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Honor has Stormlight and Odium has Voidlight, is there a Cultivationlight? If so, can an Invested person use it as a third magic on Roshar or is a boon/curse the only magic of Cultivation/Nightwatcher?
There is more! I'll just say that, the rest is Read And Find Out. You are theorizing in an accurate direction.
What can you tell about House War?
Uh, House War--the Kickstarter for the board game. So there's a board game. We're doing this primarily because people kept saying, "When are you gonna do a board game?" The big problem is I play Magic: The Gathering. And if you have friends who play Magic: The Gathering, they don't have time for any other games, right? So my experience with board games is, like, Settlers of Catan, and... that's it. So I have had to-- so what I went to them and said is, "You have to hire a top name designer, that I recognize--because my friends play board games." And so they came back to me with the designer who had made some really great games. And my friends were like, "Yes, this is a good designer." They made a game. It's fun, but I don't know if it's fun for board game people, right? Because I don't play board games. I'm like, "This thing's fun! But it--" so... I'm hoping it will be fun, and you will all enjoy it. There's a Kickstarter now, if you like board games then you can go participate in that. I can't give you direct information on, "Is it-- is it fun for people who play board games?" because I don't play them, right? I play Magic. That's my honest answer to you. And if we do this and the fans are like, "You know what, it just doesn't work if you're not involved," then we won't make anymore. But I thought it was worth trying, because I do have people on my staff who play board games. And you know, the company is good, the designer is good. I have every confidence that the people are going to love it. Except for the confidence that I can give you directly that I played it and thought it would work, because I don't know. It's-- like I said, "It seems fun, sure." Does that make sense? So yeah... We're doing one for Stormlight also that's supposed to be a war game on the Shattered Plains, and so... Because board game people are like-- they email me all the time like, "Where are you board games? Where are your board games? Where are your board games?" I'm like, "Alright, alright." But again, I just have to trust that they're good. So really, if you are into board games and you do play these games, give us feedback. Give me feedback. I have to have your-- you have to tell me whether to keep doing this stuff or not. Just like I-- I have to do this with my foreign translations. I can't read books in German, right? And so I say to my fans, "Tell me how the translations are. I have to know if I have to get a new company or what, because I have no idea."
Do you have an ETA on that Stormlight game?
Stormlight game is only just started in development. I think it-- I don't know. I mean, they love Kickstarters in board games, and we told them you can't overlap with this one. So I would bet it's a year away, and then there's a Kickstarter for that one.
To clear up some confusion, this [The Lopen chapter icon] is a picture of Rua, not The Lopen. You cannot capture the magnificence of The Lopen with drawings.
Were the ideals of the Knights Radiant consciously chosen, or did they happen naturally?
*apprehension*. This is one of those vague ones in that yes and no. They are a natural outgrowth of the spren, but the spren are a natural outgrowth of human's perception of natural forces, but the spren are sentient, so I would say it's a little more by instinct than not. For example two Knights Radiant in the same Order might speak the words differently, but the concept is the same. You will see this happen in a future book, where a Windrunner will speak the oaths. It's a slightly different take on the same concept. Some are moreso, like Shallan's oaths are very individualized truths, so.
If someone is attacked by a Hemalurgist, could they be healed with Regrowth?
So, if they were attacked by a Hemalurgist, then yes. If Hemalurgy were done to them, then it's a much more difficult thing, and that's gonna depend on a lot of factors.
Throughout TWoK, Kaladin complains that he is cursed. When others call him lucky, he thinks about all the times he has failed to protect people and considers himself unlucky. Everyone around him dies.
His Journey in that book takes him to Bridge 4, the bridge team that has the most losses, that everyone knows is a death sentence. Death being the end of every journey, this is appropriate.
But what I've never really noticed before is the importance of the bridge number. 4 is, in East Asian cultures, considered unlucky or cursed. In Chinese 4 is nearly a homophone to the word death. Buildings will skip the 4th floor, companies will skip from version 3 to version 5 of their products (Palm, OnePlus, I'm sure there are other examples but I can't think of them right now).
We already know that The Stormlight Archive finds some of its inspiration in anime/manga. We know that the Alethi are what we would consider ethnically East Asian. Dark hair, tan skin, and they don't have the large, round eyes of the Shin. It seems very fitting that the least lucky bridge, the one responsible for the most death, is Bridge 4.
Of course, Kaladin comes to believe he isn't cursed as he uses his powers to defend his bridgemen. 4 becomes the most envied bridge as they suffer the fewest deaths, have camaraderie, and eventually become squires to a radiant.
They are numbered unlucky and cursed, but turn out to be the most "lucky" of the bridge crews.
This all struck me today because at the end of Oathbringer, Dalinar casually mentions that his personal guard from Bridge 13 isn't there because that bridge crew became Teft's squires. 13 is the number in Western culture that we consider "unlucky" or "cursed," so fitting that it would be the second bridge crew to become squires of a Radiant! With that realization, everything about Bridge 4 clicked in my head.
Did anyone else catch this, or notice anything else cool with these numbers?
A lot of things fans find are coincidence...but neither of these are, actually. Those are both intentional, as are a few other little numbers things.
Numerology has not become a big thing in Stormlight during the development of it, but original (2002 version) The Way of Kings leaned a lot more heavily on numerology (gematria style word/number interactions) and that's still around in the world.
Hey Brandon while you’re here and we’re talking about Kal’s relationship with Lyn, we know he’s had at least one romantic relationships in the past being Tarah I was wondering if he was still a Virgin. Were these relationships just romantic? Also how negatively is sex before marriage viewed on roshar and namely vorin culture? I know these topics sometimes can make you uncomfortable but I’m really curious about this part of their culture.
In these cases, I generally allow it to be vague enough that people can think/assume what they want. However, some of Kal's relationships in the past (including the one with Tarah) progressed to the point that in our world, most people would have been sleeping together.
In Vorin culture, I'd say that they're not as relaxed about such things as most modern cultures are, but aren't as strict as the more religious cultures on Earth are. Alethi are concerned about oaths in specific--what have you promised, and do you keep those promises. So, for example, cheating is a far, far worse offense in their eyes. And opinions and strictness in areas of moral chastity would vary depending on upbringing and personal beliefs. To some, a promise of, "We'll be together until we split" that is kept would be considered honorable--while to others, that would be too lax a treatment of oaths.
Also, lighteyes are expected to be circumspect and maintain an image of certain decorum. But that's something else entirely...
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I like this scene for its return to task. The team is refocused, and re-energized, working toward their goal with renewed devotion. And lots of other "re" words.
Anyway, there's a good feel to this scene, and I think a lot is accomplished quickly. I also like how Vin finally confronts Kelsier about the Eleventh Metal. Right here, I guess the reader has to decide whether or not Kelsier is lying. Either he really did find legends about the Eleventh Metal, and he believes in it, or he didn’t.
The answer is, by the way, yes. He did find those legends–legends that Sazed hasn't heard of. Legends nobody else has heard of. That is suspicious, true, but Kelsier himself believed them. More on where he got them comes later in the series.Is it a coincidence that, when Michael Kramer was reading... Stormlight Archive and Wax&Wayne, Wayne sounds curiously like Lopen.
It's a cute coincidence. Lopen would have a very different accent from Wayne.
I wonder if anything could be done [for videogames] with the other short stories like Elantris... Or somehow all of them...
One company pitched a really cool VR game to me about Emperor's Soul, where you played a Myst style puzzle game in a mansion where you could rewrite the history of objects to change them into different things. I wish we'd gotten that one off the ground.
Are shardblades uniform metal, or do they have different colors on the handle/hilt or whatever? Could you paint a shardblade and have it retain the paint when disappearing/reappearing?
A Blade won't retain ornaments when dismissed, I'm afraid, including coloration. HOWEVER, they could be made to change colors when alive, and even their texture. So many Blades in the world have multiple tones, and the grip tends to be of a different texture. They're uniform metal, but don't always feel/look like it.
In world, would an in-world reader of Jasnah’s book, would an in world person consider that she is also advocating for gender equality for men?
In-world? Jasnah would, but I don’t think most people who read it would.
When you write the books, do you set up the setting and stuff first, because it's an amazing setting.
Yeah, I do a lot of planning ahead of time. I'm naturally an outliner. It's not the only way to write a book, some people do it the opposite way, but I do a lot of outlining.
I have a lot of trouble outlining myself.
Sometimes it doesn't work. There are some writers, that if they outline the book, it actually ruins the book cause they feel like they've already kind of gone through and written it.
Maya told the honorspren not to take their sacrifice. If the Recreance was a deliberate act between Radiants and spren, would spren like Maya consider new bonds?
That is also a RAFO. I'm sorry.
Are we going to be seeing more Wit in the Stormlight Archive?
Depends on if you mean the character or actual wittiness. I'm never sure if I'm actually witty or not—you'll have to judge. But the character never knows when to leave well enough alone and will be muddling things for quite a long time.
When Odium says "We killed you." Is that RAFO, or?
RAFO... I'm just not confirming it or denying it, what it means.
Why does Shallan call her father's maps strange? Are they not Rosharan?
No... They are Rosharan.
So, why are they strange?
Um-- This-- There is not really something for you-- There's not anything there.
Does Nightblood need to sleep?
*laughs* Nightblood does not need to sleep, but he sure thinks he needs to.
I asked him about what the board refers to as "reverse" compounding - i.e., using Feruchemy to enhance Allomancy, rather than the other way around. I wanted to make sure that it was really a thing that exists.
He said that it was.
Is this what the Southern Scadrians have been doing?
It's similar, but not exactly the same.
Syl asks Kaladin if he had <problems> *inaudible*. Is that just a phrase she picked up? Or is it something connected *inaudible*?
Um... there is nothing special you're supposed to read into that other than Syl personality and interactions and stuff.
[Can you write] something interesting about the Seventeeth Shard? ...Or how about this, a character that's in the Seventeenth Shard that we don't know about?
*spoken* ...I can do that--
*written* So... Iyatil was once in the 17th Shard...
In Emperor’s Soul, there are soulstamps. If you had five, what would they do?
What would they turn me into, the soulstamps that change a person? What would I change myself into?
It would be really fun to go back and recast myself as a visual artist and see what happened there. Recast myself as a computer programmer. Those are both very possible outcomes of my life. It would probably be nice to have one where I’m just a very different version of myself, to see what I could have been. That whole burning gold thing in Mistborn, that idea fascinates me, the other possibilities of what I could have been. I would look for things like that. Different things that I think are very plausible that I could have become, and it would be fun to live those lives for a little while.
I don’t think they would be better than the current one, but I certainly would be interested in them.
Do all the other Smedrys get their Talents back?
You're gonna have to see. You've seen the, uh...
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, yeah. One more book coming. It will answer that.
The Sleepless are one of the very first fantastical races I developed, and they made an appearance in Stars' End (my second--very bad--novel, which never was published.) I migrated them to the Cosmere after I started designing it, as I wanted some truly alien species. I was interested in an entity that could have "generations" within its own swarm of beings, breeding to evolve parts of its body, and spreading consciousness across a large number of individual pieces. I'd seen a lot of hive minds, and some group minds, in science fiction--and wanted to play with something that was a hybrid between the two.
However, in order to properly integrate them into the Stormlight story, I decided to make them be able to imitate humans. (And through these efforts, they are slightly more humanoid in the way they perceive the world.) That made them able to play in the events of Roshar more directly.
There are plenty of swarms in the cosmere who are not connected to those on Roshar, however.
Could a Radiant ever belong to multiple Orders?
This is theoretically possible, but it was not done in the past. It’s just not a thing that you did. It was not kosher. But it is theoretically possible.
You’d have to find spren that had volition, and you would have to convince multiple demigods to be okay with this.
The fact that you can be a Knight Radiant and you could pick up one of the Honorblades and have access to those Surges… I mean, there’s an easier way to do it, in that case. (If you consider getting a hold of one of the Honorblades to be easy.)
But it is theoretically possible to have something like that happen.
It's a plot point in Hero of Ages that gender-neutral pronouns were used for the aforementioned Hero because they were neither male nor female:
The prophecies always used the gender-neutral, he thought. So that they could refer to either a man or a woman, we assumed. Or . . . perhaps because they referred to a Hero who wasn’t really either one?
However, even this paragraph uses the male pronoun "he".
In Shadows of Self, it's again brought up (by MeLaan, this time) that Sazed is not quite either gender:
“Not really. Wow, you blush easily, don’t you? I’d have thought you’d find this natural, considering that your God is basically a hermaphrodite at this point. Both good and evil, Ruin and Preservation, light and dark, male and female. Et cetera et cetera.”
But the books continue to use the male pronouns (though normally they use Capitalized Male Pronouns or just the name "Harmony").
So my questions would be:
Sazed always saw himself as a "He." So a lot of the records refer to him that way. He'd accept they, though, and might even see himself a little more this way now. What you suggest here is something I've considered--with him having two Shards, they is a good pronoun for other reasons too.
If you had the choice of being an Epic and being evil or not, would you take that choice--
Would I make the choice to become an Epic? Well they ALL GO EVIL so NO. No no no no. I'd be a Mistborn, yes yes yes yes. *laughter* Epic? No no no no.
Can a pewter Feruchemist go all fiddler crab? Store a bunch of strength from one arm, tap it into the other?
So far, any Freuchemist we've seen has been required to enhance their entire body or make their entire body weaker.
Does Wit have another name apart from Wit?
Wit has many other names. Cephandrius is him.
What's his real name?
He does... have a real name, but he would argue that they're all real names.
What's one that isn't Cephandrius or Midius?
Hoid. *laughter* Topaz.
When he says he's named after a rock that's a reference to Topaz?
Yes that's referencing the topaz. And the other thing that he references with... When he says he's named after words on a page that is not breaking the fourth wall... It's not even winking at it. Nope... It's quite literal. Yes, that is quite literal.
You have, undoubtedly, mastered the fantasy genre. Do you ever see yourself writing science fiction?
I ask because I remember reading two or three years ago on TWG that your plan is to make the second Mistborn trilogy set in a steampunk/industrialized world and the third and final trilogy in a more sci-fi setting. So I'm just wondering if that plan still holds.
I do plan to do SF in the future. The final Mistborn trilogy will indeed be sf, with a deep understanding of Allomancy and Feruchemy having allowed them to figure out a method of FTL travel. I also have a space opera I've been wanting to write. So far, no time.
Do darkeyes feel the Thrill?
Yes, they do
Chapter Thirty-Four - Part Two
Kelsier saving Elend in this chapter was indeed something of a homage to Les Miserables. It is one of my favorite classics, and Elend's own character—with his group of idealistic noble friends—was partially inspired by Marius and his cohorts. I wasn't originally going to have Elend in this scene, but I decided to throw him in and give Kelsier the opportunity to save him, partially as an inside reference to the story that inspired him, and partially to let Kelsier do something truly selfless as a final send-off before he died.
Do people still live in Aimia?
Define people.
Do Aimians still live in Aimia?
The group as a whole? No. Do any? Yes.
/u/mistborn I know it's in cremposting, but [a cookbook] is an exciting idea and I'd love to hear whether it's something you'd consider.
It would take a lot of work to come up with a full cookbook. But it's something people have joked about before, so I don't know. Maybe if the films/TV shows get big enough, we could do something like this?
Where did the inspiration for Kaladin's fighting style came from?
Classic spearman fighting is based off of rank and file spear formations. Nothing too spectacular. I did mix it with a little bit of Eastern spear-fighting, specifically some Chinese spear-fighting, but really your classic spear-fighting technique is pretty multicultural, what you're gonna want to do with a spear. I add flourishes, which come more from katas now and than than they do from actual real-world fighting.
Though a good resource for this is Matt Easton's channel on YouTube, Schola Gladiatoria, because what he will do is he will have people doing historical martial arts, and they will do ten bouts of a person with a spear versus a person with a spear. Most of these are European, but spear-fighting tends to be pretty similar across cultures. And just watching some short spear fights, or spear versus sword... I specifically watched a bunch of those bouts for Adolin's spear-versus-knife fight that we had in Oathbringer. Just really handy, the fact that he films large bouts like that and puts them on the internet.
I perked up when Zahel mentioned Hoid! I just wonder how much we'll get to read about Hoid in this book. I really hope it's more than just an epilogue, he really seems like the type of guy who can offer A LOT of information but is too engrossed in his own journey towards a hitherto unknown goal to care about the plebian things lol
He's a little more involved than normal. (A trend that should continue into the next book, the final of this sequence.)
So would it be possible to use Steelrunning + compounding to travel FTL?
No, it would not. You could get close, though.
Kind of like Zemo's Paradox, than? You keep halving the distance, never quite making it?
*gleam in his eye* Trying to crack Allomatic FTL?
*guilty* Maybe.
You can't.
I don't know, there are alot of good theories out there.
It involves Allomantic abilities which we don't know about yet.
You said you would talk about the tone issue after the book comes out. What was that issue, and for which character?
So the tone issue for Rhythm of War is just how dark things get in some of the Kaladin viewpoints. We've had some rough times for Kaladin through this series, and I wouldn't say that this is necessarily darker than book one, for instance, or even some parts of book two. But one thing we were noticing with the beta readers is: stacking what was happening to Kaladin on top of a worldwide pandemic that was causing general anxiety in a lot of the population was making some beta readers overreact to Kaladin, the darkness in his thing. At the same time, I thought... "Overreaction's" the wrong term, right? It was the right reaction for them, it's not that they overreacted. But they reacted stronger than I think people would have in another year
And this left me with the difficult choice of: is this an actual tone problem with the book, or is this the function of the fact that everybody's really stressed right now? And I decided to walk a middle ground between this. I decided that even if it was a stronger reaction, there are things I could do that would just generally improve the book, that wouldn't make it worse, but would also help with this issue. The main thing that I looked to do was make sure that Shallan and Adolin's sequences were lightened up through most of their sequence. Even though some tough stuff was happening with Shallan and her viewpoints, particularly at the beginning, I wanted to back off on...
What I mostly did was: I added a few more scenes with Shallan and Adolin that were more "let's investigate a mystery, let's problem solve" but not "oh my goodness everything is wrong with Shallan, this is really stressful." This doesn't include the starspren scene, that was already there. But this does include... I think it's the second Shallan viewpoint in that part where they're crossing the ocean. That second Shallan viewpoint or maybe the third, there's one in there I added specifically to be like: let's show some healthy relationship stuff going on, just to balance out the fact that stuff's really dark over with Kaladin.
This might be a slight spoiler for the next book, but I can tell you Kaladin has now turned the corner, I would say. You should be expecting from now on: Kaladin's still gonna have dark days, Kaladin has depression. But he turned a major corner in this book, and I'm very proud of him.
Would there be a new effect if an Allomancer burned the metal of Paalm's spike?
RAFO. Excellent question
There's some similarity in the effect of Hemalurgy and the Dakhor magics. What would happen if you were to try combining the two?
You would have some pretty evil dude, I would expect.
Did we already find out what metal is combined with atium to make malatium?
I might have said somewhere in the series. I can't remember. It's gold.
...There are sometimes that you'll have a line of dialogue or a description, and I'm just in awe of how either hilarious or amazing it is. Have you ever written a line of dialogue or a description where you're like, "Wow, I am hilarious"? *laughter*
...All the time! No, I mean, this gets to a larger question of, when the creative process is working... you get surprised by how well the connections start working, and how things start coming together. Sometimes they don't, and you bash your head against the wall. But I think in every writing situation, at some point, you're gonna say "Wow, did that come out of my brain?" Because I got into it so much, I didn't realize all these connections were coming together in the back of my brain, and boom, it happens. And, again, sometimes it doesn't. In fact, I'll get into that in a moment, as we go to the reading. Because I... pulled a book from the publisher and decided not to publish it just recently, like last month.
Do you actually know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds?
Do I know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds? I do know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds. Thank you for promoting that one. Legion's another of these novellas I did. It's got a fun story behind it.
So I was in a writing group with mutual friend Dan Wells, he writes twisted books about people who are messed up, and he was doing a book about schizophrenia. He was deep into a schizophrenic’s mind, Dan does a lot of research hits these things really well and meanwhile I'm over here being me and I’m like “Oh this would make a great magic system” *laughter* I'm like “No, no, no, really if you had a schizophrenic and what if they heard voices and saw hallucinations, but the hallucinations helped them. Like their superpower was seeing hallucinations." He's like "That's weird." I'm like "No, you should write this” and I tried to convince him to write it and I tried to convince him to write and finally he said “Brandon, write the dumb book, it’s not my book it’s yours” So I wrote it, it’s called Legion.
It is indeed about a guy who is a genius and he can become an expert in any topic but that knowledge manifests as a hallucination that he sees, which can than talk him through things. Like if he studies, say, computer programming, he can't program computers, but a hallucination could walk him through programming a computer...
I'm going to warn you, they only do limited editions of the hardcovers on most of these. So they're expensive. But if you buy that I will send you the ebook for free. The only thing I can do that on are my novellas, that and Emperor's Soul, but it is also online for a couple bucks as an ebook. Or you can buy the very nice edition by Subterranean Press.
So he gets worse...
*hesitates* Over the course of the series he is getting worse and worse, despite what he says.
Are sandlings from White Sand an early concept for crustaceans on Roshar, with greatshells being a parallel to deep sandlings?
No, um, the idea for white sandWhite Sand came first, and it was more that I was exploring divergent ecology, but I've been doing that in Dragonsteel and in White Sand and in here with Roshar. I would say that the fact that white sand hadn't been published meant that I could do something's that were similar without worrying about repeating myself, but it's not like I used them specifically as models.
*jokingly* So are we going to get to see little dragons running around in Dragonsteel?
Uh, well, in Dragonsteel the dragons are sapient, so when I write Dragonsteel I will put dragons in there, but the dragons are intelligent and uh, can take human form, but there are actual little dragons.
Wait, they can take human form?
Yes, yes, yup.
So, I was actually wondering whether Tanavast constructed the confrontation with Rayse in such a way that *inaudible*
That nailed his foot to the floor?
He's stuck on Braize - at least for now.
Ah, yes. That was, in effect, that was an intentional -
It was deliberate? Okay.
It was deliberate. Yup.
*Inaudible, possibly 'Rayse'* started to win?
Um, well...
I'll keep it secret until it shows up on Facebook.
Yeah, it... so, Odium came at him, and he gave - not as good as he got - but he made it cost.
Did he sacrifice himself, or is Odium better at that sort of thing?
I wouldn't say that he sacrificed himself, I'd say he went out swinging.
Is Odium just better at that sort of thing?
I would say, yes.
What's the deal with Hoid and instant noodles?
...He likes his ramen, right? Like any sane person, he likes his instant noodles. Nothing more than that.
...Has he ever had instant noodles?
Yeah, he's had instant noodles before. They have them on Taldain, yeah.
Is the use of the color red before/during bad events a deliberate pattern?
Yes.
If you hate Spook's dialect, I apologize for this chapter. This is the place in the book where I spent the most time on it. I really like some of the phrases here–I tried to make the dialect focus on rhythm and sounds, making it alliterative and interesting simply to say out-loud. In case you need it, here's a loose translation of the exchange in this chapter:
Spook: "It;s not nice to play with people like that."Kelsier: "Oh, don;t worry about what he does to you. He;s not worth your concern."Spook: "You're probably right."Breeze: "What are you two babbling about?"Spook: "He wants to be clever. He pushes people around because he wants to prove that he is clever."Kelsier: "He's always been like that."Ham: "He's insecure. I think he worries that he's really not that clever."
So, November is the National Writer's month. Have you ever participated in the NaNoWriMo challenge?
I have!
Awesome! How did that go?
It went pretty well. I'm a pretty compulsive writer, so-- I don't do it as much anymore, 'cause I'm almost always on tour during it or something. But during the early days when I was trying to break in, I did it all the time. I actually wrote a big chunk of the first draft of Way of Kings in 2002, in NaNoWriMo.
Could a modern human and a listener have fertile children?
RAFO. Good question
