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Friday, January 8, 2016

A New Story for a New Year - Kingdom Death White Speaker, and Seven Swordsmen Settlement years 0-6

The Holiday White Speaker was a pretty difficult mini to work with--

Being me, I wanted to do directional lighting, but there are more than half a dozen light sources, so it took some real work not just making everything kind of orange. I decided to go with a sense of side/backlighting, since that's where the majority of the lighting was coming from.

I'm thinking I'll eventually come back and touch the model up, but for the moment, I was going kind of crazy with dealing with angles of light.

Settlement

So, we decided to try a weird variant. We're playing hero mode (1 free stat of your choice, and you don't die of almost anything, but typically go "unconscious" and skip a fight) and Seven Swordsman (7 buff fighters w/ sword mastery, don't retire, and can't ever replenish/add to population).

We were basically curious to see what shape seven immortal, but very much vulnerable to permanent injury, Survivors would be in by the end of a campaign- we expect all sorts of weird stat problems.

On top of this, since our campaign's all wacky already, we decided it'd be a fun time to see what happens, incorporating all the (beta) one shot scenarios.

We didn't have a good theme idea, so eventually settled on the sins. We'd've done the Seven Samurai or Magnificent Seven if we'd remembered them better. But we didn't, so we started with seven characters with one stat up each.

Pride & Lust: Lucky
Gluttony & Greed: Speedy
Envy: Accurate
Sloth: Evasive
Wrath: Strong

Pride, Wrath, Lust, Envy fought the mini lion, and came out fine except Lust who got a strength buff and accuracy penalty (it begins!)

Year 1
We built the normal stuff. We didn't innovate (heresy!) because we only had one bone and wanted a sword.

Oh, also, our settlement got named "Dante's Shithouse." I remember joking about how most of the footnotes in The Inferno were "IDK who this guy was except Dante hated him so put him in imagination Hell," hence the shitlist, but somehow that became shithouse?

Anyways, we went on Aya's beta mission, which went swimmingly (2 wins for 2 plays through the scenario, now).

We then had a horrible lion hunt in which Pride died (he got ripped apart by a flesh tower, so needed to sleep it off) before we got to the fight, Greed got brain problems, and we limped through to a victory.

Year 2
Aya came by and gave us her awesome gear for some reason. Then we got Inner Lantern, finished a Rawhide set, started some Lion gear, and got bone darts.

We then went out on a hunt and met Candy and her weird animal sidekick. We ambushed the Young Lion, killing it before its first turn (though it didn't know it yet, we'd crushed its windpipe, which took a minute to set in). So, that was a first (crit kill, that is). Didn't really get a sense of how good Candy was, since we were already fighting at very nice accuracy, but it was still fun to get her gear (since we were too cranky to let outsiders join us).

Year 3
We got Elder council, which did nothing but waste endeavors.

We went and fought another lion. Our player controlling two survivors got a bit rash this time and enraged the lion by killing its cub, and then gambled until both of their survivors were "unconscious," so we were fighting a lion with Enraged, who immediately drew Ground Fighting (normally fine, except our ranged fighter was currently out of the picture), and then Bloodthirsty. So, we got several severe injuries due to 2*+1damage, but pulled it off (one of the hardest early fights I've had).

Year 4
We spent as much as we could, getting a Symposium and a Weapon Crafter. Unfortunately, the Symposium drew the attention of a hooded knight, who hacked two of our survivors into unconscious bits.

So, we now knew we were going into a Butcher fight with only three survivors. We decided to spend everything we could, even if we didn't really want it, since we expected to lose the fight, despite some good gear.

We tried Paul's fight, and got some nasty luck that killed us before any chance to attack.

We then fought the Butcher a man down, which came down to one attack, and we decided to swing instead of throwing our founding stone. It drew the trap, which started a chain reaction that killed all three survivors in one round :/

So... not great. At least we all died to bleeding so nothing really nasty like a movement reduction or disorder came up.

Year 5
We tried Paul again and died again, though this time after getting half-way through his health.

We then killed another puny lion.

Year 6
The Armored Strangers came to give us some loot (not knowing we were immortal, they took pity on our seemingly weak group).

We then tried the Messenger of the First Story, and didn't do a great job, and got her killed. We then got through a pretty rough fight with our survivors against the lion, but did kill it, so had a huge pile of resources. We made some nice weapons and got a leather worker since we had the resources (though no ammonia since we kept not hitting understanding).

Thoughts
We've been playing things really loose. Being fairly competitive gamers, there are lots of things we haven't explored since they looked like bad gambles, and conservative play seems generally best. This mode, with lessened consequences, gave us a lot of freedom to take stupid risks, which has meant that we haven't done as well as one would expect from great stats on immortal guys, but it's also a game where everything goes about twice as quickly since we don't need to debate smart choices, and it's more of a sandbox.

I was a bit surprised in feeling like Hero Mode did a great job making the game light while not really losing much of the impact, other than of course guys dying exceptionally rarely. I like it enough that I definitely want to try another hero campaign later.

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