I’m glad you’re putting such faith in us. We’ll try to live up to your expectations.
This has been a long time coming.
Team Analysis: CA and TC
Knight of Light, Page of Doom, Sylph of Heart, Thief of Void, Witch of Mind, Prince of Breath, Mage of Time, and Seer of Space
Okay, you’ve got yourself quite the crew here. It passes the first two points of inspection, having a Space and Time player and having an even number of players. As far as Classes, the scales are a bit tipped towards the active side of things, but it’s nothing too worrisome: three passives to five actives should work out okay.
The Knight of Light is…a bit dangerous. We’ve talked about this with the, what, three-and-a-half (if you count the team ask) asks about Knights we’ve had? Knights’ Aspects are those that the session itself lacks. So in stark contrast to the Knight of Void’s session we discussed not too long ago, the Knight of Light would be very big problem to the session. The session would have absolutely, or at least next to, no luck at all. Anything that can go wrong for this group will go wrong, and it will go very very wrong. So when they arm themselves with Luck, they will need to be creative (hint: not all luck needs to be good to be luck), and arm themselves with what little of their Aspect exists in the session to help both themselves and their teammates proceed. Personalitywise, the Knight of Light would have a “mask” which would obscure their true personality, like Dave’s cool kid attitude, Karkat’s anger, and Latula’s radical gamer girl persona. In order to work well with their team, the Knight would need to learn to remove their mask and be true to themselves, which, thanks to the presence of a Sylph of Heart and a Witch of Mind, will likely not be an issue.
The Page of Doom, as all Pages do, will start with a lack of their aspect, but will attempt to make up for this lack with overcompensation. An example of this would be Jake believing everything that he was told. As such, this Page of Doom will likely have a hard time obeying the rules, and then will attempt to enforce the rules on everybody else. This behavior might end up alienating them from the rest of the team by being a total nuisance to everyone else, which is bad, since the theory is that Pages may need some help to reach their full potential. The only major example of this is Aranea helping Jake. However, if the Page does end up reaching his full potential, then he will make the team a force to be reckoned with. The Page would be the one who allowed people the ability to arm themselves with destruction and rules, and while their enforcing of the rules would certainly arm their teammates with them, to arm their teammates with destruction, they will likely need a bit of ability to cooperate. Just imagine what would happen if they got into a fight while armed with the Page’s abilities.
The Sylph of Heart is one of the two players which could help the Page reach their full potential, with the other being the Witch of Mind. The Sylph would be very (and I do mean VERY) good at resolving disputes between their teammates. They would understand emotion, and would know how to get the desired results between two parties, i.e., reconciliation. Of course, if they were to desire to bring two people further apart emotionally, they could do that, too. Really, it’s about creating animosity or the desire to reconcile between two people, and boy, oh boy, can the Sylph do that. Furthermore, most Sylphs have a tendency to meddle in their aspect, so the Sylph of Heart would most likely meddle in romantic affairs of their colleagues, so they would WANT to resolve these disputes as well. The Sylph wouldn’t be very likely to be the grounding force of this team, as, despite the human element to their aspect, they would be more concerned with their teammates than the larger picture of the goals around them.
The Thief of Void would be able to steal the nothingness out of thin air, much like Roxy’s abilities (as one would imagine, given the similarities between the Stealing classes), but where Roxy does it for someone else’s sake, the Thief would use their powers to get what they want. But I would advise one thing: the Page of Doom and the Thief of Void should never go anywhere near each other for prolonged periods of time, they will be at each others’ throats faster than you can say, “No, dude, don’t,” ‘cuz if you’re looking for a rule breaker, the Thief of Void is it. Impatient, has powers that break the basic laws of matter, not very likely to give them up, the Thief of Void is everything the Page hates, as while the Page knows sacrifice and rules are necessary to keep a system running, the Thief is just running around and bypassing everything they know and love on the average Tuesday. Not very helpful to their blood pressure. When it comes to opposing viewpoints, boy, do these guys have them. The leader of this session, provided they’re at least partially knowledgeable concerning their abilities and Aspects, will be glad to have the two of them by their side as advisers. And if things should come to a fight, the Sylph of Heart and the Witch of Mind should be able to put a leash of the two to keep them apart.
The Witch of Mind would be like Sherlock Holmes, except not. The Witch would be able to make astounding leaps of logic that make NO SENSE, but still turn out to be correct. They would have a sort of intuitive understanding of what they were saying, just perhaps no real way to express it because to them, these little neurons connecting, adding information one after another, really just only make sense to them, being the only Mind player in their session. Now, there could be a really good reason for why they can’t get these words out in a reasonable manner. Maybe they’re prone to sesquipedalian loquaciousness, like I (CA) am. Maybe they have a speech impediment like a stutter, or a lisp. Maybe they’re deaf and can’t speak very well or easily, or maybe they’re just outright mute. But if they can get their teammates to trust them (and that is very vital), they should be alright. Their teammates will be able to put their outright faith in them, regardless of whether or not it makes sense to them that the Witch just KNOWS that Snape didn’t kill Dumbledore, or that Laura was always scared of Kevin. And what’s better is that the Witch would be able to put leashes on their teammates, by manipulating the consequences of them doing bad things, like the Thief and the Page fighting. Thief punches Page, Witch makes it so Page punches back harder, and the Thief decides, hey, maybe punching my teammate isn’t that great an idea. However, manipulating consequences, which fall under the category of the Doom aspect as well, might annoy the overzealous Page if they catch on. Therefore, it is vital that the Witch remain discreet with their actions.
Oh, boy, do I (CA) know the Prince of Breath. As an alternate god tier title for myself, I did a fair bit of research into what it would mean to be the Prince, whether thematic aspects of my life fitted the Sylph role or the Prince role. From what I found, Princes lack their Aspect as an integral part of who they are (Dirk being a stone cold motherfucker, Eridan lacking faith in something he so obviously loved, magic, and Kurloz being a very chill dude), so the Prince of Breath would be lacking freedom. The Prince could easily be the one who is home stuck until the session starts, but even then they might find that their portals are just a little bit too far to reach, so that just means that they have to take things into their own hands when it comes to their freedom. The Prince wouldn’t be the optimal choice of leader, as them lacking their Aspect generally leads to some sort of inevitable backlash in an abundance of their Aspect destroying things through them, and between Eridan destroying lives and the only Hope left for his race, Dirk throwing himself into the fuzzy pixel mess Caliborn had made by shoving everything at once into the game cartridge, and Kurloz sewing his mouth shut, it doesn’t end well for the Prince, nor anyone else involved. So no Prince leaders. But the Prince would be a really REALLY big help towards killing the Black King, being able to destroy everything by simply remaining unhindered in their path (or by destroying everything that would hinder them). The Prince would be rather emotionally attached to other people, reflecting the denial of Breath (and therefore acceptance of Blood), and while these bonds might become troublesome, the Sylph of Heart would be able to weaken or strengthen the emotion joining them, and therefore weaken or strengthen the bond as the situation required. If there was ever a perfect auspistice for the Prince, then the Sylph would be it.
Well, the Mage of Time is a role that we have done before. You know pretty much exactly what they can do, so I’ll skip to the interpersonal relationships! While the rest of the Justice League are out fighting crime, getting their hands dirty… WITH JUSTICE, the Mage of TIme will be Martian Manhunter, staying in the Watchtower, looking over everything from a distance. This would make them a poor leader, but a decent advisor, as they would remain rather detached from the rest of the players, and as such it would be incredibly difficult to have a very close relationship with them. Therefore, it would be incredibly difficult to even get them to hate you, so if you want them to be someone’s kismesis, moirail, auspistice, or matesprit, you’ll have your work cut out for you. The Mage may also be too constantly busy with their own task of keeping the timelines stable to assist with anyone else’s problems, but they will, through their own tasks, keep everyone safe as best they can. One word of caution, though. KEEP THEM AWAY FROM THE PRINCE!!! While, yes, every Mage has had a history of being screwed over by their aspects, a Prince has had a hand in the downfall of Mages everywhere. Examples of this are Eridan blinding and half killing Sollux and Kurloz deafening and mind-controlling Meulin. Luckily, the Mage of Time’s detachment should help in distancing themselves from the Prince.
The Seer of Space is the optimal leader for this session given the classpects you have provided for us. They would be able to see into the whole of creation, to search for what they needed, and while this doesn’t seem to be quite as perpetually nifty as another Seer’s abilities to look for path to take or fortuitous action, that’s because they don’t need to know all that. You see, with this variety of cohorts working with them (eight people is a fairly large session, and while it adds a lot of variety to the Black King’s abilities, it also gives the players a huge amount of variety in abilities), the Seer would have their back covered, given the variety of Aspects around them. They would able to find what people need to get things done. Like Heimdall….actually, that’s really not that bad a metaphor for the Seer of Space. Only Void Players could escape their view, or perhaps a Prince of Light, who could use their powers to effectively blind the Seer. But, seeing as there is no Prince of Light in this particular session, the only Player who could hide themselves from the Seer of Space is the Thief of Void. This could lead to one of two things happening. Either the Seer would harbor some animosity towards the slippery Thief, perhaps send the Prince of Breath or Knight of Light after them to keep the Thief on a short leash, or the Seer, who would probably be more relaxed than the one who took the former option, would have to become far more skilled than the Thief in order to possibly hope to keep tabs on their teammates. However, most Seers are the types to want to know everything, and might initially try for the former of the two options rather than the latter. This is not what Seers are made for, though, and they will have to overcome this adversity in order to perform their tasks more effectively.
All in all, the team is all right. While it definitely will have its fair share of struggles, these can be overcome with enough work put in by the players. The Sylph, Witch, and Seer are undeniably the MVPs, what with the former two keeping pretty much everyone on a leash and the Seer leading the whole damn circus to town, but if they can get everyone under control and try to work around the utter deficiency of luck the Knight’s set up for them, it should be alright. A challenge? Most certainly. But alright in the end.