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Vitanvox Beta Content Review
🕑 Added 2023-04-28 09:00:04 +0000 UTC
Vitanvox was raised among the children of the Silence Nursery. Their caregivers wordless smiles are sewn into their faces, their lips sealed tight. The children of the nursery have a specialized diet of Banshee Viper tongues and denatured venom that manifests curious effects in adulthood.
Vitanvox was the March 2023 beta content release and it brought with it another new ability and two pieces of armor that showcase how this works. From now forward I am going to start these beta content reviews with a critique of not just the mechanical aspects of these releases but also the thematic ones. I've decided to do this in part because I want to highlight when we're seeing content that builds more into the world; why it does so, what real world references or tropes are being used and if the whole thing is effective. If you're not interested in that part of the critique, skip to the section titled The Gameplay.
The Thematics
Vitanvox's name is a portmanteau of the Hindi word Vitan and the Latin word Vox. Vitan in this context means amongst many different things sacrifice while vox means voice. So her name sort of (badly) translates into one of Sacrifice Voice, Cover Voice, Make Voice or similar. It's actually a rather meaningless combination when you start to really look into it because combining a Hindi word with a Latin one really removes the context for what Vitan is intended to mean here. It is a name; so it is fine that it is somewhat nonsensical, but this mashing together of two very different cultures languages (one living, one dead) highlights one of the major issues with just borrowing things that sound cool without really thinking about what you're doing.
The Banshee outfit itself also demonstrates a clash; the outfit that Vitanvox is wearing is a Bedlah; which is an Egyptian Arabic word for a folklore traditional Egyptian costume mostly warn by women (but some men wear it during weddings). It is a very popular costume style taken from Egyptian belly dancing clubs (Kabareeh) and adopted by belly dancers across the world; this widespread adoption of the style has meant it endures it in the minds of Western audiences.
However; the Banshee is an Irish folklore creature that is a female spirit; the modern name comes from the Old Irish “ben side” which means “woman of the fairy mound”. I am sure you are all very familiar with the concept of the Banshee; a spirit that isn't always malicious in its own nature, but because its keening wail heralds the death of a loved one they are considered dangerous spirits. They are not in themselves directly harmful, but they are a bad omen indeed.
I explain all of this because I wanted to highlight just how much taking Egyptian culture in the case of the bedlah and smooshing it together with the Irish folklore of the banshee creates this nonsensical, discordant mash of themes. You can try to justify this with all sorts of different "in universe" things; in the case of Vitanvox it's because this outfit is made from the dura (outer skin) of the "Banshee Vipers". That is another frustrating thematic because Banshees have nothing to do with serpents; serpents within the context of Ireland's folklore are linked to St. Patrick; a terrible man who has not been canonised (it is a misconception that he is a “Saint”) because first up; recent historical understandings indicate he was likely a slave trader and secondly the “serpents” in his story are in truth the pagans and druids (native culture) of Ireland. St. Patrick's story is about English Christianity once imposing its will upon the Irish people, something that reached the level of an atrocity in the Irish Potato “Famine” (it wasn't a true famine, it was a genocide committed by the English ruling class against the Irish, one Ireland has never recovered from. England's nobility and poiliticians were very good at genocide and oppression, just ask any of its neighbouing countries or former colonies). It is understandable that an American living in New York doesn't have a good grasp on the history between Ireland and England and as such I'm not calling all of these fantasy spins on real world concepts/history offensive as such, but they are overly simplistic tone deaf and hold only a surface understanding of the real world and historical events/things they reference.
Use of a creature more closely linked with the Egyptian mythology and folklore would have been a far more satisfying thematic piece.
The concept of the Children of Silence on the other hand is an interesting and enticing bit of world building and as such I can overlook the above Banshee/Viper/Bedlah issues with a roll of the eyes, a shrug and a quick hand wave. It's fine, I was nitpicking for sure.
Here we see a leaning into the horror trope of "violent silence" (known as mouth stitched shut) and the fantastical concept of using venom that has been denatured through heat to provide special abilities to people. This part is right in the mix with the whole concept of Kingdom Death being populated by malleable human analogues who can have their very genetics re-written through their lives. This glimpse into another part of the world is somewhat interesting, but it one cannot overlook that it is lazy writing to create more questions without providing answers to either the new concept or existing ones. It smacks of a throwaway set of ideas that were baked up over an evening when it's like this. Of course if the People of the Silence are visited in a campaign before this stuff fades from memory then I will retract this complaint.
Ultimately this means that I think I end up giving the lore section of this beta content a passing grade, but just barely, along with the note “Try better next time.”
The Miniature
Vitanvox's miniature is an in universe one that unfortunately leans into the public perception of Kingdom Death as being “Breasts & Beasts” while it is well sculpted for the most part it commits the artistic fundamental mistake of that is known as the 'Boobs and Butt Pose'. This pose is where a character is standing in a way that if you are looking at the back of them you can see their back, face, butt and breasts. It's very fanservice here due to Vitanvox pushing her posterior out; causing a vertical curve in her spine. This pose is one that has become very disliked over time and is often parodied or mocked; famously in the art series where male Marvel superheroes are redrawn in the same style as the female ones. It results in a very unnatural looking pose; especially for a miniature that is depicting a fighter. We saw a similar discordant pose in the small Erza of Deadheim who was standing in the 'Head and Hip Pose'. If you want examples of poses I think do look good in miniature form; the Contrapposto (standing upright weight on one foot), En Garde combat stances; Atlas pose (holding a globe above your head) and weapon across shoulder are some great examples. I will also accept copying famous JoJo's Bizarre Adventure poses as they are based on modelling shots.
To be clear; I am absolutely fine with miniatures that look sexy; especially now we're seeing male pin ups as well. It's just jarring when it is used on an “in universe” non-pin up character. As I am critiquing this miniature sculpt under the basis of a piece you might use on the table, it is very awkward looking.
On the other hand; I love the face, hair and headgear on this miniature. She has a wonderful snub nose, not something that's very common in miniature sculpts and her hair accessories are gorgeous. The miniature also accurately depicts the look of both gear pieces while also letting us see what the future potential head, arm and leg pieces of this armor set would look like. I really love the scale bracers in Lokman's artwork and the little scarf having gems attached to it is a great piece of detail.
Most of all though I'd like to point out the really cool weapon holsters for the two weapons are; they are a little impractical and thematically they add a third culture to this melting pot – we're now Irish, Egyptian Arabic and Japanese. Still, they look so very cool with the Katana and Tantōgripped by oni-like faces and the cloud/smoke patterened scabbards.
The biggest thing I want to point out as being just excellent are the knee pads; they tie the model back to her background as being one of the Children of the Silence with those BFG looking giant ears and I absolutely love them. I want to see a full suit of metal armor from these people; it would look really wild and stylistic.
In the end despite the actual clothes, armor, hair, weapons, lantern and face being really well done this is in the end a “try better next time” piece because that pose holds the rest back.
Now all that all my historical and artistic whinge is out of the way, lets look at the game content!
The Gameplay
We get three new pieces of content in this box; two armor gear cards and a glossary card that provides a new ability. We'll start with that ability, because in order to understand the context of the gear we need to know about the rules.
Banshee Dura is a really exciting and unique new ability that has a lot of potential power. It is giving you a bunch of extra actions each turn, one for each howling token you have. Now that would be ridiculous in a vacuum, but as we'll see when we look at the gear, this powerhouse ability is appropriately curtailed by the gear downsides. However, it is worth remembering in the future that Banshee Dura itself has no intrinsic downsides – putting this on a gear card without limitations is just not something you can do casually.
I don't think I really need to go into too much detail how powerful this is, because it is effectively able to give you a move, an activation, survival actions without spending survival and temporary +1 strength tokens. It is giving you everything that a survivor intrinsically can do plus more to boot. We've seen some great abilities before now, but this one is up there at the top for pure power in isolation. In order to understand what it is like in practice we'll look at the Banshee Bedlah now:
Crafting Cost: 2x cloth, 1x perfect organ, 1x leather
Here we can see where the brakes have been pumped; in exchange for getting a bunch of tokens that let you move; do survival actions, activate gear and gain temporary strength tokens you lose access to your normal move, activation and ability to spend survival. That means in situations where you need to spend survival to avoid something, or gain a bonus; you cannot do so. That is limitation that does have some drawbacks, but in exchange for that you are getting a baseline 5 howling tokens a turn; meaning that you can move, activate and perform a combination of three survival actions or +1 strength tokens. That's a higher power level than a baseline survivor gets for sure.
There are further drawbacks here though; this is a body slot armor piece that requires leather and a perfect organ while it only provides 1 armor protection. The body slot gets hit twice as often as other slots on a survivor; so you cannot take too many hits before you're in danger of death. That signals to us that this gear card is not for a frontline tank; and is more for damage dealers.
The 2x cloth crafting cost is also not insignificant; in fact, both of these pieces cost two cloth and that's a stiff ask when we have Vagabond Armor; the Sighing Sarong (Summer Cyrus/Flower Knight), beta White Sun Lion armor and the Brave Dirndl all also requiring cloth to differing degrees. A settlement has at most 4 pieces of cloth and as such it is a premium resource. That's not a bad thing from a design standpoint; asking players to make difficult choices with limited resources is interesting. It's what makes the Conviction principle so meaningful – there is not a right choice between Accept Darkness and Collective Toil, it is down to the playstyle you're using and the path your settlement is taking. The same applies here; but it also means that any future Banshee armor pieces are going to have to not involve cloth in their crafting materials for that cheeky little setkeyword that indicates there may be a follow up set of cards that provide the arm, leg, head and armor set cards. I can't judge this gear card based on that, but I can judge it based on its potential with its matching waist gear card and existing armor pieces.
As for the affinities; we'll get to those further on in this article, but suffice to say they are very good.
Crafting Cost: 2x cloth, 2x scrap
The Lioncloth is the piece which really makes these two items worth the hit in armor points; that activated ability can increase the number of Howling tokens up by two or more quite easily (as we will see) and when you have 7 or more Howling Tokens per round you can easily use some of them to increase your strength up to a very solid amount which can mean this pair of armor pieces are a very viable option for a DPS (Damage Dealing) Survivor to use well into the mid game. In fact, with the addition of a shield and good frontline tanking survivor(s) you can run this loadout for a lot longer than most damage dealing builds. However, a lot of that depends on what you are going to run in the other three armor slots.
I do want to point out the keyword downside that both of these two armor cards have, they are jewelry and White Lions steal a piece jewelry when/if a hunt party is defeated. Make sure you have an alternative cheap piece of jewelry somewhere in the team to sacrifice if this happens; the Lucky Charm is an excellent option for this as it is both powerful and cheap.
The Affinities and Potential Builds
So the affinities on these two items are lights out amazing. Those two Green affinities are in the perfect slots to connect with the Leather Shield and/or Monster Grease. What's great about this is you only need one green affinity to get the Loincloth activated; so you are not compelled to fill in the other one. Also these two gear cards connect with each other via a red affinity and leave two upwards pointing red affinities to connect elsewhere. What that means is we have the potential to make use of two White Lion armor pieces like this:
That is a really powerful early game ring of red affinities giving you +2 Howling tokens and it is in a compact square that will fit anywhere on the gear grid (depending on what your other items will be). You have a place to fit any arm gear your heart desires (Rawhide Gloves is +survival and an easy to connect left red affinity; you have +1 movement (movement is a top tier stat) and you can lean into the Leather Shield or Monster Grease with ease as we can see in this example layout below:
There are limited returns on connecting both the shield and Monster Grease and I would probably pick the leather shield in most cases; but it is nice to have the option to ignore the shield (because I can't afford it yet) and move the entire lot down a row if I need an L shape on the top to fit in other options.
There is also an alternative using the Screaming Bracers like so:
(Note this is the 1.5 Screaming Bracers, the 1.6 ones have a worse ability, but they still have the same affinities).
This layout sets us up with a left facing Red Affinity that connects with the Monster Tooth Necklace (+2 strength and halfway to another howling token!). Other alternatives include the Leather Mask's down red instead of the White Lion Helm (the Lion Helm's ability can't be used, so it's just providing affinities and protection) the Bone Club (red/red between the Lioncloth and Bedlah), the Hooked Claw Knife from the L3 Gigalion, Dense Bone Arrows (Gigalion), the Heartbow (Death Crown Inheritor Aya), Speaker Cult Knife (White Speaker), Sunshark Bow (Sunstalker), Scrap Dagger/Counterweighted Axe (Weapon Crafter) or even the Scrap Sword.
(This is the 1.31 version of the Scrap Sword, it is the same as the 1.6 version, the 1.6 just has a cleaner layout with the Barbed 4 ability).
That last one is especially exciting because this is one of the first times that a build could come out using the Scrap Sword. You can substitute the Rawhide Headband in to connect with the Scrap Sword for that blue affinity and then fill out the rest of the gear grid with a Lucky Charm plus connecting blue affinity or similar. It's exciting to see a weapon that's always been on the cusp of being good find a place where it can really work.
The Summary
This is a somewhat mediocre miniature combined with two very exciting pieces of game content that currently signal they'll be getting a further “expansion” in the future to complete the “Banshee Belly Dancer” armor. My gripes with the thematic areas of this content are nothing compared to how much these two new cards can develop and expand your early game experiences with variety. They are armor pieces that do not rely on full sets to work and that in itself is very exciting as it increases design space. They are also very powerful when used together, but you pay for that power with very low armor points, which means that the longer you use them the more risk involved and they cost a very valuable resource.
As such I can recommend these two cards and will be considering them a staple inclusion in my future campaigns even if I do not always craft them every time.
Comments
a warm, awful feeling
It’s so cool to see the options those gear cards open up! thank you!
