Miscellaneous 2023

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Name Miscellaneous 2023
Date
Date Jan. 1, 2023
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Entries 19
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#1 Copy

Pagerunner

And I noticed on the Coppermind that we haven't seen any Feruchemical symbols for [the four unknown Allomantic symbols]. So it's got me wondering if you've designed any Feruchemical symbols to go along with these four Allomantic symbols?

I know these symbols are used to fill out letters in the actual alphabet, and that there are no canon metals assigned to them; that's not what I'm asking about. I'm more curious if the symbols even exist to round out the Coppermind's table.

Isaac Stewart

We created Feruchemical symbols for those four metals at one point, and I think this is the latest.

#2 Copy

LewsTherinTelescope

Well well well@jancilynne is "Skyward Legacy" supposed to be an actual name like "Skyward Flight", or just a placeholder for "those books after these current ones"? or are you not ready to say one way or another yet?

Janci Patterson

It is the working title. If the publisher likes it it will be the series title.

#3 Copy

Lotus

Will there be slugs?

Janci Patterson

Would it be a Skyward book if there were no slugs?

j man(?) 2001

depends on when it was set

Janci Patterson

I suppose.There's something announced!  It's directly after Defiant.  Same set of characters.I think we have now exhausted what I'm allowed to say about it.  Besides that I'm really excited.

Oh, there are three books! I can say that!

#4 Copy

Dan Wells

What's Dan Writing?

I continue to work on the revision of Dark One. It's going well, but still not at the pace I would like, in part because I am splitting my time with three other major projects: a new Cosmere series and two secret things I can't tell you about.

What's Dan Reading?

Right now I'm reading Dawnshard, which is a small book that fits between Stormlight 4 and Stormlight 5. And that news, by itself, is not super exciting, but I'm reading it for a very specific reason which IS exciting but which I can't tell you :) You'll find out in a year and a half.

#5 Copy

Brandon Sanderson

What I’ve been working on is the Szeth and Kaladin sequence for this book [Stormlight Five], which means I have finished that now. It means I’ve finished all the flashbacks and I’ve finished all Szeth’s viewpoints and all of Kaladin’s viewpoints, which are somewhat intertwined at part of this book. And so I am now going to be moving on to another viewpoint sequence and try to get that all the way through. I’m going to be working on a big chunk of the characters now who have some integrated sort of thing. So it’s going to be mostly I’ll be working on Dalinar, Shallan, and some Renarin. There’s a lot of stuff going on, kind of interconnected, some Navani as well with them. The goal is to write that all the way through. And then, everyone that’s left over, will get their own set of viewpoints in kind of the last third of the chunk. Then I’ll do the interludes at the end, if I haven’t written them already.

#6 Copy

ADHD Projects

Do we see Allomancy in this book [Tress of the Emerald Sea]?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't believe you do

Chaotic Forager

Do we see Allomancy but not Allomancy?

Brandon Sanderson

Potentially. This is what I was working on 3 years ago. I am on the Stormlight world right now, writing Szeth flashback scenes. But I don't believe you see any Allomancy in this book. You're talking about emotional Allomancy?

ADHD Projects

Yes.

Brandon Sanderson

No? Hmm... *hems and haws for a long time*

The only question mark... So, Hoid is not using emotional Allomancy on anybody, how about that?

#7 Copy

Questioner

We have these moons [on Lumar], they're so very large, you have the seas that look and function so differently. Is it like an atmospheric bubble they're in? How does it work when you cross from one sea to the other. The spores are touching, there's different coloring, how does that section off so distinctly?

Brandon Sanderson

So it's kind of interesting, I kind of got some of this, the way I look at these seas, from real world oceans where two wave forms meet, saltwater and non saltwater meeting. And there's actually kind of a weirdly regular line between them that gets maintained. (And obviously, then, they mix, because they're both just water.) But that line was really fascinating to me.

What's going on in my mind (and I haven't run this past the Arcanists), but the idea is that enough is falling from these spores, that as they're kind of mixing, they're also kind of going down underenath, and you've got the decomposition of the spores (which is part of what's causing the seethe) and all of these sorts of things.

They do kind of mix. The line, it would look pretty regular from someone standing up on a ship and looking at it. But if you got close, you'd see more spore mixing and even blending pretty far in. But, then those spores are getting pushed underneath by the new spores that are coming, and the new layers, and then those spores are dying off at the bottom of the ocean and things like that.

That's how I'm doing it in my head, at least how I'm justifying getting that kind of creepy line that you get, even in the real world between different bodies of water meeting. But, again, I haven't run that past the Arcanists. That's how it's working in my head.

#8 Copy

Dan Wells

Can you talk about the person you were pitching with, or is that secret? 

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, I can. It was Joe Michael Straczynski. So Joe attached to it. Super cool guy.

Dan Wells

He is the guy that did Babylon 5, among other things.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, he attached to it and he and I went and pitched it together, and it got picked up. But then Joe really got excited by certain aspects of the story, not really by my outline. He really loved the idea of this—he had an idea, he wanted to do something that was very close to Castle, where there is an author in the real world writing books. We would write these fantasy novels and the show would be the fantasy novels. The author was like a character who was channeling and releasing them. Some of this was from the original pitch, but it was a video game in the pitch.

He was really into this and so much of it changed that I called him up and I was like, "Joe this is nothing like my pitch". And he was like, "yeah I know, I got really really excited". I was like "ughh" and he was like "ughh" and I'm like "what if we just separated them" and he said "that's a great idea". So we just hand shook on, he can take his pitch and sell it, he just took Dark One off it 'cause it was changed so much, and mine just went back into the thing. I don't know if he ever got his made. He was very easy to work with, I'll say that. Very very classy in when I called him and said "this is nothing like my pitch", he was like "yeah I know, I'm sorry, I got really excited".

Dan Wells

Well and that’s what happens, that’s what happens in Hollywood. It is such a collaborative industry and a collaborative medium that, you know, whoever has the money and/or authority is the one that is most likely to see their vision made. Which is rarely the author!

Brandon Sanderson

It got picked up. They commissioned a pilot from him on that thing. Basically, I said "go do your thing, if this takes off come back to me and I can maybe write the fantasy novels in the real world". I'm totally cool with your concept here, we will just take Dark One's name off of it. Obviously it didn't get picked up, because the show never got made—

Dan Wells

Yeah, because we have never seen it.

Brandon Sanderson

—and he never came back. Anyway, that was Dark One, was my television pitch. It was multimedia in that I planned a couple of epic fantasy novels to tie in, but that was kind of like the television show was the thing.

#9 Copy

Ben McSweeney

[The Year of Sanderson Soonie Pup plushie is] not a diagetic pup design, i.e. a Soonie Pup as might be given to Wax's kids. But a plushie like that would be, in many respects, just like any other generic stuffed wolf-dog toy. 

#10 Copy

Ben McSweeney

The early designs of Shardplate helmets had some options with holes instead of slot visors. These were specifically rejected, and thus all helms (in canon art, so far) have some variation on a slot visor.

I tried getting 'em in there with Plate, but he's got reasons for the slot shape.

#11 Copy

Kingsdaughter613

Do you know if the GB symbol/Marewill developed together/always intended to resemble one another, or was it ascended fanon?

Ben McSweeney

When it was decided that we needed to have a marewill design, I immediately pushed for it to resemble the GB icon. I don't think the original linked-diamonds symbol was intended to resemble a flower, but I wasn't the designer on that one.

It's possible that Brandon intended them to match from the start, and I was just already on the same page when I got the assignment. I honestly don't recall for sure, I just remember that it clicked quickly.

#12 Copy

Brandon Sanderson

When Stormlight 5 is out and you've read it, remember to ask me what happened in my writing on July 18th. I wrote an important scene yesterday that I think might be worthy of a little extra special notation.

#13 Copy

Cheyenne Sedai

I'm really curious about Boatload of Mummies because Brandon did mention on his updates that you'd worked on it for NaNoWriMo for the past couple of years which is really cool. And the title is incredible. I don't know if that's gonna be the final title, but that's what it's always been referred to. How have you been doing with that?

Isaac Stewart

Thanks for asking us. It's a project that I love. So I finished it. Finished a draft in September of last year. It's rough. It's a really rough draft. There's a lot of things that I'm still working through. I'm trying to narrow down the shape of the plot in a way because there's a little bit of--it wasn't inspired necessarily by these things, but it was after the fact that I realized, "Oh, it's part this, part that." It's sort of begins King Kong, if you imagined getting people on a boat. And then it continues as Death on the Nile. Then you get to a portion on an island. And then it ends The Mummy. And throw in a healthy dose of Venom. So it's like, "Okay, am I doing too much here?" And that's kind of where I'm at. You know, is this even a thing? Have I thrown too much in? Is this too much of a storyline? And i don't think it is. It really is in the end kind of a Raiders of the Lost Arc sort of story. You could pull out those some of those same elements and say, "Raiders of the Lost Arc starts out King Kong." But the basic plot line is there. There's going to be scenes in the current draft that are basically finished. I don't think they're going to change too much from the version that it is right now to the end.

Will it be called Boatload of Mummies? Probably not. I can't see that as a title of a Cosmere book, right? But we can affectionately call it Boatload of Mummies as long as we want. The working title is Book of Nails. And whether there's a series title or not, we'll have to figure that out if it's a story that people want to continue learning about.

But let me tell you Nicki Savage is so much fun to write. Don't expect exactly what you get from the broadsheets because she is writing to a particular audience, and has learned some skills from Allomancer Jack--though I do think Allomancer Jack's stories might be closer to the truth than Nicki's are.

You will see parallels between this story and some of the elements that are in the broadsheets. But she's basically: if you can imagine a Mary Poppins. who is incredibly interested in the supernatural, and is not afraid to beat up people. That's basically your character right there. And she's just, she's a load of fun. A boatload of fun.

Cheyenne Sedai

I imagine from what you've said that you still wouldn't be ready to give us what could eventually function as a back of the book blurb?

Isaac Stewart

During the first NaNoWriMo that I worked on it we had to come up with our elevator pitch on that, and I wrote the Readers Digest, TV Guide version of it, and it was "A woman with a strange, magical power journeys to an island to find a mythical book that might raise the dead." Something like that.

This particular book is interesting because... How do I pitch this when it's a spin off of a different series. It's a spin-off from Mistborn, technically. But it's not a Mistborn book. You can't pitch that to somebody who doesn't know Mistborn. And that's been some of the fun in trying to figure this out is "How do I tell a different story here, but then have to reintroduce how Allomancy works? But now in this era, we know about Allomancy, we know about Feruchemy, we know about Hemalurgy. We have crossovers from other worlds. How do you write this book without confusing somebody entirely without... "There's like 50 magic systems in here, and I don't understand." And that then goes into the pitch. How do you pitch this book? People who know the Cosmere, you just say it's set on Scadrial, but it's not really a Misborn book. It's just hard to encapsulate and someday I'll figure it out.

#14 Copy

Noxilicious (paraphrased)

In the past, you've mentioned how Skyward was originally intended to be part of the cosmere. Were cytonic abilities originally going to be an Invested Art, or were they developed after the creation of the cytoverse proper?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Slight correction, Skyward was not going to be part of the Cosmere. It was specifically Spensa who was going to be in the cosmere. The story she was going to be part of is still cosmere-relevant, and we will still see it, but we'll see the replacement for Spensa instead. The cytonic abilities were developed afterwards, as we see in Defending Elysium.

#15 Copy

Brotherwise Games

One thing that's especially neat [about the Stormlight TTRPG] is our first big adventure (that takes you from first level to sixth level and beyond) was all conceived and outlined by Dan and Brandon working together. If I had come up with an adventure, I probably would have tried to keep it off to, like, a little corner where it wasn't affecting a lot of things and didn't interact with the main canon. And they just went straight through the middle of what's going on during... Words of Radiance is kind of the timeframe for the adventure. For example, the Everstorm happens during the adventure. And you're not right there next to the main characters of the books, but in the warcamps. You're in the vicinity. You interact with a Herald or two or three. That is wild; I wouldn't have tried to put that in there.

#16 Copy

Brotherwise Games

The Mistborn Deckbuilding Game (and it's possible that will be the final name; the Star Wars deckbuilding game is just called "The Star Wars Deckbuilding Game," so we might end up doing the same), that's a really exciting project, as well.

The game is essentially themed around being a mistborn in training and contending with rival mistborn, and really getting straight into Mistborn duels and battles, while still having some of the intrigue that's a big part of Mistborn books and a big part of the non-physical metals.

Cosmere.es

I think the image you shared was Vin. Is it like you are going to be playing the characters themselves? Or are you going to be playing other mistborns, or...?

Brotherwise Games

The setup is that you are playing one of the named characters. So you're playing as Vin or Kelsier. Or Shan Elarial, an Inquisitor, or Zane is another playable character.

Cosmere.es

Can you be a kandra?

Brotherwise Games

There is a kandra card, but that would be kind of an ally. Same with a lot of the mistings, and things like that. Within the boundaries of a deckbuilding game like this, everybody's gotta have a similar level of capability. I can see us doing a feruchemy expansion in the future, but right now a keeper is just one card.

Everybody's a mistborn, everybody's got access to the eight core metals, and then over the course of the game you can gain access to atium, which has really big effects, often game-winning effects.

Cosmere.es

So we are in Era One, the first books, maybe the first? The Final Empire?

Brotherwise Games

Yeah. The first couple of books, I'd say, is the general time frame here.

If this game does really well, we could always expand into future eras. There's other ways we could adapt the system to handle Era Two stuff or later Era One stuff, but we're starting with what we think are some of the most iconic and recognizable aspects of... being a mistborn, jumping around rooftops, throwing coins at each other, getting into fights, going to balls, convincing people to do things. All those classic aspects that you think of in Mistborn.

#17 Copy

Cosmere.es

And then we had another announcement, which is Shards of Creation. It's another card game, and this one is focused on Shards that Splintered from Adonalsium when he was killed. I read that probably not all of them are going to be displayed in the game, but we will see a nice number of the Shards?

Brotherwise Games

Yeah, we'll probably start with at least eight. I can see doing eight, and then later doing the other eight. Or, I can see doing more. We'll see.

This is a game that I would not say is gonna come out in 2024. Probably 2025. This would be a lower-cost kind of game, more like a traditional card game, beautifully illustrated in an art nouveau style. And it is a trick-taking game, so one that you can teach pretty much anyone in your life to play. It's not a game that is reliant on people being hobby gamers. If anybody's ever played spades or hearts or bridge or any kind of basic trick-taking game, you'd be able to understand some of the rules here. Out of all our games, it's the one that I can most easily play with my parents.

#18 Copy

Cosmere.es

What can you tell us about your future projects?

Brotherwise Games

It's definitely a multi-year partnership, and so that gives us some confidence to be able to plan out things long-term and known that, for example, if we start an RPG, we have a long runway to be able to keep adding supplements to that, keep adding games to that.

We know that a lot of people have asked for, like, a big epic board game. Something along the lines of War of the Ring or Star Wars: Rebellion. That's something that is always on our minds.

And we're always open to new things. Shards of Creation was not something we were planning, it's something that a member of our team designed and put in front of us, and we said, "Wow, this is really good. We should make this." So we have some flexibility like that, as well.

But even if we just had our current lineup of planned releases, that's enough to account for years of very cool Cosmere stuff.

#19 Copy

Dan Wells

The last few weeks I've been doing a ton of writing for Super Secret Project X. I can't tell you what this is literally until it is out in the world, but here are some hints: it's three things, and they're in the Cosmere, and you should really come to Dragonsteel '24.

Event details
Name
Name Miscellaneous 2023
Date
Date Jan. 1, 2023
Entries
Entries 19
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