Last time we climbed to the top (bottom?) of the Inverted Mountain. It’s time for things to get more terrestrial. We’re going down to the Abyssal Woods today, and then even further into the bowels of the kingdom death world.

… it probably has actual bowels, doesn’t it? Someone ask Poots at Gencon.

Anyway, today’s theme is “Fixers” which is a really crap term that I swear will improve by the end of the post. These are the expansions that take something from the current KDM releases and go some way to correct the issues that they have. The ones selected for this treatment and the likely reasons why are:

• The Spidicules: Rules as written it breaks settlement progression and it’s gear progression is genuinely awful.
• The Flower Knight: The showdown is a bit easy and the rewards it offers are either stupidly, brokenly good or completely terrible.
• The Lion God: Too hard, too little, too late.

Now, thematically, the Spidicules and Flower Knight were always from the Abyssal Woods. So, it may just be a coincidence that they also have some crappy elements that aren’t as prevalent with the other expansions. Regardless, the Abyssal Woods is set to be sprucing them up in one way or another.

Let’s get stuck into it.

THE ABYSSAL WOODS

Back in the kickstarter, there was a weird feathery monster thing at the end of the page video that, for weeks, went unexplained. Turned out Poots was saving that information for a grand finale as the Abyssal Woods, of which that monster is the centerpiece, was the largest expansion to date.

It’s huge, and I don’t even know where to begin with it. It combines with only two other expansions to produce a completely new timeline. The Mountain Man needed seven! Granted, the Abyssal Woods is way more expensive than the average amount KDM expects you to throw down but holy moly. Let’s just count the monsters:

1. Dragon Goblin
2. Human form of the Dragon Goblin
3. Flower Witch
4. 5 Disciples of the Flower Witch
5. Spiral Knight
6. Luna Encounter Monster
7. 3 Lotus Encounter Monsters

That’s about the equivalent of 3 or 4 large expansions, all rolled into one, and with a price tag to match. Where to begin…

Lets start with something obvious. The Dragon Goblin is the Dragon King. He’s got a human form that’s likely to fill a similar nemesis role in People of the Bloom to his counterpart in People of the Stars. His enormous masked monster form is both a super powerful end boss for the campaign (and interestingly, just in general if you want to toss it in) and a midgame regular quarry you can drop in to any campaign on it’s own. Is that worth getting the Abyssal Woods for? Of course not. It costs half as much as the entire base game. Though potentially that’s $200 well spent if the other encounters can also be used on their own like this.

I mentioned “People of the Bloom” as if you should know of it already, but honestly, no one would blame you if you didn’t. It was utterly forgettable. Bloom is a variant campaign that comes with the Flower Knight expansion. Do you like being unable to use the good part of your expansion with no appreciable benefit? No? Neither do most people, and that is really all it offers. The perks it gives to survivors are possibly slightly fun for some wacky builds but it was just poorly conceived on the whole. It’s not broken, just boring. What is interesting though is the flavor of the survivors worshiping a Flower Knight, and thus being unable to hunt it. The Abyssal Woods is a remix of this concept, which raises some questions about how the campaign will be structured.

You absolutely need the Flower Knight and the Spidicules to use the Abyssal Woods and play the totally overhauled People of the Bloom. It is also slated to have connections with the Dung Beetle Knight and the Honeycomb Weaver, which both have some level of thematic connection to the Woods. Those two aren’t necessities though.

So how would the timeline look? This was relatively easy to infer for the Inverted Mountain but here… it’s a bit of a stumper. First of all, there is no obvious White Lion equivalent. You don’t have to have played much KDM to know how important the first quarry is. Spidicules is going to be the Antelope, as it already fits there. Now, where is our Phoenix? It’s probably not the Dragon Goblin although it’s power level is stated to be equivalent. But then again, it’s not the object of worship here, so there may be no issue with hunting it as there is with the Dragon King. What about the Flower Knight? Probably shouldn’t be hunting it but if that’s the case why does it have some swanky new armor sets? There is a way to trade resources for the flowers the Knight usually provides in the current People of the Bloom, so maybe that mechanic is receiving an overhaul.

It’s a puzzler, but looking into the armor sets gives us some clarity as to what is going to be dropping our crafting materials. The Flower Knight’s owl-like visage, elegant plates and floral affinity is very prevalent in the tellingly named Bloom Armor. Another set seems to be a conglomerate of obvious Spidicules parts (the huge spindly hands on the gown are a dead giveaway) with the strange living clothing of the Witch and her Disciples (who are confirmed as a nemesis’s… damn this didn’t get clearer at all). The Dragon Goblin get’s it’s own funny-looking clothes but as it’s confirmed to work on it’s own that doesn’t indicate much. I really hope they rework the Silk Armor from Spidicules so that crafting a full set is possible before the benefit of doing so is completely overshadowed, but I think the Abyssal Woods is not going to be the expansion that does that. More on that later…

The Flower Knight is not a hard fight, and it’s new armor set is not quite as grandiose as the spider/witch hybrid, so it may actually end up standing in for the White Lion despite currently being tuned to appear much later. Poots did say that he would be increasing it’s difficulty with some brutal new AI cards but they’re likely to be legendary additions that won’t affect the Lvl1 showdown. There’s still the chance that it cannot be fought in which case the campaign may just start on the Lion. “The Forest Wants What it Wants” suggests the edge of woods is not far from the grassy plains where the lions roam (gosh, how disappointing would that be though). The Disciples are a nemesis as is their Master, and the Spiral Knight and the Human Dragon Goblin round out a larger than average list of nemesis encounters. Just throwing it all together at face value, we have a slightly smaller pot of showdowns than the Mountain offers but one mostly equivocal to the base game set.

Things get muddier again though when we look at the Spiral Knight. It is a nemesis *and* a quarry. It seems like it’ll be playing the role of nemesis in People of the Bloom and otherwise usable as a standalone quarry outside of it. This has some precedent in that the Sunstalker and Dragon King exist more-or-less as nemesis encounters in their own campaigns, though the Spiral Knight is more of a “Kingsman” than a “Watcher”. There’s already a lot of competition in that slot so it could just as easily be one of the missing quarries and serve as a standalone nemesis for custom campaigns.

Now lets add some tar into the mud to make things even more densely speculative. As mentioned before, the abyssal woods touts integration of the Dung Beetle Knight and the Honeycomb Weaver expansions (skip a few paragraphs down if you’re unsure about this one). Suddenly we have a fitting first quarry in the Titan Bee and a more obvious Phoenix tier creature in the Weaver. The Titan Bee wasn’t even conceived as the year 1 quarry it is now at the time of the kickstarter, so the initial idea for how the campaign would play out could not have relied on it as an option. Plus it’s not a necessity anyway. The tantalizing mystery of the first hunt still remains up in the air.

Dung Beetle Knight is less of a head spin. Mid game progression into the DBK for the sweet spot of 4 quarry “tiers” fleshes the Woods out to the same level as the Inverted Mountain timeline, albeit with a reliance on first wave content you may have already played. People already use him for this.

I’d be surprised if there wasn’t inbuilt flexibility with putting these pair in without rocking the boat too much (like putting nemesis expansions in PotSun). A couple of new crafting options maybe. New calcified items also seem pretty easy to include without threatening the level of forced integration I bitched about last time.

The encounter monsters are interesting here… well, the 3 Lotus monsters are whatever. They’re what we’ve been told encounters look like. A handful of little dudes. But there is only one Luna monster listed. Is it the king mook for the Lotuses and they’re all fought together? Or can an encounter involve just a single enemy? If it’s the latter I am very intrigued, because it suggests a level of AI competence far greater than I’d expect from something sitting somewhere between the in-showdown minions some monsters have and the monsters themselves.

It could also just be a typo as it gets pluralized later in the announcement… goddamn it Poots! Why ya gotta be the way you is.

I haven’t even begun to cover the potential that is having 5 separate Disciples as one encounter. The Red Witches may end up setting a design precedent for this one to pick up and run with. The disciples also have a mini campaign where you play as them. Hmmmm. Very familiar. And veeery welcome.

The Abyssal Woods is way less of an investment baseline than the Inverted Mountain, but I find it to be less interesting for it. IM is going to be more cohesively designed due to the necessity of all it’s components, whereas I feel that Abyssal will feel comparatively lacking without DBK and the Weaver beefing it up a bit. Add those and the price tags for these full new campaigns become a lot closer, though the Abyssal Woods still wins the value war if you’re looking for a brand new campaign.

Let’s talk about something a bit easier to quantify…

THE HONEYCOMB WEAVER

This was once set to be a great value expansion, offering an early game variant of the titular monster as well as a full power variant around the Phoenix’s difficulty level. Think the Frogdog. Then, due to Poot’s intense affinity for Scope-creep, it’s now two totally separate monsters rolled into one pack. Making it a great, GREAT value expansion instead. Forget the Frogdog. This very well may be the new king of the “Buy this one first” recommendations down the line.

First we have the Titan Bee. Originally just little bearded bee buddies for the Weaver, Poots decided to make this a giant year one monster instead. It kinda looks a lot like the Gorm, just less overtly horrifying and sexual… though we have not seen if it has a, uh… “stinger” yet. Considering this news was conveyed more or less as an over-excited first time announcement with no further context provided, we can set aside the bee for now and talk about the Weaver.

The format of the expansion doesn’t seem to have changed much despite the brand new monster. The Weaver was initially intended to be a year one fight, or at least, one of them was. It comes with two sculpts representing different levels of the species’ maturity. They are now both set to be involved in the later encounter, though how exactly this will go down is totally up in the air. The big ol’ bee has upset what was once a relatively straightforward expansion outline.

As far as AI goes, we can expect the Weaver to be taking advantage of it’s many long appendages to bludgeon survivors. A bit less pugilistic is the lifecycle the Weavers perpetuate. They seal up bloated corpses and arrange them in a comb to produce a vile honey that nurtures the eggs of the Nightmare Bees. Apparently this is quite an explosive process, so there should be some cool terrain interactions to consider on the hunt. The little bees themselves are a deadly force, so be constantly on the move turn-to-turn to ensure you keep their stingers at arms length.

The armor sets are amazing too. Bee-barians and fancy knights that evoke the Weavers gravid form, complete with garish codpieces. I’ll let them speak for themselves…

And that’s basically it. The expansions’ other party trick of integrating the the Abyssal Woods has already been covered so in a final analysis we’re left with very little that seems like it could go wrong here. Solid, solid expansion. I’m excited.

THE SILVER CITY

Speaking of solid expansions, the Lion God was not one of them. Go refresh yourself on part 1 if you need to, I already talked a bit about it there. I’m fine to wait. I’m not going anywhere.

Up to speed? Good. Now throw all that in the bin because the Silver City is overhauling it completely.

It’s probably best to think of this as a half-campaign replacement. The early years are spent as you would usually. Hanging out on the plane of faces. Hunting whatever quarries you picked. Drawing Glossolalia 3 times in a row and googling the odds of that happening.

Then bam, the teen years begin and so comes rumblings from the the deep. The Lion God and his vaunted city wait for you under the surface. Rather than the exploration being a single story event with cascading random tables, as it currently is, this expansion turns it into a fully fledged dungeon crawl. You have the option to eschew a hunt to instead spelunk into the bowels of the Silver City. We already know there’s some wondrous, and extremely deadly, treasure to be found down there. It could be worth your while, and whether you like it or not, the Lion God is coming for you.

The City is promising a lot of stuff. Firstly, the dungeon crawl concept proposed for the Nightmare Ram survives in it’s entirety here, including a monster within the maze. This fellow is the “Lost Knight”, and the KDM team is working in the opposite direction to the Ram by trying to get the completed Knight into the dungeon rather than developing him in there from the start and eventually deciding against it. The Silver City looks to be far more spacious than the mountain garden, so I imagine this will be less likely to fold as a concept.

Other than that, there are three different enemy types that stalk the corridors and rooms. Creepy jellyfish. Madmen clad in the skin of said jellyfish. Clawed octopuses. It’s all vaguely aquatic. The only real information we have about what they do comes from preview images of the test components. Whatever it may be, they certainly seem to do it in great numbers…

Said images also showed a few decks that determine what happens within the dungeon itself. There’s a room deck, so it’s easy to deduce that things will work similarly to several popular dungeon crawl board games. Draw a card, place random tiles down as you explore further and further, roll for the haunt… ok probably not that derivative. There’s 12 tiles listed, and the showdown board itself doesn’t seem to be involved at all. There’s also a minion deck, which ought to just be determining what is coming to feast on your flesh and which nook it’s crawling out of. Finally, we see a “danger” deck. Just a guess, but you probably won’t like drawing from the “danger” deck.

But what about the LG? Well, he’s now going to be the final boss. Or potentially just *a* final boss depending on how well this integrates with other endgame expansions. Considering his relative difficulty this is probably going to work out a lot better than the baseline quarry hunt he was before. The rewards would be easy to integrate into the campaign material as they barely had anything to do with LG directly, with one notable exception that I will not spoil.

Speaking of rewards, there’s two new armor sets here. The silver relic set seems to just be composed from loot you’ll receive from successful treks into the city. More interesting is the “Lion God Guardian” set. It bears more than just a passing resemblance to the Lion God itself. How you’ll acquire this has not been teased, though it may just be the next tier of rewards from whatever the Lvl2 and Lvl3 dungeon equivalents are. It could also be related to the new story progression. Survivors do seem to love worshiping huge monsters that invariably want to kill them, so why not express that piety by dressing up like one!

Well, that’s about it for the “fixer” expansions (I lied it didn’t get better). Some very interesting things here to process, so I’d be keen to hear feedback about what you think concerning the increased focus on campaign-spanning experiences.

See you all ne… wait.

Oh.

Oh yeah there’s one more “fixer” expansion we should talk about… though it wasn’t always that way…

Behold!

THE CAMPAIGNS OF DEATH

I’m gonna level with you, at the initial pitch of this I did not care in the slightest about Campaigns of Death. You need every single initial expansion to make it work, and I did not have that. I still don’t have that (soz Lonely Tree). I thought that eventually some pirate would just make a PDF of it that I could take a glance at and say “Eh, neat” before promptly forgetting about it forever because I was never going to buy it.

Well, no mincing words here. I was very fucking wrong.

Lets talk about scope creep first, because it’s relevant, and it’s the reason you’ll be getting your expansions in 2023. It refers to the phenomenon when a projects scope keeps on creeping further and further above the initial draft, potentially making it better but also delaying it indefinitely due to the additional time it takes to finish the additional things. Go figure.

Poots is obviously a passionate guy. Not so much a perfectionist as a super focused fine-tuning machine. He’s said a few times that he’s personally working on Advanced Kingdom Death and that it’s been a very iterative process. Hell, all the new content has been; they’ve tried many many versions of the showdown rules for everything revealed so far and you can bet that even though he’s not directly involved in the development of much of them, Poot’s definitely keeps an eye on it. Once he feels it’s finally at the finish line he’ll drop it and go straight into the next thing. Of course, the state of some of the initial rules and expansions shows he’s not always the best judge of when something is “done” but you have to hand it to the guy, there’s been way more hits than misses, and the whole point of 1.5 was to take another pass at the core game.

Poots is also kinda loony and prone to fits of excitement. See exhibit A:

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHSJKHFKDSHFdsofs;oj;fdsof paid gp’oi gsp[dm gp sd[mi sm sIf psim p[ofim psoif [psdim f[pmi fei fpdSIM fpdsmpi i fo]dsmi mf opmd

That’s a direct quote from the Kickstarter.

Look at what happened with the Titan Bee. He loves dat bee. Dat bee is now responsible for a full expansions worth of development time added to the Honeycomb Weaver. It’s nearly doubled in size. All because he loves dat bee. I don’t know if the Spiral Knight was also scope creeped into the Abyssal Woods for real or if the way Poots announced it was merely well placed hype… but it certainly seemed like he threw it in there on a mad whim. There’s even some promo material affected. Certain pinups, and the Satan twins, were just casually remastered with the old and new sets offered together despite all the people who bought them having already paid and being perfectly fine with the initial offering. It’s mental.

And who from the first kickstarter could forget the prices for the expansion add ons?! Half the reason Poots is allowed to break common kickstarter courtesy and get away with it is because he somehow delivered an extremely top notch product after shooting himself in the foot with every single expansion someone added to their pledge back then. Seriously, it’s actually inspiring. And probably just inexperience rather than actual creep. Poots now clearly understands that bigger = more money.

Anyway, Campaigns of Death was initially a book with a single new nemesis fight thrown in. Said nemesis had absolutely no details beyond it’s name, “ancient butcher”. Even it’s base size hadn’t been determined. The book offered 3 new 30 year campaigns, some mini campaigns, a few cards of every kind to help glue these together, and some instructions/advice on how to balance the expansions to make your own campaigns. Cool, but the steep entry meant that this was icing for a cake most people had not baked. For 90% of us the $40 was better spent on a real expansion.

All that still exists, but now it also comes with new content for every single one of the first expansions. Every single one. Errata. Reworked and revamped AI and hit locations. Better integration with core and upcoming campaigns. Crossover elements. New items. New innovations. New everything. For 12 whole expansions. This is the real “Fixer” and then some. The collective rulebooks have even been added into a sexy new hardcover like the base game now has. No more oily fingermarks!

Of course, all this more than tripled the price tag. Ouch. But if you were one of the lucky few who already had it in your pledge, that $40 just became this kickstarter’s version of the first’s $30 Dragon King. If there is any indication that scope creep is a very real issue for Poots, this is clearly it. Of course, if he pulls it off…

Another concern though is what this means for the expansions people already own. This is now some of the most expensive expansion content soon to be available. The improvements it makes are likely to be very desirable and relevant for the 90% that didn’t care now too. Before they’d have been apathetic, like me when it was $40, and loathe to want to shell out for everything now when only a fraction of it applies, and the wider product is useless.

I don’t know if I like this. On one hand, it’s absolutely huge. It’s not merely a fix for the expansions, but a full expansion expansion for all of them. The value is really good when you consider that. It’s a product with extensive development time. You can’t just bundle these up into an errata PDF to throw up on the website.

But, I really hope for parts of it Poots does exactly that. The expansions are fine as they are for the most part, and the few game breaking typos are pretty easy to pick up on and amend yourself, but its not much effort to at least take that aspect out of the Campaigns of Death and just give it to everyone. It’s a way to dodge how cumbersome this is. The logistics of getting a scant and variable handful of errata’d cards to fans all around the world would be more trouble than it was worth I’m sure, and I would be extremely surprised if that is an option that ever becomes available. At best, it’d be a single paid pack with everything. I’d prefer he just put the fixes up on the web so people can at least know about the actually-just-shitty parts of their purchases, and if they really want to upgrade what they have to version 2, then they’ll have that choice as well.

Also of note, the campaigns promise “exciting new typos”, so maybe this will be a endless poo oroboros that will just trade issues for issues. Or maybe we’ll just get more secret farting arts. Or maybe I’ll get hired as an editor. A man can dream.

————————————————————-

Anyway. Now we are actually done. There’s only one super big game changing overhaul left to cover. I’ll be rolling the dice on that one next time.

Ciao for now!