Well, it’s been a long time since I wrote anything. There’s a half finished post-gencon wrap up still sitting here. Turns out life can get very distracting. I think I might take an honest try at turning this into the generalist gaming blog it was always intended to be, but for now I’ll keep it mostly traditional.

Anyway. Poots. The dude has been relatively consistent so far, enough so that it’s easy to tell who has been paying attention and who hasn’t. Consistency, mind you, is not necessarily a good thing. You can be consistently mediocre, or even consistently atrocious. I don’t think Poots is either of those things, but he is consistent in his management of updates and development. So much so that the claim of moving to a quarterly update schedule seemed to be more platitude than promise because the precedent was so strong.

I just want to provide my thoughts on how he communicates as it seems like it’s the chief talking point between the legendary giga-updates. With the recent Frosthaven update and Kings Coin controversy having really brought out some strong reactions it seems especially relevant. Seriously though, some of you are eating each other alive… chill out!

Anyway, lets begin with a bit of context as to, potentially, why it be like it is.

THE DOWNSIDES OF FREQUENT UPDATES

Development is an iterative process. If you’re going through a ton of those iterations, it’s hard to solidly define a point to pause and release information. Sharing insight into a dev build of a game is nearly unheard of unless it is done in a highly curated way for marketing purposes, or well after release as a bit of trivia (that may or may not also be for marketing purposes).

The reason, of course, is setting expectations. You push one iteration into the public eye and then scurry back to the drawing board to keep making changes, and add or shed content as dictated by play testing, hitting core design goals, and sometimes resources/what is actually physically possible. The people who aren’t involved in that process don’t see that part though. The update becomes their gospel.

Naturally, this causes problems with “What could have been.” An idea, great on paper, may not transfer to reality in a way that maintains it’s excellence. It may even completely fall apart and represent a dead-end whereupon further iteration is so difficult that it’s better to stop entirely and start from another angle. We have already seen this with the Nightmare Ram. Some people were very upset to learn that it’s design brief had changed rather significantly from the initial showing to the later previews (though it was eventually shown that is wasn’t exactly the case). And very upset people are generally not a pleasant thing to have attached to your brand.

Unfortunately for those people, the Nightmare Ram is not the only thing that is going through changes. There’s no way every concept is going to hit the mark on the first throw. Some will, more or less, but others are going to come out quite differently; this happened with the initial kick-starter (Slaughter too many lions and the Lion God will getcha!), it happening with some wave 4 expansions and the entirety of Wave 3 (though as this was purely additive in extremis, most people were cool with it.. RIP original savage bone-eaters though…) and it’s 100% happening behind the scenes for a bunch of stuff we haven’t heard a thing about.

So how do you show that off? I would argue that you shouldn’t. I would say that the best progress to share would be only that which was 100% confirmed. Or maybe… 99% confirmed at least. 90%? Whatever, you get it. It’s simultaneously the best version the devs can manage to make and a real preview of what the audience it’s intended for can expect to arrive on their doorstep. No messy missed expectations to be had.

The other problem is that each update is a talking point. And generally, people want what they want, not what they’re given. When these intersect, it’s happy days for all. When they don’t it usually creates more resentment than would have existed had there been no update at all.

With so much content on the horizon, the chances of hitting what any particular individual wants to see in an update that is focused only on one thing is so small that it does pose a real risk of this occurring as regularly as regular updates would hypothetically arrive. The huge posts alleviate this by talking about vast swathes of game content that is chronologically relevant (ie Wave 3), 90% developed (ie Screaming God/Black Knight), or stuff already so ill-defined in the first place that all the information is producing totally fresh expectations (ie encounters).

But the biggest hurdle of all with this is… time frames. What content we want to see is one thing, but dozens and dozens of disgruntled backers want a solid due date for wave milestones and I honestly don’t think it’s something Poots even knows right now. Game development for him is beyond deadlines since he works for himself and is not beholden to a publisher’s desire to push whatever is there to market at a strategically selected time. When it’s finished, and the production of the final version is in full swing, I have no doubt that we will be updated. But that clearly hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen until Poots looks at everything and thinks “yes, this is done”.

Put together, there’s a real risk of him causing prolonged outrage the more he engages with a nebulous fan base with no end in sight. Wave 3 already has some of this stemming solely from the delivery time. That isn’t going to change until it does though, so why add to it? It damages the brand for no real gain as the kickstarter investment has already occurred, and as the store sales are focused far more on content unrelated to either kickstarter, why bother? Not to mention the mental tax attached to receiving a ton of negative feedback in the classic way it’s delivered: a frothing internet rage.

But wait! As backers we are entitled to know when our stuff will be coming! Except, we really aren’t… that’s not how kickstarter works (despite the shift to it being used as a glorified pre-order service because average people hate risking money). Like it or not, we already threw our dollars at an idea and there’s no recourse to dictate the circumstances in which that idea comes to fruition. Many of you may have already suffered through campaigns that simply did not deliver or finally came through on meager promises after years of lies. It’s unfortunately just how the system works… we didn’t become shareholders through this investment, and we either have to hope the risk is worthwhile or we shouldn’t have made it at all.

As glum as that sounds, I am still hopeful considering the scope of this kickstarter far outstrips the first, and the that one was a complete clusterfuck that delivered far after many had already gave up on it as a bad investment.

All that said…

POOTS NEEDS TO DO FREQUENT UPDATES

Ironically, I think one aspect of the controversial latest update is only a few degrees shy of the perfect solution.

Why is it perfect?

Simple. It required one artwork, and a short description. So it took no time at all to make, and it depicts something that probably won’t change between now and when we get it. No distraction from his other duties and no unrealistic expectations set.

Poots could have put out something like this once a week. Heck, even once a fortnight. Just one thing. Chop up a mega-update for the content. Make it so small that it doesn’t warrant the worst of the potential craziness some of those updates set off. So frequent that the communication issue is stymied and a sense of progression is imparted to the backers even as it continues behind the scenes as it always has. Do it consistently, and you set the expectation for what an update is. No time-frames, nothing that may come back to haunt him. Just a neat little nugget of progress once a week with no more words than what is necessary to explain what it is, delivered so consistently that people eventually don’t expect to see more.

I’m sure that the critique may then shift to the updates being “not enough” but that falls neatly into the realm of whinging because “enough” is so subjective and “more” is so risky. At the current glacial pace there’s good arguments to make that the updates we do get are so infrequent that people could easily feel like they’re being ghosted… kickstarter poison if ever there was any.

Now personally, I don’t need anything to assume that work is continuing on KDM. I don’t expect updates more frequent than once or twice a year if there’s nothing worth updating us on. But for the many who are not me, whom I do not think are wrong in any way for wanting some reassurance, this would be an easy compromise.

Of course… Poots won’t do it. Have you seen how he communicates? It’s… endearing? Certainly effective at creating hype. Very friendly. Also frequently and needlessly vague. And extremely unprofessional. Either way, it’s consistent. It’s his brand because it’s literally just him and a keyboard and as such I don’t think he can do anything but what he does. He already said he wouldn’t do weekly or monthly updates and I feel like that’s because he can no longer conceive of putting quality time into an update schedule that isn’t curated to look phenomenal and really showcase the work of his team. Habits die hard and communicating as an afterthought to the other things on his plate until those things are gone is one of his biggest habits.

Speaking of…

KINGS COINS

Holy hell am I baffled by community reactions sometimes… but to be fair, boy oh boy does Poots need to get his foot out of his mouth for things that are strictly business related. The sheer lack of anything indicating how many Kings Coins would be worth buying was just dumb. You only bought 50? Sorry bud, you needed 100 for what you wanted! Better luck next time!

I wonder if they intentionally tried to make it as far away from anything evocative of kickstarter-esque “pay now receive later” beats. But that’s honestly just what these should be. Pre-order tokens. Here’s the catalogue, pick what you want. Give money. Get at next sale. Done. Dusted. Simple and clear. No polarizing 24hr exclusivity either, though I personally didn’t think that was that bad by comparison.

The sky fell the moment these were announced for another reason as well. Many took the wording on the email (Your purchase of King’s Coins helps support the team while we eagerly await our return to HQ. Thank you so much in advance!) to be indicative of financial troubles hitting Poots and co, something a quick store update sought to dispel.

But consider this: of course they’re suffering financial troubles, despite what Adam may claim. The entire world is suffering financial troubles, in one form or another. The COVID-19 impact is being felt everywhere. It’s a tough and troubling time. The only way for anything below the major mega-businesses to economically cope is for cash to keep flowing until we all reach the other side of the tunnel and “normal” business decisions might resume.

Some people are outraged at this “cash grab”, especially considering the outstanding kickstarter. Please. There’s nothing wrong with employing an unusual method to inject some quick funds into the operation without necessarily expending any resources alongside it. This isn’t the nefarious scheme. It will allow the KD business to survive a little better for the time being and that benefits everyone as they can’t make anything if they go down. The chief criticism should be that it ought to have been done in a much clearer way.

But they have over 12 million dollars of our money already! Why not use that? Well, it’s a horrible idea for one. That money is for the kickstarter, it should be used for the kickstarter, and the moment it is used generally is the moment the slippery slope starts icing over to enable a wonderful nosedive into the dead kickstarter fulfillment zone. Using that money to recoup regular business losses is just as devastating to the logistics of delivering the project as blowing it on fancy NY hookers and scotch would be. Adam and co SHOULD NOT USE IT for any other reason than development and fulfillment, and anyone who begrudges the store and it’s continued support and new releases while we wait needs to understand this.

Anyway, back to the Kings Coins. They’re dead now. I don’t feel good about that as the idea, flawed as it is, is something that probably needed to happen to make me feel comfortable about Wave 3 and beyond. I feel the only thing that would stop progress is for it to become a fiscal impossibility. Poots managed to deliver kickstarter #1 despite horribly undervaluing it, but no money is no money and right now no money is all the rage.

THE FROSTHAVEN UPDATE

What an oddly worded endorsement. Classic Poots. I saw a lot of people making judgements on whether or not it was passive aggressive or classy or whatever. I didn’t really think it was anything but a Poots-brand half-baked keyboard vomit brought on by warranted enthusiasm. Dude just gets excited about stuff. Remember that weird Dragonball kid video post he made because he was excited?

As someone who enjoys both KDM and Gloomhaven (and backed Frosthaven), as well as a wide variety of other things, I’ve never understood the “us vs them” mentality some people expressed. Two things can be good. Something being good doesn’t devalue other things. There isn’t a finite pile of goodness that is shared and as such one thing rising above does so to the detriment of others.

Thankfully there was a lot more wholesome comments, especially in the wake of Poot’s update. I think we can all agree that it was a nice thing to do.

Anyway, that’s all for today. This was way more meandering than the other stuff I wrote but hey, maybe someone will find it interesting. There’s a high likelihood that the next thing I do will be on the forthcoming update and then I’ll move on to other games since I don’t want to write content for KDM that has any kind of spoilers in it.

Unless people have any requests?

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.

——————————————————————————-

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

Welcome back to another exciting blog post where I speculate about what’s coming and then we all have a good laugh about it when Gencon ruins it all.

I’m excited!

I’m also in a lot of pain after messing up my wrists and hip this week in a freak Segway accident. I wish I was joking. FOOSH injury and all. This whole thing was typed with hunt-and-peck. Took ages…

Anyway…

Last time I covered the Campaigns of Death. They’re slated to arrive before all the new expansions as part of wave 3, alongside the pinups, and of course…

THE GAMBLER’S CHEST

Goddamn, where to begin with this one… I probably lied when I said that the Abyssal Woods was the largest expansion but it’ll depend on what form this thing even takes come it’s inevitable public launch. It’s a grand collection of disparate elements that has everything from regular game content ranging from fighting arts to new showdowns, some remixed base gameplay options unlike anything seen before, and enough plastic to create a second pacific garbage patch when you pitch it into the sea in a fit of madness from attempting to comprehend it all.

“Disparate” is definitely the word for it though. I think I’m going to break tradition and do some subheadings to try and make some sense of all this.

Lets start with the big one…

– Advanced Kingdom Death

Probably the most exciting part of the chest, at least for me. Advanced Kingdom Death is a pretty major overhaul of several core systems. Early in your campaigns, you can opt in to using the advanced ruleset, which Poots has described as a more hefty simulation of the settlement and it’s inhabitants, and having many features he personally likes better than the systems of the regular core ruleset. It’s also gonna be in a book of it’s own; fingers crossed for a sexy hardback instead of a flimsy booklet.

(Stress on “opt in”, this isn’t a replacement for the core game, it’s a variant. Poots may have different tastes to yourself.)

The lore to this is that your survivors have eaten a creepy looking blob thing that has left intelligence enhancing “arc cells” in their brains. These have allowed them to develop a broader comprehension of their existence, and a greater capacity to assist in each others development.

The effect is that the fighting art deck disappears completely. Poof! Gone. Instead it’s replaced by a pair of new decks: Character, and Knowledge. Somewhere in there, we also have philosophies as well. No word on what’s happening with the secret fighting arts.

How does this all fit together? A good question, it’s not currently super clear. It would seem that it starts with character, then philosophy, then knowledge.

When a survivor first receives a name, they’ll pull a philosophy from the character deck. The contents of that deck seem to be based on what sort of history, events and choices have shaped the settlement. There’s many that correlate directly to obvious milestones, such as romanticism and presumably barbarism, as well as certain settlement events like the bone eaters. The philosophy itself is a randomly determined outline of that characters progression, and it’s not known if they can change it once it’s assigned.

Characters can earn “collective cognition” points from engaging in hunts against different beasts of different levels. The potential points from each quarry is exponential, so there’s a real incentive to engage in level 3 fights in order to supercharge your progression. The points will feed into the survivor’s philosophy in order to obtain various perks that are added to the knowledge deck. Once in there, the entire settlement may access them, though whether this is innate or takes an investment of endeavors to teach is unclear. One card revealed showed a reworked fighting art system that accrues it’s own points earned through engagement with said art. Earn enough points to “complete” the art and an extra bonus card will added to the knowledge deck.

There’s also hints towards survivors retiring or at least taking a break away from hunting to teach their fellows. This may be the way the knowledge deck is shared among peers, and Poots has said that it’s likely that survivors will only hunt a handful of times when compared to the base game once this option is available.

This is all pretty cool, and probably far more interactive and fulfilling than the limited survivor progression options there are at the moment. However, I cant help but think that it all involves a heck of a of of bookkeeping. If you’re not the sort to enjoy the already substantial amount that exists with the core rule set, you may find that AKDM adds a lot more of more of what you dislike. I still think KDM paperwork pales in comparison to playing a caster class in Dungeons and Dragons though.

Along with these advanced mechanics is an advanced timeline. A new quarry, the Crimson Crocodile, is being added. It’s potentially a White Lion replacement, however, as AKDM begins at a particular milestone I imagine the Lion must still exist as the first hunt at least. There appears to be some reworking of certain events and possibly even showdowns too: The Hand was teased as bearing a much deadlier agenda than his usual mostly jovial self.

Another feature is the Scouts. This seems mostly fluffy, as an explanation for why the settlements gear returns after a total party kill. There’s a fifth member in tow, walking camouflaged and lantern-less behind the hunting party, prioritizing the safe return of their valuable equipment should they fail the hunt. Apparently this won’t always be the case, as the Scout may leap to action within the showdown, although with dire consequences should they die as well. They can also be trained to range ahead and report back on what is coming, although with similarly gruesome fates awaiting depending on how much on an investment was made in training them to do so.

There’s really not much more to say about AKDM at the moment, beyond that it’s an apparent black hole for Poot’s personal development efforts, and that it’s likely to be a focus in our incoming Gencon update due to being next in the release schedule. Look forward to reading that in November.

(NOTE: I wrote all this before Poots’ comment Q&A and I thought I wouldn’t change it so we can see just how wrong or right I turned out to be with some of this. For instance, Poots has just confirmed that Crocodile is a “node 1” quarry… which honestly still puzzles me as to how it fits into the AKDM mold).

– Nemesis showdowns and Encounter Monsters

We got two new showdowns here.

The Gambler, who Kingdom Death veterans will recognize from what I suppose are now cameo appearances prior to his full introduction to the game. Kinda like GSK. The chest is named after him and the model they’re tooling has to be seen to be believed.

Atnas is the next. He’s an violent evil Santa Claus. I honestly feel like this one is more of a joke than some people tend to think and won’t have a great deal of content behind him. That said, apparently his bits must be collected prior to fighting him, so there may be some cool new timeline events to suffer first at least. I’d love a “Christmas Day” event that was actually just a jolly festive time without any violent twists on it. Save those for Atnas’ pointy candy cane spear (or whatever he’ll be wielding).

Literally zero information exists beyond the above, so really all we know is that they’re coming. I find it odd that more hasn’t been released about the Gambler, though Poots was quite specific about the information he shared concerning him at last years Gencon.

The encounter monsters are a cannibalistic tribe of Bone Eaters, and an unnamed monster that looks like a creepy bug-slug. Poots mentioned that encounters have been worked on extensively before reaching the form they decided to go with, so those initial pitches I used to determine how this might go may very well be totally useless! Still, the effort put into these will make Mosquito and Abyssal Woods even better value than I already believed them to be.

– Narrative Sculpts

Narrative Sculpts in general are the way forwards when it comes to survivor representation. While the armor sets are impressively modular, they are a bit “action-figure” static as a result. Narrative sculpts don’t offer any real customization options without a bit of conversion chops, but are already dynamically posed and exceptionally detailed representations of many different survivors. Their outfits range from general armor sets to representations of settlement or story events, all the way to things like Twilight Initiates and unfortunate souls in the throes of the King’s Curse.

All the new expansions will be using these in place of the armor set kits in the first wave, which is one of many tidbits I didn’t mention (skipped most of the lore too). The Gamblers Chest will be filling in much of the base game content with narrative sculpt representation, and includes a few things from the Dragon King and Sunstalker expansions as well.

Each of the GC sculpts also has some thematic gameplay additions, including philosophies and knowledge cards for advanced KDM, as well as general gear options, mixed sets and classic fighting arts. Some things like cooking have specifically been called out as receiving a few tweaks via new innovations.

There’s also a few bits and bobs, like a sci-fi Ana, a pinup catgirl, and fantasy versions of the Mr and Mrs Poots. These have mild related content but don’t really excite me. I want the brutal whimsy.

– Miscellaneous crap

Well, not really crap. Just some cards and things that help expand parts of the game. It appears that there’s going to be a fair bit more than just the ones that were mildly tied to the narrative sculpt themes.

THE STRAIN SYSTEM

Ok, so this is technically part of the Expansions of Death. But it’s more-so a macro level rework of how the KDM expansions work in general, old and new. So, it felt more appropriate to put this with Advanced Kingdom Death as it’ll be something that may potentially affect far more people than simply those able to use the Campaigns.

I’ve occasionally mentioned “nodes” in these posts. They’re the new way of determining what expansion should go where and with what. Putting too many quarries that provide rewards of a similar level and demand similar investment together generally results in only one or two being hunted since time doesn’t permit focusing on them all.

So, nodes help you work out where an expansion falls. Strains are a bit more complex.

I’m going to use a bit of an odd example to describe this as succinctly as I can, because lo, we have ourselves a looming update of which AKDM and COD are going to be the focus, so rampant speculation is going to go out of date waaaay sooner than everything up to this point.

Some of you may have played, or at least heard of, the popular video game Minecraft. Before you play you set a few parameters to create your world. Do you want it to be flat or extremely mountainous? What sort of biomes are there going to be and how prevalent is each? What level is the sea at? How deep can you dig? It’s all reasonably customizable and ensures that you have some control over how your world will be before you start playing in it.

That’s the first part of the strain system. You set the parameters of your upcoming campaign. What monsters will fill what nodes is the most obvious choice, but although Poots has been tight lipped about many key details so far, he specifically mentioned that

The strain system will be *the* way of playing KDM moving forwards, with the existing and upcoming campaign arcs being presented as completely pre-selected parameters. It’s essentially a fancy way of implementing the expansions you own and shaking up the world after each settlement falls. If you don’t have any expansions, it’ll just be business as usual.

The second part, as far as can be discerned from what little we know, is how the world evolves depending on your circumstances. This was teased in the content of the “Echoes of Death” release. In that, depending on some very specific milestones, you had some content permanently added to the settlements fighting art deck. Poots also shared one example beyond this of a new card being added simply by surviving the “Twilight Knight in Training” base game variant for long enough, so it’s fair to say this implementation is likely to be how this part of strains is going to look once it’s in our hands despite it being one year onward.

Interestingly, Poots also said they may even do something as drastic as “unlock a new campaign”. Can’t wait to see if you can pivot your existing one into the new direction or it it’s solely casting a light into the future with your actions, for new survivors to find and run with. I just hope it’s not legacy style content, I’d hate a bunch of envelopes to sit in the box unused for potential aeons.

It’s also been confirmed that the new expansions are going to have strain content, which makes the choice to focus on it first quite understandable.

————————————————————————————-

That’ll do for now. I feel like I spent years on this and I’m not particularly happy with it… but w/e, I’m on the mend. Sue me.

Please don’t actually though.

Join me next time when we cover what remains: The odd shit that don’t quite fit so good together. Then, Frogdoggod willing, we can do a big Gencon update to cover the inevitable “omg ur near baseless speculashun was NOT ACCURAT :P”.

I’m sure that’s gonna be fun!

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!

Gosh, where to go now…

The expansions of Kingdom Death are evolving in crazy new ways so I’m reluctant to rely too greatly on direct comparisons to the first set (except for the Gorm of course). The new lot are ostensibly standalone designs but in nearly every case something exists to bind them together into longer cohesive experiences. Viewing them through that lens is a totally different kettle of fish to how the first expansions could be appraised.

Stuff like the Screaming God and the First Hero are divorced from these connections, so they were relatively easy to discuss. They are what they are. But the Frogdog, Oblivion Mosquito and the Nightmare Ram are a bit more complex… they’re all native to the Inverted Mountain. Why is that so special? It means that they’ll be filling some familiar roles in what is essentially the sequel to Kingdom Death: Monster.

I should mention that there are arguably several “soft-sequels”. Advanced Kingdom Death. The Strain System and the Campaigns of Death. The Abyssal Woods. All propose some radically new timelines with new encounters, timelines and cards for your survivors. We’ll get to them another day.

There’s no doubt though that the “People of the Mountain” campaign (made from these thematically related expansions brought together by the “Mountain Man”) is the shiniest of them all, as it replaces… well… everything. There’s no appreciable crossover with any existing base game or expansion content. It’s a fresh experience formed of fresh experiences. This has many pros and one huge con that you’ve probably already realised, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.

Lets take a look.

THE MOUNTAIN MAN

We’re beginning at the end, with what is either an excellent expansion… or possibly the worst of all the new expansions. It depends on how fiscally responsible you are.

This one’s all about “People of the Mountain” and it appears to not be usable outside of running that campaign. It’s a huge departure from even the best “People of the…” content we’ve seen before in that it goes far beyond a re-themed timeline thrown over the base game components. Instead it provides everything to run a settlement in a completely new biome of the world of Death. We’re talking a totally new timeline, with new events of every kind, new innovations, new base crafting locations… and the synthesis of the Frogdog, Oblivion Mosquito, Nightmare Ram, Gryphon, Pariah, Red Witches and Black Knight into a new basic list of nemesis’ and quarries.

But uh oh! This is another expansion that is really light on the ground when it comes to solid information, and trusting the initial blurb in full seems like a pretty awful idea considering most of them are clearly just draft concepts. The campaign will also need to have the expansions it depends on in some state of development to even begin to be developed itself. That seems a ways off, so judging exactly how far this will go is not currently possible, nor would I expect to see anything before the rest are all but nailed down. I have hopes that there will be a new set of 100 generic hunt events in the Mountain Man’s rulebook to go along with the obvious story replacements, plus at least as many settlement events as the base game has (helped along by the ones the expansions contribute). Integrating even more expansions with it should be possible although without any base game content this may be a bit wonky for some, like Slenderman or Lion Knight.

The Mountain Man itself sits at the top of the Inverted Mountain. He’s the final boss, in the same vein as the Gold Smoke Knight, though his agenda has been fleshed out a little more. He’s got gangly minions that sound like they’re going to be encounter monsters, but could just as easily jump out to ambush the survivors during the showdown itself. Whatever form the showdown takes, it’ll only be a capstone, so the quality of the rest of the expansion will need to be top notch.

If there’s anything that truly intrigues me about this one it’s the two “Visionary” and “Apotheosis” narrative miniatures included. Both of these come from existing resin sculpts that have some tantalizing scraps of lore. The Visionaries are survivors that have found incredible artifacts of immense power that motivate them towards some lofty goal, and in true kingdom death fashion, it seems said ventures are often doomed by their very nature. The Apotheosis men and women are empowered by an unknown force that increases both their power and their ego to lofty new heights but, surprise surprise, this seems to also turn out badly for them. These sound very much like the existing Twilight Sword and Savior mechanisms, so it’ll be cool to see them get a fresh mountainy take.

Of course, here comes the major con. If you aren’t buying the 7 other expansions to make this work, you’ll never buy this one and none of this should excite you. If you are, fingers crossed that this is a more than worthy successor to our time on the plane of faces.

THE PARIAH

Our first new Nemesis. This guy has a wacky gimmick that has some odd implications.

The deal goes that the Pariah will come to your settlement, kick things around and be the general major ass that all nemesis encounters are. So far so good. Nothing out of the ordinary. We can stack this up against the likes of Slenderman and the Manhunter when determining if it’s worth your money.

But after you beat him back, things get weird. The Pariah gets serious, and stops your settlement from functioning until you go and beat him up where he lives. Unfortunately, he lives high on the mountain where he uses supernatural agility and strength to run around on the roof of his lair via special footholds. So the showdown is also upside down as the survivors monkeybar their way around the place, with the peril of the long drop yawning beneath them.

What gets me is the vagueness of this concept. The clearest part is that this is the Inverted Mountain’s Butcher analogue. He’s currently slated to start appearing a year after it would though. A special showdown in a regular campaign then? I could have sworn Poots said he hated those. It also seems like you might only fight him twice a campaign, once in each form. Maybe he’ll stick around after being “defeated” though… if I had to guess I’d say this will be the case.

Reason being, apparently new innovations and arts must be developed to tackle the Pariah. Normal survivors aren’t known to run upside down or swing around from the ceiling, so the necessity of this may be absolute. The kickstarter doesn’t outright state this though. If it is, I imagine that in the wake of the Pariah’s first appearance at least some of the process should be kicked off by added timeline events. Kind of like Hands of Heat. Considering that fighting arts are slated to completely disappear in Advanced Kingdom Death, that part may just be “nice to haves”.

The pause that his next appearance allegedly puts on your campaign would be completely untenable if you had to rely on dumb luck to get the innovations necessary to defeat him. The choice should therefore come from how much investment you put into those tools, and the Pariah potentially sticking around a bit longer would make this feel a bit less of an investment you are forced to make for a single fight that then uselessly hangs around like an tagalong friend.

I’d like to think that climbing related innovations would have a wider impact on the Inverted Mountain campaign, but this also has to stand on it’s own merits… hmmm. We’re getting faaaaar into the realms of speculation here.

I don’t know. This is all a very generous interpretation of what little we have so far. It has all the potential to be hamstrung as an expansion by a couple poor decisions (here’s looking at you, Spidicules) if this pause thing turns out poorly. I can only hope that’s not the case.

THE RED WITCHES

Another nemesis that both excites me greatly and draws my ire. This is the Frogdog of part 2.

Let’s get my grievances out of the way first. I don’t like pinup models. I don’t begrudge those who do though, and I was happy to see they are adding some males into the mix.

The Red Witches mostly look like pinup versions of something else. In the vast array of thematic draws that help KDM aspire beyond the love letter to Berserk that it so clearly is, the softcore art of scantily clad babes, each with thighs larger than my entire being, I’ve found to be the most out of place. The Witches are by no means the worst of this, and the White Speaker aesthetic is pretty cool when they use it right (like, oof, that Slenderman intro…), so I’m not too pursed-lips prude about it. But, especially compared to every other Inverted Mountain offering… it’s a lil bit incongruent.

Enough pearl clutching. The concept of the witches is really freakin’ cool. Three merciless treasure hunters out to kill the Pariah, and for whatever reason, your dudes as well. Three fully fledged nemesis on the board at once. I am so keen to see how they pull the AI/HL deck off with that. A whirlwind of carnage from all three Witches doing something each turn would be sweet, though it does seem like a balancing nightmare. Poots says that it may be an escalating affair with the Witches showing up sequentially for each level of the fight, but also that there was no solid idea in place at the time of the kickstarter.

There’s been few hints about how the mechanics work subsequent to that either. All we have are concepts, though they are quite strong and unlikely to be hamstrung by design constraints like the Nightmare Ram was. The Witches can swap places on the board using magic from their cloaks, and each appears to favor ranged combat (though one of them is clearly carrying a wicked looking dagger). They also have a mix of supporting actions and offensive actions so that they’re all constantly present in the fight but not necessarily always on the offensive. I hope each has a distinct personality when it comes to how they fight, as it would be a bit disappointing if they just had interchangeable AI cards. There may also be appearances from neophyte white speakers though the sentence describing this is too vague to be worthy of too much scrutiny.

The cloaks seem to be the predominate spoils of the fight as well, though with the caveat that they are mildly carnivorous. You’ll supposedly need Gryphon spit to craft the protective gear necessary to wear a cloak without being eaten. This is… a bit worrying. Is this fluff and this expansion will have some means for you to collect it built in? Or is this fully fledged cross-expansion integration? It was a question many had at the time that remained unanswered, though Poots has said that he did not intend every expansion to work fully on it’s own. We’ve just covered the Mountain Man which is perhaps the ur example of that design philosophy… but the level of potential interaction here is so mild by comparison that it seems unreasonable to ask someone to shell out for another whole expansion they may not want, let alone one as expensive as the Gryphon will be. He could always just change it to something more commonly available, but the armor concepts have been complete for a while.

This trend continues with another great concept with dubious execution, though I am far more positive about this one. The witches are hunting the Pariah, and the expansion has a mini campaign that allows you to enact that quest. Playing as the Witches sounds super fun and the campaign is short so taking it out for a spin is not as big an investment as integrating a regular expansion into a full campaign. However, you need the Pariah. Stands to reason, but more and more of the features here are being walled off by these costly necessities. I’m getting them all so it doesn’t affect me, but it will affect someone.

Oh, there’s also some interaction with Fade but like, how big could that possibly be?

Maybe I’m splitting hairs considering the $400 baseline entry cost to KDM… but still, these are unprecedented cross-expansion requirements and I do not think that should be the norm.

A contentious expansion to be sure, but also a bit more intriguing than usual for it.

THE BLACK KNIGHT

Finally, a nemesis expansion that only has mild controversial elements!

Already a fan favorite in the resin range, the Black Knight has another leg up on the competition in that the showdown concept is far along in development and received some very positive feedback when it was demo’d at Gencon last year.

The Knight is a sleeping behemoth in a ruined hall who is tended by an underground society of young squires. Many of the statues that surround the knight’s resting place have been extensively repaired with “elastomer” (which seems to be the proper term for the “Gryphon spit” in the Red Witches expansion). This has not only restored them but made them quite… springy. When slammed into the statues, the survivors are unceremoniously thrown around the room by the snap-back.

It honestly looks like a lot of fun and I’m sure we are going to be hearing many stories of crazy campaign-destroying ricochets.

I mentioned that there was some controversy though. You may end up only fighting the Black Knight once a campaign, and the trigger for this is succeeding… which is the point of the game. While it will escape to fight another day in any other circumstances, once you know the score getting only one new fight out of the 25-35 you’ll do over your campaign may not really be worth the price of admission. He does drop materials to provide a selection of craftable armor sets but it is not the full fledged offering that a quarry would have and merely seems to be a mild twist on the normal nemesis payout. The overall package is shaping up to be a cool showdown but it may well be on it’s way out before you’ve really had time to appreciate it.

Thankfully it’s got a built in saving grace to reach the level of content one might expect from a top tier KDM expansion. A standalone mini campaign, playing as the squires of the Knight. Unlike the witches this one will work out of the box with no further investment, so while it may not match the hype of playing as the “monsters” it doesn’t require you to shell out extra cash just to use it.

All things considered, this is probably going to be the best of the nemesis expansions for someone not going all in on the Inverted Mountain. Aesthetically it fits with some of the popular first wave expansions too. Custom “All Knights all the time” campaign anyone?

THE GRYPHON

After 4 nemesis in a row the settlement is in dire need of supplies. Lets nab ourselves a quarry!

But oh shit, it’s the Gryphon. We know basically nothing about the Gryphon itself. Not even what the model will truly end up looking like, since it’s slated for a rework. Probably not a drastic one, but right now no one knows but Poots. He also said it may instant-kill survivors by throwing them off the mountain but that’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

It’s going to have it’s own campaign though, which means that we can use some past standards to work out how this will pan out. People of the Nest involves survivors who have fallen under the sway of the Gryphon’s hypnotic musk. They work to build it’s “nest”, a grotesque conglomerate organism. I can smell the depressing outcome from here. Interestingly, this musk also works on other monsters, so there may be some cool interactions with that. Monstrous allies would be groovy, even if it’s only in the form of coexistence within the horrifying “settlement”.

There’s nothing beyond the Gryphon in the expansion though, so this is probably going to be closer to People of the Sun than People of the Stars. Sunstalker and Dragon King have their downsides but are often counted in the top 3 expansions in the game, so the Gryphon following their example is unlikely to miss the mark.

Where it fits into people of the mountain is somewhat more difficult to place. There are basegame analogues to the rest of the campaign. Frogdog is the Lion. Mosquito the Antelope. Ram the Phoenix. Hmmm, we’ve run out of quarries. Where does the Gryphon fit then? Well, many people add in an additional quarry beyond the Pheonix, such as the very popular Dung Beetle Knight. It adds a further notch on the progression of the core campaign that many feel should have always been there. I imagine the Gryphon is a more thematic and accounted equivalent of doing that.

The Gryphon is another standalone campaign expansion first and foremost so there’s a lot of value in that alone. It’s on the podium with the Frogdog and the Mosquito for sure. It’s just a shame that this has to be an inference, rather than based on some hype previews. Retooling the model for production may have put this one behind the development curve.

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So that’s it. Very ambitious. One thing I didn’t mention is apparently Anna is the head dev on the Inverted Mountain, and she’s done some excellent work on the first set of expansions. I think that the quarries are going to find love as solo expansions, but I’m not quite sold on the nemesis encounters. It’s also a metric assload of money to actually play the full campaign. For those who have a lot of dosh to spare, but maybe not quite enough for 8 complete expansions, there is another full-replacement alternative that I’ll be discussing next time…

See you all then!