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Wednesday, October 28, 2015

The End of the Beginning of the End - Kingdom Death's Butcher, and settlement years 18-20

Khorne, eat your heart out. Actually, no, I think this guy might do it for to you.

The Butcher is one of many examples in Kingdom Death of something thoroughly threatening in concept*, but is also tongue-in-cheek enough to make it still fun and instead of escaping into the realm of overly serious and dark: he's got some ridiculous naming schemes, like his Furious Shoulder or Furious Vambrace hit locations, plus the occasional silly illustration.

* He bypasses armor just enough to make it way less useful but still necessary. Also, the face-skinning thing.

I'm very happy with how this study in lighting came out, and think that his skull helmet (bottom left) got some of the best subtle lighting I've ever done. It was also pretty fun to work on my second primarily backlit model (the first being malifaux's Mr. Graves).


And on to the continuing saga of Mt. Rushmore...

(As always, some spoiler potential though I try to avoid it.)


Year 18
We got a ton of Hide off of the previous Phoenix fight, but didn't have the requisite Iron or right other Phoenix resources to get anything useful from said Phoenix set, so focused on filling out a Leather set and getting utility items this time around.

It was then time to fight another Legendary lion.

It ambushed us before we could try to mine. Then I... honestly don't remember what happened here. It was fast and brutal and we chumped that lion.

Year 19
We got a horrendous amount of Hide from the Lion, then we got Forbidden Dance and were able to swap resources for other draws... and got more Hide. It pretty much sucked.

We then set out to meet a Butcher at the edge of town.

That Butcher had no idea what hit him. First round, he got hit for -1 evasion, then drew two '-2 toughness for the rest of the turn' wounds. I think the fight only took 3 survivor turns to finish him off.

Our valiant defenders then stole one of his axes and headed back to town with a shrug.

Year 20
Our single remaining newb started freaking out about some stupid ghost (random event) so we killed him because he wouldn't shut up (otherwise he'd've distracted us for a whole cycle, the loony). He was obviously just jealous that he never got to go kill a monster while everyone else had, and wanted some attention- what a loser.

Then we turned around and found out we were sitting next to a ghost (scheduled event). Oops, our (survivors') bad.

Well, this meant we were now entering the countdown to the final showdown, so started trying to fine-tune out builds.

We outlined our goals:

Primary:
-Get our best Green Savior to hit her fourth age event (a narrow window we've planned for) before being the damage soak whenever we fight the Watcher
-Get our Twilight Swordsman to at least level 4 proficiency (2 is the threshold we passed that makes it not a burden; 4 makes it really nice (need 1 more proficiency); 6 makes it great but isn't necessarily worth the effort. We might be able to hit it if our training event goes well.)
-Try to get our Katar cannon to peak fighting doom. She has exceptionally good strength, a big old speed buff in her cat armor and with natural bonuses, gets extra attacks on a perfect hit (10), can shunt off one bad reaction and, if she kills another legendary lion (which is very likely), will get the perfect hit threshold down to 9+... with a base of 10 attacks an action, split across two sets to avoid traps ruining it.
-We have two good builds based on extremely wide critical wounds at this point: one Savior and one puncher. The Savior is what we're hoping for, with a bow, but we're not positive since she's reached what she can do and the other guy has some growth potential. We also have a nice spear wielder who could do.

This'll build one tank, one moderately durable (fast) cannon, one support/crit piece, and one more durable (strong) cannon.

Secondary:
-Finish a phoenix armor set- this'll require at least one more phoenix fight (tricky since two of our slated veterans can't risk some of the stuff it can dish out so would need to skip those fights) and two iron (one from a cat fight; trying to get one from mining since we don't really care about other cat resources and don't have any other ways of getting iron that we know of).
-Have backup survivors: We have two crit-ers, two green saviors, and two katar specialists. The worst would probably be if our Twilight Swordsman died, since we don't have anyone else with a similar ability set.
-Get a better bow. We we're hoping to get the last of what we need from a phoenix, but not banking on it.

So, we're setting out on the first fight of the last (post-nemesis battle/event) leg of our quest take on another Lion, to finish leveling up our Green Savior (Mean Green Manzi), get our Twilight Swordsman (Beak Georgev) another point of proficiency and (fingers crossed- 60% odds in our favor) find two Iron shards so we're guaranteed a complete Phoenix armor set.

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