[OB] Oathgate locations

[Salkara]

I plotted out the Oathgate locations to see if there might be some pattern:

I was hoping it would match up with points on the Radiant chart (or something similarly simple), but I can't see anything. Hopefully someone else notices what I can't.

I used the following labels:

• X = Oathgate, exact location known
• ? = Oathgate, exact location unknown
• U = Urithiru, approximate location

and here are locations listed out as the high storm blows (right-to-left):

1. [X] Shattered Plains
2. [X] Kholinar, Alethkar
3. [?] Thaylen City, Thaylenah (exact location of city on island unknown)
4. [X] Vedanar, Jah Keved
5. [?] Kurth, Rira (Jasnah believed it be in Kurth, but may be elsewhere)
6. [X] Azimir, Azir
7. [X] Panatham, Babtharnam
8. [X] Rall Elorim, Iri
9. [?] Shinovar (hidden somewhere)
10. [?] Aimia (exact location on island unknown)

 

Edited September 20, 2017 by Salkara
What happened to my formatting??

[What's a Seawolf?]

Awesome idea.

Some random thoughts looking at the map

-Whatever the creature or warlord is in Sesemalex Dar may very well head to Azir, once general knowledge of Urithiru and Oathgates becomes known.  No other Oathgate is even remotely close, and Oathgates are going to become critical for both aggressive and defensive maneuvers.  (Don't want an army dropping in right next door without warning.)

-Lift grew up in Rall Elorim, which has an Oathgate.  I anticipate a connection there at some point.

-The four Oathgates in the Northwest portion of the map (counting Shinovar and Rira) seems a little odd with the story so far and general Rosharian power favoring strongly the eastern part of the continent.  Obviously the Oathgates were created in a much different time period, but 40% of the Oathgates in one relatively small section is a little strange based on our current knowledge.

-There is a large swath of land in the northeast and all the Reshi Isles that have no Oathgate.

[BlackYeti he/him]

45 minutes ago, What's a Seawolf? said:

-The four Oathgates in the Northwest portion of the map (counting Shinovar and Rira) seems a little odd with the story so far and general Rosharian power favoring strongly the eastern part of the continent.  Obviously the Oathgates were created in a much different time period, but 40% of the Oathgates in one relatively small section is a little strange based on our current knowledge.

-There is a large swath of land in the northeast and all the Reshi Isles that have no Oathgate.

This does actually make sense. We know that each of the Silver Kingdoms had one Oathgate, and each of those locations corresponds to one of the Silver Kingdoms as demonstrated on the map below.

It may look a bit like the Oathgate in Kurth is part of Iri there, however, the colouring of the map would indicate that the island in question (as well as all of the Reshi Isles) was, in fact, part of Rishir.

So, as it stands, I don't see any major issue with the proposed placings of the Oathgates.

[notsawerd]

Thaylen City will be a port city given that its on an island and their economic driver is trade.  I am guessing on the Northern side in the strait at the closest point to mainland Roshar.

We know so little of the Shin so its hard to know whether their major city would be coastal or on a river.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was physically as far away as possible from the rest of Roshar.

 

From what we know so far Jah Kaved is highly populated and its oathgate is far to the south.  This leaves a lot of people without access to an easy oathgate.

[lastofus]

2 hours ago, What's a Seawolf? said:

-The four Oathgates in the Northwest portion of the map (counting Shinovar and Rira) seems a little odd with the story so far and general Rosharian power favoring strongly the eastern part of the continent.  Obviously the Oathgates were created in a much different time period, but 40% of the Oathgates in one relatively small section is a little strange based on our current knowledge.

 

If you only consider the military side, from Dalinar's visions, east is (was) the power house of Alethela. So probably most of the population were in fighting shape; had training or at least could fend off most attacks til the Knights get there. But Oathgates were needed to travel faster to remote(?) areas like west.

Quote

Although the orders of Knights Radiant were centered in Urithiru, Alethela was their home, and Radiants lived in cities throughout the nation, crossing borders to fight.

 

Edited September 20, 2017 by lastofus

[Pagerunner he/him]

Nice job beating me to this! I tried this before preview chapters, and I obviously had less luck. I had been looking for ley lines; maybe you could try marking the Oathgates on the WoR map? It has some lines going out from the compass that are almost certainly not significant, but which I wanted to check.

One other thing. One of the Interludes mentions the "isle of Akinah," so I think the city and its Oathgate isn't on the main Aimian island, but one of the smaller ones. If that helps at all.

[platnumkid]

Good work, I was doing this informally Tuesday afternoon.

I agree with BlackYeti, when you look at the silverkingdoms map it all makes sense when you consider that all the islands in the north are part of Rishir.

The thing that really interests me is about that map.  Do we know how accurate it is?  We know the Reshi islands move, during the shadow days was Kurth actually much closer to the rest of Rishir (modern Herdaz)?  Maybe this Silver Kingdoms map is a modern projection of information that Ardents have found about the silver kingdoms onto a current map of Roshar.  For instance maybe they have found records or other writing that says that Iri and Rira made up the silver kingdom Iri, but something else that said that all islands that were in the Reshi sea were part of Rishir so they knew to colour Kurth's island to go with Rishir instead of Iri with the rest of Rira

[+Extesian he/him]

Nice post. To clarify, yes Akinah is surely the location of the oathgate (here's a map of the city)

And Akinah is the large island in northern Aimia, just to make the location as accurate as possible

Quote

They hadn’t been sailing long, only a short distance out from Liafor, up the Shin coast, then westward toward this northern section of Aimia. They’d soon spotted the large main island, but had not visited it. Everyone knew that was barren and lifeless.

 

[Salkara]

16 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

One other thing. One of the Interludes mentions the "isle of Akinah," so I think the city and its Oathgate isn't on the main Aimian island, but one of the smaller ones. If that helps at all.

I know this is the spoiler board, but aren't we supposed to put spoiler tags around stuff not in the released preview chapters? (Unless I'm thinking of /r/Stormlight_Archive, or this was mentioned in one of the previous books' interludes)

[Calderis he/him]

17 minutes ago, Salkara said:

I know this is the spoiler board, but aren't we supposed to put spoiler tags around stuff not in the released preview chapters? (Unless I'm thinking of /r/Stormlight_Archive, or this was mentioned in one of the previous books' interludes)

Things that have been made publicly available at no cost are fair game as far as I know. There's a thread, pre-preview chapter that had all of the released chapters, and transcripts/videos of Brandon reading those interludes. We had threads dedicated to the Akinah interlude prior to the previews starting. 

[Pagerunner he/him]

19 minutes ago, Salkara said:

I know this is the spoiler board, but aren't we supposed to put spoiler tags around stuff not in the released preview chapters? (Unless I'm thinking of /r/Stormlight_Archive, or this was mentioned in one of the previous books' interludes)

As far as I'm aware, information from readings is fair game (and was the majority of discussion in this board for a good period of time). There are two flashback chapters from Unfettered that we haven't seen yet; people have been avoiding them, but I don't know if they're strictly off-limits. Maybe @Chaos could clarify?

[Salkara]

Just now, Calderis said:

Things that have been made publicly available at no cost are fair game as far as I know. There's a thread, pre-preview chapter that had all of the released chapters, and transcripts/videos of Brandon reading those interludes. We had threads dedicated to the Akinah interlude prior to the previews starting. 

 

Just now, Pagerunner said:

As far as I'm aware, information from readings is fair game (and was the majority of discussion in this board for a good period of time). There are two flashback chapters from Unfettered that we haven't seen yet; people have been avoiding them, but I don't know if they're strictly off-limits. Maybe @Chaos could clarify?

Okay, then I'm probably just conflating 17S rules with the subreddit's rules. Thanks.

And yeah, that's the reason I specifically left off the "?" off one of the islands as described in Kaza's interlude.

[king of nowhere]

As far as spreading the oathgates go, they are fairly evenly distributed, with the exception of northeastern roshar laking one, and the gate in kurth being too close to the others - and only servicing a relatively small peninsula.

Is it possible that we have wrong information and the oathgate in kurth is instead somewhere else? that would fit perfectly

[redbishop]

It would be interesting to see that mapped onto a sphere.  A Mercator projection like we see above may obscure a planet-wide pattern for Oathgate distribution.

I just tried doing some math to try and figure out what size globe it would need to be mapped onto, but the extrapolations are tied pretty closely to planetary composition.  Fundamentally, surface gravity is proportional to average planetary density and radius:

g = (a pile of constants) * d * r, where the pile of constants account for the universal gravitational constant as well as geometry, d is average density and r is planetary radius.  Relating Roshar to Terra is a simple matter of ignoring Surges and setting up a ratio.

Since surface area (A) = 4 * pi * r^2, we could theoretically come up with some interesting theories.  Mercury, Venus and Earth are all pretty similar in density, so if we hold that constant and apply the first relation, Roshar's radius is .7 Terran radii.  Using the second equation, that means Roshar could have a surface area of as little as half (.49, technically) of Earth's surface area.

Any geologists care to weigh in on how much less (or more?) dense a planet without tectonic activity would be, relative to earth?  Do we have any clues that would give us a sense of scale to the map, so we could map it to a sphere?

[Calderis he/him]

@redbishop the problem with that idea is that Roshar as a supercontinent does cover the whole globe. Not even close.

I'll see if I can find the map that someone made (that Peter Alstom said was pretty accurate) that showed all of the continent in the southern hemisphere with the northern isles approaching the equator. 

A globe layout won't give you an accurate distribution of the Oathgates.

Edit: here it is.

 

Edited September 25, 2017 by Calderis

[Aleksiel]

Here's Roshar on a globus:

 

 

The red line is the Equator. I found another where it's even more obvious, but for some reason I can't add another picture. Oh, well.

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, redbishop said:

It would be interesting to see that mapped onto a sphere.  A Mercator projection like we see above may obscure a planet-wide pattern for Oathgate distribution.

I just tried doing some math to try and figure out what size globe it would need to be mapped onto, but the extrapolations are tied pretty closely to planetary composition.  Fundamentally, surface gravity is proportional to average planetary density and radius:

g = (a pile of constants) * d * r, where the pile of constants account for the universal gravitational constant as well as geometry, d is average density and r is planetary radius.  Relating Roshar to Terra is a simple matter of ignoring Surges and setting up a ratio.

Since surface area (A) = 4 * pi * r^2, we could theoretically come up with some interesting theories.  Mercury, Venus and Earth are all pretty similar in density, so if we hold that constant and apply the first relation, Roshar's radius is .7 Terran radii.  Using the second equation, that means Roshar could have a surface area of as little as half (.49, technically) of Earth's surface area.

Any geologists care to weigh in on how much less (or more?) dense a planet without tectonic activity would be, relative to earth?  Do we have any clues that would give us a sense of scale to the map, so we could map it to a sphere?

We have figures!

Arcanum unbounded gives the size of planet roshar as 0.9 earth radii, and its surface gravity as 0.7 g. With those numbers, it is easy to get an average densitiy of the planet (which was closer to the value of mars, by the way)

Still, we don't really know how big is the continent compared to the planet. We could make some reasonable assumptions assuming that taylenah is at 60 degrees of latitude and the reshi islands straddle the equator, but those are all assumptions. Still, we can get an approximation within +-30%

[waynegrantham]

On 9/20/2017 at 4:12 PM, BlackYeti said:

This does actually make sense. We know that each of the Silver Kingdoms had one Oathgate, and each of those locations corresponds to one of the Silver Kingdoms as demonstrated on the map below.

It may look a bit like the Oathgate in Kurth is part of Iri there, however, the colouring of the map would indicate that the island in question (as well as all of the Reshi Isles) was, in fact, part of Rishir.

So, as it stands, I don't see any major issue with the proposed placings of the Oathgates.

Random: could the Reshi oathgate be on a Greatshelll and move around?

[17th Splinter he/him]

2 minutes ago, waynegrantham said:

Random: could the Reshi oathgate be on a Greatshelll and move around?

You could probably build one on a Greatshell, though we don't know, and I don't think it would work while the island was moving. 

[redbishop]

Does anyone have the skills to superimpose the Oathgates onto the globe and see if the describe any interesting sort of pattern?

Mars makes sense.  I will have to dust off AU once again.  My thanks to the collective for your patience.

[BlackYeti he/him]

Brandon recently tweeted an image containing a new map of Roshar that pinpoints the location of Thaylen City (I've put the image in the spoiler box at the bottom of this post so it doesn't take up too much space). I've updated my above graphic to include this new info (and to incorportate @Pagerunner's above suggestion of limiting the Aimian Oathgate to the islands).

Edit: Having had a chance to study the new map a bit more, I now notice that it also gives the exact location of Urithiru, so I'm replacing the graphic with one showing showing the precise location of the Urithiru Oathgate pairs (in blue instead of red).

Spoiler

 

Edited October 7, 2017 by BlackYeti

[SilverTiger she/her]

Why doesn't Rishir have an Oathgate and Iri have two? Jasnah could be wrong about the one in Kurth, or there are more than ten oathgates. Plus, are the Reshi Isles on the map the greatshells? I always thought that the island chain was actual islands, and the greatshells kind of wandered around the Reshi Sea (the islands are marked on a map, which is hard if they're mobile, and the size would a bit unrealistic even to Rosharan greatshells if true).

[Mulk he/him]

23 minutes ago, SilverTiger said:

Why doesn't Rishir have an Oathgate and Iri have two? Jasnah could be wrong about the one in Kurth, or there are more than ten oathgates. Plus, are the Reshi Isles on the map the greatshells? I always thought that the island chain was actual islands, and the greatshells kind of wandered around the Reshi Sea (the islands are marked on a map, which is hard if they're mobile, and the size would a bit unrealistic even to Rosharan greatshells if true).

with respect to your first question, you have to look closely, but one of the two gates you are taking to be Iri is actually on the Reshi color - so even though it's closer to Iri than the bulk of Reshi is, it is still on Reshi land.

With respect to the rest, I tend to agree with you. I'm not sure if there has been a Word of Brandon or Peter on this issue specifically, but it's hard to put something fully mobile onto a map so I always took them to be regular islands.

edit: credit to @BlackYeti for pointing this out earlier

Edited October 9, 2017 by Mulk
giving credit

[SilverTiger she/her]

A far-off island is kind of a weird place for an oathgate, which was supposedly easily accessible for everyone. Are we sure there isn't one in modern Herdaz? Because then they could send Lopen and his infinite cousins to open it (along with a Radiant).

[WhiteLeeopard she/her]

Wonder what there was on the Shattered Plains to deserve an Oathgate. Everywhere else there are remains of the old cities, even if they built entirely on top of them, the other Oathgates are on currently important cities. Yet not only was the SP completely barren and empty, but it was the only door left open. Makes one consider if what shattered the plains is related to the Recreance.

Herdaz and the Horneater peaks are suspiciously empty of nearby Oathgates. Maybe the Herdazian and Horneaters only "came to be" after the last Desolation. 

The island may not seem a logical spot, but its very reasonable for an entire seafaring group. Reshi is mainly made of islands and people more at home on the sea than at land. An island, maybe their capital at the time would be the perfect spot for them to reach easily.

I also see a lot of people saying it makes no sense the Reshi have 2 Oathgates. While honestly, what I thought when I saw it is that it is a wonder the current kingdoms are so similar to the 10 Silver Kingdoms and don't have even more shifted borders. Its been thousands of years, all that time ago for us we had Egypt and Babylon in their full glory, or even their predecesors . Since then maps have changed...a lot.

Edited October 9, 2017 by WhiteLeeopard