Knight of Doom
Time for another one of our friend’s titles.
Powers: CA
The Knight and the Page are the active-passive pair for the Exploit classes. The Exploit classes are known for using their Aspect as a weapon, or, in the Page’s case, giving it to someone else to use as a weapon. But there are many major questions about Pages, and those are, “What is up with them having to pretty much wait to use their powers? Why do they have to wait to reach their full potential? Why are we talking about this now, when we’re supposed to be talking about Knights?” Well, simple. I have a theory about the relationships between Pages and Knights, and it’s more than just their ability to exploit their Aspect. My thought on this is that they both actually have to wait to use their abilities until they reach their full potential, but what’s special about the Knights in comparison to the Page is that Knights don’t have to depend on others to reach their potential. The whole ‘loner’ thing? Yeah. Knights learning to depend on their own abilities is really kind of a soul-searching moment. So, now that that detour is over, what can the Knights do? Well, once they reach their full potential, they can learn to equip themselves with their Aspect as a weapon. Depending on the Aspect, that can mean a variety of different things. Dave, the Knight of Time, can use Time as a weapon. His ability to use time travel, his ability to slow things down so that he can move faster in comparison to them, all of that is just him weaponizing Time to his benefit. And although Karkat never reached god tier, we still can see a bit of his weaponizing his Aspect, i.e., Blood, the Aspect of bonds. He brought his team together to act as a well-oiled machine and defeat a huge-ass monster that was an amalgamation of their lusii. He created their bonds, allowed them to actually complete their session, even if it didn’t end fruitfully.
Another thing that should be noted about the Knight class is that, so far, there’s been a pattern of Knights’ Aspects being that which their sessions lack. I say pattern because it’s not just been two, there’s been three Knights, and their titles and sessions fit this rule. Dave’s session is short on Time, Karkat’s session is short on Unity, and Latula’s session was filled with idiots. So any session would seemingly be lucky to have a Knight of Doom, provided the lack of Doom isn’t in their enemies.
So, what specifically does weaponizing Doom mean? It means that the Knight would be able to weaponize laws, limits, and endings, mostly bad ones. They would have an intrinsic knowledge of Doom, and while they might not always be able to explain their Aspect to other people who don’t actually have their Aspect (for example, Latula said that karma, the consequences for one’s choices, made some sort of sense to her as the Knight of Mind, and Dave never really being able to put the intricacies of Time into words). A Knight of Doom would be able to understand laws and rules and why endings happen, but the most important thing would be the power that they have to weaponize rules. Now this is difficult for me to write about because weaponizing rules? That’s something a Mage should do, right? *nervous sweating* But then I realize that it’s not the class that’s allowing the Knight of Doom to do this, more the Aspect and then I eat some macaroni and cheese and I’m okay.
So, to weaponize rules is something that would actually be pretty useful for a player, especially once you remember that Sburb or Sgrub is, by its definition, a game. To weaponize the rules is to take what the game gives you. You could essentially use cheat codes and give yourselves powerups by weaponizing the rules and implementing your own. You could implement the “bad end,” into the rules by putting in what could essentially be called a one-hit-kill cheat code into Sburb’s or Sgrub’s programming, allowing you to, as you might imagine, kill everything in one hit. Not to mention Doom’s link to outright destruction. As a Knight of Doom, you’re essentially allowed to weaponize destruction’s powers for yourself. A Knight’s ability to be a one-person army (or maybe just have the ability to gather an army really, really quickly) is hella useful.
Another thing to note is that Doom players might have two dream selves. So far, the only two Doom players that we’ve had are players whose aesthetics center around a duality theme, so that might be what is the cause to their two dream selves, but it might also be something regarding Doom’s relation to death and bad endings, and the game trying its best to balance these factors out.
Weapons: TC
A major pattern that seems to occur in the weapons of Knights is that they all tend to use bladed weapons. Dave used a sword/broken sword, Karkat used sickles, and nobody knows what the hell Latula used. As for the weapons of Doom players, there is no major pattern here, since they never used a strife specibus, and preferred to utilise psionic abilities to fight their foes. However, Sollux was shown to have the ninjakind strife specibus. In any case, the main pattern which will be observed is the pattern in the strife specibi of Knights.
Land and Quest: CA and TC
Doom has a lot of negative connotations, given both its nomenclature and its players dying. A lot. But to be honest, there’s a lot more to it than just death and gloom and harming its players. There’s order, and nature, among other forces, needs a natural order. Once again, in order to help find one or more of the words in the “Land of X and Y,” formula, TC and I recommend the use of this word list, courtesy of thepageofhopes.
Similar to our discussion of Mind player’s lands, we only have two Doom players (Sollux, the Mage, and Mituna, the Heir), and of those, we have only seen one’s land: Sollux’s. The Land of Brains and Fire. Given Doom’s link to destruction, we can assume Fire is probably the Aspect word, leaving Brains to be the aesthetic word. Again, we have no idea what Sollux’s quest was, so we don’t know what the quest word was there. Again, that’s for you guys to decide.
Now for the quest for a Doom player, there is, once more, many possibilities. But the one I suggest specifically for Knights of Doom is learning to weaponize the destruction happening around them to defeat some sort of larger boss, maybe even a denizen. Say there’s a large creature terrorizing the consorts of their world, whose weakness happens to be the one thing that keeps the state of destruction happening, and they just happen to know how to avoid it. Well, weaponize that destruction, use your innate abilities as a Knight of Doom, and save the day. Learn the pattern the destruction follows, and lead whatever you need to slay to where the destruction is to occur again, and you have a dead beast and very happy consorts.