We are on the last leg, and just in time too. Poots is about to drop…

DA BIG ONE

He’s already uncharacteristically answered a bunch of kickstarter comments. I am already right and wrong about a few things. I can’t wait to see where this goes, and I’ll do a lil summary of that content as a pre-gencon part 5.5 or whatever.

Speaking of Gencon, I better hurry up and finish this series. No fun in predicting things that are already confirmed.

First, we’re on to the very last full expansion, and it’s set to be a doozy…

THE IVORY DRAGON

Satan is a KDM entity that, over the course of these updates, has gone from being one of the most out-there pinup concepts to something I really enjoy. They’re an ancient divided shape-shifter that manifests as beautiful twin lovers. Their lore, along with their frankly perverse choice of “clothing”, makes it pretty clear that they are quite sadistic and spread chaos wherever they go.

There’s some new stuff that either makes that waaaay more interesting, or switches it up a bit. My money is on the former, but I’ll elaborate later.

First lets talk about the hyped up initial showing. Poots apparently had not expected to hit $6666666 in funding and had half-conceived the Ivory Dragon as a goal for that level. With the benefit of hindsight that lofty goal seems pretty quaint, but if I’m honest I have no idea what a third kick-starter would bring in were Poots to do it in a few years.

Anyway, the Ivory Dragon is one of Satan’s forms. It’s true form, to be precise, and what a form it is. Taking some inspiration from artworks like Saturn Devouring His Son and a fusion of medieval and modern depictions of the devil, the Dragon appears to be a handsome and many-limbed alabaster demon astride, or potentially fused to, a grimly sexualised beast. It’s an odd looking thing, and it’s ridiculously, stupidly huge. With the Goblin Dragon already bulking out on the Dragon King, the Ivory Dragon appears to be set to dwarf them both from the initial sculpting progress reveal. How the hell I’m going to take this to games night, I do not know, but thankfully that may only be a problem I need to solve once.

This is because the Ivory Dragon is the final boss of Kingdom Death. Period. Although the Goblin Dragon can be used to extend the timeline beyond the Gold Smoke Knight , the Ivory Dragon is explicitly only for this purpose. Five more years are granted once you put down the GSK before this gargantuan terror appears to cap off the campaign in circumstances that one can probably guess from the simple fact that this is SATAN you are fighting.

At first I found this concept a bit at odds with what KDM presents. You fight some powerful entities, sure, but they’re really only powerful from the perspective of the survivors, and smaller fish on the wider scale. Some, like the Hand, are so powerful that it’s arguable that you fight them at all. Here, you’ll be fighting Satan. How? How could the survivors do that? This was about as weird to me as the Survivors tackling the Scribe, who is basically their ambivalent and unknowable god. But the name “Satan” carries connotations that may not necessarily be the case in the world of Kingdom Death, there’s no real evidence that it has any real form of divinity like the Scribe or the Golden Entity, and by the time they fight him/her/them the survivors will have already clad themselves in armor and weapons fashioned from a legendary entity.

Lets talk about that quickly. As this is content for after Gold Smoke Knight, the survivors get to peel him apart and make some sweet kit out of him. This is not specific to the Ivory Dragon; you’re able to do this in the extended Goblin Dragon timeline as well, and presumably anything else in future that creates content beyond ol’ smokey also qualifies.

But what’s this? Two other armor sets are coming with the expansion?

One is pretty easy to explain. It’s a hybrid between Lantern Armor and Gate Guardian Armor, the latter presumably coming from a second monster in the expansion appropriately called… The Gate Gurdian (goddamn it Poots!). If I had to guess I’d say this was some form of Quarry-like fight to slot in for the 4 years between Satan and GSK that’ll provide a quick and simple power boost to meet whatever bullshit Satan is going to throw into the mix. It could also be more akin to the limited sets approach that the Black Knight nemesis is going to use, considering the short period of time you’ll have to fight it.

Then there’s the third set. It’s Ivory Dragon Armour… what? How? How the heck is there a set for a monster that caps off a campaign? How the hell do you build it? What do you use it for? I’m thinking that Satan may not necessarily just close the campaign, and these sets may be used for the post-game infinite hunts, but honestly this is a stumper. I’m keen to know more about how this fits in…

Satan may be the grand finale, but the expansion also seems capable of affecting your campaign from the very beginning. I mentioned there was something that might switch up Satan’s lore a bit, and that’s that it hasn’t just divided itself up into the classic tongue-clad twins. It’s done it a lot, and some of the time, the resulting twin entities don’t know their dark origin. These are the Satan Starting Survivors. Now, if it was just “survivors” I would chalk this up to an event page in the expansion rules for a pair of wacky new pop points and tally my day on the speculation fields. But these are explicitly “starting survivors”. Although amnesiac to their true nature, I doubt that a campaign that opts to have these guys wake up to the White Lion with the rest of the Ink-Eye Gang will have that remain the case for long…

Very Intriguing.

Now, normally, I’d be ready to dismiss this expansion as doomed. The Lion God showed that late game expansions have some issues in implementation for the average group, and this is like, the hyper-mega-ridiculoso end game expansion that takes a back seat until you completely finish the core game. But, we’ll soon be living in a world that has the First Hero expansion. Suddenly your 35 year campaign is a much more palatable 13. With that fast-track option available, and the hints towards broader interactions with your campaign at large, this still won’t be for everybody… but at least it’s for quite a few somebody’s now.

Also, to end on a downer (this is Kingdom Death we’re talking about here) this was originally slated to be potentially “wave 5” content in that it would be coming so late that it might not make it along with the wave 4 stuff. I’d imagine there’s been enough delays that pretty much all of wave 4 is going to be releasing later than the projected time frame of wave 5 anyway, so hopefully Satan is along for the ride. That’s hardly uplifting news though.

DEATH ARMOR

And here’s the last true expansion, that actually has less content in it than some of the “non-expansions” that are going to be preceding it.

It’s impossible to talk about this without mentioning Green Armor. Mostly, because sweet fuck all has actually been said about the Death Armor. But also because they are clearly cut from the same cloth, conceptually.

Green Armor was a mini-expansion that involved the creation of a suit of spectacular armor, and a sword and a shield that were near game-breakingly amazing. It used bits and pieces from nearly every expansion, so it was really a little bonus to tie together those purchases for people that had gone all in. Those requirements, though, were basically impossible to actually fulfill without an intense level of game knowledge, pre-planning and some amount of luck… so for the most part Green Armor was considered to be a bit of a damp squib. Now, some pieces of it are much easier to make than others, and even one or two is a welcome addition to your survivors arsenal even though the armor is ostensibly designed to work as a cohesive whole. So, it wasn’t all bad if you didn’t dedicate the required brain power to figure it out (or read a guide from someone who had already done the work for you).

Death Armour is the new Green Armor and promises a much simpler premise. Rather than being an amalgamate of all the hardest to obtain bits from the first expansions, the armor needs bones. Lots of bones. How many exactly? “Pretty much all (of them)” says Poots.

Okayyyy… that’s… potentially just as bad, if not worse, than the Green Knight armor requirements, but for a distinctly different reason. If this truly needs all your bones, plus some specific “bones from only the greatest monsters bones” (godDAMN it Poots!!), there’s a fair chance that it’s going to warp the heck out of your campaign progression. Bones are important, though potentially less so as the game goes on, and needing to hit specific milestones as well as dedicate a full third of your resources to crafting this armor does threaten to be a bit of a campaign ruining experience. Sitting on hundreds of bones you can’t use until you get to late game… not fun. Green Knight armor was hard to make but it did not impact your acquisition of general resources. Now, this may just be doomsaying, but I feel like if this is implemented wrong then it could just end up being more of the same insofar as providing a challenge no one will want to care about. Ideally though, the investment of bones will pay off in the form of a sweet new gear card every few years that’ll be strong enough on it’s own to feel worthwhile.

Plus, the armor looks pretty cool. There’s concept art for numerous weapons, so there may actually be a bit more flexibility in how you go about crafting the armor and the benefits it gives. Or maybe Poots just hadn’t decided on what would be the Griswaldo/Fetosaurus combo this time over.

I guess we’ll know soon enough.

PATHFINDERS OF DEATH

Welcome to the promo content! This ranges from singular crossover models with like, maybe one or two cards worth of game content all the way to stuff like the Pathfinders of Death, which has some cool, if reserved, game play impacts.

If you don’t know what Pathfinder is… well, it’s Dungeons and Dragons, but made by a different company. No real need to be more specific than that.

This expansion takes some characters from that and slots them into the world of Death. There’s some small RPG elements that are coming along for the ride with them, including class based story events that replace “age” that allow them to “level up” in a more traditional fashion. It seems like this can be shared with other members of the settlement to allow a wider use of these mechanics beyond the initial 4 characters.

Adding this in makes your monsters a bit more trouble to balance things out. So far this seems to only be the base game nemesis monsters, but it is more gameplay content than many of the other promos and crossovers.

It doesn’t beat the next one though…

SUPER SURVIVORS

If you didn’t know, Poots loves Dragonball. His first act after the closure of the kickstarter was to post the following video and take a short break to play Final Fantasy 15.

Yep.

The super survivors are Poot’s love letter to DBZ. A Savior is having a nightmare and it’s up to your survivors to enter their dream to calm them down!

Said dream is ripped straight from the Cell-saga, but with a bit more of a dung-beetly-bug foe than you might remember from the before-school cartoon block. There’s a lot more Super Saiyan forms on display than what there was at that point in the manga/anime, though I’d chalk that up more to wanting some visual variety in the sculpts than expecting it to have a game play related impact.

I freakin’ love this, because I know that Poots freakin’ loves this and ergo, it’s going to have a disproportionate amount of effort put into making it. It’s a ridiculous concept that just barely fits into the universe without scratching the sides too much, and within it anything goes. It’s just a dream, so who cares if the survivors are going to scream to power up their survival and unleash Kamehamehas? Heck, the Red Savior mechanic is basically Goku’s Kaioken technique already.

This is a full nemesis showdown, with a completely new AI and HL deck for the “Perfect Dung Beetle”. This actually got clarified recently which kinda baffled me because it seemed pretty obvious in the initial pitch. Maybe some people who bought it don’t know anything about DBZ? “Perfect Dung Beetle” is a joke people, he’s just Perfect Cell. And like all the best parodies it’s coming from a fan who cares enough to not half ass this.

I’m expecting this to be a great showdown that’s chock full of references but relatively rewards light. Which is fine, this isn’t meant to be a full expansion even though it almost qualifies as one from the amount of content alone. It’s going to upgrade your saviors and there’s some DBZ related gear art teased. Beyond that I think the reason to pick this one up is if you’re a fan of the source material, or if you enjoy some of the sillier side to KDM and want to have ridiculous one-off showdown.

This has my vote for the best promo content. We’re not done yet though.

WANDERERS

The littlest promo content that could. These guys are vaguely defined elements of the Advanced Kingdom Death book. But we love vaguely defined stuff here!

Essentially, these are all various characters that could “wander” into your settlement. They’ll have some specific story events concerning them and are apparently a powerful enough addition that you’ll be limited in the amount you can put in a campaign.

Each of them was pitched with the same rough outline of content. The model and sculpted base, of course. Then also a small book with the story elements, a few gear cards to represent the characters stuff, a philosophy for AKDM and a secret fighting art.

Aaaaaaand that’s all we know. These promos are small, and were ill defined as a pitch and remain so.

I am a big fan of Hyperlight Drifter and was glad to see it represented, but I still didn’t buy him. I don’t think these guys represent a boatload of value, especially compared to the other promos, and ESPECIALLY compared to any of the expansions. Without any real idea about how valuable the philosophies are going to be, it’s a tough call to think that buying these for game related content was the right move…

Spend your money on the actual Hyperlight Drifter instead. Seriously. Great game, go play it!

FALSE MESSENGERS

They’re back! The cool pop-culture references with half-baked content. These are veterans from the first kickstarter, and woah, were they underwhelmingly stapled on to the side of the game. You can still read their rules on the KD website.

This is a shame because the models and references are awesome. We have some Berserk, Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda and Gurren Lagaan all KD-ified and that’s pretty damn awesome. Many people want these for the models alone.

Which, if I’m honest, is the only reason to want them, because we know even less about them than the nearly nothing we knew about the wanderers. I’ve even heard that they’re going to be wanderers, though I can’t find anything to substantiate that right now. I may just be blind. Either way, whatever reworked game play these guys are going to offer is a mystery, and not a particularly intriguing one because they’re SIXTY DOLLARS WHAAAAAT!!?

If you have $60, buy Dung Beetle Knight. Or Slenderman. Or invest it and wait until we know more about whether this is worth that much.

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Well, that’s everything for now! I think. Let me know if I missed anything that’s worth talking about.

Thanks to everyone for reading. Like I said, there will be another short update in the coming days concerning Poots’ comments fiesta, followed by some more big posts after Gencon wraps up and the latest updates are released.

Thankfully, it seems like my November prediction was wrong. So, be seeing you all again soon.

TTFN