I don't know how they do that either, it's scary.

Anyway. I would instantly dismiss the idea that your Cataclysms (or lack thereof) in the last Session are affecting this one. The only thing consistent between Sessions are players, or bugs associated with said players ("plz halp i keep getting double dreamselves why"). And even if the Cataclysms somehow affected the victory door, it would only affect your Session. Like, for example, rendering the game completely unbeatable, turning it into a pseudo-Void Session.

So I'll just take a blind guess. An Active Cataclysm by way of replication and copying, a Passive Cataclysm by way of madness and lack of focus? When people talk about "Grace Cataclysms", they're less like explosions, more like poison. A long shadow cast over the Session, a malaise permeating every event, leading back to you. I'm going to guess that Rain's influence caused persistent errors such as visual glitches, objects appearing where they shouldn't be, and delays in events (triggering too soon, triggering too late, outright failing to trigger unless "activated" three times)? It's likely that the Mist Cataclysm had a stalled activation, and replicated itself, accumulating. Imagine if you will, a kettle filled with boiling water. Except the kettle keeps on forgetting the part where it lets out the steam and whistles. And after roughly an hour of boiling and building up steam, it remembers "wait, I should whistle before it's too late". And it lets it all out at once and explodes. Thankfully the house was already vacated when the kettle became bright red and a haze rendered the kitchen unlivable.

In much the same way the Heir & Ward are the Inheritor Classes, and Thief & Rogue are the Displacement Classes, the Cataclysm Classes would be the Waste (active) and Grace (passive). They both are meant to “ignite” change, with the Waste suddenly changing things up, and the Grace slowly changing it.

The thing is, SBURB hates you and so “bringing change” translates to “causes travesty”. That’s why they’re alternatively called the Disaster Classes. The best way to describe them is that Wastes are ticking time bombs for their session, and Graces are poison.

So let’s take the Breath Aspect. Wind & Freedom. The Waste would suddenly explode, in a burst of wind, knocking the planets around. Or they would cause the session to be “free” in some way, like opening them up to other sessions, or removing the border between the Furthest Ring and The Medium. Meanwhile, a Grace of Breath would cause people to drift away, slowly freeing them from the bonds that makes them friends. Or the Heart Aspect. A Waste of Heart would make everyone’s personalities do a 180, or would swap their souls. Meanwhile, a Grace of Heart would induce disassociation that gradually leads to the loss of identity.

Here are some things to note about the Cataclysm classes.

Wastes get broken powers. They can fling their abilities with more destructive force than most end-tier Princes & Bards.

Waste of Time and Waste of Space will never be naturally attributed. It’s like the Clown, it doesn’t happen. They would be absurdly powerful and probably destroy reality. If for some reason you break the game and give yourself either Titles, consider this. Don’t.

The Disasters will never not happen. You must plan accordingly. If you have Plans A through Z and one of your buddies phones in and says they’re a Waste or a Grace, then start from the top with a new alphabet. I always preferred the Greek alphabet.

The Embodied Poison of Soul and Emotion

“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

as requested by anon

The aspect of Heart is paired with Rage, as they both have similar themes, but go about it in different ways. Rage externally makes things go the way the Rage player wants externally, while The Soul changes things internally to get desired results. Heart also deals with Souls and Splinters, and you’ll be seeing, heh, a lot of Heart players. 

They’re the same guy.

Graces are a relatively little-known class, the passive Cataclysm class to the Waste’s active. They can accurately be described as the poison embodied by X. Their destruction is a slow burn, but it still burns all the same.

So a Grace of Heart is one who is the poison of souls. The Grace disrupts people’s very being by existing. People tend to disassociate and feel weird around her. Ghosts, Timeclones, Dupliclones, Mist players Fogging, and Robotic Doubles feel similarly weird. More than likely, Heart and Rain players will be incapable of staying as one person for too long. As she grows in power, the disassociation will become worse and at longer distances, until it results in a CATACLYSM.

Sample Cataclysms

Everyone is so disconnected from themselves that they begin switching bodies at random. Everyone must randomly adjust to their “new” classpects to win. If there are multiple copies from a Rain or Heart player, they all count as one person. Time Clones all count as individual people, however.

The game itself is confused, and cannot tell the difference between offshoot and Alpha timelines. ALL TIMELINES ARE CONSIDERED ALPHA. Despite this, only one timeline’s worth of players can pass through the door.

Everyone’s souls have left the premises. They have also shattered into their own temperaments, like an episode straight out of a cartoon. However, Replayers are broken people, so expect emotions like Wrath, Depression, Empathy, and things that are liable to hurt themselves and others.

A Grace of Heart is likely given the title because she does not truly understand herself, and is not secure enough to come out of her sell and be noticed. So the game thought it would be best to solve your identity crisis/shyness by making you a caustic mess that causes lethal identity crises. Nobody is mentally lost if everybody is, I guess.

How to Play a Grace of Heart

Work with people’s souls to help the team

Become a bit more extroverted, get to know people

Help alleviate the Cataclysm you cause

How to Die a Grace of Heart

Work rough with souls and browbeat things into happening, with no regards to the person themselves

Stay out of sight

Cut your losses on the Cataclysm or any damages you cause

In short, don’t be the Toxic Asshole Fairy

Grace of Heart Abilities

[Waltz In Other Shoes]: This game loves naming abilities after Waltzes. This power lets you split your mind over several targets, like underlings, and lets you control them all as one hivemind. Useful if you’re hurt, are swamped, just need a lot of firepower.

[Harmonic Emphatic]: This move spills a bit of your soul onto your environment, allowing you to commune with it. Great if you’re lost, want lore, or just looking to investigate.

Well, it's just really freaking me out that I know it's coming, but don't know what it'll be... and I know that there probably just is no way to know for sure, but I'd like to at least narrow the possibility space a little?

Basically I'm hoping you could give me examples of Grace cataclysms you've seen/heard about? Just so I can at least have some understanding of how bad it'll be?

A lot of guides seem to avoid posting specific examples, or don't say if they're talking about a Grace specifically, or a Waste. I feel like I'm flying really blind here.

I imagine specifics are light in the wild, either because the nature of the cataclysm is unpredictable (the common joke is that when you're making plans for your sessions on a whiteboard, you draw a line, on the left is your "pre-cataclysm" plans, and on the right you leave "post-cataclysm" plans blank because once it happens everything you wrote up to this point will have been rendered obsolete) or because of causality. The state of knowing a horrible thing will happen, but letting it happen anyway, is something non-Time players have trouble grasping, but in much the same way that you need to let it happen or else you create a Doomed Timeline, you need to let your cataclysm happen. SBURB's intention in making you a Grace is to put you into the spotlight, and preventing your abilities from causing a cataclysm necessarily reduces your visibility. Which SBURB will respond to by killing you.

You're a native Time player, so I imagine you already know this, so I will help you out. But I wanna underline it. If you attempt to prevent the cataclysm from happening, you will die.

Graces bring change through passively igniting catastrophic chain reactions. Their influence is more akin to poison than it is to setting off bombs. Light governs the domains of probability manipulation, favorizing outcomes, and good luck, as well as light as a physical phenomenon. Graces are a heavily passive caster-type class, and Light is heavily oriented around support abilities. With all of these bases in mind, I can somewhat easily formulate some ideas as to what your cataclysm will look like.

As a Grace of Light, you'll have a number of extremely powerful support abilities, mainly oriented around giving good luck to allies or issuing blessings that make things easier for them in their ventures. You'll be handing out luck like they're asses, and your coplayers have known nothing but years of bitter ass famine. And because the Grace class is so powerful, it'll be really good luck as well. So much good luck suffuses the air, passively increasing luck accumulation for everyone. People will probably begin leaning on it more, alchemizing equipment which provide chance-based special effects, or creating impossible plans that would only work if 1-in-a-million chances happen 9-times-out-of-ten. Then, at some point, because you've tilted the sclaes so far in one direction, the scales will flip right off the table. Probably once you go berserk and use [Dance of Thorns], accumulating truly massive amounts of luck such that you become a black hole of good fortune and go supermassive.

I predict that your cataclysm will be the luck probabilities for your session being thrown permanently out of whack as the session tries to re-adjust the values back to normal. In doing so, all of the very lucky players (except you, naturally) will have their high values overflow into naturally being dogshit, thus making everyone permanently unlucky. On the flipside, NPCs (who normally do not accumulate luck, and indeed benefit less from luck as a game balancing mechanic) will be naturally very lucky. Not only making combat a lot riskier, but ensuring that the player's plans (which they'll need to re-learn actually making real plans) will go sour in some way inevitably. You will thus be extremely noticeable for not only being the only one not cursed with bad luck, but for being the only real means through which people can be "blessed" to normal-or-higher levels of probability.

I've been having trouble finding clear info on Graces... and that Grace of Blood has me really worried. I thought my cataclysm would be an accident of some kind? That's how a lot of guides made it sound, but maybe I mixed it up with the Waste.

But for that person, they sounded like they were doing it on purpose, and it sounded really scary and confusing. I don't want to hurt anybody, (or whatever they did exactly...), am I really gonna go crazy like them?

No, as a Grace you're not predestined to go insane, I was being a bit hyperbolic (and insulting towards someone jokerposting in my inbox, people jokerposting in my inbox is surprisingly common and always annoying). I don't think whoever that was is representative of most Graces. Partially because I don't think their "plan" fits what Graces typically end up doing, and partially because they were ranting about something much more philosophical and personal than just the game. At worst, they cracked under the pressure and are about to undergo their cataclysm, but it will be nothing like what they described.

Graces and Wastes are both cataclysm classes, and are both destined to cause a cataclysm. The difference being that the Waste is "active", and their cataclysm is more like a bomb going off, while a Grace is "passive", and their cataclysm can be more likened to a poison of some sort. When the cataclysm happens, the course of the session will be irreparably altered, such that any major plans you had for "how the session will go" will be rendered irrelevant. Whatever is going to happen to your session will be a slow corruption. Nobody will see it coming until it's too late, it cannot be stopped, and people will be hurt by it. But it won't be your fault. This is just what happens when a Grace enters the session.

My advice for you in the short term, as a Grace of Light, is to put the cataclysm to the back of your mind. Any attempt at reducing or avoiding the harm is doomed to failure. It's going to happen, and once you shake things up just in time for the third act, the eyes of all your coplayers, and the game, will be on you. If you're concerned about the fallout, focus on either fixing the harm, or helping everyone work past it and complete the game before the "poison" gets worse.

I have found my cataclysm.

I will speak the words and poison their brains and end that which has plagued me since the game's first moments.

They will become unhuman. "Social animal" is a phrase that shall exit from our minds, and we will all be better for it. (You know this. I'm sure you would feel better if you could forget what being lonely was. Oh how I wish I could reach you with my powers, or had the time to break those parts of you with my words, but alas!)

I think I will only have one shot. Any recommendations for how I might maximize impact, keep them all in place as I speak, and so on? I will not be able to hold back much longer, and will not be able to understand how to contact anyone (or that I might want to) afterwards, so please do respond completely, without prompting further correspondence between us, and with haste.

I know the Grace going insane is kind of an inevitability for any session they're in, but this is the first time one of them has decided to, mid-mental break, log onto pitsblog, and start typing manifestos at me.