
The Seer of Doom
Powers: CA
The Seer and the Mage are the passive-active pair of classes whose powers revolve around Knowing their Aspect. Where the Mage, as we have discussed many times before, is someone who uses their Knowledge of their Aspect to further their own powers (the way I described it sounds fairly malicious, but you must know that the Mage is meant to work that way), the Seer uses their Knowledge to benefit everyone, to prod others in the right directions, and the Seers we’ve seen in the past have done exactly that: Rose Lalonde, Seer of Light, telling her allies which way the meteor should go and for how long, Terezi Pyrope, Seer of Mind, giving John a list of tasks to complete to correct the timeline, hell, even Jade Harley as the inversion of the Witch of Space (Seer of Time) using the clouds to tell the future to point her friends in the right direction. Seers understand the ebb and flow of their Aspect, understand the way things move and interact in the grand scheme of things. They don’t alter anything themselves given their passivity, they simply rely on others to do their bidding, to follow their instructions, and become unwitting Mages in the process, minus the knowledge. Seers are the James Moriarty, the Sosuke Aizen, the Felix (from Tales from the Borderlands, to be entirely sure you’re getting the reference) of their sessions, the mastermind (hopefully without all the villainous connotations).
Doom is the Aspect of rules, of endings, both good and bad, and of singularity. A Seer of Doom would be able to see, much like a Seer of Light, what needs to be done for the path to extend to the “good end.” SBURB is, at its core, a game, and some of the best games we know are ones with multiple endings. Take Until Dawn, a game all about choice, Life, Doom’s antithesis. A Seer of Doom would be able to see everything they have coming, they would understand the point at which they can’t make a choice to save, and must make a choice to sacrifice. Where, say, a Seer of Life would see all the ways to save, how to undo sacrifice, the Seer of Doom would see the sacrifices that would have to be made. A Seer of Doom’s natural disposition may be somewhat pessimistic—they’re the lab rat in a maze who figured out that their life has been spent running into walls, undoing obstacles only to be put into an entirely new maze. But where knowledge is suffering, wisdom is peace, and the Seer may eventually get over the cloud cover to see the sunrise yet again, learning from their Aspect to accept sacrifice and endings as a natural fact of life, and where those rules can be a little stifling, they exist to keep us safe, and with their knowledge of sacrifice, and what might constitute as a balance (Law of Equivalent Exchange, anyone?), the Seer can save the people they need to and, most importantly, want to.
Weapons: TC
Well, this is my first time doing Seer weapons, I think. And honestly, I’m kind of glad about that. After all this time thinking about what all Seer weapons have in common, all that I could come up with was that they all at least originate as melee weapons. Between Rose’s knitting needles and Terezi’s cane sword, they both seem to have little in common other than both being melee weapons (at the start, at least). However, it is possible that a Seer’s weapons embody something that the wielder seems to lack, or lacked at some point. Terezi’s cane symbolizes her blindness, while Rose’s knitting needles represent her former lack of a hobby, or to some extent a lack of a life in general.
Doom weapons are even worse than Seer weapons, as in actuality, all we know is that both Doom players, the Captors, in all likelihood used their powerful psionic abilities more than any strife specibus. This was at least the case with Sollux, who used shurikens and a ninjakind/throwingstarkind strife specibus, but has never once been seen using it. This leads me to believe that Doom players use some sort of innate ability in combat. This could indeed be skillful use of a weapon, or psionic abilities, or even talking to the point that their opponent’s head hurts instead of fighting at all.
Putting these two facts together, the Seer of Doom’s weapon would likely be one of two possible things. It could be a weapon that represents a gaping hole that has been present in their life that may or may not be supplemented by some other skill. For instance, perhaps the Seer carries a weapon that they aren’t really good at using, and prefers to out-think, out-maneuver, or out-talk their opponent instead, or maybe they just carry a weapon while using some other skill to fight. Another possibility would be that the Seer uses a weapon that they are uncannily skilled at using to make up for their lack in another area of their life. In either case, providing specific examples of strife specibi that would fit into such a category would require more in-depth knowledge of what the Seer is like, and as such, I will leave such a task up to you, the reader.
Land and Quest: TC and CA
Okay, here’s a word list to help you come up with the land if you’re having trouble determining the Aspect words. With that said, let’s go.
Doom. It’s the Aspect of destruction, of sacrifice. Sollux is the only Doom player whose land we’ve seen before, The Land of Brains and Fire. Fire being a destructive force, it’s more than likely that that’s the Aspect word. But sadly, there’s not really that much we know about Doom players’ lands—we can guess that they are filled with destruction and that that’s the force that makes the world go ‘round, but there’s not too much we know for certain. We’re doing a bit of guesswork, really.
But uncertainties aside, what might a Seer of Doom’s quest be? Well, we’ve talked about how they can see the necessity of sacrifice, but, really, no one really wants to sacrifice things, wants to admit the existence of a no-win scenario. They need to learn how. They need to learn the poetics of Doom, the existence of the end. And so, they must see the end firsthand.
The Seer’s world is dying. No better way to put it, really. The world ends there, and the Seer knows it, they can see the signs, even if their consorts can’t. This, though, is a natural cycle for this world—for every end, there is a beginning, and the world comes back more verdant than ever. Their quest is to make sure that enough of their consorts survive to see that new beginning. The catch? Not everyone can.
The Seer has to choose who to let fall into the abyss for the good of the many. It’s painful. It hurts to have to let them go. But for the best end to be reached, they will have to be sacrificed. And the Seer has to bear the burden, and hope that the wisdom they receive will grant them the peace they so desperately need.
Thank you very much.
Team Analysis: TC and CA
Knight of Heart, Seer of Breath, and Mage of Void
Alright. Since you have acknowledged these are not the only players in the session, we won’t talk about what you need. We’ll instead go right to work discussing what their roles are in any session at all together.
A Knight of Heart is a bit of a tricky player. On the one hand, they have the ability to weaponize their soul, whoever they are as a person, be this splitting into multiple versions of themselves to make an army of the aspects of their soul, or arming themselves with a weapon symbolically representing them. On the other, they’re probably trying to hide whoever they are in some way shape or form behind a mask. We’ve discussed this before with other Knights, but so you know, Knights have a bad habit of hiding who they are behind any one aspect of themselves they want to accentuate, Karkat’s anger, Dave’s coolness, Latula’s G4M3RG1RL persona, often as an attempt to make sure that their weaknesses don’t get found out. Karkat never wanted to let anyone know of his mutation, Dave of his feelings of being a coward and his abuse in childhood. So Knights have something they want to hide. And they need to stop. They may not need to open up completely to be capable of using their powers (their class, after all, is one of self-discovery and self-reliance, achieving their own full potential by their own power), but if they want to be able to help their teammates with their land quests, and with the session in general, then they need to learn to let go of their mask, at least in some small part. Find a teammate to confide in, perhaps? Either way, a Knight of Heart would prove a great and easy mediator between people in the session, and while not necessarily a leader (whether or not they are depends on whoever else may be in the session), certainly someone who can take care of the team. Also important: the presence of a Knight of Heart indicates that the session lacks either emotion (perhaps in the sense of everyone being as “cold” as Dirk) or a sense of self to provide distinction between players (as we suggested before with the earlier Knight of Heart post, perhaps the session is comprised largely of twins or triplets to physically denote this lack of self).
The Seer of Breath would be able to see what’s needed to free people from their connections to things, people, and places…to put it bluntly. There is a lot more to this Seer’s powers but I’m focusing on this aspect of it right now because while we’re on the subject of the Knight of Heart and the Seer of Breath together, I think this is probably the person most likely to help the Knight break down their mask! Their ability to see what it would take to free anyone from their connections by pushing them in the right directions to make their own sort of self-discoveries partners perfectly with the Knight’s need to do things themselves to figure out how to use their powers. The Seer would say things, little things, push them in the right direction to seek out their own freedom from needing to hide who they are. The most immediate comparison I can think of would be Cole from Dragon Age: Inquisition (forgive me, for I am likely to be making these references far too much for my own good). His desire and innate ability to sense pain and try to, in his words, “untangle it,” is very similar to the Seer’s ability to free people—this analogy I’m making would be even more accurate if this Seer uses their powers purely to help others, freeing people from toxic relationships, from obsession, from addiction. But the Seer can also use their powers for not-quite-so-good things, too—breaking apart perfectly healthy relationships for the sake of the team dynamic, breaking apart people from their coping mechanisms to make the session far easier, but the further and further they go to get rid of things, trying to shape their teammates, the more likely they are to invert—begin to free people from their external connections just to strengthen their devotion to the team, that’s not Seer of Breath territory—that’s a Witch of Blood. Breath players are likely to be leaders in their sessions because of their innate freedom. Nothing’s holding them back but themselves, and of the three here (you need at least three other players, the Time and Space and one last player to even things out), this is the person who’s most likely to be the leader. They can make the hard decisions, they just need to be careful to not meddle too much.
The Mage of Void, as we noted before, in the post we crafted about them, is someone who can see a lot. And for the Knight of Heart, that’s probably a bit too much. The Knight didn’t ask them to figure them out, to figure out their secret—it just happened, and now it seems to the Knight like they’re just holding it smugly over their head. Screw them and their stupid face, the Knight thinks, just waiting for the other ball to drop…in actuality, it’s nothing like that. The Mage has no intentions of using this information, or giving it to anyone. They just kind of don’t care. Not to say that they don’t understand the gravity of the Knight’s need to keep their mask on for the other members of the session, they just don’t care about their finding out the truth. For all intents and purposes, they invite the Knight, you can keep on pretending with me, too, act like it never happened. The Knight can’t bring themselves to, though. Something about doing so just feels wrong. In any case, we’ll talk more about them later. The Seer and the Mage get on well together. As the Mage and Seer come into their powers, they get closer, the Seer going to the Mage for information, secrets that impede on their ability to untangle the bonds keeping people around them stagnant. The Seer depends on the Mage for a lot, and the Mage in turn, trusts them. They help because they know the Seer won’t misuse their powers for stupid stuff, and the second they try to, the Mage pulls the plug. In a series of checks and balances to keep the team leader from screwing the session over, the Mage of Void is the first line of defenses. In hindsight, perhaps they’re a better leader?…Well, it doesn’t matter much. Without the other players, we can’t figure out too much.
Sadly, without the other members of the team listed, we can’t draw too many conclusions as to how this would go down, but you seem to have a neat little cell here. Be careful who you choose to put in with them.
Relationships: CA and TC
Knight of Heart, Seer of Breath, and Mage of Void
Knight of Heart <> Seer of Breath: This relationship needs to be this level of strong friendship for anything to get anywhere on the Knight’s part of understanding their powers. Anything less that this level of trust and respect and it might not work. But beyond it needing to be this, their titles actually lend themselves to it pretty well. Passive-active groupings work pretty well together, one pursuing what the other points out in their sitting on the sidelines. A Seer of Breath would be able to learn how to remove bonds and the Knight of Heart would be able to create emotional ones. They would bond over their differences, recognizing the other’s strengths for the advantage they are, and would likely learn to compensate for each other, the Knight moving where the Seer cannot, and the Seer knowing what the Knight doesn’t. Their cooperation makes or breaks the game.
Knight of Heart <3< Mage of Void: Now what I described before, the relationship between the Knight and the Mage, it’s a bit one-sided. The Knight has all these feelings of anger towards the Mage because of this sudden unmasking, but the Mage just doesn’t really feel this great, undying need to use this knowledge, this dirt on the Knight for anything at all, no desire to humiliate or expose them. There are two ways this could go from here, and really it depends on how much of the Knight’s dependence on the mask the Seer manages to dismantle. Either a lot of the mask comes off and the Knight mellows out, this relationship would dissolve into simple and unpassionate professionalism, or the mask still manages to stick around, and so does the Knight’s animosity towards his teammate.
Seer of Breath <> Mage of Void: We talked about this before—a healthy respect and trust between them? Their methods of teamwork? Their ability to control each other (and not in a malicious way, more that they’ll stop each other from being stupid)? That’s a moiralliegance if ever I’ve seen one. It just needs to stay that way. Too passionate in either positive or negative directions and we have them trying to control each other or being far too lenient, neither of which is really any good. Okay, good? Good.
How many times can we type out “I’m sorry,” before the post is either A, too long, or B, just plan annoying, or, C, some horrific combination of both?
Like, seriously, we’re so sorry for not responding to anything in ages. We love you all. You’re seriously great. Like, scary great. We can’t quite fathom how and why you’re still asking us things. We’ve not posted anything in ages! Like, some six months, right? You guys are seriously amazing.
And you’re all so nice, too! Not only have we been seeing a ton of compliments (<3) but one of you has offered to draw us fanart! Like….why? How? What? You’re so rad. All of you, not just the person (or persons, someone else might have offered to do the same in the meantime, I’ve not read carefully through all the asks) who offered to make us fanart.
So, here’s the deal: we’re not going to be closing the ask box. I don’t think that’s fair, just because we’re too stupid to go ahead and actually Shia LaBeouf the analyses, you guys don’t get to ask us anything else. Also, it would kind of just make this blog fall into complete and total inactivity–you guys’ asks just flowing in keep us motivated when we finally get free time! We’re going to be posting what we have worked on and finished (we’ve had a little bit of trouble with one of our most recent asks–too little data to really work on and we had to do a fair lot of guesswork to finish it), and we’re going to be working on more things ourselves. So thank you for so much patience, thank you for so much patronage, and thank you for almost 150 followers (and not a single bot account! I’m so proud of us for managing that)!
Alright, with that said, I hope you’ve all had a happy holiday season, have a happy new year, and let’s see if we can get this ball rolling!
- TC and CA