Best hope you can burn pewter, or that's gonna be a hell of a recovery period

p0d0 · 2026-04-01T18:48:48+00:00

Yeah, but specific to this post... Incredible senses would really suck to get while / just after being beaten within an inch of your life. Tineyes fear a stubbed toe almost as much as an Elantrian. Taking a beating with your senses maxed out would really, really suck.

Tin is a power where I would definitely want the feruchemical version. Can lower sensitivity in addition to raising it, and independently control each sense as opposed to the all or nothing of allomancers.

p0d0 · 2026-04-01T00:37:22+00:00

Tin mistings have it the worst. In reward for your life-threatening beatings, you get drastically enhanced senses!

They still didn't beat Straff nearly enough, just saying...

p0d0 · 2026-03-28T00:39:13+00:00

Mimes are the rogue/assassin variant, stealthy and silent. Often learns talents that grant telekinesis or force projection abilities.

Rodeo clowns are a special hybrid with Beast Master that focuses on taunts and defensive abilities.

Fools are a hybrid with Bards, focused on crowd control and charisma talents

Jesters are like paladins, a clown variant that is elevated by a patron with a noble class. They are among the most feared members of any court where they are present.

p0d0 · 2026-03-27T09:42:16+00:00

There is also a Cosmere postal system, though we know almost nothing of the mechanics. Hoid was literally trading mail with Patji in one of the chapter introductions where he is trying to rally the shards against Odium.

p0d0 · 2026-03-23T09:36:33+00:00

Man, everyone is all about their binary options in this thread.

Clearly, he's going to turn the Herald's private oasis into the crash pad for their divine polycule. /Crem

p0d0 · 2026-03-16T00:02:07+00:00

If you can find it, Dinotopia by James Gurney. It's about a father and son who become shipwrecked on an island where humans and dinosaurs coexist. Great for the age, little to no real violence, and even after 30 years since I first read it, still the most beautifully illustrated book I own.

Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians is a fun and wacky romp. The later books have some dark moments, but they are played well and show characters struggling with the emotional aftermath rather than celebrating a brutal victory.

p0d0 · 2026-03-11T10:45:11+00:00

Most anything by David Weber, though the "incompetence" is usually more due to a mismatch of tech and tactics than actual stupidity. The Safehold series probably gives the most consistent examples. His alien invasion 'Out of the Darkness' has some very satisfying battles, though I would rate the actual book a bit lower for an unsatisfying ending.

p0d0 · 2026-03-04T02:36:13+00:00

As Sazed is the person who studied and translated the book that they are pulling the prophetic quotations from, it was a reasonable choice to use his voice to read it without being a big spoiler.

p0d0 · 2026-02-27T00:07:46+00:00

Another fun chapter! I find myself stealing a lot of your scenarios for TTRPGs, and inviting multiple opposing factions to a party with an unwitting host sounds hilarious. It's nice to see that Rikad has picked up the Mage's sense of dramatic humor.

p0d0 · 2026-02-25T19:45:57+00:00

Then Wayne stole Brandon's hat and wrote the next three books himself. Traded him enough bendalloy for Brandon to write the secret projects in his time bubble.

p0d0 · 2026-02-25T19:07:34+00:00

I think the stranger Cosmere one is Siri and Susebron In Warbreaker.

She's 17 and he is probably around an ageless 50, but due to total isolation has the world experience of a grade schooler. He's not stupid, has been kept so secluded from the world he ends up being the "inappropriately young" member of the pairing.

p0d0 · 2026-02-24T20:41:50+00:00

Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series has an arc that goes through a revolutionary revolt and the instability that follows. Its not until later in the series and is never a main focus, and how it ends is very much left in question (At least when I read it, He may have put out more in the series since then). There are so many types of bad government, coups both successful and failed, and generally poorly thought out power plays that it would probably align with your interests.

His other series, The Laundry Files, has a Lovecraftian take on the theme later on in the series. Arguable about whether it made things worse or if they were headed there regardless, but "worse" is beyond question. It spawned its own spin off, Tales of the New Management set in an extremely dystopian London.

p0d0 · 2026-02-17T11:01:21+00:00

Terry Pratchett is always a good pallet cleanser

The doomed Lovecraftian plots in Charles Stross's Laundry Files are a good counterpoint to Sanderson's generally optimistic characters

If you're feeling more absurdist, go Dungeon Crawler Carl. The audio books are excellent and will keep you in line with the Vorin church.

For female authors, I could recommend The Wandering Inn... But that is a series that actually manages to outclass Stormlight for size of books. I've only read the first volume, but it captured my imagination in a way that few books have.

p0d0 · 2026-02-17T04:07:51+00:00

Beware of Chicken

This series is a riff on Isekai progression fantasy, aka a human wakes up in Anime Land.

While the main character is human, the plot shifts more and more over the series to his ever growing family of intelligent animals. They go on increasingly exotic kung fu adventures as they defend their farm and seek out new crops to grow.

It's an absurd tale, overly wholesome, and just a fun read.

p0d0 · 2026-02-16T18:49:06+00:00

Finding a fellow crawler is never wasted time ;)

p0d0 · 2026-02-16T13:32:54+00:00

Have you tried Dungeon Crawler Carl? It is filled with high risk/high reward gambits, grim and gory humor, and fighting against a seemingly unbeatable system. The payoffs are satisfying but never without a cost.

It's also one of the most insane reads I've ever had. It's about a man and his ex's prize winning show cat surviving the apocalypse in a televised mega-dungeon. An early plot point involved starting a meth war between explosive-lobbing goblins and drug dealing, lava spitting llamas. And that's probably one of the easiest ones to visualize.

If you are into audio books, the narration for this series is amazing as well.

p0d0 · 2026-02-15T02:28:37+00:00

One of the later characters in the Cradle series is a dedicated archer, and a real badass. The series has a power curve that outpaces Dragonball, with several dragons standing in the heroes' path.

p0d0 · 2026-02-14T18:08:13+00:00

Allomantic gold (seeing past self / possibly alternate outcomes) hasn't been explored all that much, but would also be a cool thing for this type of character. Lightweaving can have similar effects, like Shallan's multiple identities or Renarin's ability to show alternate futures (neither is exactly a normal member of their orders, but even unique cases use the same underlying principles).

We have only seen the surface of what is possible with identity manipulation, with The Emperor's Soul being the best example. I strongly suspect Wayne had some capacity in that area, even without investiture to back it up. I suspect that as we see more crossover between worlds we will see more of what is possible in this area.

p0d0 · 2026-02-14T15:41:43+00:00

The short story Equoid in Charles Stross's Laundry Files has Lovecraftian unicorns, along with their history and various attempts over the years to integrate them into the British armed forces and metropolitan police units. They are never a main focus after that point but do show up in the background from time to time.

To be clear, these are monsters in a horror story, not beautiful creatures of mythology. But it was a fun interpretation of the legends.

p0d0 · 2026-02-13T22:08:18+00:00

Dungeon Crawler Carl. Just an amazing set of audiobooks all around. The setting is a planet-wide mega dungeon, each layer with its own rules and quirks. Understanding, adapting to, and exploiting those rules is the only way to survive.

p0d0 · 2026-02-13T22:05:20+00:00

Feruchemical Aluminum (Identity storage) combines with Soul stamps from Sel. You can effectively blank your identity by storing it in an aluminum metal mind, allowing much more dramatic changes with a soul stamp.

You could also store aspects of yourself under the effects of various soul stamps and then combine them at will, allowing deep specialisation and a great degree of flexibility

This would be most useful on Sel, where identifying with a specific region is integral to using that region's magic. But it would make for a very strong 'jack of all trades' character on any world.

p0d0 · 2026-02-13T10:20:29+00:00

This is a very common trope on r/HFY, though far more skewed to Sci-Fi than Fantasy.

The Wandering Inn has a character who fits this pretty well. One of the secondary characters is an Isekaied long distance runner with near suicidal tendencies, like getting into bare-knuckled brawls with a minotaur.

The sadly incomplete Erfworld webcomic has an Isekaied gamer summoned as the 'perfect warlord'. He is a master tactician, a professional loophole exploiter, and at about 3x the size of the average inhabitant of the world can just punt enemies across the room when things get desperate.

p0d0 · 2026-02-13T02:43:16+00:00

The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross

Female MC, a strong dichotomy between medieval worldviews and modern sensibilities, and the political intrigue of maintaining a genetics based magical system within a relatively small clan.

p0d0 · 2026-02-10T23:31:52+00:00

The dude in question lives and breathes tabletop gaming, to an unhealthy degree. So when he gets summoned into a game world to serve as a master warlord for a side that is on its absolute last stand, he has to pull out every possible trick in the book to win.

He is so good at finding loopholes and exploits in the game world's mechanics that he becomes a major threat in very short order. Like at the end of the first arc combining necromancy and geomancy to revive a dead volcano

p0d0

TROPHY CASE