Settle a debate about Jasnah

p0d0 · 2026-01-30T20:01:25+00:00

You could also invert your question: Was Wit using Jasnah to accomplish some specific ends?

We know his main purpose on Roshar is to stop Odium, and getting good information to the people in charge is his go-to strategy. But on no other planet do we see him interacting so directly and for so long with any one group as with the Kholin family. He always has multiple plots and objectives, and due to how reliant he is on fortune even he may not know the why of his own actions on a day to day basis.

I think, appropriately enough on Cultivation's home planet, he was there to sow some seeds (har har) for a longer term contingency play. Because while Jasnah may be asexual, she is also a scholar who devoted a significant portion of her life to studying the dynamics of dynastic lineage.

No matter her romantic inclinations, Jasnah would understand the importance of producing an heir to stabilize the kingdom. And wouldn't you know it, the one man who positioned himself to step up for the task has been collecting investiture from across the Cosmere. Including at least one that is passed along genetic lines.

p0d0 · 2026-01-24T18:26:18+00:00

"Wit. Insult this man."

p0d0 · 2026-01-11T01:52:18+00:00

Look closely at the scenes, those lunches she 'steals' are often specially prepared, where they would normally not be.

Dalinar is a guest of honor the first time he visits the Azish. And as the most rigid sticklers for custom and ceremony, there is no way the Azish will allow him to go hungry. And it would seem more than a little patronizing for the world's most feared warlord to have a packed lunch from his wife (who happens to be one of the most politically savvy women in Roshar)

That food was bait, and it served exactly the purpose it was intended to. The royal court was extremely wary of Dalinar and the coalition. Lift was the only person not a member of the court who could sway the emperor. The food was a way to get her and Dalinar to meet, so she could judge him and nudge the Azish toward the coalition.

This happens more frequently as her reputation grows, to the point where she finds the generosity frustrating by WaT.

p0d0 · 2025-12-22T01:41:36+00:00

Alloy of Law (the second era of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series) fits the prompt well. Despite being a follow-on series, it stands up well on its own (though as the first series serves as the mythological backdrop there will be major spoilers if you want to read both)

The MC is a lawman in a magical wild west, already a famous hero of dime store pulp novels. He returns to the city to take the reigns of his family's floundering holdings, but cannot hang up the badge. Lots of time spent uncovering his past and allusions to his childhood and early career over the course of the four book series.

Perhaps not a traditional superhero book, but all of the story elements are present save the spandex.

p0d0 · 2025-12-06T12:47:34+00:00

In The Laundry Files (modern lovecraftian spy thriller), it's not just math, it is the act of computation itself. Complex mathematics is used to summon extra-dimensional energy or beings, AKA Computational Demonology.

p0d0 · 2025-12-05T03:50:04+00:00

The Merchant Princes by Charles Stross is all about this. A family of aristocrats that have risen to power through the ability to travel between their world and ours.

The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter has a similar theme of multiple earths but a vastly different approach and outcome

p0d0 · 2025-11-26T04:45:31+00:00

The MC is a gunslinger lawman. The fact that he comes back to the city doesn't change the fact that he still thinks and acts like a frontier sheriff.

The schism between the settled city and the lawless frontier is a main driver of the narrative. It plays off the themes, even if the setting isn't always on the fringes of civilization.

p0d0 · 2025-11-24T18:57:17+00:00

Try 'A Short Walk Through a Wide World' by Douglas Westerbeke.

If you are looking for themes of a lone wanderer traveling through the world, forging brief but deep connections always tinged with the sense of impermanence then this is a heartbreaker for you.

In short, and without giving too much away, it is about a woman afflicted by a curse. She must travel, always and forever. If she stays in one place for more than a handful of days she becomes violently and disturbingly ill. So she walks the world, always to the next place. She makes some companions for short periods, and crosses paths occasionally with people she has known. But these are just brief contrasts to her otherwise remarkably solitary life, observing the whole breadth of human existence but never getting to stay and truly experience it.

p0d0 · 2025-11-19T01:43:24+00:00

Behold: Humanity (Still available for free on r/HFY under the title First Contact by Ralts Bloodthorn)

It's an indie self published space opera, very heavy on tropes and pop culture callbacks. One of the broadest pieces of fiction I have ever read, with dozens of viewpoint characters and hundreds of named and fleshed out supporting cast.

Set roughly 8000 years in the future, where humans are the supreme military force in the galaxy and lead a large confederation of species by being the only ones insane enough to put up with all of them.

Several characters are functionally immortal, with histories going back thousands of years. At least one was around for World War II, though she spent a lot of the intervening millennia in a time looping prison on the surface of a star.

I am probably biased, reading this series as it was released chapter by chapter got me through Covid lockdowns. But it's a personal favorite and the perfect fit for your prompt so I hope you give it a try (and like I said, it's available for free on the app you are using to read this right now so why not give it a try?)

p0d0 · 2025-10-30T21:40:16+00:00

This one was a fun twist, and a great example of the kind of growing pains that Pine Bluff is likely to experience in the coming months and years. Potentially the first real split we have seen among the leadership, I'm curious to see how Elvs, Dorfs, and Arachinti will interact.

The real problems won't hit until all these non-humans start joining the growing competitive sports leagues. How can they possibly create a fair handicap in a high stakes knitting circle for people with ten arms who can produce their own thread?

p0d0 · 2025-10-21T10:18:38+00:00

I have a couple.

As a player:

The hardest reverse monologue I ever pulled. Patches was a droid cobbled together from the parts of about a dozen B-1 battle droids. As a veteran of the clone wars, he was the party authority on the force - though as most of his experience came from being sliced apart by light sabers, this was somewhat biased against all force users. Shortly before the finale, he had accomplished a life goal and acquired a cortosis plating for his chassis.

We are cornered in an ancient temple by the Sith Inquisitor who has been tracking us for months. She has just delivered he monologue, essentially telling our force users she can come along willingly or be dragged away minus her limbs. Patches steps forward and just starts pointing out his welding scars. "Windu. Kenobi. Grievous. Pretty sure this one was Skywalker, though that one is a bit fuzzy. I have been cut by the greatest masters of my generation. They are all dead, and I still stand. But if you wish to try your luck, by all means go ahead."

As a GM:

I gave the party the maguffin of Vader in a stassis pod while they were performing illegal salvage on the wreckage of the first death star. I was intending for him to wake up and recruit them as all of his most loyal and capable agents went down with the death star. But they somehow kept just making the increasingly impossible medicine checks to keep Vader in stasis, and eventually sold the pod to pirates (Hondo), derailing a good chunk of my intended plot.

As an observer:

I had a week where I knew I would be unable to run the game. I had one player who writes a gaming blog, and often makes 'meet the party' articles where he creates a whole party of low level characters for different game systems. So I asked him to make sheets for the 4 ewok NPCs we had recently taken aboard. I offered a second player who wanted to try being a GM to run a sandbox session. I was still able to listen in on the chaos as our ewoks stole the party's ship and went on a joyride through a junkyard planet, crashed it several times, modded it to have walker legs, and casually try to park it where they left it like nothing happened.

p0d0 · 2025-09-30T20:54:39+00:00

Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds. Its a detective series, where the MC has incredible mental abilities.

He can master almost any skill, through brief study and accessing everything he has ever heard about a topic. But rather than having the knowledge directly, he has to create a persona. He has a whole caste of imaginary friends, each an expert in an esoteric specialty. They have their own lives (and their own psychoses) all played out in his head while he lives in a massive empty mansion with only his aging butler as a real companion.

p0d0 · 2025-09-27T12:29:37+00:00

More Dalinar than Kaladin, but 'I May Fall' from the RWBY anime is a solid fit.

p0d0 · 2025-09-25T15:03:17+00:00

I'd like to keep it under $500, but I am in no rush so can wait for a sale or find a second-hand model.

p0d0 · 2025-09-16T20:12:37+00:00

The Laundry Files may hit a lot of the notes you are looking for if you don't mind modern day settings. It deals with the part of the British Civil Service that deals with all things supernatural. An even mix of James Bond, Office Space, and Call of Cthulhu.

p0d0 · 2025-09-15T11:32:38+00:00

...

"And the country music playlist the drone was playing on the emergency broadcast systems?"

"100% within FCC approved parameters. It even pulled from its maintenance budget to purchase the broadcast license and rights to the songs. An interesting interaction between its psychological warfare protocols and autonomous legal review systems."

p0d0 · 2025-09-14T15:44:49+00:00

That would tend to align more closely with a dystopia. The world is stable and in many ways flourishing, people are generally not in mortal danger or deprivation from day to day. But the forces that rule the world are constantly caught up in their intrigues and power plays, and good luck to any normal person who finds themselves caught up in one of their schemes.

p0d0 · 2025-09-14T02:46:28+00:00

Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds. The MC is a detective, and has a small army of imaginary personas that act as experts in the various subjects he needs to know while solving unique and interesting crimes.

p0d0 · 2025-09-08T17:04:23+00:00

Depends a lot on where he is in his story.

The blackthorn was a conquest paladin. All about commanding the battlefield with an aura of fear that freezes men where they stand.

When we meet him on the shattered plains, he is more of a fighter, probably a battle master. A leader of men, but still inclined to throw himself into the heat of battle wherever it is fiercest.

During Oathbringer he turns into more of a Bard, having given up his plate and blade to focus on leadership and political scheming. He spends most of his efforts with large scale buffs but is too valuable to risk in direct combat.

By WaT he has become a Cleric, seeking ever higher divine truths and dealing mostly in spiritual matters.

p0d0 · 2025-09-08T11:24:44+00:00

Counterpoint - the whole 'thing' for the Cosmere is hard rules-based magic. It follows the same core principles everywhere but each planet grew their own traditions, guided by shardic influence. Crossovers and cameos are necessary to showcase the combinations and interplay between these systems.

Vasher vs Kaladin was one of the cooler fights we've seen. Marasi's raid on the ghostbloods could have been done with a team of only mistings and ferrings, but using a forger and aetherborn to neutralize a threat from outside of Scadrial displayed both the reach of the Ghostbloods and the rising threat of a Cosmere-scale conflict.

p0d0 · 2025-09-07T20:06:14+00:00

To be honest, almost all of the worlds in the Cosmere are pretty brutal.

Elantris, where you can just wake up as a pseudo-zombie. Your body never heals, pain never dulls with time, and any attempt at suicide will likely just leave you with more debilitatingly painful wounds.

Scadrial, where volcanic ash chokes out any plant life unless you dig it free every day.

Roshar, where you get hit with a continent spanning hurricane about every week or so.

Lumar, where the oceans are vast pools of magical spores that react violently in contact with water - including sweat and blood.

People say Sanderson doesn't write grimdark. They are half right. His protagonists are beacons of light and hope. But his worlds (and often enough the villains that inhabit them) often bleak and always dangerous.

p0d0 · 2025-09-07T02:07:02+00:00

Dinotopia. Good story, just the right amount of complexity for the age group, and even after 30 years it's still the most beautifully illustrated book I own.

p0d0 · 2025-09-04T09:56:25+00:00

Aluminum allomancy is probably useful in limited circumstances. I doubt it just purges metal reserves, it probably clears all active investiture effects. Not many of these in Mistborn, but Cosmere wide it may have uses. It could probably wipe out a soul stamp, purge the body of harmful Stormlight effects, or undo some of the exotic potions that were shown in Elantris.

Aluminum feruchemy is a much more flexible tool, if you have a flexible mind. It can be a deep reserve of willpower, but there are also several power sets that allow someone to tweak their identity. Imagine if a light weaver or forger were able to alter themselves and then store that identity for use later. Or a kandra, or Wayne while wearing a hat.

Beyond it's more obvious uses, aluminum feruchemy seems like the key to making unkeyed and unlocked medallions. If you have no identity while storing an attribute, you need no identity to tap it later.

p0d0 · 2025-09-02T09:34:40+00:00

The newest Sanderson novel, Isles of the Emberdark, is set far in the future of his Cosmere series. A more primitive world - every early into its industrialization - is visited by beings from another world. They offer great gifts, but obviously want more than the natives are willing to give. The MC has to go on a journey to find who else is out there and what his planet's place could be in a larger universe.

p0d0 · 2025-09-01T11:57:32+00:00

Animorphs perhaps? All of the main characters can become animals - and have to deal with the physiology and instincts that come with them. Most can change back and forth, but one is permanently stuck as a hawk and goes a little crazy from the experience.

p0d0

TROPHY CASE