The Kingsmith | Gambler's Chest Expansion | Kingdom Death: Monster
With the Screaming God stampeding onto my showdown board it is time to take a deep dive into it's Quarry Node 4 predecessor. We'll start this written deep dive as always with a look at the gear because that tends to be the less complex load for me to lift. It's even simpler when we consider the King because a large part of the gear from the Kingsmith is relatively straightforward in design. A part of this is because the Kings are a member of the Regal faction and as such they lean hard into the concept of absolute silence. This is partially represented by an exclusion of affinities, which as we know from the original Hand showdown are a form of auras. Auras in this case are thematically representing a form of sound through vibrations and because The Kings transform sound energy into matter as a part of the Eldritch Escher-like processes contained within their robes.
What we get is a fairly straightforward set of gear cards that I honestly find clean, powerful and direct. They bring to the table not clever tricks (though there are a few) and instead their main design is one of raw power via big numbers. In fact, if I'm honest, the numbers tend to be so large that most other end game monsters are overwhelmed by gear constructed the remains of Kings. This isn't automatically a bad thing, it's just the end result of what happens when the designers explore the limitations of their game, The King is very close to the bleeding edge of this game's mechanical scope (as is the Godhand and the Parasite Queen, yes I played against her before writing this) where you can feel the distortion and straining against warping. A long time ago Adam wrote that he was cancelling the Lantern Festival because the power scope of the post-Watcher world required a fresh new start point normalised at a higher level.
The reason for this is the same thing that affects all games where player pieces level up, as one's characters become stronger, the opposition's numbers also increase. In Kingdom Death the big scaling numbers for Survivors are Strength, Luck and Soak (Armor points, Block/Deflect and so on) and for monsters its Life, Toughness, Speed, Wounds, Damage and sometimes an increase in total actions per round. The two most notable number races are Strength vs. Toughness and Speed+Damage vs. Soak. As we'll see when we look into the breakdowns for the gear here, we're reaching Strength rolls around 20+ and total Armor Points that begin at 60. This arms race is a part of many games and it some ways it's kind of a treadmill situation because 5 vs. 1 is effectively the same as 50 vs. 10. It's why I work on the scale of “Hits to Kill” when assessing my defenses vs. a monster rather than just raw armor points.
For example; a level 1 White Lion takes 2 basic hits to kill an unarmored survivor in the head (we're taking severe injury = kill here for comparison's sake), it takes 4 hits to do it vs. a survivor with a rawhide headband. A level 2 White Lion dealing 2 damage per hit kills that unarmored survivor in 1 head hit and the rawhide headband survivor dies in 2 hits (2+2 vs. 3 soak). You can see how Rawhide has fallen down to being the same as unarmored when against a L2 White Lion; and to complete the picture if we move up to Leather Armor + Leather Shield (5 armor points + 1 head injury box for 5 soak) The L2 White Lion now needs 4 hits to kill; meaning that we're now kind of as durable against the L2 as Rawhide was against the L1. It is never that simple though, but I did want to highlight how 'number get big' is often just a case of keeping pace with the enemies and their increasing numbers. We get to decide (most of the time) what level our Quarry monsters will be at, but our Nemesis monsters are a very different beast as they develop in power throughout progression of the timeline.
Why go over this again? Well it's because in the case of gear from The King that "number go big" lands a quite far on the survivor's side. Once you're set up with King Gear you're ahead of most of the remaining monsters you'll face outside of the newest Finale monsters, because the gear is scaled for The King rather than those who came before in the content release schedule. I never thought I'd be asking for the Gold Smoke Knight to be considered for a buff, but here we are.
Before we move on, this does bring me onto something that's been on my mind a lot recently and that is rotation of products. Any game that has consistent releases as part of being a “lifestyle game” reaches a point where older stuff is just unfeasible to keep around. Either the old designs are not keeping up with newer ones (due to power creep, complexity creep or simply being from an older design ethos), the complexity of everything the players are being asked to take into account is too much, or the physical cost of these older releases is too much. It costs for companies to hold stock, be that in shelf space or warehouse space and eventually something has to give. This is the place where 2nd Editions or “Vaulting” tends to come in. To provide a few prime examples of where this has happened this is occurring right at the time of writing to three of Fantasy Flight Games' Living Card Game lines, with the most notable of these being Arkahm Horror moving on to “Chapter 2” which is trying to serve as a new entry point to the game (there are other issues with Chapter 2 that think I'll write about here as a bonus article); Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborne has also tackled this twice now and the grandfather of “rotating content” aka Magic: The Gathering has been doing this for years with its various formats. In fact Magic's hit a problem where its most popular format – Commander – is causing a lot of friction because it is what's known as an “Eternal Format” where all cards ever printed (unless banned) are legal and some of the most vital cards for the format are locked behind the promise of never being printed again.
What I'm writing here in this aside is basically that I can see the mechanical conclusion of Kingdom Death: Monster on the horizon in The King and I think that the Ivory Dragon is going to end up being the perfect “end” point for Kingdom Death: Monster. I hope that when this Kickstarter is done, Monster is slapped on its boxy butt and called 'good', not because I want to stop visiting this world, but instead it is because I can see how the game has sprawled and now started tripping over itself. Team Death, Adam Poots Games, Kingdom Death and We Survivors (The Community) would all greatly benefit from a new jumping in point. Adam has talked about Kingdom Death: Titan as a lighter load for the design team to work on, but I'd also love to see the systems for gear, survivors and monsters adapted into a realisation for Kingdom Death: Labyrinth. I'll also say it, the Ringtail Swamp should be a standalone game rather than another Monster expansion. This doesn't mean Monster would be abandoned completely, but I would like to see what Team Death can do with their enemy and equipment designs in a dungeon crawling environment because too many other designers refuse to innovate and move out of the previous century.
However, this massive tangent needs to get wrapped up, it's a lot of words to say that I don't want to see any other Quarry Node 4 gear sets have higher numbers than what we see here. That's unusual because I'd normally use the first release of a particular Quarry or Nemesis as the yardstick to measure the others against and see if they're around the same power level, instead I want other QN4 gear releases to dial it back a little bit.
OK, enough yapping, time for the Kingsmith. We're going to start with the location endeavour, which is called Pull Binding Chains. This is a similar mechanic to the Scrap Gathering endeavour from the Weapon Crafter, except that it is more complex and more dangerous. The survivor we send into the decaying realm has to roll on the Decomposing Labyrinth table which I'll include in full here.
The first thing to note is that Legendary Lungs bonus, Legendary Lungs is tied directly to the Butcher, but can sometimes turn up in other places. For example People of the Sun have a relatively straightforward route towards gaining it (they can't really use Deathking Armor without risk though as it is heavy and has no affinities, so most of the time this is for the weapons). We can see that Legendary Lungs is something we really want to have while scouring this Escher-like hellscape because it pushes the survivor away from the automatic death rolls. The second thing we can see here is that being able to Prevail is a vital survival tool, Prevailing is spending all your survival (at least 1); this means we should not send survivors with no survival into here unless we're looking to kill them off without gaining any precious Deathmetal.
I'm not going to cover Directional Dyslexia here as it's a relatively simple disorder to operate and you should not really be sending important survivors in here anyway (Trepanning is also an option to deal with it). But we will look at both Grounded and the Regal Signet Ring.
Grounded is the ability for a survivor to set their Insanity to 0, 1 or 2 at any time they desire, once per lantern year (LOPS). There are a number of places where this can be useful, especially if you're caught with 0 insanity and a potential brain trauma coming, and as it is an ability and therefore 'slotless' you're always happy to gain things like this. Abilities are amazing because they don't occupy any slots that are needed for gear, knowledges/fighting arts or disorders.
The Regal Signet Ring can only be grabbed via ways of increasing your dice roll, the main one being that aforementioned Legendary Lungs, but Otherworldly Luck is a classic option for Art Survivors (I've taken to calling Fighting Art Survivors Art Survivors recently because I like the sound of Arc vs. Art).
Before we get into this gear, I do want to touch on the naming conventions used by this, the Regal Faction. Kingdom Death is very precise with how it uses naming of things, the names come from the Survivors of course, so they represent the viewpoint of the survivors rather than the names that the monsters give to themselves. It is however intensely interesting that Regal is used for a lot of The Hand's faction gear, while the similar, but Royal is used both for King gear and for Marrowism/Bone Eater related elements. It's putting both “factions” (in as much as you could call Bone Eaters factions, all Bone Eater campaign when?) on a similar nobility status tier (something we see with the Jellyfish attached to Atnas) and while I'm not sure there's direct links between the two, it is interesting. Stuff like this doesn't happen by accident in Kingdom Death as they are very deliberate with their naming conventions and as such it might be hinting at a connection between the Bone Eaters and the Kings, perhaps a King is the end result of an existence spent supping on the marrow and crunching on the calcium of survivors?
The Ring itself is another simple piece, it's a bunch of affinities and a speed reducing protection passive that can't be used by Saviors. Speed reduction is great as it reduces hits and also this one is extra powerful in that it can push speed to 0. Most monsters at this portion of the game should have sufficient speed to avoid that fate, but it's got that combo potential sitting there.
Onto Deathking Armor itself now:
Individual Crafting Costs
Helm: 1x Pallium, 1x Deathmetal
Gauntlets: 1x Majestic Arm, 1x Deathmetal
Platemail: 1x King's Cloth, 1x Deathmetal
Greaves: 1x King's Coin, 1x Deathmetal
Boots: 1x Perfect Hide, 1x Deathmetal
There are a couple of interesting things to look at on first glance; we can see here why one has to use the Pull Binding Chains endeavour a fair bit because we need 5 Deathmetal per armor set. The total number of resources also looks low at first glance because it is just 10; however this is a gear recipe that takes into account resource quality, yes the crafting costs are low in number, but these are some of the most difficult resources to procure because you have to be killing Kings to get them. The low total number of resources is also a result of the short timeline period you can commit regicide during, the crafting recipes have to respect that. Another thing to note is that the Deathmetal != metal keyword, which is a bit unfortunate as it stops any future interesting synergies or interactions that revolve around the metal keyword.
We have zero affinities in this armor set, that means we have at best 4 squares where we can place affinities and that means a maximum of 3 connector affinities from gear cards if we somehow manage to make them all connect. My armor layout above is not optimal for that purpose, but the design was made for highlighting the gear in a pretty display rather than maximizing the number of affinities you can use. If you are maximizing for affinity connectors you'd leave an L shape of empty slots which is where that 3 comes from.
Our other shared elements across all pieces are the heavy keyword (a whip in the hunt party can sometimes help mitigate that) and a total of 12 armor points per hit location, resulting in a total before shields of 60 armor points. That means a monster dealing 5 damage per hit would still need 3 hits in the same location to reach a potential kill roll, exceedingly durable but not beyond the biggest of bads.
Our specific abilities are all simple, but powerful. While insane we cannot be knocked down, we are hushed by the sound absorbing discs on the armor, which means we cannot scream, roar, encourage or activate noisy gear.
Hushed: Hushed survivors are cloaked in silence. They ignore vibration damage, are considered deaf, and cannot encourage, roar, scream, perform audible effects, or activate noisy gear.
A quick note here, despite the silence emitting aura of this armor set, noisy gear is still noisy for some unclear reason, I bring this up because I find it thematically unsatisfying that this is the case and I hope some errata is issued in the future to address this. If I'm cloaked in silence and my blowing a horn makes no sound, then I should not be a viable target for the Harvester, nor should Coprolalia.
Our Gauntlets give us access to Deflect 1 as an activation and also give us an additional optional attack roll before we draw hit locations. This skirts around things like Slow's Speed 1 limitation while also being fully optional, if you hit 8 times and you're worried about the Trap, you don't have to roll that 9th dice. This is of course very strong.
On the Greaves we have an activated ability that knocks down the monster, while Indomitable does nerf that a bit, the ability to surge inside other survivors attacks when opportunities are presented can allow for more than one survivor to take advantage of the knockdown before the monster rises up at the end of an attack. In addition, monsters are vulnerable to being knocked down during their flow steps or similar places with a survival window and that can halt whatever they are doing, allowing this tool to be utilised both offensively and defensively.
But. The largest problem with the greaves is they're in the wrong place, greaves aka jambeaus are worn on the shins to protect the tibia due to how little muscle is on those locations. This is waist armor, so of course that makes it completely unplayable due to breaking immersion, just like having to wear Thor's Járngreipr, the Seed Pattern glove on your head.
Finally the boots have the most interesting ability, allowing them to use a double movement (move + dash for example) to employ a form of portaling through “Escher's Kingdom Death” (as I'll call this other worldly realm to distinguish it from the Kingdom Death the survivors live in) and stepping out adjacent to a unit on the board. If it is the monster then there's no additional impact because monsters don't have insanity to track, but other survivors are disturbed by the experience – which is probably like having the Deathking armored survivor step out of your form like how people pass through Marvel's Spot or Doorman. As a related aside, if you have not watched Disney's Wonder Man, I massively recommend it, as unlike a lot of the current Marvel releases it is in the top tier of their productions. Ben Kingsley once again reprises his absolute star turn as Trevor Slattery and I am always here for his performance as well as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's incredible debut as Simon Williams.
All in all, as I mentioned near the start of this, Deathking Armor is mostly simple in its applications but simple does not mean weak. This is a focused, precise set of defensive armor with very few downsides (cost of getting deathmetal, no affinities, heavy keyword and the power of the monster it comes from).
Before we move on however, I would like to just mention how much I want to see these armor design released in miniature form for some kind of variant or retooled elsewhere.
These are from the Kickstarter (apologies for not having a higher resolution), I love it when the armor makes survivors look like miniature versions of the monster and both of these are one of my favourites.
We've got another eight pieces of gear to run through and I don't really want to split this up because the is already an automatic second part coming due to the Armory existing. So I guess it's time to mush on.
One of the things to cover thematically is the return of affinities to the weapon and item gear cards. Thematically I'd hazard a guess that it's because this gear is less about imitating The Kings and instead these cards are all positioning in opposition to it. We can see this most clearly with the names of the weapons, they're almost all terms that are focused around the actions of toppling rulers (Adjudicator is the weapon with the most tenuous link to the theme, but it does still stand “in judgement of kings”). I think this is a delightful bit of theming as having gear from the QN4 monsters come into focus around the mechanical and thematic aspects of slaying these monsters works really well. This is one of the fun aspects baked into the gear design of Aeon Trespass: Odyssey and it's equally fun and engaging here.
Last bit before we get into the individual weapons, all of them have an additional weapon typing in Grand on top of an additional type, I'd guess that the Grand Kingslayer has the additional typing of Sword as it's a Grand weapon in name and nature, but it's still Grand. The main advantage of Grand as a second typing is the specialisation that adds +1 accuracy and knockdown on a critical wound. The Mastery is solid, but it's linked to Perfect hits which isn't a mechanic printed on these weapons apart from the Katars. As such if you have The King in your campaign it pays off to complete Grand weapon mastery in advance of constructing these, but in truth one would hope that most of your masteries are completed at this time and you're raising a second or third generation of masters thanks to Family.
Kingslayer
Crafting Cost: 1x Deathmetal, 1x Ancient Blade, 1x Leather
This is a relatively straightforward weapon, providing an average base wound roll of 19 (Str + Sharp d10 + d10) and being able to cancel the first reaction on a HL card lets you sink a nasty Reflex or Wound reaction. Refined is one of those nice bonuses that in essence increases your first wounding roll because you only have a 1% chance of getting that 1 (10% of 10%) and as such it provides a portion of extra strength as well.
Refined: A gear special rule. When this fails to wound, you may reroll the wound attempt. Limit once per attack.
The affinities are decent, but nothing special for swords and overall the main reason to craft this is because you don't like slow weapons or you don't have a pylorix and want to tool up for Regalism as soon as possible. The pylorix is more likely to drop than the ancient blade though because there are 3x pylorix in the resource deck and just 1x ancient blade.
Grand Kingslayer
Crafting Cost: 1x Deathmetal, 1x Pylorix, 1x Iron, 1x Ancient Blade
Most of the time this is the sword I am going to be crafting, the Grand Kingslayer does require that extra resource and iron over leather, but the improvements that this Grand version offers over its Ungrand sibling are fantastic. We move up to a 24 average wounding roll (13 + 5.5 + 5.5) and while we only have 1 speed and lose both refined plus the ability to cancel a reaction; we get Devastating 1 and that more than make ups the difference amply for myself. I much prefer a second automatic wound over cancelling the first reaction and that slight wound roll improvement. The Grandaddy becomes extra powerful when combined with the Deathking Armor extra attack roll. We also get more affinities to boot.
In truth I think that the Kingslayer should probably get an accuracy buff so it hits on a 5+ and I would consider these two weapons competitive enough. As it stands right now this is a bit of a Gaxe vs. Greater Gaxe situation where the two handed version wins out as long as you have both hands. The Ancient Blade is not a common drop from the monster as it is a singleton in the deck, so you want to make the most of it when you get one and for my tastes it is the Grandaddy that ticks the boxes.
Adjudicator
Crafting Cost: 1x Deathmetal, 1x King's Collar, 1x Perfect Bone
I don't think it's much of a secret what my favourite weapon types are in KDM, they're all weapons that I used personally back when I was an active practitioner of Kung Fu; Fist & Tooth, Throwing Weapons, Paired Swords and Polearms. While polearms are not their own weapon category in KDM, instead being either Spears, Axes or Axe/Spears I still gravitate towards weapons like the Adjudicator. It helps that Spear design in Monster leans into some very powerful attributes that focus around attacking safely; the first of these is Reach and the second is the Weapon Proficiency/Mastery. Adjudicator supports this by giving us a single automatic wound when we draw the trap, meaning not only do we get to punish the monster for its strongest “reaction” card, but we also get to try and shuffle the trap away if we have Spear Specialisation.
Beyond that we have a potent stat line with average speed and accuracy backed up by a monstrous 14 strength (meaning a 19.5 average wounding roll) but there is no sharp or affinities on this weapon so its harder to reach much past 20 toughness without assistance from the survivor or gear. Because of this I find that the Adjudicator works best when paired with a Node 3 armor set like Dragon King or Phoenix Armor rather than Deathking.
I also love both the illustration and the minature design of this weapon so very much.
Usurper
Crafting Cost: 1x Deathmetal, 1x Iron, 1x Spiral Pauldron
There are two Spiral Pauldrons in The King's resource deck and this makes the Userper a lot easier to assemble than the other three weapons above it as all of them require a resource that is singular in the deck. Usurper's attack profile is identical to Adjudicator's and the differences are the green affinity, the lack of Reach, the axe weapon typing (which is weaker than Spear, but still in the upper half of weapon types) and it has this single “no-sell uno reverse” against the first knockdown a monster attempts against Usurper's wielder. I find this one well balanced considering it's easier to craft but once again the pure nature of its design means there's not much more to break down here.
Assassinator
Crafting Cost: 1x Deathmetal, 1x Leather, 2x Bone
If you wanted to point at a single example of the growth and maturity of Team Death's design work, the crafting cost of the Assassinator is a prime example. This weapon is heavily designed to be used in a pair, and all of the elements that link into that encourage you to wield two, but you are able to run it single handed if you want. The real design gem though is the crafting cost, this is the cheapest of all the gear cards in this crafting location because we don't need anything King specific beyond being able to Pull Binding Chains and scoop up some Deathmetal in the Labyrinth. That means this weapon bypasses one of the larger hurdles paired weapons have because everything you need to make this beyond the Kingsmith can be generic.
The weapon itself is also a very interesting and tight design that uses one of my personal favourite mechanics – Perfect hits. We're greatly encouraged to run paired by the Barbed 4 alone because that (1/5+/12) stat line isn't great at hitting perfect hits which get better the more dice you roll. We also get the sweetener of Deadly 1 on a Perfect hit and Deadly 2 if paired.
All of that in addition to that really smartly placed right facing blue affinity that can connect to a Lucky Charm makes this weapon one of my stand out favourites in the King Smith. It has been such an interesting journey for Team Death when we consider how they changed their approach towards Paired when they saw that the players considered paired to be a mixed bag rather than all upside.
As much as I personally love the Adjudicator, I think the Assassinator might be the weapon design I appreciate the most here.
Royal Shield
Crafting Cost: 1x Deathmetal, 1x Stone Infant, 1x Void Fabric
Another slam dunk design that includes one of my absolute top mechanics, the grid position based pointing arrow. KDM's greatest strength and the thing that sets it head and shoulders above the other boss battlers is the Gear Grid system. Having a spatial puzzle involving not just optimisation but also position creates an engaging sub game where players are being asked not just to craft the right gear for the job, but also fit it into a small ecosystem that is being used in collaboration with 3 other ecosystems. Gear Grids are THE mechanic that other boss battlers, dungeon crawlers and adventure games should be leaning into and evolving. Heck I think that the Gear Grid system is so good that it would make for an engaging element in Roleplaying Games, it's one of the best board game designs of the previous decade and I'll never understand why it's not being talked about more in design circles.
The Royal Shield is a triumphant rival to even the mighty “Crispy Bacon” (Oxidized Beacon Shield) as it provides a whole bundle of extra armor points and a really action efficient Deflect 2. It's a little tricky to get this done on Deathking Armor due to those limited slots, but there are plenty of layout patterns that can get you the extra half green and red affinity you need.
This is one of the best shields in the game at the moment and you can craft multiples of these if you get the resource drops.
Royal Medallion
Crafting Cost: 1x King's Coin, 1x King's Cloth, 1x Heavy Chain
The Royal Medallion might be the weakest gear card in this entire suite of options. Knowing where the monster is going to target if it is choosing a single target is very potent, it allows for a lot of easy positioning where the monster cannot reach the survivor with the priority target token. However, we're looking at a steep survival cost here, 3 survival per turn drained means that dashing to keep distance and dash-cancel is going to be difficult. Likewise surging to block/deflect is also tricky.
However, this does not mean the Royal Medallion is bad, it's more that it requires work, strategy and building around in order to function properly. Having ways to quickly replenish survival when needed such as Survivalism's Tenacity can be clutch, Red Fist's allowing Strength Tokens to be used as survival is another fantastic point to leverage (you can't really do that with Deathking armor because of its token cleansing ability) and we can even combo this with the Royal Shield in order to stick close to the monster and gain our Deflect 2 via attacking.
Again this is a spot where Team Death's growth in design skills has really paid off because I'm not dismissing this due to it having a downside that can't be managed or played around. I love designs that seem bad but can be leveraged with work and compromise.
Royal Lantern
Crafting Cost: 1x Antique Bangle, 1x Pylorix
Something that I often wish had happened when playing Kingdom Death is that the game began with a specific Lantern slot where survivors had to equip a lantern. I'd have it as a 10th slot in order to not add additional pressure to the gear grid, but I think it would have added a lot more character to the game, especially if you leant into it further and had a thematic lantern for every single monster type in the game. Cat Eye Lantern, Wailing Lantern and so forth. It's not that difficult to retrofit into the game to be honest and maybe it'll be something we see from Team Death in the future?
The Royal Lantern is an interesting gear card, reducing the length of the Hunt Phase is usually a good thing, though you don't want to skip in front of Overwhelming Darkness if mineral gathering is one of your goals. Of course that's not going to happen at this point in the game because we're mostly going to be moving deep into the darkness as we're hunting the biggest game. Also, against The King this item is almost a negative because the King hunt events are a lot more positively slanted than you might have thought. It's fairly easy to Ambush Kings, which makes sense as they literally cannot hear you coming because they convert sound into physical objects.
This lantern is fine, but it is better in People of the Lantern due to the enforced need for lanterns in gear grids post Watcher.
Summary Thoughts
The Kingsmith gear is as I mentioned in the opening ramble, is currently somewhat over tuned for the power level that monsters reach and as per the tangent I got into early on I think that it's hard to push the monster power level much more without needing to address the game's mechanics becoming unmanageable. I think that the Ivory Dragon is likely the place where Kingsmith gear will start to fit into the game, though I do find myself wondering what other monsters could fill the campaign post Gold Smoke Knight and give Kingsmith gear a proper challenge. Until then, there's a fun power fantasy reward for players who triumph here.
Next time I'm going through all of the Armory weapons, seed pattern weapons and the Indomitable weapons which are if we're honest, more powerful than what we've seen here. Until then, please do share any neat interactions you've discovered with King gear combined with gear from other sources!