A Review of Indomitable Survivor Heartleech Baselard Rene | Kingdom Death: Monster

Her body was a flame. She could feel the last of her strength draining, unwilling muscles slackening. With a final, pitiful swipe the hulking mass collapsed with a sudden rush of metallic crashes. Aching in every fiber, she threw aside the heaps of majestic cloth until she lay breathless, clutching the dented scraps of the crown. With the last of her resolve she lowered its broken circle over her bloodied head. She felt nothing. 

Art: Lokman Lam
Sculpture: Team Death

Contents:

• 1 x Heartleech Baselard Rene hard plastic miniature and base with flat insert

• 1 x Ennui of Dominance King indomitable resource card

• 1 x Heartleech Baselard pattern card

• 2 x Heartleech Baselard gear cards

• 1 x Living Glossary card

• 1 x Install guide card

• 1 x Large matte art print

WARNING: While there is a card inside the box that makes it clear you need the Gambler's Chest Expansion to use this model, there is at time of writing no warning about this requirement on the shop page. I bring this up because it is something I expect Adam Poots Games to do in order to ensure their customers are informed at point of purchase. Do not buy this to play with unless you own the Gambler's Chest.

With each new release of an Indomitable Survivor that comes out I find myself asking more and more often the question “Are we at saturation? Is this too many?” I do find myself certain that these are being released at a rapid rate that is somewhat overwhelming, likely because of the relative simplicity involved in designing 1 gear card + its crafting cost and then locking that behind the Indomitable Resource system. However, I did come to the conclusion that saturation for this system is not based on the game overall, but instead on the individual monsters that get these cards.

To expand on this further, not all monsters are created equal, quarry monsters get a far higher encounter rate with players than nemesis monsters. Your typical nemesis monster turns up a maximum of three times in a campaign (excluding the heart flute), a single quarry monster can manage to match that in just three lantern years. There's also inequality between the various quarry monsters, the earlier one is in the timeline (lower node number), the faster players can reach the level 3 stage and experience those new indomitable patterns. We get more years to unlock and interact with something from the Gorm when compared to The King. Currently King Indomitable Pattern gear has a maximum of seven years it could be used in assuming you go after a Level 3 King at the first possible opportunity (Lantern Year 22), that's not something most settlements and players can manage, it's more likely that the King's Level 3 version will be taken down a few years later (and we have nemesis showdowns eating into that timeline for quarries also).

What I'm getting at here is that I think we already reached saturation point for The King's Indomitable Gear with the previous release and Rene as such lands herself right in the hands of “lifestyle KDM players only” territory, at least until we finally get the First Hero expansion to allow for starting in the late game immediately. I am going to give this release an honest breakdown and evaluation, but I cannot overlook that the King gets this release while others such as the beloved Sunstalker, Dung Beetle Knight and Slender Man or the in desperate need of this kind of support Lion God are left on the wayside. One can put Indomitable Patterns onto just about any monster in the game, even if they don't drop resources in the first place, you create the new resource and then add generic/perfect resources to the rest of the cost and it just works.

Yes, the King has had this legendary status for a long while due to its cancellation and relaunch, but I'm going to be honest, that was in the pre-Gambler's Chest Period. Since it's release I've found it to be less than I imagined it would be. The original Lantern Festival expansion promised something more than the final result we got in the GCE. Do not get me wrong, The King is an excellent monster with a tight and well designed showdown battle and I like it a lot. But it has become just another Quarry monster, and it's one with gear that results in overwhelming force that the other late game monsters struggle to stand up against. This gear is fun, but it's also something of a power fantasy ride in a portion of the game where the balance strains and splits in the face of the weight that the numbers survivors are outputting.

What I'm getting at here is I do not want to see any more King Indomitable Resource releases after this one, we've had three of them and the game doesn't need more when so many other monsters that are played with more often are languishing without the love they deserve.

With all that written, let's get to the contents of the box.

The Miniature

Rene was released a while ago in Painters Scale as Hollowheart Rene, she is in fact the only non-plastic release from that line I own. When I saw her Painter's release I assumed that we'd be seeing a rescaled version of her in the future, however I was hoping that it would be a part of a Survivors of Death release rather than this individual box as the Echoes and Survivors line tends to offer better value for money.

The model has handled very well being scaled down from the resin cast with all of the detail being preserved, though this miniature does land closer towards the “gooning” end of the spectrum, as somehow the partially missing bodysuit that makes up the first layer of the Deathking Armor makes her look more naked that unarmored survivors. I'm not really concerned about that, nor am I delivering any kind of judgement, I'll paint and use the miniature just fine. It's more that I find it interesting how this change works, I expect her to be better armored and she isn't, which results in her looking more naked than even Ashbloom.

All of that aside, she's a great miniature, that's why I have the Painter's version as my one lone miniature I could afford to budget for.

The Gameplay

You know the drill by now, kill a Level 3 King, draw a random indomitable resource. Otherwise you'll never see any of the cards in this box. The Heartleech Baselard has an additional wrinkle in that it is a paired weapon. At some point during the design process for Indomitable Resource mechanics it was decided each one of the two paired weapons required a separate Indomitable Resource to be gained in order to craft them. This has a lot of friction for the player experience while also adding additional challenges for the design. Players experience that pang of loss and desire to 'complete the set' which may not happen. Designers have an even harder to make the weapon really good one handed in order to justify the existence of the first weapon and make the paired strong enough to justify the second copy. The Designers also have to avoid making the paired version so strong that players feel there is a missing piece without that second blade and decline to make it at all unless they get the second Indomitable Resource required.

In short, being a Paired Indomitable Weapon is a difficult place for a weapon to be, and it always makes the weapon less valuable than its compatriots. That is the landscape that the Heartleech Baselard finds itself living in.

Crafting Cost: 1x Ennui of Dominance, 2x Pylorix, 1x Ancient Bangle, 2x Deathmetal

The crafting cost here is a bit of a weird one that starts to get very odd if you begin to think about it too hard. It depicts Rene in a funk over the emptiness she feels from this victory:

Emotion is a part of the crafting process, now as someone who learnt carpentry and forging from older family members and who both paints and writes, I absolutely maintain that emotion is an important aspect of the creating process. It's a part of what makes art, art, what makes master craftworks so appealing. There is not just skill and talent, there's also an expression of life in the piece. This is one of the many things that I dislike about "AI" generated art and I am thankful that Adam Poots Games supports human artists and designers, what they create here is truly unique and unmistakably in conversation about what it means to be human.

The friction I find here is first of all with the stone face portion of the art, it is rare that artwork in KDM misses, but the faces here are so flat and weirdly distorted that it looks like Rene is leaning on a flat painting rather than some form of table made out of a raised portion of the floor. Maybe it is just painted on? I don't know, I do know that I shouldn't feel that Rene and the faces are not part of the same image when I look at it and I also know that this is one of the only times I've ever experienced this feeling of a “miss” from Team Death's artists.

The other minor thematic miss for me here is that as an emotion rather than a physical thing one is left questioning why only one copy of this is produced at the end of the showdown, why doesn't any other survivor get this feeling also? There are plenty of ways that can be hand waved away, ultimately it doesn't really matter, but it is niggling in form that other indomitable resources haven't generated before. If I take a different perspective on this however it does feel very King for something to be created out of an intangible concept like emotion. I like that and I also really like that the emotion is spent when constructing the Baselard though, that's super thematic and on point.

Neither of these matter in the overall picture, but I wanted to explore that, especially because even now my eyes do not like looking at the stone faces in that art.

The weapon itself is very much on par with its Indomitable Peers when you look at the stats, we have appropriate levels of speed, accuracy and strength all of which make this an excellent end game weapon. A pile of stats does not make for an interesting gear card though, there is almost always some extra juice pumped into these indomitable cards and what we have here is the combination of the two abilities Refined, Bloodthirst and the Baselard specific “Siphon Vitality” ability.

Refined - A gear special rule. When this fails to wound, you may reroll the wound attempt. Limit once per attack.

Bloodthirst - A gear special rule. When you activate this gear, gain a bleeding token.

Siphon Vitality. When you wound with this, before performing reactions, you may archive a bleeding token to cancel the reaction of the wounded HL Card.

These together synergize to increase the odds that we wound via refined and then Bloodthirst generates a bleeding token that Siphon Vitality can then cannibalize in order to cancel the reaction. You're more likely to wound thanks to that reroll and that means outside of failed wounds on failure reactions the only real threat of reactive behaviour from the monster comes down to reflex reactions and traps. That's a large reduction in monster damage against the survivor and given how few turns the high level showdowns can break down to it is really significant.

The paired ability here is another variant on Devastating, all of these have proven to be no better than just having Devastating in the first place and there's no exception here. But, the Baselard is a speed 1 weapon, so the paired second blade adds potentially three extra wounds per attack roll. (+1 speed, +1 wound per successful hit+wound) without considering extra rolls such as the Deathking Gauntlets ability. That's a lot to miss out on and it brings the problem of paired indomitable weapons back into focus. You might be excited about having a Baselard, but once you've played with two of them and seen the damage multiplier it represents (something that not many Paired weapons do achieve when they just add pure speed) then having one feels like you are leaving value and joy on the table, I already encountered the “I don't want to craft this unless we can make two.” situation and it managed to make the King fight feel like a slow, rigged slot-machine. We did encounter this before with the Gussy Knives from Grimmory's release, but as the Gorm currently only has two indomitable resources (Morg's chonky Axe being the other) it was a lot less frustrating to play at the moment. In contrast The King now has five (Seditioner, Regicider, Lordsruin, Oblouk Shield and the Heartleech Baselards). That's a 20% chance of getting the second matching weapon per showdown fight and if more King Indomitable Patterns are released in the future those odds will fall down even further. This is why we have a saturation point, the new Indomitable Resources cannibalize part of the previous ones.

Final Thoughts

After all of this, I can't really recommend this one to anyone other than the lifestyle gamers who are playing campaigns with the King in it multiple times a year all the way to completion. It faces the same problem that will impact all quarry monsters in time, that of diminishing returns, with the added wrinkles of being paired and end game content. The more indomitable patterns we have per quarry monster, the less the odds are of having a specific one and while that is good for variety, it's not good for each individual card and their releases. We're paying the same amount per King Indomitable Pattern white box here but each additional one we get means we'll use the previous ones a bit less often. That makes this an impossible thing to recommend for players on any kind of budget even without considering the Gambler's Chest requirement.

Also if I'm completely honest, the Baselards are simply less interesting than the Oblouk Shield and Lordsruin Scythe. Both of those two indomitable weapons play with fresh takes on mechanics that are stronger (Luck for Lordsruin, Positioning and Movement for Oblouk), those also both have the stats to back up their fun playstyles. When we cut the Baselards down to their beating hearts we just have something that deals wounds efficiently and while that is good, it's also the bare minimum that weapons like this should be doing. The King has so many incredible aspects to it and the MC Esher aesthetic that the Oblouk Shield references via the portal still makes it stand out the most for me. Even the Seditioner and Regicider are doing additional wounds, but they have more interesting gimmicks attached to that mechanic. Leaving only the Self Bleed portion of the Baselards standing and that's not a gimmick which is leveraged much outside of the early to mid portion of the game. As a Crimson Crocodile Indomitable Weapon (with balanced stats for that) I think this could have worked well due to the Crimson Armor's focus on bleeding.

There are simply better Indomitable Survivor boxes to be picking up here and as such I think this one can be left on the shelf at least until we get the First Hero Expansion in our hands. That release may well increase the play occurrence of the King sufficiently to justify the extra variety.