QuestionCould you do a session analysis for a Knight of Void, Mage of Space, Rouge of Life, and Page of Heart? Also could you explain the powers and things a Page of Heart would have, I haven't found a good analysis anywhere. Answer

Sure thing! Once again, like with the Page of Mind post we did not too long ago, we’ll do the specific god tier first and then go about describing the team.
Also, sorry it took so long. TC and I have been hella busy. Hope you like it.

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Powers: CA

The Page and the Knight are the passive-active pair for the Exploit classes. Their jobs are to allow themselves, or, in the Page’s case, others, to exploit their Aspect as a weapon. Pages and Knights must both reach their full potential in order to completely use their abilities, and given how Pages rely on others to reach their full potential, it takes an infinitely longer time. However, all this time spent on the Page is not in vain. Once they reach their full potential, Pages are hypothesized to be the most powerful Class in SBURB. Pages arm others with their Aspect, granting them great power in a sort of repayment for allowing them to reach their full potential. Pages are like kings, leading an army of Knights of their Aspect. And with the Page of Heart, that is a very apt description, especially given the abilities of the Knights this Page would be leading.
The Page of Heart would be able to arm others with the Aspect of Heart. This means that the people they arm become Knights of Heart, in addition to giving the Page an ability to give others a certain emotion that they may already be feeling a spark of. It would almost be like a cleric in an RPG or something similar, making their teammates feel pumped for battle. If the Page’s team feels as though they will lose the battle against their Black King, then the Page will be able to take their fighting spirit, for that always exists going into a battle, and boosts it. They boost their team’s morale, in order to give them the feeling that they will win, and giving them more of an ability to win (you know, if you think it, you can do it).
Another ability of the Page of Heart to equip others with Heart as a weapon would be allowing their allies to become Knights of Heart. A couple of posts ago, I explained the abilities of the Knight of Heart, but in the case you hadn’t read that, that basic abilities a Knight of Heart would have include an intuitive knowledge of Heart, leading to a sort of empathetic ability in order to know what emotions to exploit, the ability to create a sort of “soul weapon,” which may reflect the person who uses it or the Knight in question’s strife specibus, and the ability to splinter themselves, making an army out of the parts of themselves that feel or act certain ways. For example, let’s say that Vriska came into contact with a Page of Heart who reached god tier and their full potential, and they happen to bestow the powers of a Knight of Heart on her. Her splintering might occur between the side of her which is entirely victory-driven, another might be the side of her which feels a fair amount of crushing remorse for her actions, and yet another might be the homicidal maniac who believes those who drag down the group shouldn’t be around to do as much and so on and so on. She’s a very conflicted person at some points, and not so much at others. This Page will have more of an “army” to lead than others, given how their Knights would be able to split themselves up into different people.
In any case, this Page will likely have a role in their team as a motivator of sorts. Someone who can get their team up and at ‘em as far as completing quests and other jobs and the like. This makes them a prime choice for a leadership role, but I’ll be analyzing that role more in-depth later on in the team section.


Weapons: TC

The tendency for a Page is to use an ACTUAL WEAPON as a strife specibus as opposed to the item lying nearest to them.  A Page would use a sword as a weapon instead of, say, a broom.  Heart players tend to gravitate towards melee weapons with a sharp and/or pointed edge.  As such, when taking both of these factors into account, we get the following weapons.

  • Axekind: Hope you’ve played The Forest…
  • Bladekind: BAN…KAI!
  • Chainsawkind: The most efficient way to carve a pumpkin.  Suck on that, knifekind!
  • Knifekind: Speaking of which…
  • Lancekind: Would you rather be a girl with a flower, or a boy with a stick?  Bear in mind that the stick is pointy as all hell.
  • Scythekind: For whom does the bell toll? Meh, it’s up to you, I guess.
  • Sicklekind: No hammer this time.
  • Spearkind: These monsters sure are scary.  Especially with those sticks.



Land and Quest: CA and TC

A lot of this will be repetition from the Knight of Heart post we made not too long ago. So here we go.
So far, we’ve seen the lands of two Heart players, Dirk Strider, the Prince, and Nepeta Leijon, the Rogue, but of those two, we can probably only use one as an example, as Dirk’s session is a Void session, which leads to some automatic differences between his world and the world of a Heart player in a normal session. For example, his entire world is covered in a noble gas, and is filled with dead, skeletal consorts…or maybe those are just monsters? And of course, time for our usual disclaimer-like quip: as with TC’s land, we suggest the use, once again, of this word list to aid you in the creation of your land, in both its quest and its aesthetic.
In any case, the unfortunate fact is that we are now limited to only using one land, the Land of Little Cubes and Tea. Nepeta’s land is an oddity in its nomenclature, given how it is made of an extra word. While this was presumably done only on Hussie’s part to make the abbreviation for the land LOLCAT, this is an interesting thing and I felt need to make a note of it.
In any case, Nepeta’s land is rather easy to deconstruct and decipher. The “Little Cubes,” part is likely a reference to the little cubes forming staircases and such all along the land, looking suspiciously like sugar cubes. This is likely the Aspect word. Heart lands tend to be sweet and soft, and these “Little Cubes” are most likely made of sugar. The “Tea,” part is quite obviously a reference to the teapots sitting on top of the mountains on the land. We aren’t entirely certain which is the quest and which is the aesthetic word given how little time there was spent focusing on the characters in the Land of Little Cubes and Tea, but that’s as much as we can learn from the name and brief glances we have gotten of the land.
As a side note, if none of the words in thepageofhopes’ list appeal to you or they don’t seem to fit the land you had pictured for your character (if you thought of a quest beforehand), it is possible that the Aspect word for a Heart land is meant to sort of reflect the nature of the player. Nepeta, despite having her underlying metal-as-all-hell nature, was a sweet, adorable individual, a personality that made her easy to like, and as such, her land reflected that. Dirk didn’t have an Aspect word, but his land reflected him, as it was a very interesting land with great levels of depth to it, like Dirk.
As for the Page’s quest, I imagine it a little like this: Dominoes. There is a problem on the Page’s world. The consorts, although they recognize it’s a problem, have no real motivation to get rid of it. This is similar to the Knight of Heart’s quest, but rather than the Knight themselves motivating everyone, the Page is smart (this isn’t to say that the Knight isn’t, their abilities work in a different way than the Page’s, which would have made this quest a bad idea for them to undertake). They realize that, given the nature of their abilities, a lot less work can be put into things if you simply have some people act as the motivators. Motivate one in the right way, and you have a Knight of Heart to motivate others. Spread them out, give them enough time, and these Knights of Heart would have spread Heart throughout their area like wildfire. Now the Page can point the Knights in the right direction, tell them what they need to do, in order to get rid of the problem. This might be making something. This might be getting a weapon from somewhere else on the world for the Page to use to slay some sort of monster. Whatever it is, with an army of Knights to motivate the consorts, the quest is a lot easier to manage.



Team Analysis: CA and TC


Knight of Void, Mage of Space, Rogue of Life, and Page of Heart

Well, there’s an immediate problem that I spot with this session: There’s no Time Player. Time Players are vital to the session. Doc Scratch, I believe, said something along the lines of, “A session without a Time player is doomed to fail.” And what’s worse is that without a Time Player, your players wouldn’t have a Scratch Device to help start the session over, so their game is doomed and without some Deus Ex Machina sort of thing going on, and a healthy session intervenes and gives them something to work with, then this session won’t have any sort of good ending. More likely than not? The Reckoning will happen, and everyone will die. The end.
But I’m not going to end it there. You have a Space player, one of two necessary parts for this game. There’s still some sort of hope here, so what I’m going to do? I’m going prescribe you a Time player based on what kind of Time class would help balance out this session. I might even help and prescribe another player to help out if it comes down to it (I know a fair amount of people I’ve worked with want sessions with an even number of people, and it may even be required by SBURB anyway, so I’m going to help you out there). So let’s see what kind of things the team you already have need.
The Knight of Void would provide an immediate benefit to this session. A Knight’s presence in a session means that whatever their Aspect is, their session lacks it, and this session is given a great gift by this Knight. Under most circumstances, the Knight of Void would likely constitute an immediate advantage to their session, as the lack of Void means that this team would have everything they need to complete their session successfully. In this session, though, given how there is no Time player, they would have everything they need except Time to help the Genesis Frog or to prepare themselves. This Knight would be an army, a construction crew, basically anything, able to call out anything they need from the nothingness, and able to show up wherever they may be needed. The weaponization of Void would likely allow this Knight the ability to teleport into and out of existence wherever they need to be, or, at the very least, turn invisible. But with this boon comes a potentiality for the session’s curse: Knights have a mask that they hide behind. For Dave, it was the impermeable “cool kid” act, for Karkat, it was anger, and for Latula, it was the identity of the gamer girl. If this Knight hides behind a mask that makes them keen on overworking themselves, or, on the flip side, not working at all, then the session has more problems than simply no Time. But that’s why the Page will be helpful, once they reach their full potential. Now, this may seem manipulative, but if the Page were to arm the Knight with a feeling of guilt whenever the Knight doesn’t show up on time, or a feeling of happiness whenever they do something good, then the group may be able to train the Knight to step out from behind their mask and simply act for the group. The Page will have to be careful with when and how they do this. If they simply do this with their abilities, rather than talking to them and using pathos to convince the Knight that what they’re doing is problematic, then they might accidentally invert themselves into a Thief of Mind, stealing the Knight’s thoughts and giving themselves a boost while doing so.
The Mage of Space. Now, I know a fair bit about Mages, TC being one, and I know a fair bit about Space, that being my Aspect, so I know that an unprepared Mage will cause a pretty large degree of problems. First off, Mages have a tendency to be bitten in the butt by their Aspect. And Space is a very big thing to have its teeth digging into your ass. Space has a connection to creation, and if the Mage breaks the rules, then gods know that the game might glitch out, and the Mage might end up standing on an enemy spawn point working double-time. But altogether, a Mage balanced by their teammates would be an asset to their team. Their massive knowledge of how Space works would allow them to go around at super-speed or make their enemies go around a lot slower. They could teleport themselves and other things. They could make things bigger or smaller, within the rules of how matter works, and they might even be able to, given enough time learning, make one of those never-ending corridor type deals. You know, when the protagonist of something or another is running towards a door at the end of the hallway or whatever, but no matter how fast of long they run, it never seems to be getting any closer? That’s likely something the Mage could manipulate into existence. They would be the person who needs the Knight’s services most, even outside of their quest, as the Knight would be able to pop test subjects into existence for them to learn more about their abilities and the rules of Space once they reach god tier. But again, the Mage’s inevitable backlash will have to be something that the Mage is prepared to get rid of, and they will have to help prepare their teammates to do the same. The Mage will need to learn or already have some sort of good work ethic, because if they want to complete their quest and learn to manage their abilities as the Mage of Space, then they will have to work double-time, and the Page would likely be able to help motivate the Mage, too.
Next up, the Rogue of Life. Now, let’s face it: with Nepeta’s ship-making, Roxy’s drunken speech obscuring what she’s trying to say, and Rufioh’s wings, Rogues have always had the tendency to reflect their Aspect. But with what I can tell, as soon as the Rogue enters the session, that tendency to reflect their Aspect is gone. Nepeta didn’t have much in the way of shipping time until the trolls were on the meteor, as far as we can tell, Roxy became sober (and as such, her speech stopped obscuring information, a major symbol of Void), and Rufioh ended up becoming paralyzed from the neck down, thereby losing his freedom. So this Rogue would likely be a very lively person before the game started, they would be all for all the possibilities of their Aspect, and then when the game starts, they might not show this all too much. This isn’t to say that they end up being as bland as dead!Aradia, but it might mean they their priorities get put in order. Let’s say that this Rogue, before the game starts, is all for screwing the rules (a more symbolic showing of Doom, Life’s antithesis) for some reason or another that may have to do with affluence, but when they enter the game, something happens that makes them realize that the rules are important in this game, and they embrace the control that Doom has over their life. They realize the limitations of Life, and respect them. The Rogue would be a grounding force for the rest of the team, understanding where Life’s jurisdiction ends, but that doesn’t mean that they might not stretch those rules if something very special to them were on the line. The Rogue would be taking the life from their enemies and giving it to their teammates, a fearsome ability that would be very useful in making sure people tend not to die. But when the Reckoning comes, not even they will be able to keep things from dying.
And finally, the Page of Heart. I had mentioned a something about Pages earlier in another team ask, and I’m thinking that a lot of it rings true here, as well. The Page will likely be at least somewhat mild-mannered, and likely a sort of protege for some of the other members of the team. The Rogue and the Page would likely keep the other members of the team in check, what with the Rogue’s newfound understanding of rules and the Page’s understanding of emotion. But funny enough, I have a feeling that this Page might be more likely to be looking at a lot of the session in a more objective manner. I talked about some of their roles earlier, with the Knight and Mage, but they would probably be the one who lets the Knight and Mage know what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. They would make the Knight and Mage aware of things by using their abilities, but they have to be careful that they don’t just make their teammates feel things on the fly, lest they invert by the surprising overuse of their abilities. The Page would have to be willing to talk to their teammates, let them know that things are going wrong, and that they can be a part of the solution. Counselling, you know.
Altogether, this is a pretty good bunch. A fair balance of people grounded by an understanding of problems and solutions, and a fair amount also aided by their ability to do awesome things. But we are still missing two players. So first off? We’ll add the Time player.
For this session, we recommend the Sylph of Time. Once they reach god tier, the Sylph would be able to create Time for others, giving everyone enough Time to finish their quests, master their abilities, and then be back in Time for tea. They would have time travel, like all Time players, but they would also be able to give Time to their other people. It would be like giving others a hyperbolic Time chamber (give the player ten minutes in the Sylph’s abilities, and they would be able to complete a day’s, a month’s, etc., worth of stuff). The Sylph, as a healer, would be able to heal using Time, basically undoing whatever damage had been done, provided Time was willing to do that much. I would recommend having this Sylph’s major concern be reaching god tier, at which point the ability to make hyperbolic Time chambers for everyone else be an option. They would be a major asset to this team, but would also be able to help solve any arguments people might be having in the team (give them Time). Then they would know when to send in the Page to help.
Now, for your last player, TC and I had a bit of a debate. We both knew that achieving a balance between active and passive players was probably for the better, but where I was thinking Mind player, you know, logos to the pathos, TC was thinking Hope (because all sessions could use a bit of Hope) or Rage (to motivate). Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought Rage players were a bit dangerous (no offense, Rage players, a lot of times, dangerous is good, just a bit scary), especially in a session that might have Space itself causing problems with the Mage in it. Then he suggested the Witch of Blood. Active player. Not a member of an Aspect already used. Also, incredibly helpful. You know those horrible (and I mean HORRIBLE) fanfictions you might be able to find gods-know-where if you’re not careful? Those ones where not only are physics questionable, but everyone’s acting out of character as fuck? Well, the physics would likely be the Mage’s job, but the OOC team-building-in-five-minutes thing would be the Witch’s. This session, with the Sylph and the Page and Rogue acting as grounders, and the Mage and Knight being powerhouses, is already very good. They would have a good chance of succeeding. But if their teamwork is shoddy, not much could be done with it. The Witch would be able to rewrite any encounter like it were a bad fanfic. They would make the Knight completely abandon their mask to help their teammates with little to no prompting courtesy of the Page, the Mage would be willing to work just as hard as they need to, and the Rogue, well, the Rogue may be poorly written, but at least they pose a good point: don’t break those rules, Mage. The Witch of Blood would be able to make the team cooperate as never before. If they were good before, well, with the Witch by their side, as TC put it, they’d be “a well-oiled machine.”
Add a Sylph of Time and a Witch of Blood, and your team has a very good chance of surviving. Nice job choosing a variety of Classes and Aspects.

  1. fancygodtierpowers posted this