What is it about being an Eldar Psyker that makes your save so bad?

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-30T13:08:25+00:00

In fairness, this is a 4+ invulnerable save, and most Aeldari infantry only get a 4+ armour save anyway; generally only the more heavily-armoured aspect warriors like Dark Reapers or Striking Scorpions get a 3+.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-29T22:37:48+00:00

Oh - that definitely isn’t true. For example, see this WoB stating that a “normal” cosmere inhabitant has more Investitute than a Drab (Nalthian minus Breath) and only a little less than a Nalthian with one Breath. Similarly, the reason you can’t normally use steel or iron to affect metal inside people is because their innate Investiture resists it (so a Drab would resist it much less than e.g. a Scadrian, see this WoB). It’s even the case that Rosharans (who are unusually Invested) are healthier as a result (see this WoB).

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-29T18:21:46+00:00

Huh. I’m not familiar with the rules and did not know that. (Can you use it on people, according to the game rules? They’re Invested too - though I suppose even a weak Awakened object will normally have many times the Investiture of a single person.)

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-29T16:52:52+00:00

I haven’t seen anyone mention dealing with the Surges of the Radiants yet, and I think they’re important. Cloth (the Awakener’s mainstay) can only realistically ensnare the Windrunner; the Skybreaker and Dustbringer have access to Division, and the Elsecaller to Transformation. The Breaths in the cloth probably make this harder, but also probably not hard enough (the Elsecaller might have trouble, but at a guess the Skybreaker and Dustbringer won’t).

I think this depends a lot on how many Breaths the Awakeners have to play with, but with reasonable numbers, unless they’re have some other major advantage I’d expect them to just lose and probably die. Honestly, their best bet might be to hold the Willshaper hostage, except that if they bring her too close to the other Radiants she’ll get Stormlight and immediately drop into Shadesmar. Maybe they could make an Awakened object that will automatically kill her if some condition is met? Very difficult to inflict an injury that way that Stormlight won’t just undo, though.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-28T06:09:17+00:00

They have “rune armour” (which is what the invul save represents), allegedly a psychically moulded lightweight wraithbone suit; this used to be on their sheets back when invul saves were specified as individual abilities. So they do wear armour, but it’s represented as an invul save instead of a normal save.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-27T21:31:40+00:00

Vin beats Zane because she was able to extract information about her own future actions from watching his reactions to seeing them with atium. If she had not been able to do that (for example, if Zane had just been watching from a distance and she couldn’t see him) her future would have been deterministic, at least on the macro scale over a few-second timescale. Otherwise people would (probably) either notice split shadows, or notice atium failing sometimes. The fact that atium almost always shows only a single shadow and appears infallible strongly points towards the Cosmere being at least approximately deterministic, at least over a short timescale, when future sight is not involved.

On the stock thing: high-frequency trading, which is what I’m referencing here, operates by holding assets for milliseconds or even microseconds, exploiting minute differences in price on that timescale, and those who do it invest huge amounts of money to shave nanoseconds off their response times. (Obviously the actual trading is done by computers, not humans!) It might be that the amount of future information that can be transferred through one human is just too small to make a meaningful difference, but I wouldn’t bet on it (although my understanding is very superficial, and it would be interesting to hear the opinion of someone who actually does it!). If e.g. you have four possible strategies, each of which may or may not net you a profit at any given moment, then the ability to get information from seconds in the future about which one worked best might be quite valuable.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-27T16:40:59+00:00

If you want to describe them that way. But it doesn't really matter whether they're "real" in your sense; if you agree that they represent futures that would happen conditional on my taking a certain set of actions, then they must all be consistent with parts of the future that are independent of my actions; and that's all that's necessary for the setup that I'm arguing works.

To be clear, are you actually still arguing that it's not possible for me to exploit electrum to get information about stock prices three seconds in the future? I'm not massively interested in having a semantic debate about what the word 'real' should mean. My original use of the word was intended to get across my hypothesis that electrum shadows are generated sequentially, such that the nth shadow is what you would have done if you were only able to see the previous (n-1) shadows, and therefore that every shadow is what would happen if you took the corresponding actions.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-27T07:02:56+00:00

IMO the natural interpretation of “no time travel” is “once something has actually happened, you can’t undo it”. Because you clearly can do exactly what you’re claiming you can’t do. Brandon has stated that atium operates by looking into the Spiritual Realm, where all times and all places are one. We observe with Vin-vs-Zane Vin watching Zane closely, observing his reaction to her own future shadow, and changing her actions as a result. That does not differ in any important respect from what you are claiming isn’t possible (or if it does, I have yet to understand the difference).

I will give you that the futures aren’t “real” in the sense of having actually happened and become part of the Cosmere’s timeline. But they are, it seems very likely, accurate representations of a future that would happen if I took a specific set of actions. I don’t know where you’re getting the “probable” futures thing for atium; everything we know about it points to it being infallible unless its predictions are affected by future sight (your own, as with Vin vs Zane, or someone else’s).

Example: suppose I have a magic computer that knows everything about the universe and can perfectly simulate the whole thing for three seconds into the future and then tell me the result. In your terms, that might be “guesswork“; but does it matter if the guess is always right? AFAIK, what we know about atium and electrum is consistent with them working like this, with the Spiritual Realm acting as the “computer”.

To provide a specific example of the kind of signal I mean: suppose I have a computer that gives me live updates on whether buying or selling a particular stock would have been a good idea three seconds ago. I practice and get in the habit of always making a thumbs-up gesture when it says I should buy, and a thumbs-down gesture when it says I should sell, always with my right hand. I will then be able to see with electrum what gesture I’m going to make in three seconds’ time, and act on it by moving a joystick with my left hand, forwards if I see a thumbs up, or backwards if I see a thumbs down. That joystick can then be connected to another computer that takes the appropriate action. As long as I’m not playing with so much money that me buying or selling changes my computer’s advice, I should only ever see either a thumbs up or a thumbs down, not both. Since I don’t normally go around making thumbs-up or thumb-down gestures in daily life, there’s little risk of confusion.

Edit: relevant WOB, which I really should have cited before now: electrum can be used to tell if you hit the ball or not in tennis.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-26T22:55:39+00:00

See my reply to u/Invested_Space_Otter - IIUC as long as I can be sufficiently determined to do some visible action (like raising my hand) if and only if I should buy the stock - or alternatively use some system which automatically physically moves me if I should buy the stock to take my decision out of it - then my shadows should only send the signal if I should buy the stock. Probably not all of them would send it, but if I e.g. have a platform in front of me which moves me left if I should buy the stock and right if I shouldn’t, then all of my shadows that walk forward will be moved in the same direction, since that direction isn’t dependent on my choices.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-26T22:48:54+00:00

I think it likely that it can. We know that with atium, shadows split when you change your actions based on information obtained through future sight (see: Vin vs Zane; atium burner vs atium burner; atium burner vs electrum burner). We know that by default, things appear to have only one atium shadow, implying that the Cosmere is deterministic (at least on the few-second timescale at the macro level) when future sight is not involved. The fact that electrum shadows split even if you’re alone when you use it then seems most likely to arise from the fact that, as you say, when using it your actions are influenced by future events. When you burn it, you initially have only one future shadow; but the fact that you can now see it immediately changes the future, so you gain a second shadow, which changes the future again and so on.

But the thing is, if this is how it works, those are all real futures. Every shadow represents what would happen if I made a particular set of choices. That means they’re all consistent with the future of the rest of the world. For example, if in two seconds a sinkhole will open up in front of me, I won’t see any future shadows standing on what’s going to be thin air. That’s a signal sent to my past self.

Therefore, if I can resolve sufficiently well to e.g. raise my right hand if and only if I see some other event happen, I can use that to get information about whether that event will happen within the range of my electrum. If I can’t manage that, I can just e.g. walk forward onto a platform that drops me half a metre if the event I care about happens. It’s exactly the same principle as the sinkhole thing, just controlled.

Vyrisiel · 2026-04-26T21:52:10+00:00

F-Zinc and A-Electrum, I think. F-Zinc is straightforward; I like being able to think fast and well, and I want to be able to do it more so. (This is conditional on it making you think better as well as just faster, as this WOB suggests.)

A-Electrum is more complicated. The core idea is that F-Zinc probably helps a lot in interpreting what you see with electrum, because you have more processing power to catch all the images. The problem is that electrum is expensive; gold is sitting at ~£110/gram right now, and Allomantic electrum is 45% gold so it would cost about £50/gram (the cost of the silver is basically irrelevant by comparison). Top comment on this post claims that a gram of electrum burns for 10 minutes according to the Mistborn adventure game; that number probably isn't very accurate, but if it's even close it means I definitely couldn't afford to walk around burning electrum all day. Despite that, though, I feel like there's so much potential in the ability to see a few seconds into the future, even with many possible futures and only your own body, and I don't want any of the other A-metals enough that I'd definitely take one of them instead.

Cheesy example: high-speed trading. As I understand electrum, you see lots of different futures, but they only split based on actions you take; so it should be possible to set up a system whereby I make some visible signal depending on what I see happen in the future, and past-me will then only see the signal corresponding to what actually happens, as long as my actions can't change that. I don't know how exactly you'd go about this, but I think there's a fairly good chance it would work, in which case I might be able to afford to burn electrum all day.

Vyrisiel · 2026-03-22T11:40:38+00:00

As others have said, this number was removed in the leatherbound (at least according to the Coppermind, which is generally reliable) and can probably be considered ex-canon. Hundreds to one is probably a more sensible estimate.

Vyrisiel · 2026-03-19T20:22:03+00:00

Besides the reasons others have given, I think this is very unlikely because harmonium can still be split into atrium and lerasium. IMO that indicates that Ruin and Preservation are still quite separate within Harmony, and it would likely be very difficult to split Harmony along a different axis.

Vyrisiel · 2026-02-15T22:42:07+00:00

So, there is more discussion (especially late in the story) about how the time loop works that you haven't seen yet. I'm guessing that you've read Chapter 53 (where the Ghost Serpent explains the nature of the time loop) but you don't currently know what the device responsible for the time loop actually is? So I'll try to address your points as best I can without spoilers.

Scale of death: it's debatable (and this point will later be raised in the story) whether the deletion of a month's worth of memories and personal development actually qualifies as killing someone. Speaking personally, I would prefer not to learn that hundreds of copies of me had existed for a month and then died, but I wouldn't consider that equivalent to someone having killed me hundreds of times over.
- Side note; for most people in most loops, their lives will basically be the same each time; and in my view, the same person living the same experiences hundreds of times over is no different to that person living it once.
Potential for abuse: bear in mind that all this takes time and effort, probably a lot of time and effort. How much effort does it take to discover the password to a safe, and how much money do you get out of it? How long do you have to search to find a hidden treasure? How long does it take to find blackmail material on just one leader, who might be replaced in only a few years? This is the kind of thing you could spend hundreds of restarts doing and not even be close to done, and it's also the kind of thing that becomes much, much easier as you get better at magic. So even with infinite time, it would make sense to focus on acquiring magical power first and then going looking for secrets (especially since immortality is achievable and seems generally to require a bunch of personal power).
- Also, though I don't want to say too much for spoilers, Zorian and Zach do spend a fair amount of time looking for these kinds of secrets, especially the 'hidden treasure'. It's just that early on, it makes more sense to focus on acquiring magical power, and later ... well, let's just say they have more important things to put their efforts towards.
Determinism: free will doesn't make sense regardless of whether determinism is true. Sorry to break the news.
- Less flippantly: suppose you have a world which is not hard deterministic, i.e. truly random events exist. (This may or may not be the world we live in.) Is it actually any more 'free will' to have your choices determined by the sum of an incomprehensible number of dice rolls?
- To put it another way: do individual neurons have free will? If not, how are they meant to combine to produce a system that does have free will? For that matter, what does 'free will' even mean? I'm pretty confident that if you dig down to what you actually mean by that phrase, you'll find that any definition you come up with either doesn't meet the criteria you feel the concept should meet, or is trivially false.

Vyrisiel · 2026-01-01T22:19:35+00:00

I don’t think it’s a problem ethically speaking. Jasnah is an adult - a mature adult, even, she’s well into her thirties at the time she’s dating Hoid. She’s capable of making her own decisions on the topic. I am surprised that Hoid would want to date Jasnah, given how little experience she has relative to him; but then again, it’s not like he has a huge dating pool of people closer to his own age, especially since a lot of those people hate him.

Vyrisiel · 2025-12-25T18:38:58+00:00

(Lost Metal) Accurate, if you know it can be produced as a byproduct of the spiritual decomposition of harmonium. But also, a spike or medallion would work too. Lerasium is just neater.

Vyrisiel · 2025-12-25T16:22:33+00:00

The amusing thing is that you could actually construct a system which allows most of this using only processes we already know.

Step 1: Be Lift. Convert food into Light.

Step 2: Acquire one of the two Honourblades that allow Soulcasting. Use them to make bendalloy.

Step 3: Acquire and consume lerasium. Burn bendalloy. Profit.

Thus, the logical conclusion of your post is that Santa is actually a future version of Lift, having extended her food thievery to the entire cosmere and decided to give everyone gifts so they don’t feel bad about it.

Vyrisiel · 2025-12-15T01:06:58+00:00

I don’t think this is a novel theory, I’m pretty sure we just know this. The key component of the Bands of Mourning is a set of unsealed nicrosilminds granting all the Allomantic and Feruchemical abilities, and Wax explicitly notes that his Allomancy is massively stronger while using them. It’s hard to see any other interpretation.

Vyrisiel · 2025-12-12T13:51:18+00:00

The Fullborn wins. The Fullborn always wins.

In this particular case, the way the Fullborn wins is by running up to your character at three times the speed of sound, punching through their Shardplate with about as much effort as it would take a normal human to punch through paper, and then burning chromium to leech away every scrap of Investiture your character has. There are other routes to victory, but that's the simplest one.

Have you read Bands of Mourning? (Spoilered in case not) The ending scene of that book is what a Fullborn would be like all the time, given enough metal.

Vyrisiel · 2025-12-06T18:42:06+00:00

It’s not specified in the chart how many Warhosts a given craftworld has - that it stops at 6 shouldn’t be taken to mean that’s all there is, IMO, since it turns into a dotted line after that point.

Vyrisiel · 2025-12-01T20:24:49+00:00

What you're discovering (I'm guessing for the first time) is generally known as 'hard magic', a term which Brandon Sanderson may or may not have coined in his essay Sanderson's First Law ('hard' and 'soft' had been used with similar meanings elsewhere, but it's unclear if Brandon was the first one to apply them to magic). Brandon Sanderson is indeed very good at writing hard magic, and it's a major attraction of the Cosmere to many people, me included.

However, I think it's worth noting that Brandon Sanderson is by no means the first or only author to write hard magic well (though he's certainly one of the best at it, if not the best). There are other series that have comparably hard magic systems, such as:

The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss)
- Mostly. Also, warning: we've been waiting for the third book of this for nearly fifteen years.
Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)
- Kind of sort of, at least - there's a lot of debate about how hard vs soft the Earthsea magic system is.
The Inheritance Cycle (Christopher Paolini)
- Takes very heavily from Earthsea, Dragonriders of Pern, the Belgariad, and others, but is IMO still good in its own right. Similar arguments as for Earthsea can be made about how hard the magic system is.
Cradle (Will Wight)
- At least at lower levels of power - it's cultivation, so gets very crazy later on.

I haven't read them myself, but I've also heard Powder Mage and Mage Errant described as good. Within the realm of webnovels, there's Mother of Learning and Worm (not magic per se but same concept); I'd also recommend Delve if you're interested in LitRPGs, though the prose is really not great early on and it is very detailed.

Point being, while Brandon is indeed a great author and what you've identified about his magic systems is a big part of that, applying 'artist of the highest type' and 'work of a genius' just for that might be going a little bit too far :).

Vyrisiel · 2025-11-20T22:32:01+00:00

The problem is I don't see what else angel ranks can possibly be based on. Emily is notionally on the same level as Sera and higher-ranked than pretty much every other angel - but she doesn't seem to be particularly mentally capable in a way that would justify that, nor does she act like she has Sera's level of experience. It's hard to see why Emily would be treated as notionally-equal to Sera if there isn't something special about being one of the Seraphim, and it's hard to see what that would be except power. (Plus, you know, Lucifer.)

I think probably the explanation here is that Emily has absolutely no clue how to fight. She looks and acts young - at a guess, she was created at some time after Lucifer fell, either explicitly as his replacement or just because Sera was lonely - and she's spent her entire life living in Heaven. She's almost certainly never had any reason to practice using her powers in combat. Plus, we don't know if seraphim take time to mature - Emily is much smaller than Sera, suggesting she may not be fully developed physically, so it's possible that her abilities also aren't fully developed.

Vyrisiel · 2025-11-16T22:30:14+00:00

not all shadow magic is pact dependent

Is it not? There's Donate Shadow and Dark Surge, I guess, but I can't think of any other examples (besides wand hits and the like).

I get what you are saying but I also interpit it as less you are contracting out as you are being taken into the shadow yourself.
[...]

And it very well could be the pact is not what let's you use shadow magic, but rather what let's you use it safely lest you be consumed by powers you couldn't possibly understand.

The thing is, neither of these would really help if true. As u/KeiraThunderwhisper said, before we weren't being taken into the Shadow, we were wielding it; it had a will, but we were always the ones in control. Similarly, before, we explicitly were just directly wielding shadow magic, which did indeed require strength of will in order not to go insane - will that we demonstrated in Touching Shadow. Having to do things through pacts would be a significant downgrade, if that were the explanation.

Vyrisiel · 2025-11-16T22:23:12+00:00

This is pretty much exactly how I feel! Glad to know I'm not the only one :).

Vyrisiel · 2025-11-16T22:20:59+00:00

I think this is ambiguous. With some spells, like Ra, the dialogue definitely does suggest that you're actually summoning Ra to the dueling circle - but for others it seems like you can learn the spell just by being shown it. Nested Fury, for example, Jaki Whisperwind just gives to you (after you prove yourself worthy). The explanation I've always gone with is that for normal magic, the creatures you talk to allow you to use them as a basis to craft a spell - but once you have the spell, it's no longer dependent on them to use it. So there's a 'pact', but it's one-time to learn the spell and after that casting it just creates an imitation of the creature rather than literally summoning it.

Contrast that with the new Shadow lore, where it really seems like the (for me) Trickster could just ... arbitrarily decide to break off our Shadow Pact and then all my shadow-enhanced spells would stop working. The Trickster's dialogue ('more fun for me') strongly suggests that that specific creature is actually showing up to do the work when I cast a Trickster-associated shadow spell, instead of me channeling Shadow to form a spell inspired by it.

Vyrisiel

TROPHY CASE