The master of the forge of the Holy Lands. A gleaming dominion wrought of garish vanity for the unseen entity. Roaming across the stone face plains in search of magnificent godmetal, your survivors may run afoul the hulking monster as it searches the cracked seams of the land for its prized materials.

Contents:

• 1x Forge Priest Plastic Miniature and Base

• 1x Godmetal Pilgrimage Pillar card

• 1x Forge Priest Hammer rare gear card

• 1x Forge Priest minion card

• 1x Godmetal Lodes terrain card

• 1x Install Guide

In something of a surprise in March the Forge Priest plastic miniature, which was first released as a part of the “Naked Futures Bundle” along with the Storm Knight, Male Silence and Female Silence has been brought to life as a new Pillar card. The Forge Priest is one of the more significant individuals that comes from that region, and my assumption is that this miniature was going to originally be a part of the monsters in Kingdom Death: Labyrinth which would have been a dungeon crawling boss battler that takes place in the Holy Lands. It is possible that one day we'll see that game come to light, for sure it is what I want to see enter design once the Monster content is done as I love a good dungeon crawler (and also Monster is starting to reach saturation point for its content and having a new game design where one explores a different part of Kingdom Death's world is something I think the franchise needs after the current Kickstarter).

The Forge Priest represents something more than just a way to get old stock of a plastic model into rotation. Instead it gives us a new element that can turn up in showdowns that never had it before, this is the mechanic of minions. While minions themselves are not entirely new, Spidicules, Sunstalker and the more recent Red Witches all have them, the concept of an independent minion with its own objectives. One that also isn't just a direct threat, but instead is here to perform a task and will only harm the survivors if they interfere with that or get too close.

This is a very interesting new addition to the game as it offers not just more tactical decisions to be made during a showdown, but it also makes better use of KDM's somewhat too empty board and also adds another layer of world building onto the game experience. So let us take a look at it in detail.

The Miniature

I have had this miniature for a number of years now and it is part of the older style of plastic miniature where the original sculpt was translated into plastic. This means that the miniature is not as impressive as the current releases, but considering the cost of tooling a new plastic sculpt I can somewhat forgive this decision. I am sure that a 2020s version of the Forge Priest would be far more dynamic and imposing, but I'll accept the more environmentally friendly decision to use an existing sculpt that has already been tooled. It's less wasteful and it's cheaper for Adam Poots Games to work this way as the cost of setting up a new miniature for production is significantly more than using existing steel dies.

Overall this miniature is pretty fine for its age, I prefer the newer style that has been adopted in more recent times as the increased scale has allowed for more crisp detail and the proportions look better on the table. While I find the hammer to be a bit unimposing when compared to both later weapons and the other weaponry wielded by members of the Holy Lands the weird Giger-esc nature of the Forge Priests helm still remains a wonderful draw. It's not the best miniature, not even from its era, but it is alien enough to make it feel like someone/thing from a far distant place.

The Gameplay

Skipping past the Pillar portion of this content, because at this stage we don't have a full picture on how the Pillar cards are used, the way that this content is currently included is by adding the new Godmetal Nodes terrain card to the standard terrain deck and when it is drawn it will add two Ore Vein terrain cards set up normally and the Forge Priest Minion who is set up at least 5 spaces from all board edges (otherwise the Forge Priest is placed as the players desire, same system as terrain).

From there the Forge Priest follows similar core minion rules as printed in the various expansion rulebooks. There is a full rule sheet provided if you do not own said expansions, and to shorthand those rules here is a brief summary of the rules for the Forge Priest. Please refer to the rules in expansion itself for the complete picture:

• It has its own card with statistics

• It does not used attribute tokens

• It has no facing or blind spot

• Wounding it does not count for weapon proficiency

• Getting knocked back into a minion halts the knockback and triggers collision for the survivor only

• The Minion Action is performed at the end of the monster's turn. If there are multiple minions then monster controller choose order

• The Forge Priest chooses shortest route to target, moving around any other models or impassable terrain

• The Forge Priest does not have hit locations and just has a Minon action. It has life points, which are reduced by 1 per successful wound. It is killed and removed if its life points hit zero.

So the Forge Priest is somewhat akin to a standard dungeon crawling monster, it's got a simplified set of behaviours and a simple wounding system. It sits somewhere between the original Spiderlings/Shades and the Bone Eater encounter monsters, leaning closer to the Spiderlings as the Bone Eaters do have some variation and texture in how they act and react.

This is the Forge Priest's minion card, we can see that it has in essence two targets, either a survivor within its range of 5, or failing that the nearest Ore Vein. If it goes for the survivor then it has a fairly hefty (4/2+/5/Bash/Knockback 12) attack and if it reaches an Ore Vein it mines the Iron, removing the terrain. Also if there are no Ore Veins left on the board the Forge Priest departs, I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't walk to the nearest board edge before leaving, instead it vanishes into the wind. This is probably done in order to keep the rules short and on a single side of the card, but it could be some additional ability that the Forge Priests themselves have. We'll get a clearer picture if more of these minions are added to the game, because at the moment we've only got the Forge Priest and the Beta Lion Knight Scholar to compare and they both function a bit differently.

I've very much enjoyed the addition of the Forge Priest to my games, from an atmospheric standpoint the experience makes the board feel less like a mostly empty battle mat and more alive. There's more features on the board to interact with and we even have something that if left alone will go after the ore tiles or depart from the board if there are none (and the survivors are also out of range). It's a very fun and immersive experience, it also brings more iron into the showdown economy, but it comes at the cost of being hit very hard by a hammer and smacked very much out of position. I also appreciate that if you stay out of the way of the Priest it will concentrate on its task before departing.

There is also a reward if you do kill the Forge Priest, and given that this miniature has 16 toughness and 6 wounds that's something which will take a fair amount of effort. The monster isn't going to sit around and wait while you smack this interloper in the face either, you'll be dividing your efforts and that does have a cost. The reward for achieving this is the removal of the Godmetal Nodes terrain card upon the killing of the Forge Priest and that removes the Forge Priest from the campaign. This provides a minor amount of deck thinning and reduction in the number of cards that generate iron. It also provides the survivor who killed the Forge Priest with +3 survival and this weapon (which they will need to put into their gear grid as soon as they kill the Forge Priest if they want to keep it).

As a club, this weapon is something that you can use comfortably for most of a campaign due to it always having access to Lantern Armor's sharp club bonus. In fact with that additional Cumbersome added to the mix it almost feels like the Bone Club's big brother, if its brother came from a Kingdom built around eugenics that is. The Forge Priest Hammer also offers Devastating 1 to add to Club Proficiency/Mastery's ability to deal additional wounds and some positional control with that Knockback 3 plus a Flinch token. As a reminder here is the Flinch Token text.

Flinch token - When a monster with a flinch token attempts to perform a reaction, cancel that reaction and discard this token. A monster cannot have more than one flinch token.

All of this is very much in line with the mechanical themes of clubs in that it can control or manipulate the monster's behaviour in some fashion and the knockback also echoes how the Forge Priest uses the weapon to knockback survivors when it hits them. Irreplaceable is of course a massive downside to have on gear cards, but when you gain the gear card for “free” as part of rewards for killing something I think it is a perfectly fair ability to stick on the card. It's a clean, neat little weapon, the main question we'll have to work out over time is if it's worth killing the Forge Priest for the weapon or leaving it alive so we can potentially get more Ore terrain from the Godmetal Loads terrain card in the future. Iron is a very important resource for a mid and late campaign settlement so that is not an easy question to answer right now and I think that is a sign of a well designed expansion. No easy answers, no autopilot decisions.

Final Thoughts

I don't think this is a “must purchase” item, but I do think it is a very good option to purchase if you want to have more interactivity with the terrain deck. I like things that change the amount and nature of terrain during showdowns a great deal and this is doing it in a unique fashion that expands the world that the players experience. It's as delightful as Gatherism is, but it's not just copying that philosophy's homework and instead is opening up the games mechanics in a new way without adding too much overhead. I like this adaptation of the minion rules an awful lot and I hope we see more of it in the future. I'll give it an A grade.