Brandon Sanderson

Hold on, there's an annotated Alloy of Law? Gotta get me that, the annotated Warbreaker was great. Also, Kelsier never had enough time to become a savant, did he?

Well, he's had his post-death period. And he didn't need to be a savant, he had Talent!

Spook didn't take that much time to become a Savant once he started burning constantly, as I recall. It's just that continually burning your valuable metal when you don't really need to is pretty unintuitive.

Tin and steal (and presumably iron) are easy to be savants off, since it's mentioned they're VERY slow burning compared to, say pewter. That slow burn is why Vin developed her horseshoe trick, since she had a lot of iron and steel in her at the time.

Tin's probably the easiest, because you're constantly getting something out of it while it's burning. It might not always be something good, but your senses are always working.

I assume that the relative ease of achieving tin savantism applies to Inquisitors and their steel/iron sight, too. They need to be constantly burning one of the two to even see at all, so I imagine that they become savants in those metals quicker than most coinshots/lurchers might.

The Inquisitors are a bit Fridgey though. Vin and Wax have shown us that the burn/power level needed to see EVERYTHING in blue lines is still significant, even for Wax the Steel Savant. And doesn't this mean that anyone on the lookout for Inquisitors should have felt them from their steel or iron pulses? Of course, they could be copper clouding, but then VIN should have felt them with her enhanced bronze. So this implies that the blue-sight is a passive ability. IN WHICH CASE EVERYTHING STOPS MAKING SENSE!

It's not inconceivable that hemalurgic shenanigans involving spikes through the eyeballs means that inquisitors don't play be the normal rules re: iron/steel sight.

As far as savanting in general, it's definitely mentioned that the various metals are pretty different in terms of the effects. Apparently it's not uncommon for brass and zinc burners to become savants without even noticing, while tin and pewter savants are rare (tin because they deliberately avoid it, because they don't want to end up like Spook, pewter because they usually get themselves killed first, either in a fight or by screwing up a pewter drag or something). Steel and iron would probably be somewhere in between; it's hard to do it accidentally, but it's not dangerous like pewter and doesn't have the negative side effects like tin

edited 17th Jun '16 5:25:08 AM by NativeJovian

Has Brandon said anything as to the abilities of a theoretical Atium Savant? Or the even more theoretical Lerasium savant?

I'm not sure enough of either of those even exist for anyone to become a savant with them.

That's why I was asking about a Word of Brandon.

Hmm… would Harmonium/Sazedium, when ingested, cause Allomancy AND Feruchemy?

A Lerasium savant just seems so... wasteful.

Presumably had someone stolen the kandra Atium stockpile during the OT one could have become a Atium savant though.

Word of God is that if you burn enough Lerasium to become a savant, you become Preservation. Presumably, there's only enough Lerasium around for this trick to work if Preservation is dead. Hell, even when he was dead, there were only sixteen beads, which I doubt would be enough.

No word on if the same thing can happen with Atium.

That makes a surprising amount of sense.

In other news, there's a Kickstarter up for the Mistborn board game. I read through the preliminary rules they have posted; it actually looks pretty interesting. The players are Great Houses during Kelsier's rebellion. They gather resources (food, soldiers, atium, etc) and "personalities" (things like hazekillers and mistings, plus specific characters like "Shan Elariel"), which you use to solve "problems". Both solving problems and failing to solve problems have different effects, which can be good or bad for you depending on circumstances (meaning you might deliberately backstab another house's attempts to solve problems if their failure harms them or benefits you). The thing is that most problems are too hard for one house to solve on their own, so you make "deals" with other houses to combine your efforts and split the rewards. Deals are deliberately open-ended; the only real rule is that you can't trade victory points ("favor", representing how pleased the Lord Ruler is with your house at the moment) directly, though you can agree on how big your share of favor will be for solving a problem.

The game ends when you either reach a high enough unrest level (which is affected by solving or failing to solve problems, as well as certain personality cards) and the Final Empire collapses, or else the "Vin" problem is solved (or you fail to solve it, though that adds half the unrest needed to collapse the Empire all by itself). If the game ends with the Final Empire intact, the player with the highest favor wins. If the game ends with Final Empire collapsing, the player with the lowest favor wins.

It actually looks really fun, if you're into that sort of thing. If you like Mistborn and board games, I'd definitely say go for it. If you're not a board game fan, though, it's not really very Mistborn-related exceme for the themeing.

or else the "Vin" problem is solved

What a lovely euphemism.

I want that so much. But even at the minimum of $35 shipping that's going to bring the total up to at least 100 AUD...

Good news! It looks like all the Cosmere-related short stories are coming to paper. This includes stuff like Mistbron: Secret History, the Allomancer Jak stories, and a whole new Stormlight Archive Novella titled "Edgedancer"... so hopefully it's about our cute little thief.

Neat. I'll need to pick it up. I haven't read too many of Brandon's short stories, other than Secret History and the two Legion novellas.

I did notice on his site that "Stormlight novella" was at 100%, but I had no clue what that was. Interesting choice. Is that going to come out before Stormlight 3? I guess if it's short enough and has a limited perspective, it could take place at the same time.

Hopefully it's set AFTER Lift's segment of Words of Radiance and not a 'Secret Origins' kind of thing. No offense, but given it's a novel, I'd rather have Lift being awesome and belching rainbows than her origin story.

I dunno, I might be willing to see an origin story for Lift. It would be interesting to see what the hell is wrong with Rall Elorim, City of Shadows. Plus the specifics of her deal with the Nightwatcher. But yes, I would prefer seeing the hijinks she gets up to as the new Prime's best friend.

Alternatively, it's from the POV of an Edgedancer from before the Recreance. I really doubt we'd get something like this early, but I'd really really like to see more of ancient Roshar.

edited 22nd Jun '16 5:46:36 PM by Discar

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm okay with seeing hr Origin. It's just 'd rather read it as interludes in a longer book. I mean, can you imagine reading Kaladin and Shallan's flashback segments as a novella? Depressing as hell. Remember, to be a Radiant you need to be broken. I don't want to see Lift being broken, I wanna see her being awesome! Roshar's Token Mini-Moe deserves no less!

Well, not all "broken" has to be "horribly depressed":

But it does mean their backstory is horribly depressing. Shallan is a reasonably happy person, but only by suppressing memories of most of her childhood.

The only exceptions would be people with mental illnesses; people are are born with cracks in their souls. We see some Shards talking to people like that in Mistborn, but we don't know if that's enough for a spren to form the bond and give them Surgebinding.

I think both Kaladin and Shallan qualify for some measure of mental illness, to be honest.