
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.
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.