me of an approaching Renaissance. That's not what Steampunk is. In Mistborn, we have a WoB that the technology level of Scadrial pre-Lord Ruler was creating early steam engines, and then the Lord Ruler backtracked them and kept them stuck, while keeping his favourites. I've placed them at early Renaissance, precisely because of that. Early spring powered clocks and pocket watches appeared in the late medieval/early Renaissance period (1524, actually), and modern style watches began appearing mid-renaissance. Water containing mechanisms... I'm not sure precisely what you mean by that, but things like aqueducts, water wheels, water towers and reservoirs, and other such things go back as far as the Bronze age. I didn't put them full Renaissance, because the Renaissance had four major advancements in my opinion - The Printing Press (HUGE), The Scientific Method (HUGE), Navigation Tools like Astrolabe, modern compass, and projection mapping (for expansive ocean trade), and Muskets and Pistols (the first personal gunpowder weapons to revolutionize warfare). The most advanced technology is canning, for certain - it's a bit of an outlier. So, that's why I put them where I did As far as Roshar goes - see above. I tried to take into account magic when I could - rather than pushing the ages, though, it seems to destabilize the normal progression, making some things come earlier than they usually would, and other things later. You'll see specifically for Sel that I boosted the Elantrian specific part up to late Renaissance. Early wave theories and classic physics models were published in the early 1800's, which is technically Industrial, but I feel their knowledge on that score was boosted by their Aons - they studied what they knew. By contrast, their mechanical knowledge was crappy - they seemed to have no gears, no crankshafts, no springs, no complex mechanisms of any kind. No explosives, no advanced building techniques, no advanced seafaring. Why would they need them when they could just magic those effects? The sad part is that as a result, the only ones with advanced knowledge were the Elantrians, because they never developed civilian, non-magic tech past the Iron Age. So I put them in Renaissance, because they have some tech that should be Industrial, but others that are far underdeveloped and should be Iron Age. Notably, they do have a scientific method and some form of mass printing. We have WoB that Allomancy advanced metallurgy and mechanisms faster than they normally would have been otherwise. I imagine allomancy makes some principles that were discovered rather late, like magnetism, instinctive to the native population. Which is great. Regardless, I did my best given what we know. And from the time skips we have seen, everything actually fits remarkably well. Mistborn to Alloy of Law is pretty much perfect, and again to the time frame of Mistborn Trilogy 2. Roshar fits quite nicely techwise with what we know of the Desolations. The manywar and Warbreaker match up excellently. While there are certain techs that are more or less advanced, and maybe a couple hundred years leeway in some places, it all fit together to scale admirably. My biggest personal issue is actually "When did people arrive on the planets, and what tech did they have when they did arrive?". That is by far the biggest possible hole in the system, to my opinion.

My chart has them at late medieval. We know they have siege weapons, but no gunpowder. This may simply be because the materials for gunpowder are scarce on Roshar. They've just started to develop fabrial technology, and are only now learning to apply it to things like tower cantilevers and other such devices. They have some deepwater navigation capabilities, which might put them near the age of exploration, which occurred late medieval as well. Their medicine is unusually advanced, but they lack printing presses entirely. They don't seem to have compasses, astrolabes, or other navigation devices, or if they do, we haven't seen them. Another cool thing I thought of is that the Vorin theocratic ruling period matches up to the tech level of the Roman Empire. I wonder if it's not inspired by the Romans?