Hall of Fame - Kingdom Death final survivors, and years 19-20

So, a fun set today- my favorite characters from each of the three campaigns we've completed each got custom models.


Above is Kaneda. I always thought this was a fun, but ridiculous, model in that the gear set was pretty much unbelievable. But then I ended up fielding almost the exact set, with a metal shield; oversized axe; blinged out belt; sword (the sheath's visible in those pics); bucket of grease; leg armor; and, ahem, some extra hormones.

The only modification here was removing her cape, since I thought it looked too weird.

Moving back in time a little, Georgie, from Mt. Rushmore. Her lion set and beast Knuckles have become a staple build for us. I gave her a sort of rushing/lunging look, since that style is never standing still. About the only thing the style isn't great at is wrecking extremely high-toughness enemies or ones which punish a large volume of hits.

Even further back in time, Rondo, from New Detroit. He had all sorts of mental and physical issues, but was still the hero of our first doomed settlement. Among other things, he had a problem with overeating, so I decided to give him a paunch, as much to play with a less-athletic body as to represent him more faithfully.

Continued Settlement years

Year 19 cont'd
We decided to take on a level 2 king's man instead of a level 3 butcher, with some relative newbs.

The King's Man's additional ability was a painfully obnoxious one. We got hammered again and again, and he kept rolling 3/4 hit rate when odds were 1/2. We managed to entirely avoid ever clumping up, which was nice, but our guy who circumvented wound cards with his axe got killed off first, after a valiant effort and quite a few 10's.

Having him out and our katar wielder (the only one with a high attack volume to peel those ablative hits off) without her speed made the second half of the fight a real slog. We clawed our way to the goal, losing our scout, too, and finally our katar wielder dealt the last hits alone, with our heavy axe guy out of position.

He then fell apart, losing a sword in the process, and bestowed his lovely impairment... on our survivor who was too scared to go on another fight. Thanks, dude. We effectively lost 3 guys to him though only gained the benefit of 2. At least we have a good candidate to get around the limitations of an otherwise good sword.

Well, we've now won against every level 2 nemesis, which is kinda' cool, though we already hated a regular baby king's man fight. Probably going to avoid this guy in the future.

Year 20
We were of course expecting to be Watched. We then debated for like an hour, and decided that we wouldn't actually gain anything more from another fight or two vs. just lunging in.

So, re ran in, with a way less impressive set of gear than last time, though with more impressive guys.

Kaneda!!, our transexual axe mistress who'd survived from the First Story, pumped full of crazy (bitter frenzy, crazed, rhythm chaser, and a new set of hormones, also 14 insanity on a 0-3 scale), wearing war paint, grease, earrings, a big metal shield, and not much else. Also, wielding weapons from our vanquished foes, with the Butcher's Cleaver in one hand and the King's Man's Steel Sword in the other.

Guy Montag, our Grand Weapon fighter with Red Fists, who'd lost his Zanbato and was making do with a Lantern Halberd, otherwise basically set up as our scout (luck, full rawhide, circlet- we decided a bow wasn't worth 2 item slots for a good chance at -1 evasion and no chance of wounding). Definitely our worst offense.

Mia Montag, his daughter, and the twilight Swords(wo)man. Level 4 proficiency, meaning fast but no great crit range. In a mix of Leather and Screaming armor to get the Undeathable rule (50/50 chance of killing blows not killing). Equally obviously our best offense.

Disco Inferno, our katar mistress who wasn't taking a katar today (that's 3 for 4 not taking their favored weapon as their primary or at all) but was taking an axe and a red charm, to have the most possible ways of circumventing toughness, since she was the only one who wasn't strong enough to reliably wound otherwise.


Having less offensive power than our first Watcher defenders, we summoned a retinue of buddies to help us hit harder. Mia took two sets of swings, and sheared off 9/10 wounds on the Watcher, which caused it back the f* off.

...Which, unfortunately for it, put it right in range of Kaneda's sword. She hustled over, landed a perfect hit (almost 2), and swung twice, which, was hitting on 2+'s in its back arc and, with the help of her retinue and buffs, was dealing an epic 19+ 3d10 strength (that would be attempting to match or beat a toughness of 20). Suffice to say, she didn't need to use her axe. She also didn't need her retinue.

We decided to stow Home? for post-campaign fun, whenever those expansions get here, instead of sending the settlement up against some monsters that would probably eat their faces.

Post-campaign thoughts

Well, interesting stuff. We didn't hit any of the resource generation of Mt. Rushmore, so Home? ended with a pittance of resources back in town, instead of enough to make several weapons and maybe even a poor armor set. We had only one Rawhide set and one Leather set as our complete armor sets, and, due to poor luck and deciding to rush the Watcher, most of a Lion set and Antelope set. Instead of complete: leather; 2x rawhide; phoenix; and most of an Antelope. We also had less cool but stronger weapons for the most part.

For our goals for this campaign, we did try some new Principles (not that they're hard to hit), and did manage to try out hodgepodge armor combos instead of complete sets (as much out of bad luck as out of any active choice). We'd failed to hit our Antelope set we'd wanted to try out; had lost Leather early so didn't have early Leather; lost our first chance at a blacksmith so also didn't get that early (though still got it, as opposed to last campaign).

We did, however, die almost exactly half as often, mostly due to winning all of our Nemesis fights, and had achieved 3 masteries (would've been 4 but we'd lost our grand weapon so had nothing for him to fight with) instead of none. This was also without our previous house rule of being able to avoid deaths, and we never needed to use our house rule we'd kept of worse odds of hitting Starvation during a hunt.

Something unexpected we ended up trying was never fighting the phoenix, which definitely decreased our damage output and the quality of our armor. I'm expecting that having neither phoenix gear nor blacksmith gear would have made us pretty weak, particularly defensively. Having neither and no twilight sword would have probably turned a pretty easy end into a really rough one, which leads naturally to...

The Watcher

This was odd. We beat him even faster- took two activations and some riskier maneuvers rather than five activations.

I'm starting to feel like training up a Twilight Sword user is, umm, too good? I mean, sure, it's hard at first, but damn is it good. It reminds me of the super sword from Majora's Mask, for those of you to whom that reference means anything: It takes extra work to get it, but lets you breeze through the boss.

I'm curious what the boss would be like without it, because we barely used our retinues' strength buffs, could have certainly used them more aggressively, and only needed about 1.5 guys' worth of attacks.

It frankly feels less challenging than most of the other Nemesis fights.

We have, however, always beaten him before drawing a trap. maybe they're horrible? IDK, pumping strength seems obvious, since you (with very few exceptions) have your best chances with something with a high wound chance, and you have access to (somewhat risky) huge strength buffs.

Well, next time, we're going to try variants, now that we feel we've pretty thoroughly rocked the standard campaign.