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Kingdom Death: Monster – A Post Mortem Review (Core Game): Part 2
🕑 Added 2023-07-14 09:00:05 +0000 UTCFor part one of this series see here. This second part will dive into the Settlement Phase, Monsters and Campaign contained in the Core Box for Kingdom Death: Monster. We'll end with a summary of my final thoughts and a brief look at what I personally want from the Gambler's Chest Expansion.
The Settlement Phase
In sharp contrast to the arbitrary feeling experience of the hunt phase, the settlement phase is a deep and engaging set of mechanisms which is only marred by the hunt phase returning, but this time it's wearing a mask, speaking in a funny voice, and calling itself a 'Settlement Event'. Settlement Events in theory add more emergent storytelling, lore building and challenges for your settlement. While for the most part they certainly do that, some settlement events are so wild and on the edges of what's an acceptable card that depending on when they happen they can crush the joy out of the players. The events in question are notorious; so much so that I've heard of fabled settlements where the cards Murder, Plague and Cracks in the Ground were “accidentally” eaten by the dog, or the baby, or just lost down the back of the sofa, or forgotten in the box. Plague is actually the one of these three cards that I feel is mostly OK, as it does have reasonable counterplay where you can rushing for the Bloodletting innovation; but it can still feel bad if it hits really early and that may put a group of players in a bad place.
Fortunately for us; Settlement Events are the one dark smudge in an otherwise sublime experience, and even with the cards it is not the concept of the settlement events which causes the issues, it is just the balance of the aforementioned cards which are off. The game thinks that killing your most experienced survivor is a good way to 'balance' the game and add difficulty. It certainly does add difficulty, but when a key portion of the settlement development is baked into survivors gaining experience and weapon mastery, having a card specifically target those survivors is one of the reasons why I describe this game as being cruel. Getting a survivor to weapon mastery is a long, arduous task and weapon mastery unlocks a permanent upgrade for your settlement. The only way to protect these survivors is by having another survivor with more hunt XP available to get murdered. This is why Savior Murder Bait strategies are successful; saviors can get to nearly max hunt XP in a couple of years (generating lots of resources at the same time if they are the blue savior type) – it feels really gamey to do this, but the other options are to “lose” murder, redraw the card and increase your cheating count or suck it up and start over with whatever years you have left in the settlement. Feels bad.
The rest of Settlement Phase could be considered to be a cooperative Euro style worker placement efficiency engine puzzle where you stick resources in and get gear, innovations, population and various other specific bonuses out the other end. You start this portion of the phase by gaining a number of endeavours depending on how many survivors returned from the hunt, plus some which may be generated by innovations. You then have to collectively figure out where to use these endeavours and what new gear items to construct from resources. Another small mini-game is navigating the timeline events (both current and upcoming) alongside any other random results from tables. It is a great phase of the game loop and I think I'd play a board game based entirely around this kind of settlement phase; with the hunt/showdown results being generated automatically cause I like it that much. A game like that would require serious work to the point that one might as well be playing Paleo instead, but I often wish I could just play the settlement phase while other people do the hunt/showdown, just to see how this part of the game feels purely in isolation.
An additional benefit of the Settlement Phase when compared to Aeon Trespass; is that while you can lay it out and have it take up a large amount of space, equally you can also not put it on the board and keep it in a folder, or just as individual location & gear cards. Which means it can be reduced in the amount of real estate it takes up. It's not as impressive as ISS Vanguard's ship book, but it is a lot less real estate when compared to ATO's beautiful, but table devouring map.
It's also important to note that one of the changes 1.6 made was to move monster specific gear like the Phoenix and Screaming Antelope options out of the Weapon Crafter/Barber Surgeon settlement locations and adjust them so they can be used in any campaign even if the relevant core game monster is not included. This is a huge, move that we the community (you guys) pushed for, so well done all, pats on the back all round. The way that the Barber Surgeon's unlock was changed is also an excellent decision which has provided serious quality of life upgrades – drawing Flower Addiction or Apathetic disorders early on was effectively “killing” a survivor, but not anymore, now one is just a short distance from trepanning away those issues!
I also applaud the move made in respect to the Zanbato, which was in 1.5 and earlier just a a cheap but stupidly overpowered White Lion weapon that you built a bunch of and then didn't worry too much about breaking them. Its power level has remained the same, but it's now a lot harder to craft because it requires a new resource that was added to the game “Perfect Resources”.These are a mechanic that gates powerful gear as they now require these hard to find basic resources – at least they would be if the Harvest Ritual didn't allow you to engineer a guaranteed draw of all three in a single settlement phase. It is worth mentioning that there was a knock-on effect for the Dung Beetle Knight, Trash Crowns have become a lot more expensive to manufacture. That's actually a good change in my opinion because it forces a hard decision on the players, no longer can you just deliberately trash Zanbatos to make Trash Crowns. Of course, at this point the Trash Crown needs a revision because of how odd it is at the moment (it is a head slot card without the armor keyword or the accessory ability and it feels like that was a mistake, but the DBK is not core game content, so enough).
The settlement phase is low key my favourite portion of the game, I adore bringing back those random bits of the monsters and working out how best to utilise or save them. I might love it more than the showdown; not sure about that, but sometimes, against some monsters I do find myself wishing that I was not currently fighting it and instead I could be playing around with tokens, cards and dice. Speaking of monsters...
The Core Game Monsters
The four hundred and twenty dollar box comes with three “Quarry” Monsters, three “Nemesis” monsters and two “Final Nemesis” monsters; the latter two who represent the “mid-game” (previously end game) and final bosses. I'm not going to sugar coat it here or bury the lead; from my repeated, extensive plays I one hundred percent am of the opinion that there are not enough quarry monsters in this box for the length of the campaign or the price it commands. After these afformentioned hours and hours (weeks? months? I've lost count, what does time even mean anymore in the fading of these lanterns?) ahem, hours of playing the core game experience for Kingdom Death, I can conclude that the minimum number of quarry monsters one needs to make for a good, varied and rounded play experience across 30 lantern years and 30+ showdowns is around five or six; split between early, mid and “late” game options. I have a preference for six, with three early and three mid. For myself the core root of this are two twin elements; the first is how limited the synergies, options and “optimal” choices are when you only have three monsters to hunt and only one of them provides late game gear. The second is that only a few monsters are as interesting and rewarding to fight at every single level.
What I mean by this statement is; in most cases the change from one level of monster to the next boils down to a few extra AI cards, higher stats and maybe a new gimmick like the puddy cat's Grab. On the whole monsters do not challenge your preconceived perceptions of the monster by throwing in a curve ball, instead they tend to have some single new mechanic that one needs to learn how to counter along with being tougher, faster and meaner. This is especially noticeable in the trio of core monsters; at level 2 they get a funky new thing that they do now and then at L3 they just do it again, but harder, with more feeling and a special resource that you can use to make, respectively; a crap dagger that had to be fixed with an entirely new replacement in the Gigalion. A reference to Jesus with irreplaceable because that's a goodmechanic for an item you can only craft by hunting an L3 Screaming Antelope (that was sarcasm, it's a bad mechanic, it's better employed when it is used with rare stuff gained from hunt events) and actually a good piece of support gear that is unique, fresh and wonderfully engaging as long as you can stomach bursting down the L3 Phoenix as fast a possible before it either starts to cause devastatingly fatal severe injuries or waste your time by making sure that the hunting survivors never existed in the first place.
I am of course, over exaggerating for comedic effect, but when you contrast the experience of hunting higher level core game monsters to the expansion ones there's a notable difference in quality. The Sunstalker is a really well designed fight with reasons to hunt it at every single level. The Gorm offers an insight into every stage of its lifecycle and The Dung Beetle decides to slap to the ground before slamming its Resin Dung Ball into your face. Repeatedly. Until your survivors noses all sit on the inside of their faces, which are now concave instead of convex. It's brutal and a delightful puzzle to solve.
The core quarry monsters however demonstrate the inexperience of their designers at the time and have issues that a new player might not notice. We are fortunate in the case of the White Lion that one can switch to the Gigalion as soon as we're moving onto L2+ Lions because it changes the experience in a significant manner (I also basically count Giggity as just being the White Lion++ as long as Disembowel doesn't go breaking the showdown AI again) while also adding meaningful reasons to hunt the L2+ monster instead of just stalling the showdown until you've drained every single resource card from the now empty balloon that once was a White Lion.
It is time to dive into each of the monsters in the core game outside of the two “big narrative bosses. Are they at least good within the context of that limited experience? Do they do their job right?
The White Lion is the first monster you'll experience and at L1 it is by far and away the best designed of all the quarry monsters in the core game. This monster is designed to be 'babbies first quarry' and it does a superb job at that by providing a monster with behaviours that make thematic sense, but are also relatively simple to grok mechanically – the White Lion likes to knock survivors over and pounce on them, otherwise it tends to focus on the nearest threat in front of it. This is excellent design and while above I mentioned that the core game monsters do not really evolve too much and that is a shame. I do think that the L1 → L2 step of adding Grab is perfect. This is your training wheels monster; it is meant to help you understand that things change when you are facing a higher level monster. If you went straight after an L2 White Lion after spanking an L1 one, you didn't have extra survival actions and you got bodied hard then it is doing its job right. Remember, KDM is a cruel game, it expects you to be over prepared for everything if you want to succeed and if you don't do that? The game assumes that you are having fun digging your own grave so it can body block you into it during a thunderstorm.
The same praise cannot be written when discussing the Screaming Antelope. It is thematically a perfect expression of a ravenous prey animal, sometimes flailing around skittishly, while at other times delivering a panicked kick to the head. Thematically that is. On the other hand the mechanical design of the monster is, to be direct about it, awful. It's often referred to as “The Loot Piñata” because the main use players have found for it is to beat it slowly and deliberately until every single last resource flies out of its body. This is facilitated by it being offensively less powerful than the White Lion at level 1 and its propensity towards healing up through eating acanthus which is growing in the showdown board. It's a thematic joy, but a mechanical loophole begging for exploitation.
Just above everything that could have gone wrong with the Antelope's showdown design did; it is overly generous on the acanthus, its AI is mechanically weak (but thematically strong), its HL deck has every single card in it printed with the word “Have a free resource” and nothing else for some reason and when it hits L2 its Diabolical Trait manages to be worded in a way that confuses most people who encounter it. Because it implies that it does one thing, something that makes sense based on how charging animals work in real life, but in truth it does something else.
The Screaming Antelope or its gear drops have been revised in every single update that the core game has received and at this point it seems clear that APG just do not know what to do with it. They're unwilling to revised and update about half the cards in each deck while also revising the showdown design and that holds them back from doing something as successful as the White Gigalion because, lets not beat around the bush here, the foundations for such an endeavour would be rotten to the core, filled only with decaying acanthus and deer corpses. I think it is honestly a lost cause at this point and we should simply accept that it is what it is in 1.6. A below average quality monster with some mostly below average gear that exists to empty its bladder in haste to deliver Blood Paint straight onto our Gear Grids so we can all be happy. It also serves as an example of how not to design a good Quarry monster – don't let quarry monsters self heal; players will abuse that, hard.
Our quarry third monster lands a distance behind the Screaming Antelope, but it still manages to serve up its own problems and issues. The Phoenix is a spin on the concept of the mythological creature's themes of death and rebirth by having the monster be able to manipulate time; in theory this is a fun idea. A foe that can move back and forth in time is a brain breaking concept to face. It has the potential to be epic, memorable and turn human minds into noodles.
In practice, Old Man Phoenix often creates a miserable experience where survivors can be erased from ever existing during the hunt phase (thereby having the player controlling that survivor sit on their phone for the next hour), key weapon survivors can be aged up during the fight so hard that they can't complete their weapon masteries or even, in the most mechanically frustrating and weak moment of the game, the Phoenix can randomly have and draw the legendary card Deja Vu; resulting in a situation where every single survivor can be erased from the timeline before they even have a turn. That's not good, that's a suite of tricks which players are going to either learn how to hard counter or fall into over and over because they are a board game submissive or avoid by opening the brown box that contains either the Sunstalker, Dragon King or Dung Beetle Knight. It is a fight which can be mastered and beaten, but once you do, we run into a separate issue, its armor is both thematically and mechanically flawed.
Armor Sets are one of the major problems that harass the core game; monster specific armor tends to be weaker than the generic versions; White Lion and Screaming Armor are both less efficient, powerful and protective than Rawhide & Leather Armor. This is a problem that no edition of the game has ever managed to overcome; White Lion and Screaming Armor will always cost nearly twice the price of Rawhide without being twice as good and they're both strictly worse than Leather Armor which has an equivalent resource cost. Great if you want to fulfil your fantasies of the adventures of the full leather daddy settlement; not so great if you want to make good use of all those armor kit miniatures. Miniatures which have become obsolete due to the entire game range scale creeping upwards to the point where you have to put the old minis on base 'lifts' to keep them not looking dwarfed.
To return to the armor set situation; Phoenix Armor is mostly decent, but it is an incredibly uneven set; it has a great helmet and body piece and then the rest is thoroughly mediocre and offers armor points and armor set bonus which is genuinely good when combined with the right weapon. In fact, out of all the monster based armor sets in the core game; only Screaming Armor gets its affinities right; the White Lion and Phoenix armor affinities are either poorly aligned with bad directions (both White Lion and Phoenix Armor are guilty of this) or ignore the theming of the monster they come from by not having a good selection of “rainbow” affinities. Phoenix Armor might be able to perform meme levels of strength charges, but it is worse than every single other option that sits at the same Node level andit is not even the best use for Phoenix Armor Pieces. That belongs to two of the three Lion Knight hybrid armor sets; Warlord Armor and Dancer Armor are both better sets of Phoenix Armor than the core game set could ever dream of being. (Brawler Armor respects the mechanical design of the Phoenix by being mostly bad and a meme, but it is still super cool by virtue of being a hybrid set as they promote hunting multiple different monsters).
Lantern Armor is also something I find hard to invest much in; Iron is often better spent on Beacon (Bacon) Shields and a few select lantern weapons, not because the armor set itself is bad, but because it is hugely expensive to craft despite having a “self-destruct keyword” in heavy. You can usually justify one set of Lantern Armor because of the club synergies hugely improving the Bone Club and Skullcap Hammer.
Before we move on, I'd like to also briefly make a comment on the game's armor system in general. Armor is so important and armor set bonuses are so powerful that most survivors only have 3 gear slots left to play with after they've got protection and a pointy stick to hit with. That does homogenize the game's gear grids a bit; but it is not a core game only issue and there are places where the game gives you more freedom to build interesting gear grids that are not just dominated by 5x Armor Gear Cards (Crystalline Skin, Acanthus Doctor, Leyline Walker, People of the Skull and similar).
Weapons are another sticky spot in the core game's balance. In an almost inverse move to the armor situation where the generic stuff is the good stuff, there are monster weapons which are strictly better than any other option you could go for, and this 'obviously best choices' is something that is very frustrating in a sandbox game where we should be picking from a bunch of options that are either even in power, or situationally stronger when used in concert with other things. We have a little of this in stuff like Shield + Spear survivors having synergy, but that only applies when you have mastery on both survivors. Something you can't utilise for long without having “ageless” on both survivors so they no longer gain XP and can hunt “forever” (also Murder says hello). That's without even getting into the problems with Dagger and Whip progression; one of which works now because APG put out more busted new Dagger designs each year than any other particular weapon and the other still only has a total of five options. Actually, before we continue let us just briefly look at Whips because it is a great example of why multiple options matter.
The first whip you can craft is the Rawhide Whip; this is an interesting weapon due to it having Provoke, something that forces the monster to pay attention to you by giving you the priority token when you wound the monster. The power of this AI control is balanced by it having just 1 strength, so you need to grow up to be a big strong boy or girl to properly use this. But, for some inexplicable reason, despite being a Rawhide Whip it is the only Rawhide gear card in the Skinnery that needs the Ammonia innovation. If you don't already know (you do know, you're a smart cookie); Ammonia is used to make Leather. Leather can be used to make the Hunter's Whip, which while lacking Provoke has better stats in that it when it is not wielded by Conan it can actually wound a L1 White Lion sometimes (it also Archives moods, a super cool mechanic). So there is almost no window where one could craft the Rawhide Whip and not craft the Hunter version instead.
Also, the options almost end there, that's all you get to last you all the way until you get to the Ring Whip; which is an end game whip and has in essence 5.5 strength. Because it's strength 0 + sharp. Have you ever tried to master Whips in this game? It's an endless exercise of pumping steroids into one survivor so they can wield these weapons and even then they end up being worse than all the things other survivors are using. We get a nice little bone thrown to us in People of the Lantern where one can craft the Oxidized Ring Whip and get a weapon that's actually appropriate for the power level of the monsters you are fighting (for the first time in the entire campaign for whips), but that's campaign specific and it's still not really a new weapon, it's an upgraded old one.
Before we move on from this; it doesn't get any better when you add expansions, there is one whip in all the current expansions, it is the Silk Whip and it is in essence a side-grade from the Hunter Whip. One can only hope that the Gambler's Chest showers us in good whips.
I've not even gotten into how badly Thrown Weapons are treated in this game. At least Bone Darts are best in class for the very earliest fights. I guess. I'd still rather be gaining mastery and doing cool Zena Warrior Princess moves with a Chakram. No Thrown Mastery allowed ever, full stop, is a really weird and limiting choice for a whole weapon category.
This is one of the spots where the heart of the problems lay within KDM's core game, you have a limited number of options where gear targets are concerned and on top of that your options are further held back by many of them being suboptimal or downright terrible. While 1.6's updates have taken some steps to try and balance issues that occurred in the older editions; in the case of the Screaming Antelope everything's been nerfed so hard that the only real value in hunting it is for using resources in generic recipes and finding the Bladder so you can get Blood Paint – a really fun and decently powered support item that lets you dual wield in a way that paired can only dream of. (Paired is a weak mechanic, but it is well utilised occasionally in expansions).
In respect of the campaign's three nemesis monsters; one of them is a complete joke; as in it is a joke at the expense of the players (it's not a joke at all within the context of the world and I do like the character a lot). One of the others is so poor an experience that the optimal play is to skip the showdown and reduce your population by 4 (if you can spare the population loss, which you should be able to once you've learnt how to grow and maintain your settlement population) and the Butcher.
The Butcher is genuinely the best designed monster in the entire core game; something that the game understands by getting this bad boy down into the timeline as early as possible. But this is not to say that the game always utilises it correctly; there's quite an unpleasant 'git gud' experience where the game expects you to have prepared bandages and evasion for its showdown battle without any form of storytelling to set the ground work for this encounter. Didn't do that? Bye bye population and resources, start again. Sadly his kind of rug pull is a common experience in the game where monsters either turn up with no narrative warning to help you prepare (The Big Bosses are an exception to this), or just get an introduction that's thematic without explaining much about the monster's mechanical implementation.
A more sophisticated narrative structure would probably have a timeline event in Lantern Year 2 where a bloodied survivor stumbles into the settlement, and is only able to indicate that they are being pursued before before bleeding out from a bunch of cuts. Perhaps even one could save the survivor if the settlement had already crafted Bandages and innovated Bed? However that's not what the story experience for core KDM is; and one has to take it as is – good for its time but showing its age.
All of that written, there is 100% a thematic style and flair to having The Butchers have zero reason for turning up outside of just arriving with the intention of slaughtering resistance before stealing survivors, it makes them more like raiders, and that absolutely links with the rage-coward aesthetic that this monster has.
In showdown there are absolutely no notes I would give in respect to this monster; it's a perfectly expressed showdown that has a great marriage between mechanics and thematics. The lower accuracy that this boss has ties well with the wildness that an extreme level of rage would represent and it's always a challenging and engaging showdown even when you know The Butcher's tricks intimately.
The Campaign
People of the Lantern is very clearly Adam's favourite child; it gets the most additional content produces for it (People of the Sun comes second, People of the Stars gets basically nothing except scraps at the moment), it is also the longest and least suited for a new player – however it performs well as an upfront thesis for what Kingdom Death wants to be doing. You'll get to experience a sandbox where most of your opponents are chosen by yourself, but the campaign will provide skill checks against you at set times via the set Nemesis monster showdowns. The mechanical narrative as such is pretty strong; though you will notice that the middle years (post-Hand, pre-Watcher) feel a little lost and lacking in the tightness that the start and end portions of the campaign.
The narrative structure of the campaign has an even worse disconnect; in the pre-1.5 versions of the game there is a strong narrative that contains two stories; the first of which is the tale of the settlement and its hidden benefactor; the sleeping Watcher inside the Lantern Hoard. While you may not notice the hints on your first few plays of People of the Lantern; there are a whole bunch of excellent little signposts that signal well in advance of that world changing discovery which occurs in lantern year 20. We're told very early on that the Lantern Hoard provides protection from monsters for some reason; however we get multiple examples that humanoid bosses (Butcher, King's Man, The Hand) are not kept away the same way that the animalistic quarry bosses are. Given we are shown in the prologue showdown that White Lions are very opportunistic and brutal carnivores; it is significant that the Settlement is safe, but only from lower order monsters.
In support of this we can also see that all technological developments of any kind come from external sources; either the survivors find them out while wandering the world when hunting (protected by Lanterns as they do so); or they come from the Lantern Hoard (either directly or from other options which themselves can follow an ancestry back to the Hoard/Monsters). All technology and ideas stem not from the Survivors themselves but from the monsters inhabiting the world. At this point an astute player might start to question what the Hoard actually is; and be nervous about the narrative clock of 'Lanterns turning off in the Hoard' with each passing of a “Lantern Year”. There's also a sub-plot that is linked and it hints at the long standing antagonistic relationship between the Watchers who erase history and The Twilight Order who seek to preserve it.
This piece is just perfect.
This arc comes to a head with the Watcher being discovered; still not quite awake, but close to it. The survivors of the settlement have their world turned upside down and can respond either by doing what they do to all monsters - “SMASH” or trying to carry on as they were before. The second choice results in the Watcher awakening at its full strength; the first lets the settlement tackle the threat while it's not completely ready.
After the Watcher is slain in pre-1.5 the settlement falls into darkness and a fatalistic 'Boss Rush' stage emerges. The protection of the Watcher, given by a form of its emanating “threat” and the deliverance of ideas via Innovations – is gone with its life force. So the settlement ends up facing an endless stream of more and more dangerous monsters until it is wiped from the face of the plane.
Before we get onto the second story thread in People of the Lantern; I wanted to briefly take an aside to write about how good the Extinguished Hoard ending is. It provides not only a real strong blow to the players at the end of the story; but it's also open ended and not completely 100% a true end for the settlement. Players can sit down and see how long they can last before a defeat if they want, or they can leave it as an open ended story which probably ends in the destruction of the settlement, but maybe not?
This ending however created two entirely player orchestrated alternative endings to the story. The first of which was that when you hit this Boss Rush ending you could tool up as many ageless survivors as possible for hunts and then go after Phoenixes. Assuming that the survivors could avoid all dying against the more and more powerful Clock Birbs; they could trigger Deja Vu with enough age counters to reset the timeline – taking the settlement back to the point of its first creation; except they are present now (along with their gear). That creates a narrative where some ageless warriors try and live out their existence in the same timeless feeling loop of twenty lantern years; you might not want to play that out, but it's still a wonderfully hopeless narrative.
The second version of this storyline used the original version of Sacrifice; which I've pictured above. If a settlement could get a reasonably stable level of population (which can be done, because Collective Toil creates an increasing level of returns for higher and higher population numbers) then Sacrifice can be used to ensure that the Watcher never, ever awakes from its slumber. Congratulations; you and your friends have managed to establish a civilisation in the darkness; sure it's one that requires blood sacrifices every year otherwise the “god” at the middle will wake up and bring the end, but you've mastered the world with an ending that the designers never even thought could happen.
These are all elements of what made the first rendition of Lantern's story a compelling experience; and they worked in concert with the second story thread which we can call 'The King's Tale'. This is where the King's Men and The Hand come in as they are the Nemesis monsters with actual timeline story events surrounding them.
King's Men are the front line scouts for the organisation that surrounds The Hand and The Kings. Survivors are scattered around the world by a god-like Entity called The Scribe; he writes them into existence in his book (Hunt Even 84: Scribe's Book) like an opportunistic farmer just throwing seeds into the ground and not worrying what grows or not. Some of these settlers get devoured by wandering monsters as they wait up; others manage to find places where they are guided by an entity (like The Watcher) and protected enough to grow; places where the survivors are with sleeping Watchers are prime targets for the organisation because they are protected enough to grow, but their benefactor is not awake to actively protect them. It's the perfect ground for their goals, which is to shape the nascent settlement in a direction that will provide the right kind of food for The Kings.
This is all evident still in the 1.6 narrative; however it is an aborted story arc, because originally this tale was intended to go into a post-Watcher world with the Twilight Festival expansion where The Kings will turn up and if they and the Hand were defeated by the settlement then “God” himself would turn up to reap his harvest and the settlement's survivors could (to paraphrase TVTropes) get to punch their creator in the genitals for bringing them into such a horrible existence. That is gone now and it seems that the direction has been changed.
For myself that is one of the major flaws with the 1.6 storyline; the King arc goes absolutely nowhere, and we have not seen any indication that the Gambler's Chest, despite featuring the King, the Hand and the God Hand; offers any satisfying conclusion to that portion of Lantern's narrative. At best we can probably hope for a parallel story that explains why The Hand just appears once in the timeline and then doesn't come back to the Settlement despite the King's Men continuing to inspect and aggress upon the settlement.
The other major flaw in People of the Lantern's 1.6 narrative is the new Final Nemesis. As mentioned above, Lantern's first rendition of the story surrounding the Watcher is pretty close to a perfect story arc; with a subtle set up, clues laced in along the way, a reveal of the truth and a fatalistic ending that not only can be played through if the players wish; but can also be avoided, letting them feel smart. As a part of the revision Records was changed to remove the ability to push the Watcher's awakening back and the post-Watcher game was altered to explore what could be done with the Watcher's body; providing the first time where survivors actually created on their own initiative without the creature's influence.
A short aside here; there's a really interesting amount of links between the Watchers, the Ethereal Dreamer, the Saviors and the Sky Whale. All of which seem to indicate that the Watchers, the Whale and the Dreamer are all deeply intertwined on some level and I have in the past posited that the Sky Whale is the Ethereal Dreamer and it is another Entity seeking to feed on survivors, which it does via the Watchers. That would mean Saviors are an unintended side effect of the Watchers influence and their disappearing rather than dying when they age out may be them being claimed by the Dreamer at the end of their “pact”.
However; what's badly expressed in this narrative is that there's a huge, powerful and significant member of the world's pantheon which is deathly afraid of Watchers and what can be achieved with technology crafted from Watcher remains. This Entity is the new Final Nemesis for the core game – this is The Gold Smoke Knight (GSK) and via “Word of God” (from Adam directly) we have learnt that the GSK is like an elemental guardian of the land where the Plain of Stone Faces is located; however there was a disaster/enemy(s) that destroyed the old civilisation (The White Lions); threw its citizens into devolution and now keeps the place forever trapped via the history erasing nature of the Watchers. We know that this has really messed up the Gold Smoke Knight; the Silver City is now buried deep underground, the Lion God is pretty much reduced to mentally nothing via a form of dementia and the Golden Entity of the Holy Lands (where the Manhunters and Lion Knight hail from) was involved on some level. The Gold Smoke Knight has portions of its relationship with the White Lion's pre-fall civilisation with the heavy lion based elements in its design. Even its smoking halo was once a full mane like the ones that adorn male lions.
There was once a fertile land of golden grass and prideful lions. Uncounted centuries ago, a parasite took root and over time a corrupted city grew to engulf the plains. The Golden Knight, a mysterious guardian of these lands, waged a losing war against the corruption. As futile years passed, the knight’s appearance grew twisted and haggard as the land itself. It’s glorious mane fell out, replaced by angry wailing smoke billowing in its place and the Gold Smoke Knight was born.
The tricky part in respect to this background is, if you're not involved in learning the game's lore via people who have a direct connection to Adam (either through friendship or interviews) then this stuff just isn't present in the narrative and environmental storytelling the game offers. For the first time player of the game; they will be able to understand the Watcher portion of the story, but they'll be confused about what the Gold Smoke Knight is, what it means, and why it's here. There's no explanation in the box at all anywhere.
And that's where we land with the campaign itself; it was revised from being a campaign with a couple of mystery boxes around The King, The Twilight Order and The Watcher with the Watcher and Twilight Order ones being semi-opened and mostly resolved; to one which kept those boxes in the same state while adding in The Gold Smoke Knight mystery box and burying the mystery box for The King deep underground. Before 1.5/1.6 my rankings for the campaign narrative was People of the Stars > People of the Lantern > People of the Sun; but in a post 1.5 world the core game narrative is the worst of the three options; it's even the worst of the three options for myself on a mechanical front due to the loadstone that exists before you get the Slender Man expansion to replace the lacklustre experience that is the King's Man.
On top of that; what the core game has always needed is a shorter punchier “introductory campaign” to get the players hooked before unfolding the main campaign behind it. Something five lantern years ending with a boss fight against a Butcher or King's Man would have been perfect; but instead we have a campaign that was increased in length from being between 20 and 25 lantern years before the final nemesis to 30 total, with all of those post watcher fights being against level 3 monsters (which are of course long showdowns due to the monster's increased health pool). This is of course something which many members of the boss battler are guilty of; so it is not just an exclusively KDM issue, but it is concerning that the short campaigns that could be viable for introducing new players to this game and setting are far off and in expansions.
I would be remiss if I didn't praise the positive aspects of the mini-boss and Final Duo; both the Watcher and the Gold Smoke Knight are showdowns with a bit of a puzzle element to them. They want you to act in a certain way if you are going to beat them, and that's a very traditional point for boss battles; they refine and define the actions that the players take because boss battles are at their heart about learning the patterns and behaviours of the boss before leveraging their weaknesses. Both the Watcher and the Gold Smoke Knight have magic or silver bullets that you can set up in advance to help ensure your success and these are not things you can miss; they are baked into the campaign's structure with the Hooded Stranger giving you a direct counter to the Watcher and the Oxidisation giving you all the tools you need to add to your arsenal in order protect yourself from the Gold Smoke Knight.
Make no mistakes; I think that both the Watcher and the Gold Smoke Knight are breathtakingly well designed when it comes to the showdowns, I think they both nail the themes and feel epic in very different ways. Though if you compare them to each other, I'd say that the Gold Smoke Knight has the better showdown design overall because its “counter” is less of a magic silver bullet and more of a tool to help you get on an even footing. The Watcher might have the better narrative laced into the campaign, but the Gold Smoke Knight benefits from one of APG's top two monster designers being the lead on the project (for the record Anna Poots and Zachary Barash are my top two monster designers, with Adam being in third place – he did design the overall best monster in the game with the Sunstalker, but his design work is more uneven and inconsistent in quality when compared to the other two). I am interested in seeing what the larger collective of designers will bring to the table in the new work for sure; given the amount of time spent on the Gambler's Chest I expect some very high quality work.
Summary
We're approaching ten thousand words here; and I think what I've combed through here is the very definition of a hot mess. It is a discordant; disjointed and uneven experience that hits a lot of high highs and low lows. There is no doubt that the start of this campaign is an excellent experience; and the back end of the campaign is a challenge that should be respected for its tight mechanical design. Still, there is also no doubt that your average player will probably not see much of the game's back half because of how repetitive having just three functional quarry monsters (two of which have either design issues or frustrating “requirements” to hunt) can become and how uneven the recurring Nemesis monsters are on top of that (again we have one really good one, and two which are flawed). I've seen first hand many times how exasperated and disengaged players can become when they see what the King's Man's mechanics are; or when they learn that the best thing to do against the Hand every time is to just turtle and put on a good enough show to get sarcastically clapped at. I love the narrative concept of the Hand, but it feels like something that comes from a manga/anime or video game; having it be in a board game, where each showdown can take over an hour was an unwise decision.
In sharp contrast to the monster issues; the settlement, survivor and resource management systems remain a bright gem at the heart of what keeps players coming back for more. Not only do they get constant small achievable objectives in getting that next piece of gear, unlocking that settlement milestone, completing that weapon mastery or seeing what that next Innovation will be. They also get a constant cooperative puzzle on departure where the group sits down and works out the roles players will have their survivors fulfil during the next showdown; how to organise their gear grids, what synergies they can have on their own tableau and what synergies they can have alongside other players. Once again, I cannot stress enough how superior the Gear Grid system is over the traditional Hand/Hand/Armor/Boots/Helmet/Belt style that older dungeon crawlers all employ (Warhammer Quest, Gloomhaven, Descent) – it's become the default system boss battlers use; we've seen it in ATO, Townsfolk Tussle, Oathsworn, basically every single non-card based boss battler has regressed on that front, with only Steamforged Games' Monster Hunter: World providing a similar system in its stamina bar (it's not strictly the same, but it provides a similar puzzle for players to grapple with and that is why I do not wag my “lazy design” finger at MH:W, it keeps its gear simple because of how complex and/or thoughtful the stamina system can be at times).
To return to KDM, this gear grid system is the core mechanic that keeps people coming back over and over; it's that sandbox which offers a grand experience of creating, tinkering and refining even if you're just facing the same old monsters. That sense of discovery and feeling clever when you use something in a new and fresh manner or have an “Ah-ha moment” when looking at certain pieces of gear. It's what keeps the player base coming back over and over and it's the best part of the game. The levers and systems players get to pull in combination with the semi-randomisation of what you can craft that the various resource type requirements offer is phenomenal. The Fighting Arts and Disorders which I have only just touched on are also a great system; they add character and variance to survivors in interesting manners and with the move of the Barber Surgeon to being available in the mid game you even have good counter play for the more problematic disorders.
Which brings us onto the final part!
What Will Make the Gambler's Chest Succeed For Me?
The first, obvious and factious answer was not turning it into a giant campaign box and delaying the entire kickstarter's pitched content for over half a decade. One cannot put that particular demon back in the box though; so instead of worrying about spilt milk lets look at what elements of the game are lacking and have the potential to be improved here.
The first area we can see needs tightening is the storyline; what we've had spoiled so far looks promising; Nemesis characters that have been teased or present in the Lantern lore for a long time are making an appearance. The King, The Hand, The Gambler, Bone Eaters, Atnas. These are all lore sections with a great deal of potential to be interesting. Likewise the newer additions of the Smog Eaters and Crimson Crocodile, despite having not existed beforehand might well be the most exciting portions of this because of how much more the early game content gets experienced by the player base.
New monsters mean guaranteed new gear cards, settlement locations, endeavours and the potential for new innovations which is all great news because it's building on proven systems that are core to player engagement.
However, we can see a couple of sticky points sitting in the roster; for a start we still have a rather sparse selection of monsters; so it is almost inevitable that players are going to be reaching for old standby monsters like the White/Giga Lion, Gorm, Sunstalker, Dung Beetle Knight and Dragon King to bolster the experience; especially during that KDM quarry dry spell that always seems to begin to creep in during the high teens. While moving the Bone Eaters to an Encounter Nemesis slot does add something new to the table; it does seem evident that old standbys and alternatives to the Phoenix experience are going to be sought after by at least some of the player base.
Speaking of unproven aspects; the Philosophy and Collective Cognition system which has been introduced is very much looking to fix a portion of the game which worked perfectly and it remains a major concern of mine; what I've seen so far looks very unappealing as it adds more bookkeeping to portions of the game that I felt were elegant. The same applies to the Scouts of Death mechanic, something I remain very dubious about wanting to use elements of, but I could be proven wrong.
The super exciting addition to the game is not a fresh new one however, it's the formalisation of the Pattern system. In sharp contrast to the Strains system; which has felt like an attempt to brute force Kingdom Deathhaven into existence over a system that doesn't need it in the first place. Patterns on the other hand are an elegant and fun way to introduce randomisation into the game in a way that is always exciting. It's a little box you get to prod and at times you're rewarded with something that changes your play experience. I tend to prod the buttons on the box over and over until the Grim Muffler pops out cause playing with Instruments is so frustrating without it. Unsurprisingly though; Patterns tie back to the strongest part of KDM's design; gear cards.
I think I can boil down what I am after as an entrenched veteran player of this game. The kind of person that this content is really aimed at. And that is for myself; more showdowns, more crafting options, more fighting arts, more innovations. More options and choices to create for variation along with alternative showdown challenges to learn. The game is already complex enough that I personally are not looking for any more systems to stack on top of everything we already have; Strains and Patterns pushed my interest honestly to the limit of what I wanted to experience; especially strains which are so wildly inconsistent in their quality and end up boiling down to either a content gatekeep or in the case of fighting arts a random small selection that is set at the start of each campaign. Its stuff that would work better in games with less of a timesink, or a single campaign that's played through before being 'done'.
In short; while I remain optimistic about the Gambler's Chest; I cannot shake a sinking feeling that we're heading into a world where Gloomhaven style legacy mechanics are being shoved into a game that does not need them. I may be correcting myself when I get to playing the GCE; but after taking this ridiculously long deep dive post mortem am have realised that what I enjoy, what I want, are more monsters, more settlement crafting locations and more campaign frameworks that do not include the Phoenix and instead provide alternative ways to use the miniatures we have. The stuff I am most excited about in the Gambler's Chest Expansion are the extra pieces of gear; the hybrid armor sets, the new food innovations. I am decidedly lukewarm on the Philosophy system and as it is an integral part of the GCE I am left in a situation where at the moment I can see myself playing the Gambler Campaign once before breaking the entire box into parts for using in the current three campaigns instead. That's a real worry as I do want a new campaign, I just do not want Philosophies to be a compulsory portion of that experience.
We'll see, it's interesting times for sure, and I do hope that the GCE is such a breath of fresh air that it revitalises this game and the community as a whole; I've had multiple conversations over this year with different people who each have expressed that they're probably not opening their GCE and instead selling it because during the drought period we've been in for over half a decade; new games and especially fresher boss battler designs have sprung up. That's a shame. But it is also clear that it is going to take something really special for the GCE to step up alongside the modern designs that ATO and Oathsworn in particular have brought to the table. Maybe the GCE has it, I hope so. But at the absolute minimum least it has the Crimson Crocodile, and for myself, that's enough value for the $50 I spent on this box.
Carrying all the hype on its back. What a boy!
Comments
Jake Crowe
Finally finished my first PotL campaign so I gave this a read. You have such a way with words! Looking forward to your thoughts on the GCE when I finally finish it. I noticed you mentioned Oathsworn a few times in a couple articles. I’ve watched a few playthroughs (Meet Me at the Table) and found it to not quite hook me, whereas watching some AT:O (Bra Mithra; Five of Clubs) sold me right away. Do you think Oathsworn is really worth checking out? Any content creators that could help me enjoy it more?
Andrew Synnott
Thank you both, this is perfect to get me started. I'm looking forward to getting this to the table (prologue about to begin)!
Magallian
Hi Andrew, I know that these 3 posts Fen has written in 2018 discusses the synergy of core game and expansion quarries and nemesis monsters which might answer some of your questions: Campaign Strategy Guide | Expansions Synergy 01 | Expansion Combinations and Synergy - Part 1: Quarries I | 18.01.2018 | Patrons only | https://www.patreon.com/posts/expansion-and-1-16271166 Campaign Strategy Guide | Expansions Synergy 02 | Expansion Combinations and Synergy - Part 2 Quarries II | 06.02.2018 | Patrons only | https://www.patreon.com/posts/expansion-and-2-16468159 Campaign Strategy Guide | Expansions Synergy 03 | Expansion Combinations and Synergy - Part 3: Nemesis Monsters | 23.02.2018 | Patrons only | https://www.patreon.com/posts/expansion-and-3-16468181
Andrew Synnott
Fen, this and the prior were fantastic. I'm sure it was a bit cathartic to get this opus out of your head and immortalized before the GC is out. I own 1.5 (plus the 1.6 pack) and all expansions, but due to time/life have never finished a campaign. I'm itching to get one under my belt before the GC, and curious if you were to structure a People of the Lantern run, what would you include to round out the experience, improve quarry variety, etc...? If you've addressed in a post, happy to get pointed that way! Thanks!
