Crafty Games Mistborn Dice Livestream with Isaac Stewart

Event details
Name
Name Crafty Games Mistborn Dice Livestream with Isaac Stewart
Date
Date Nov. 21, 2019
Entries
Entries 10
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#1 Copy

Gamerati

How did you meet Brandon?

Isaac Stewart

Kind of in a roundabout way. We were both at a magazine at BYU called The Leading Edge. I didn't go as often. He was the editor; I met him once or twice. He didn't remember me, but I met a lot of other people that worked at the magazine who, now, some of them are my coworkers here at Dragonsteel. But I stopped going to the magazine at some point, finished my schooling, went on to start working, and decided that I needed to go back to school for optometry. I just didn't know if there was going to be a future in art for me, so I went back to school for optometry. I already had a lot of the prerequisites because I had tried a stint at dentistry for a few years before going into animation.

So I went back to school, decided to take the science fiction writing class again at BYU. By this time, Brandon was teaching it. He and I were closer in age than the other students there. This was, like, his second year teaching it. And we just clicked. We became friends. One night at dinner (because we would go out after the class and eat on those nights), I was drawing on the tablecloth at a Macaroni Grill (where they give you the crayons and things), and he said, "Oh, I didn't know you were an artist." 'Cause I was going to school for optometry at the time, I wasn't really advertising that I was an artist. So, doodling on the tablecloth, he said, "Hey, wanna do maps for my next book?" By this time, Elantris wasn't out yet, but it was about to come out. So I said, "Sure, I'll do your maps." He didn't know that I'd been doing fantasy maps on the side just for fun for quite a while, so it was kind of serendipitous.

#2 Copy

Isaac Stewart

At one point, we were going to do little sketches in Mistborn, and then we decided on just symbols. But there were going to be little sketches in front of the parts.

Gamerati

So how did you move away from sketches into the current symbology that we have?

Isaac Stewart

I honestly think that I just wasn't good enough an artist at the time (maybe not even now) to pull off this sort of illustrative thing that we wanted to do, so it kind of morphed into symbols instead.

#3 Copy

Herowannabe

I've always wondered if there was any rhyme or reason to the designs of the original Allomancy symbols. Do the number of spikes signify anything? The direction they're point? In, out, the number of dots, etc.

Isaac Stewart

No. For the most part. If I remember right, some of them have the dot inside the circle, some of them have the dot outside of the circle. And that signifies whether they're a Pushing metal or a Pulling metal.

#4 Copy

Isaac Stewart

Those dots [in Allomancy symbols] can move around. They are an alphabet, so you can use these as an alphabet to write things. And the placement of the dot will tell you where the vowel is that comes after it.

So, if you do tin and duralumin... tin is the "I." (It looked like an "I," so I assigned "I" to it. Plus, I thought it was cool. My name starts with an "I," and I wanted it). Duralumin is the letter for "S." And the ones that are not vowels, you can move the dot around for different things.

I think you can throw the dot outside of it, and it will make a different sound, and I can't remember. Like, it might go from "Sah" to "Say." And if you don't change it, then it just acts...

I think, on the Badali [rings], they're just transliterating it one-to-one.

#5 Copy

Gamerati

What's interesting about the difference between the classic era Allomancy symbols and the Alloy of Law era ones is, when you get to Alloy of Law, the rusty nails become railroad spikes almost, right?

Isaac Stewart

Yep, they do. We codified that, we decided, "Okay, now they're turning these things into typefaces, they're turning them into fonts." We even have some that hopefully we'll use later in the 1980s era trilogy, Era 3, where we've made them really thick. They're just different font, too, we've been playing with different ideas of, "How would they use the Allomantic symbols as typefaces?"

#6 Copy

Paleo

Was Nazh married? Do you know how to pronounce the full name?

Brandon Sanderson

We call him Nazh (næz), and his name is Nazrilof (ˈnæzɹɪlɔf).

We're not ready to reveal whether he was married yet, or not. Or if he still is married. A lot of questions there. However, this is something that we are actively working on, is Nazh's backstory and Khriss's backstory right now. Actively working on them.

#7 Copy

Gamerati

Do you have a "look bible" [for collaborating artists]? Or do you literally give them the stuff that you've already produced? Do you say, "This is my map of X," or "This is the way the Lord Ruler works," or do you kind of go, "Hey, here's what Vin has been for the last ten years, but these are the things you can't change"? Do you have guidance like that that you give people?

Isaac Stewart

Usually the guidance we give them is the words in the book. We sometimes give pictures and things, reference. We did that for the cover for Oathbringer, where we provided reference of, "Here are some pictures of people who look kind of like Jasnah that might work."  We're doing that more and more, but at this point...

I know that Magic: The Gathering has these big look bibles that they share with their artists, and those are really cool. And then they wind up turning them into these gorgeous art books that they've been putting out, using a lot of the same stuff from there. And we haven't gotten quite to that point where it's like, "You know what? This person has to look this particular way." We're moving that direction, slowly, but that's because we're based on books. We want people to be able to imagine the characters as they would.

We hesitate sometimes, when it's like, "Okay, here's the look of what this person is." Even with the Heralds, that we were putting at the endpapers of the Stormlight books, we are careful to say that those paintings are somebody's interpretation. We like ot think of these as in-world interpretations, and each of the artists who are painting them for us are maybe artists actually on Roshar, and they've painted these paintings that are hanging somewhere in some prince's palace or queen's palace, and they've got all of these pictures of the Heralds. So we treat these as in-world artifacts. However, they were not painted from the real people that the Heralds are, so it's more of the tradition of what this Herald looks like.

Gamerati

It's very interesting you say that, because you even said that, when you showed us your early sketches of Vin, looked very much like what [fan artists] made. So, the words are descriptive enough that they're fairly clear.

Isaac Stewart

I mean, there are some thing that we have to canonize later, like, "Which ear is Vin's earring in?" Well, it's not mentioned. It's not mentioned until we got to the leatherbound books, and we said, "We have to figure this out!" And then we made a few notes in the leatherbound books, "This is her left ear." But there are things we run into like that. And the more secondary the character is, usually the less words that are written about them, so there's more wiggle room on how to define them.

#8 Copy

Gamerati

Have you ever considered making [the Steel Alphabet] into a TrueType font so people could just type in symbology?

Isaac Stewart

So... we have one. We just haven't released it yet. And it's actually the Alloy era that we have in the font, because we needed it for the broadsheets that we do in those books. So we actually have that as a TrueType font that we use internally, but we haven't gone through all the things that we need to do to make it work nicely.

#9 Copy

Gamerati

What's going on with the "diya, tiya, niya, siya" at the bottom [of a prototype Steel Alphabet chart] there?

Isaac Stewart

This was based originally, the sounds, and we kind of diverted from this direction... So, I was a missionary in the Philippines, and I speak Tagalog, and I was really interested in the way that old Tagalog has this symbol system, where they would put marks in different places, depending on which vowels and things. So those are Tagalog sounds right there, that they use in their language, and I just threw those in there as extra letters. I didn't know what we were gonna do yet.

The "diya" actually is a "J" sound. Tiya is a "CH" sound. "Ñ," we find that in Spanish, we find that in Tagalog. And then "Sh." But we didn't really go down that path completely. That was more experimentation. You can see here there's a letter "NG," which is another very common letter in Tagalog.

#10 Copy

Paleo

How did lerasium get its symbol when it was already in use as "A" during the Final Empire? Similarly, who decided in-world what symbol harmonium gets?

Isaac Stewart

I imagine, like with a lot of symbols, these things grow organically in the world. With the alphabet... at some point, probably, what happened is: they had all of these symbols for the metals. And they started using them as an alphabet. And somebody along the line, probably under the Lord Ruler's watchful eye, assigned symbols for the different letters. And then as new metals are discovered, they just assigned symbols that hadn't been used for a metal.

So, probably what they did is, they said, "Okay, we know there are this many metals. We'll assign these symbols to letters. But hey, we have a lot more letters than we know of Allomantic metals, so we'll make more symbols." So they did. And then, as they found more Allomantically charged metals, then they would assign them the next one in line.

So, I imagine if we see more metals in the future in the books, that the letters that don't have metals associated with them will get assigned to metals. But that's what happened with lerasium.

Event details
Name
Name Crafty Games Mistborn Dice Livestream with Isaac Stewart
Date
Date Nov. 21, 2019
Entries
Entries 10
Upload sources