Adam Poots, the creator of Kingdom Death and it’s chief developer (Well, one of them at least), has adopted a very strict policy of not sharing anything before he believes it’s ready to show. A not-so-deep dive into his twitter shows that there are some really good reasons for this. That said, with the sheer amount of Kingdom Death content in the pipe the huge gaps between previews (especially when said previews reveal significant changes to the initial pitches) can make things a bit hard to follow. Everyone is hyped for the new expansion content.

But what are we hyped for exactly?

Over a few posts I’ll be looking at EVERY new expansion and what we know so far. I’ll also be making a couple of predictions or comments on each based on what we might reasonably expect to be part of them given the large amount of KDM content already available and the probably not entirely accurate idea that there is some precedents set there.

Well, who’s first? Of course it has to be…

THE FIRST HERO

Late game content in Kingdom Death is not as appreciated as it could be. It can take significant experience and practice before you even reach that point, let alone in a capacity that will allow you to actually tackle the content without your settlement being royally rooted. Half the reason that the Gorm is so popular is because you get to use it immediately and it provides more engagement with a part of the timeline you’ll be likely be grinding through many many times before you finally succeed.

The First Hero is a systemic expansion that allows you to skip directly to later Lantern Years, and wraps up the changes it makes to the KDM formula in a really cool theme. There’s a survivor out there that hunts alone, such is his/her power level. Kill them, loot their weapons, take their level 12/20 settlement for your own, and hope that the locals don’t mind exchanging their hero for a bunch of murder hobos.

We actually know a little about the showdown too. There are two potential “first” heroes, a male that takes you to LY12 and a female that goes to LY20. Both are walking arsenals, with 5-6 weapons clearly visible on their models, not to mention a headband that most players should find quite familiar. The hero will equip one of these weapons and from that point on their basic action will be replaced by it’s profile. The Zanbato has been spoiled, showing a huge sweeping AOE with the low speed and high damage typical of that weapon coupled with a nasty bleed and knockback. The weapons also have stats for their durability and can be destroyed during the showdown, so if you are struggling into one weapon you can focus breaking it to force the hero to draw another.

Exactly how attacking the hero vs their weapons works remains to be seen. We also don’t know if the hero changes weapons on it’s own or only if the players destroy one. We do know that the loot from the encounter will be more plentiful if you don’t destroy it all first, so I’m hoping that the hero isn’t “solvable” in such a way that meaningful choices are boiled away before a single “correct” strategy that never engages with the mechanic.

The starting survivors may be the key. They are “veterans” and dressed to the nines with much fancier clothes and weapons than the cloth and rock we all know and love. Between them they use a dagger, a whip, a spear and a great sword… beyond this we know nothing about their gear, any pre-baked progression or the impact of losing one of them during the showdown. While I think it’s unlikely that their gear will be gone completely, they personally may have many perks that could impact the meta-goal that is creating your advanced settlement from the spoils of the fight. For example, there may be some risk/reward in deliberately trying to nab the hero’s sweet bow if it means you lose out on a completed weapon mastery.

The First Hero should also allow for something that a lot of people ask for: Free Hunting. While it’s predominantly focused on enabling a late-game stepping stone for you to run as a campaign, I see no reason why you couldn’t do the fight and follow it with a single hunt of your choice. Nearly every quarry we know about is available after defeating the first heroine, so if you really wanted to show your group some Dung Beetle Knight antics or get your shiny new Screaming God to the table without several months worth of buildup there is a supported way to jump in without committing to a whole campaign.

All in all, I believe that this will be a new “top recommendation” expansion simply because it enables nearly any content to become pseudo-early-game.

THE SCREAMING GOD

Oh boy. Another “god” expansion.

The Lion God barely ever gets recommended when people go seeking advice on KDM expansions. The general consensus: it’s too hard, the rewards are too meh and the content in it too light on the ground compared to most other options. It’s also currently the latest late game quarry there can be, so if you’ve purchased it and you’re starting a new campaign it’ll be a long time before you ever see it even if you fight it at the earliest opportunity.

It will always have it’s defenders, but the fact that Poots is releasing the Silver City expansion as a “fix” to the Lion God is quite telling.

The Screaming God doubles down on the “God” design points whilst fixing up a lot of what made the Lion God a bit “meh”. It comes way later in the timeline than the LG and from Gencon previews it’s set to be another very hard encounter with a high mortality rate. I’m impressed with the card driven “treadmill” effect they have to represent the Screaming God constantly running away from the survivors. Very dynamic without a huge amount of work to update from turn to turn. Whether it will actually be fun is another story. The Gencon demo was not greatly indicative for a variety of reasons. Like the unknown “demo mode” changes. Or the very under-equipped survivors. Or the clueless fellow running the demo during the video that was put on facebook.

Where it differs greatly from LG is that the Screaming God has a full set of resources and the slew of crafting options that come with that. Beyond a couple of juicy things the LG solicits a pretty huge “why bother” when the rewards are weighed against the risks. Not so here. It also extends the timeline by another 5 years so there’s hopefully enough time to grab what you want before the end of the campaign smashes into the settlement. Speaking of, the Screaming God is a “Node 5” monster, meaning that it’s super late game and prevents you using other node 5 stuff. I hope this is similar to the “don’t mix expansions” recommendation that could be comfortably ignored with current things like the People of the Stars because there’s some big late game beasties that might warrant a set of Screaming God gear… but as it stands are mutually exclusive to it.

The Screaming God also has a completely separate encounter in the Parasite Queen. We know precious little about her so far: shes apparently hard to find, and she looks like a creepy woman half embedded in a throne of tentacles, arms and mouths. Par. I hope she’s less elusive than she’s made out to be, maybe an alternative end boss once some SG related conditions are met? That would make the node 5 restrictions make more sense. Also, the Illuminated Lady is her minion, acting like a siren in the dark to lead wanderers to the queen. Settlement event and narrative sculpt? Or will we be facing the lady (and now that the role is equal opportunity, the Illuminated Man) on the showdown board? My money is on the former. Either way, bare boobs and dicks ahoy.

Even if the only one of these showdowns is any good, it’s still twice as much content as most of the first wave of expansions. It’s likely that least one part of it will hit the mark even if it does end up having Lion God levels of bullshit in it. The First Hero makes it much more palatable too.

THE OBLIVION MOSQUITO

I gotta say, back when the kickstarter was running the reaction to this thing was… tepid… at best. But I loved it. It was creepy and was set to introduce a never before seen mechanic to the game. Plus, it was early game content, which is the best kind of expansion. Then the Gencon model preview happened and suddenly a whole lot more people were singing the mosquitoes praises. I’d like to say, caaaaalled it.

Now if only I called “Campaigns of Death” too…

Anyway, we know dick all about the mosquito and what we do know is very vague. It could potentially be a year 1 quarry buuut apparently it’s harder than that. Is it spidicules 2.0 then? No idea. Possibly. They’re both big gross bugs. The Mountain Man expansion suggests it’s Antelope-tier, but more on that at a later date… right now we know that it’s “node 2” which is a new system that is nebulously defined outside of the extreme ends of the spectrum and only marginally useful for speculation.

What we do know is that it’s introducing encounter monsters to the game. This mosquito has a giant swollen ovipositor and with that comes hideous pupa babies that turn people into faceless husks of their former selves. You might meet either of these fine fellows on the way to fight the mosquito, or maybe even on the way to fight anything. Either way, it’s like a pre-showdown showdown with it’s own risks and rewards.

Honestly I was super excited about that because the hunt phase is generally the most sucky part of KDM. Flavorsome it certainly is. Engaging it definitely ain’t. Adding encounters means that the RNG-fest is broken up a bit, though hopefully the encounters are muuuuch shorter and less potentially deadly than a showdown. There’s also the risk that they become stale quickly, as the AI is unlikely to reach the level of actual monsters (if they even have complex AI at all).

All that said, I think the stock of this monster has gone down a bit due to new reveals. Several other expansions have encounter monsters, so the uniqueness of the mosquito has diminished. It may be good in that you can have variety in your encounters rather than all mosquito pupa or all bone eaters or whatever… it will live and die by the wider encounter system and whatever the heck the mosquito contributes itself.

I love it but it’s definitely a “wait and see” still.

THE FROGDOG

Jeez this thing is ugly… meet Gorm 2.0.

There is very little that isn’t exciting about that, really. Except that the Frogdog is attempting to out-gorm the gorm in the “model that is hard to explain to your friends” department. A horrifying face. An enormous pair of tits. Six vaginas with faces. All whilst sitting on a giant pile of puppies, or “dogpoles”. The only thing it’s missing is a butthole between the mottled cheeks it has on full display. It has none of the elegant mix of horror, sexuality and majesty you might find in the Lion God or Gryphon… it’s just a big gross mess of a creature.

And where the Gorm had piss and vomit as it’s core mechanics, the Frogdog rounds out the mix with farts. Yes farts. Just look at this:

That’s the card back for the fart deck. The fart deck. Mercifully abbreviated to FRT, it’s a whole deck used to determine what kind of flatulent mayhem the Frogdog has decided to indulge in that showdown. They come from the “heinous origin” which likely means this is another monster where you may want to think twice before going for the blind spot.

Earlier information suggested that it can fart a sort of magnetic bubble that chases survivors, that it hops on it’s prey to attack and that it has a long tongue that can induce paralysis. Lots of potential AI cards between these elements, but as it’s a lantern year 1 quarry I wouldn’t expect it to be terribly complicated to put down straight away.

Less juvenile is the progression system for the frogdog. It has two full armor sets, one craftable early and one made much later. Two-tiered content offers incentive to fight higher level Frogdogs and farm them beyond the early game “one set and done” they might otherwise have been subject to. This strikes me as a much more fleshed out take on the regeneration suit and how it impacted the Gorm gear. More choice is always good, and considering this thing may have to pull double duty as a complete replacement for the White Lion it’s good that it seems to be shaping up to have long-running relevance.

Kingdom death has a lot of blue humor, and I enjoy the fusion of desperate horror with the frequently whimsical (at times downright silly) creatures and events. They get laugh out of my table. I especially love the constant reminder that your survivors are, despite their slow advancements, a society of naive children that constantly do idiotic things and would be totally out of their depth in the darkness if not for their will to go on. I am keen to see how the Frogdog will fit into this because I feel like it turns the dial way too hard towards “weird in a stupid way”. Being a year 1 quarry means that this thing may be some peoples first KDM experience.

Also, Poots says that domesticating a dogpole is “foolish” but so is running inside a giant mouth or eating a live bug that wants to burrow through your skull and the survivors are allowed to do that. So like, we better damn be able to domesticate those dogpoles, consequences be damned!

THE NIGHTMARE RAM

Wrapping up today we have a controversial expansion that really proves that Poots vow of long silences is the right way to go. This one is a dungeon crawl, except that it wasn’t. But it really was. Let’s break it down.

The Kickstarter blurb said this was going to be a modular dungeon crawl in a garden cave full of weird flora, traps and “boiling water bugs”. What’s a boiling water bug you ask?

People were excited because this was new ground for the game, and this expansion had a pre-existing resin model that had had more than whispers about receiving content in the future. I was definitely loving the idea of trekking through the garden with it’s own hazards stacked with the Ram’s own violent tendencies to make for a very memorable showdown.

Then Poots said in a Gencon interview that the ram was now fought on a stepped platform, which it would try to punt your survivors off of. No longer was there a crawl component. People lost their minds.

Poots was telling the truth though, but in the off the cuff interview he hadn’t selected his words as carefully as he might do in his kickstarter updates. The crawl wasn’t removed, but the Nightmare Ram was removed from it. It now has it’s own separate boss room because the mechanics of the fight and the dungeon were not meshing super well together. This makes sense when you look at the mock ups of the rooms. In places the garden corridors shrink to a single square wide. The largest room we saw in a much earlier iteration of the fight was still minuscule compared to the showdown board that monsters usually zoom around. A whole encounter in there may work but for a creature like the ram, that seems as mobile and spry as it’s other ungulate pals, the claustrophobic confines fall a bit flat. Also, glimpses of the Silver City expansion tease that the “monster in a dungeon” concept may have migrated deeper underground…

I think this expansion is a good one to cap off today’s look into things as it stresses the importance of managing expectations. Poots does not have a single qualm about changing things he feels do not work. He did it a lot for the first set of expansions and he’s all but guaranteed to be doing it again. The initial pitches on the kickstarter page were a boatload of hype but frequently had very little substance. It’s hard to buy into that when precedent shows it may end up being very different to what you felt you paid for.

But Kickstarter is not a store. Some companies may treat it like a glorified pre-order system, but Poots does not. He pitched and got money for his project and now he’s completing said project. To begrudge him for not delivering exactly what was pitched, especially when it might have comprised only a few sentences of context under a few more of fluff, is disingenuous to the development process. Poots will replace things that you think sound good with different things. What he won’t do is replace things that actually are good with different things. Whether the next iteration is enough of an improvement on the last (or whether it will be riddled with avoidable typos) is the questionable part, but the man wants his game to work out first and foremost.

Back to the Ram. I think it’s cool, I love the model and it’s luscious rump. I’m interested to see the final form it takes and how they’re going to pull off the mechanics they settled on since all that’s been said so far has been fluff.

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So! There you have it. Five expansions covered. Only… like… about thirteen more to go? Stay tuned for part 2.