Back in the Truck Again - Kingdom Death First Story Models, and Beginning a New Campaign

After a bit of a gap, another combo painting and KD campaign report...

This White Lion got a much more traditional paint job than my first one. It was an interesting piece to work on, since the detail on the model is a bit shallow for my taste. I pushed the contrast around the lion's mane and face to try to get it looking more like a lion and less like a weird monkey thing, while I tried to keep the contrast a little smoother across the rest of the body so it didn't make the whole thing look on the lumpy side.

I thought it had a nice kinda' statue look to it, and I liked my friend's idea that perhaps it's white to blend in to the landscape of white faces, i.e. natural camouflage.

The survivors got a pretty standard paint job, with a pretty low-contract bit of source-lighting, just with a bit of saturated hue and not much in the way of tone. In typically strange ways, the hair looks a little flat in the photos... IDK.

Campaign

So, we started the dragon campaign.

We skipped the first year because we were bored of fighting baby lions.

Year 1- we got dragon language instead of regular language, and the throne which had a rather alarming action on it, but was otherwise the same as the regular lantern hoard. Then we got Surge, and some basic gear.

We then made a bad gamble on the hunt, which set us all up with two bleeding, and the lion got Bloodthirsty (extra attacks if it damages enough) and Bloody Claw, the latter of which one-shotted a survivor right off the bat, and then killed us all eventually.

So, we basically got cocky and had some bad luck. Also, we forgot to name our settlement, even- we'd generally rushed into it. No one was really satisfied with this, so we decided to restart our settlement and name it...

Redux, Year 1
The Lion began both ambushing us and Ground Fighting. We had our new beetle ball, which we shoved to the side since it didn't seem useful (we don't really use LOS shenanigans).

The lion just got hit over and over again with accuracy penalties, and died mostly due to Ground Fighting being easy to wound on. We got some fighting arts, and one of our survivors was blinded due to the lion deciding (over and over again) that her face was a chew toy, since it no longer had its ball.

Year 2
We caught the plague on the way back to town, and our veteran who stayed back at town calmed everyone down when scary things started screaming and papa dragon wasn't there to comfort us. We then had the options of Shrine (pretty epic when we currently had less than one set of armor) or Ammonia (also good, though not as immediately in a lot of ways). We decided to go with Ammonia to prevent deaths (and get a very early opportunity at leather).

We finished a Rawhide set, and got another Bone Blade.

We had a really uneventful lion hunt, then the settlement's kinda' leader ripped the lion's balls off and ran away for the rest of the encounter. One of our other survivors got pretty mangled in the process.

Year 3
Pixie had a weird dream. Later, Pixie had weird visions and became the settlement's bone leader because we had our first kid, hitting population 15.

We invented Paint this year (hit all three big early innovations already!) and made a shield and started to make our second armor set (leather).

Mullet, our wrecked survivor was sent up to talk to our scary king monster dude, and was killed, but not before giving us scarification (not the best, but at least it's out of the deck). We made a grave for him.

We went on another Lion hunt, during which our veteran Sean and our first baby Pete (Praise The Tyrant or PTT) both got smarter, and Pete looked like he had the makings of a winner.

But then there were some unlucky rolls, and Pete's face got smeared across the other, larger, stone faces.

Year 4
We ended up getting a mighty haul, but not enough hide to innovate this year. But, we had enough for our second shield already, so got that and an axe, and had two acanthus. So, despite having some kinda' lame armor, we have quite a few ways of taking hits.

We then moved into wholly uncharted territory, with our first new nemesis encounter.

The Dragon leapt around really strangely, and kept modifying our abilities, but with a ton of deck fixing (AI and HL), two shields, and two dried acanthus, we managed to get by with no one dying.

Year 5
We had a really crazy settlement phase this year- to show there were no hard feelings, the Dragon traded 5 guys for one super sword, and then we had a bajillion endeavors- we repopulated up to one below where we started, got drums from a sacrifice, and got one of our survivors up to enough understanding that we started pumping out babies that came into the world with 3 understanding, which was pretty exciting.

We also sacrificed someone to get drums.

Thoughts
So... after the first fight with the Tyrant, we really enjoyed it. As is predictable, he fought in an unusual method. But we really liked the style, it was very well incorporated into the campaign structure. Definitely a nice start.