As much just an observation as anything, but one of the changes, or soon to be changes as it hasn't quite happened yet, Fourth Agers need to... "Learn to deal with" isn't quite right, as there is little they can actually "do" about it, so I guess "acknowledge exist" is just the level of freedom Traveling gives a channeler.
In my mind, the existence of Traveling is one of the main reasons WoT NEEDS the Dragon's Peace. To give them time to adapt to the fact that now just about everyone can get just about anywhere whenever the hell they want, and the only real control the governments have over it is... A single Dreamspike... WoT needs to do everything they can to make as many of those things as they can ASAP. If they even can.
But the thing is... The issue actually goes a whole lot deeper then that. In that while channelers in WoT don't yet know how to do it, we know that Gateways are capable of going to parallel and alternate worlds... Once they figure that out, then literally every single Traveling capable channeler is all of Gateway to a channeler-less world away from being able to set themselves up as a demigod, and... There really isn't a hell of a lot that anyone in WoT can actually do to stop them.
What stops a channeler from being able to pull a Forsaken and just up and takeover, is other channelers of similar training being there to counter such, but... For all the world said rouge channeler would of just up and vanished one day. No idea where they went. No way to track them.
And as a side issue... Raising the first batch or two of Dragon Blooded is going to be hellish...
Just think of it, five your olds perfectly capable of just up and popping over to the ogier's home dimension for no other reason then uncle Loial made an off hand comment that there weren't that many ogier... And it's not like they can just up and keep the kids shielded until they're twenty, no matter how much they might want to. lol
At least later on they can leave the babysitting to the elder siblings.
If I'm Elayne or Cadsuane or Aviendha or Logain or another leader f the channeling organizations, I'm setting out to have people running around laying inverted wards everywhere I can get them to layout the alarm for unauthorized traveling. Egwene was being smart by creating the Taveling Grounds, given the dangers of opening gateways and the risk of a rogue running around the world doing who-knows-what seems like rules such as designated entry points should be enforced pretty strongly.
There are ones that detect channeling, but those would detect anything, and IIRC have to be manually reset after having done so... Given that the area in question is "nigh all civilization on the planet" they'd have an easier time with the Dreamspikes, or even trying to coby the Guardian, or hell, just one of the channeling detection ter'angreal. But while maybe detecting it is nice and all, the Dreamspikes would actually stop it, while still allowing for authorized Traveling.
Hell, even the Dreamspikes are more limiters then out and out stoppers. Traveling is kinda Hax.
... Besides, why else would the Wheel make a point of having one of the things survive? Elayne copying it and Aviendha working out how to program the things is the best bet.
and we know that there are literally thousands of ways to spin wards, not sure it would be that hard to figure out how to set up wards in at least the major cities that would give a heads up whenever someone opened a gateway outside of the specified areas.
And thinking of it, there is a bigger issue with that plan. Those kind of wards only A. alert the one the placed them, or B. do something like make a noise or the like.
Between having to reset them, and only the placer being able to sense them... Like half the channelers would have to do little of anything else in their long lives, as they'd be too busy managing the things. While even if the noise option went off in a preset room, it would at best be able to give a vague area. Which it would take time to search, and would be pretty easily countered by just opening up a few Gateways to other areas of a city as well. It's not like the wards would be able to even tell the difference between a fist sized Gateway and one big enough for an army.
A bored channeler could troll half the planet just by opening pinhead sized Gateways in every other city.
Sammael had a bunch of wards set all around Illian that clearly at least alerted him to the whereabouts of a Channeler. Rand had to go so far as to trip them all at once to get around them.
Traveling uses a significant amount of the OP so even a tiny gateway is noticeable to other channelers and, as we saw at the Cleansing, there are already small ter'angreal that detect channeling of either side of the OP too so it's not impossible to reverse engineer some of those as a broader detection system or replicate the larger system used by the Far Madding Guardian device.
Nothing is ever going to be fool proof, but it's obvious that wards can be set for detection even if they later have to be reset, but Rand had a self-resetting system of wards to kill Shadowspawn at Shayol Ghul so I don't see any reason wards keyed toward Traveling would be all that crazy to develop. A clever individual could certainly go about doing what you suggest if they were determined enough, but there's nothing to say that someone else couldn't figure out how to adjust a ward to shoot a fireball through any gateway that opens it or an electrical shock etc ... none of this seems like a huge stretch based on what we've seen in the series.
LTT even said that kind needed to be reset.
On top of that wards can't be stacked on top of wards. If you place a ward that responds to channeling with an explosion, you couldn't also set one there that would tell you that there was channeling... Other then said explosion... That you yourself just made happen in your own city. If said wards are known, you just allowed a possible enemy to effectively bomb it with little actual effort on their part. While there is only so much of said explosion that could fit through say a fist sized Gateway. Particularly if they simply made it thirty feet away and pointed away from them.
A channeling detecting ter'angreal system is certainly possible... But of limited use actually stopping anything. At best it would tell "someone channeled here" not who they were, what they were doing, or where they went... Or, in the case of Gateways, if they even walked through the thing.
With Dreamspikes you have to keep tabs on comings and goings through the edge of the effect. With channeling detection you have to keep tabs on everything every channeler in your city is doing 24/10 for it to be much more then wishful guesswork trying to make yourself feel safer.
Hell, likely the simplest option getting into a city with channeling detection weaves, is just to think in three dimensions. WoT was already playing with the idea of jumping out of Gateways in the air, but the air can be watched. How much of a leap is it to just... Open a Gateway ten feat underground and dig up a little? At least with Dreamspikes, they'd likely have to go a hell of a lot deeper then ten feet.
... Like I said, to me it seems like the Dragon's Peace is the Wheel's way of giving WoT the breathing room to actually have time to think about all this shit before it hits the fan. Without it, WoT could very well of had another Breaking from it alone.
The more channelers explore using the Power in and around combat and for destruction the more others will work on defenses and early warning systems too. It's not unlike our world, we have lots of ways to blow people up, and we are always looking for new ones that are more precise or more automated and probably 100 other things too. As far as I am concerned there is really no way to ensure people's safety as long as there are hostile elements in the world, but we still develop things like Radar and Sonar and have espionage organizations to discover as much "intelligence" as we can, even if we know we can't stop every attack.
For WOT there are literally thousands (possibly millions) of individuals who could kill with a thought so we end up seeing a whole lot of systems in place designed to instill some kind of moral or societal groundwork at an individual level. This is a control mechanism that exists in every society in the WOT world and isn't likely to change quickly.
Aes Sedai have their oath, and the Novice and Accepted training drills this mentality into all the women who've passed through their training with this mentality thus the Kin struggled to even consider using the Power as a weapon. Female Wilders are consistently hidden and seem to stay off the grid as often as possible. Not once in the entire series do we see a Wilder take initiative or make herself obvious to anyone. If a woman begins channeling and survives the experience and does not go to Tar Valon she tends to keep her head down and do her best not to draw attention to herself. The only examples we have of Wilders going outside of the system are the Daughters of Silence, who were immediately (upon discovery) silenced. Most of these women would still be living since they took no Oaths, but they all stay out of sight.
Wise Ones and Windfinders are given purpose to their respective societies, pivotal roles which require them to work toward greater societal goals. I very much suspect Windfinders are similar to Wise Ones in that they would not participate in a feud between clans even if/when something along those lines may have happened. Both societies put a huge emphasis on family, clan and culture over individual desire and allow their channelers respected places, but still keep them under the "rule" of non-channlers and ultimately make them a resource for the society as a whole rather than risk allowing them to even consider seizing power.
Seanchan enslave and use channelers completely stripping them of individuality and humanity and commandeer those who can control them into the military structure which is in turn subsumed into the cultural identity of the society. Prior to this it sounds like the Seanchan continent was a tangle of wars and shifting alliances but still had some mechanism in place to stop males.
Hard to say what the Ayyad were like, but even they seemed to have a group mentality emphasis over any sort of individuality as they bred themselves and had a societal norm of killing he male children of the Ayyad at a certain age regardless of if they began channeling or not.
AOL Aes Sedai were borderline obsessive with earning rank through societal service. Up until the DO was freed they were the ultimate example of stripping individuality out of the equation. RJ even showed us how poorly these people performed once they DID go out and start trying to conquer. The Forsaken all failed consistently because they were too individual. They could have crushed the Light if they hadn't been killing each other as often as they killed the Light. The WOP seems more like the Light on one side vs literally hundreds/thousands of individuals.
Net result is RJ built a world that essentially took a bottoms up approach to containing the ability of an individual channeler to become much of a threat, all women are indoctrinated from a very young age and males (until the Cleansing) were eradicated upon discovery. Sure a handful of males found ways to try and take over the world, but because of the nature of the rest of the channeling society they were shut down pretty efficiently. Even the Black Ajah operated under very strict underground rules to avoid discovery.
The Dragons Peace is dandy, but even without it I can't see a whole lot of opportunity for individual channelers to do more than localized damage before they get swarmed. The most likely to attempt (and probably succeed) in the tactics you outline are the Seanchan, and even they wouldn't truly be able to succeed without the Dragons Peace actually in place. Aviendha's vision depended on the Aiel being able to instigate the fighting and the rest of the nations sitting out for a while. Without the Peace the Westlands and the Aiel and the Seafolk already see the Seanchan as a common enemy and are far more likely to forge alliances against them and probably shut them down if they all worked together upfront. Possibly not, but with or without the Peace the Seanchan are the only truly militarized channling group until the Asha'man appeared. But given the already close linking of the Asha'man and Aes Sedai it seems unlikely that they would create too much of a status quo shift to the mainland cultures.
*NM*
- 23/09/2016 07:08:14 PM
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