Generations: A Deep Dive into the Character Deck | Impairments (Patreon)

When starting this portion of the deep dive I got a bit hung up on figuring out the order; each category of Character card; Impairments, Abilities and Legendary Abilities has their own importance in respect to deck construction and how you can approach it. You only get one Legendary, which makes it the prize that you're always hoping to hit, so maybe you should start by considering which of those you want. On the other hand, the bulk of the deck is made up of normal Abilities so the vast majority of your experience with this deck is going to be flavoured by what you've selected there.

These are both significant aspects of the game experience that the Character Deck offers and I considered starting with either one of these. However, as you already know because the title is busy being a little spoiler spiller, I've decided to start with Impairments. The reason I made this choice is because Impairments are the “limiter” on abilities, you can only add five ability cards in per one Impairment added, which makes these negatraits (to borrow the term from Blood Bowl) the foundation upon which the good stuff is built.

Also this choice lets me work from the “bad” stuff through the good stuff to an end with the best stuff and that is a narrative journey I find satisfying. Also there's simply less Impairment cards than normal ability ones so I can get this element squeezed into one article along with an introduction to the method of how I'm going to break down these cards.

The Method

Character cards are not just about the mechanical power that they bring to the game, while each unique ability is the bulk of the text that is printed, the vast majority of the space on the card is given over to a piece of art depicting the character in question. As such, not only will we look at the simple benefit of the card as a game piece, but also we'll explore what a given character brings to the world's mythology. These cards represent faces that have been carved into the ground and the system that propagates “clones” of these long gone people has accepted their additions and adds them to the possible survivor types who can be born.

That in itself is really interesting, we know from the epilogue of People of the Dream Keeper that the characters are a new development, the Scribe watches a page from its book fall to the ground and written in that page is the settlement carving the faces of their people onto the stone floor. As the very text on GCE p179 states:

“The topography of the land is forever changed.”

The character deck isn't something that existed before the first iteration of the Dream Keeper's plan resulted in success. This wasn't here during our first cycles of the first generation campaigns like People of the Lantern for example. The legacy unlock gained here isn't part of The Scribe's plan, it's different, new and it represents a way that survivors have managed to finally make a permanent change to the world's texture. It represents a form of hope because everything isn't doomed to be totally trapped in cycles of death that never change.

That makes this entire system really fascinating from a world building perspective, it is a form of history that a settlement has managed to make stick despite the actions of creatures like The Watchers erasing history as a part of its normal life cycle. These survivors have found a way to force additional types of people into the previously closed system maintained by The Sculptor(s), The Scribe and what I believe is third element The Parasite Queen (we'll see if I'm right on that one or just barking up the wrong Nightmare Tree when that monster finally reaches us). This change is super thematic because of its association with the Dream Keeper campaign, the Gambler in that campaign is referred to as being The Dream Keeper and what are these carved faces if not the hopes and dreams of a settlement of people? Dreams being kept and preserved in a way that will bring them back over and over for possibly eternity.

This also perhaps explains why we've not (yet) received Character cards for the original cast of named prologue survivors. Lucy, Zachary, Erza, Allister, Rachel, Joe, Inti and Macy have all not received character cards because they were templates for survivors before this change happened. Perhaps they will be inserted in the future, following the change that the Dream Keeper's people have brought to the system, which I think can happen because Aya existed before the GCE campaign and she has since received her own Character card in a white box.

As for the assessment of the mechanics, I'm going to dive into each one as much as I can, covering broad use options and also any corner cases I can think of. If I miss anything, please do add them in the comments below, it's always a delight to have someone mention a unique or rare interaction in this game. Kingdom Death has grown absolutely massive in a relatively short period of time and the bigger it gets, the number of interactions grow an even larger amount. It is getting really hard to discover/read and document everything that is possible now, which makes this job a lot harder, but also keeps it fresh and exciting because the game can still surprise.

After that I'll list any clear synergies and give the card a mechanical grade in the classic grade style of ranking from F to A, with the additional options of S and S+ covering the absolute standouts. With Impairments here the grading is going to be based on how easy it is to manage the negatives that a given Impairment brings, so F is an absolutely crippling impairment with no noticeable while an S+ would be an Impairment that could have been an ability because it's not negative at all.

As for the ordering, I'll go through the Gambler's Chest stuff in alphabetical order first and then revisit the extra promotional Character cards so everything released at the date of writing this series, is covered. I'll also be using the Character tag so all character card articles can be found by clicking on that tag.

Impairments in General

All Impairments share the same floor, in that the worst an impairment represents is a duff survivor who you will avoid taking on hunts (unless the unthinkable happens and the settlement suffers a string of deaths requiring you to send out the rejects as some sort of suicide squad) and will eventually be fed into some form of generic population loss instead of valuable survivors being spent on -X Population situations.

This is because we don't currently have impairments that directly harm the Settlement, instead they tend to harm either the survivor carrying them and the other survivors who are forced to go on a hunt with them. That means we can leave the more difficult survivors at home where they can exist in peace until it is their time.

The ceiling on the other hand is either a manageable Impairment or one with no practical downside, as we'll see there's even Impairments that I consider to be Abilities in disguise, so there's a lot of potential here.

Disorderly

I can't think of a more appropriate way to start this series than with an exception to the general rules called “Disorderly”, most Character cards in the game come with an associated miniature, Disorderly is one of the exceptions to that. This follically challenged gentleman doesn't have a matching miniature (Though there are bald survivors both in the survivor kits and present in the Gambler's ball). I cannot shake the feeling that this card's art is a reference of some kind, perhaps a character from a series or a real person. However, who or what that is I've drawn a blank on. Does anyone know of some weeb thing that this gentleman is referencing? If it's not JoJo's Bizarre Adventure I tend to not know much at all.

Disorderly's outfit however is a clear reference to the card's mechanics, being a straitjacket which ties directly to the mechanics of this character. We have here a character who is more prone to carrying mental disorders and they have been depicted in the universal garb which is associated with that particular trope. This is a great piece of art in that it not only depicts the physical state of the character, it also has a lot of additional noise surrounding the piece which represents both the trailing ends of the jacket bindings and also the state of mind.

Mechanically this impairment is of absolutely no consequence at all to the survivor who has it unless they are at the traditional max of 3 disorders. At this point your typical survivor will start to cycle through disorders by discarding the most harmful one in exchange for the new one. Dealing with having three disorders and the interactions between them. The Disorderly survivor however is going to acquire a fourth one on top of usual three, meaning it takes longer to reach the “disorder cycling” point and also there's more negative mechanics interacting with each other, giving more potential for chaotic situations that can make a survivor temporarily unable to go on hunts.

I write temporary because we always have access to the Barber Surgeon settlement location and the trepanning endeavour. That means we can prune away the worst disorders on a Disorderly survivor via the expenditure of endeavours. While that's not ideal to be trepanning in order to maintain a survivor's hunt viability; we'd rather spend those resources on other options that move the settlement forward rather than tread water, it does give us a way to manage the disorderly.

Also, it is possible to gain beneficial disorders such as Quixotic or Immortal and having four slots means you can hold three “good” disorders with only one that you cycle. That gives the power ceiling for this card a lot more height than many other impairments. As such this is a survivor I can see myself using in hunt rotation as the impairment is manageable, takes a while to become relevant and potentially can pay out with good stuff

Final Score: B

Out of Sync

Our second character is another one without an associated miniature. Out of Sync is a piece of art that I find deeply fascinating as again I feel that this art is a reference to something I've seen, but cannot currently place. We have here a masked individual in a hunched up pose, they are holding their knife by the blade, drawing blood from this action and the lines around the character suggest that they are shivering or twitching. For me the entire image very much depicts a person who is struggling to fit in not only with the larger world, but with their own body.

The way that an out of sync individual expresses themselves in mechanics is with the removal of an affinity of each colour. This means that you'd need an extra affinity on the gear grid for any card ability you wanted to activate, for example in order to have an active Rawhide Headband and Lucky Charm we'd need to employ a total of three blue affinities instead of the usual two and we'd still be lacking the Rawhide Vest's +1 Evasion Ability bonus because we'd also need two red affinities for that.

However, not all gear grid builds lean into affinities, the Death Mask from the Butcher's Mask Maker settlement location is a classic example of that, if you have no affinities you gain a massive boost to your luck. Also gear from The King has a lower amount of affinities and supplies its power in other ways and finally Cycloid Scale Armor offers so many affinities that the reduction penalty is frankly meaningless.

All of that means an Out of Sync survivor isn't automatically useless, they can be a very useful member of a hunt party if you are able to build them a grid that is agnostic to affinities (or employ Cycloid Scale Armor). The first of these a fun challenge and offers a really different approach to gear assessment, however it does overall limit what the survivor can achieve and that limitation results in a reduction of potential power.

Final Score: C

The Clumsy

A third character who doesn't have an associated miniature, I honestly expected The Clumsy to have Erza on the artwork as she's normally the klutzy survivor depicted having some form of accident. Still, I'm not concerned as the character depicted here is an absolute delight, we have a chaotic scene of everything going wrong at once, with so much frantic energy surrounding this. The poor wee lass here is not only breaking the bindings on her weapon, but she's also split open her backpack and is losing supplies along with her lantern. I love an awful lot of the pieces depicted on these cards, but this one is definitely near the top of my favourites.

Unfortunately the impairment gained here is pretty much a non-starter. Weapon Proficiency is an incredibly important aspect of a survivor's progression, because it offers growth for the character via the proficiency card and also development for the settlement through the mastery innovation. We rarely get more than one weapon proficiency rank per lantern year, and the fact that they can be completely undone via the survivor perishing means that not getting an advancement 50% of the time is honestly unacceptable. We need 8 advancements to lock in our Mastery, but this character needs on average 16 to get the job done.

As such, the only place where I can see myself not leaving the clumsy survivor in settlement is where I'm only pushing three weapon proficiencies per lantern year and having a pure 'I don't attack' support in the forth slot. That means this character card isn't completely useless, but it's not a character I'd want to bring along, especially in the portion of the game where one is trying to lock in key weapon masteries.

Final Score: E

The Dying

Speaking of three survivor parties, The Dying absolutely represents one, in fact this card is the very pinnacle of 'Red Shirt' strategies; which is a play style that takes its name from Star Trek's away team trope of having a security (red shirt) extra who's purpose on the away team is to die in order to highlight the “threat” that the situation represents for the main cast. This of course doesn't really create any stakes for the viewer, and the entire trope was killed, buried, dug up, resurrected and then killed a second time by the excellent Galaxy Quest movie.

The art itself is a fine enough piece, it loses some of its impact due to it not being very different in style from the rest of the impairment/ability cards, I would have preferred a splash of red or a more sketch-like design here to make this stand out from the others, but it depicts the character well enough and there's an interesting motif in having the bag they are carrying contain skulls.

To return to the mechanics; Redshirting in Kingdom Death, is not related to the real world practice of delaying a child's entry into education in order to allow the child's development to progress a bit more. Instead it is a more callous act that usually takes place when you have mechanics that care about your settlement death count. There's a few of these out there, such as the Halloween Stan's Hope Stealer spear or the Sword Hunter's Excalibur (it's really good with Excalibur). In essence you're running something that benefits from survivor deaths and that is where having a self archiving survivor is very effective.

This isn't the only area where this card is of benefit, with Arc Survivors Murder opens up the Homicidalism philosophy to a settlement, Homicidalism (which you can find a deep dive into via the Collection tab) is a really powerful philosophy that unlocks incredibly strong knowledges that you want to put onto non-homicidalism survivors (because they get the benefits without many of the associated drawbacks of being a suspected murderer). So having this in your Impairment selection is pretty much a must if you are planning to run settlement with murder-hobos running about.

The last benefit I'll go into is a fun one that is available to any settlement and it is linked to how settlement cards operate. Whenever you draw a settlement card via a mechanic, you cannot get a second version via the normal settlement event card draw (this is a revision to Adam's original ruling of “Double Murder” several years ago). This means that if you have a Dying survivor pulling Murder out of the deck already, then your other survivors are protected from being murdered, and if you're an Accept Darkness principle settlement there are even more benefits for the person who murdered you on the normal Murder card (as opposed to the Arc Survivor one). This is a lot of protection and value especially if you are in a position where you have multiple The Dying survivors in your settlement so you can chain this for multiple years. Also a guaranteed Death Principle benefit per death.

This is a card which manages to turn a huge negative; that of a self imploding survivor, into a net positive through synergy with other mechanics and that makes this an interesting character card to include as long as you're good at keeping population totals up.

Final Score: A for Arc Survivor settlements, B for settlements that care about death count, C otherwise.

The Hunger

The Hunger is a survivor who has been gripped by the taste of marrow, but they have not fully embraced the path that results in a survivor becoming a bone eater and the art holds some of that furious energy in a way that honestly the associated survivor miniature doesn't depict. The miniature is more statuesque and theatrical in posing, whereas the art here sells that desire and need to consume the taboo.

This Impairment is a bit more unique than many others in that it offers a trade off, you gain a semi-negative impairment in Marrow Hunger in exchange for a positive of +1 strength. Marrow Hunger is not a particularly bad impairment as all it does is this:

Marrow Hunger

An impairment. If the Murder or Skull Eater settlement events are drawn, nominate this survivor.

We've looked at Murder above, so a The Hunger survivor will either get murdered or murder providing some protection for more developed survivors if you choose to leave The Hunter in the settlement and have them be the 'murder bait'. Skull Eater is a little more problematic if you're running the base game version because there's a 20% chance of being killed for enjoying some calcium crunchies, and it can cause Murder to turn up in the following year. However for Arc Survivors the alternative Skull Eater offers an unlock of Marrowism if you've picked Cannibalize over Graves (which I always do for Arc Survivor settlements because I love Marrowism).

As such, if you are planning to run a Cannibalize settlement for your Arc Survivors, this card is just a benefit with no meaningful negative and you'll always pick it. If you're planning to go Protect the Young then the drawback on the Skull Eater card becomes a death sentence due to it either resulting in an exile (returning as a Bone Witch in 1d5 lantern years) or them being erased from existence. So you may well pass on it there.

Final Score: A for Cannibalize Arc Settlements, a D for Protect the Young Arc Settlements, C for everyone else.

The Lonely

Another superb illustration here depicts a survivor who is enclosed in a spiny shell, the suggestion here is that the survivor is lonely through their own nature. People do not form close bonds with The Lonely because they are far too prickly and harm others with their personality. This art can also be considered to represent the Scout, who are by nature an incredibly isolated individual who take on the role of being an independent part of a hunt party, forging a path ahead on hunts and making the hard decision to stand apart from the others and perhaps even have to watch them die before recovering the lost gear when showdowns turn south.

It could be either or perhaps even both of these interpretations and that is part of what makes Character cards so delightful to interact with. With so much of the card given over to this black and white art, there's a lot of storytelling without requiring vast amounts of text. If you compare it to Disorders, which use the same art each time and instead use text for their world building you can see how richer the character card method is.

As for the mechanics, this character creates a completely disposable survivor, not being able to take a part in Intimacy means there's no drive to try and improve this character because you won't be able to utilise Family and pass on their weapon proficiency to the next generation. It is interesting that despite being shut out from Partnership, The Lonely can still take part in team efforts like Synchronised Strike or Tactics, but this card didn't need that because you're really not encouraged to take them out on hunts anyway.

There is a fun little trick you can pull if you have access to the Flower Knight, the Sleeping Virus Flower event “A Warm Virus” which if The Lonely is given the gear card, will allow them to transplant bodies upon their death. They become “The Guest” and when that happens the Host gains the Guest's Fighting Arts (Knowledges), Disorders, Positive Attributes and Weapon Proficiency Levels but they do not pass on their Abilities or Impairments (note the Host loses all fighting arts, abilities, disorders and impairments during this process). So that does give settlements with the Flower Knight on the quarry list a way to partake in Intimacy and Family if for some reason The Lonely is part of your Weapon Proficiency survivors due to say low population forcing you into that situation.

Final Score: I'm not taking this card in my selection outside of having the Flower Knight “escape valve” ever unless something changes with the game's weapon proficiency progression system and even then I'm probably not picking this.

F.

The Unlucky

A thematic twin to The Clumsy, the Unlucky depicts a survivor experiencing the loss of all their possessions without any real cause outside of “If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.” The energy to this piece has a lot of outward direction, as if things are being pulled away from this unfortunate survivor by outside forces.

Mechanically this one is very simple, -1 luck means that you're being excluded from the Critical Wound system, there's no reason to build +luck equipment on a survivor like this because you're trying to polish a pig. There are places where a survivor like this is relevant, monsters such as The Butcher have effectively no (alright 1) critical wound hit locations, The Manhunter punishes survivors for critically wounding him, and there are no resource drops for critically wounding many nemesis monsters. That means this survivor isn't completely useless, they can be a part of a Nemesis fighting squad, but you'd still rather not use them unless you have to. If in the future we get monsters that really punish critical wounds, the usefulness of this impairment may rise it above the ranks of 'pretty much unplayable' but as it stands at the moment I leave The Unlucky out of my Character decks because it excludes a survivor from interacting with one of the game's more fun systems.

Final Grade: E

The Impetuous (Survivors of Death I)

The First of our white box releases, the Impetuous is Monster's depiction of the Azure Knight and this is another Impairment that honestly you can work with. Suffering Frenzy on arrival is something you can build around, here's what it does:

Frenzy

A brain trauma result. A survivor who suffers this is Frenzied until the end of the Showdown Phase.

Gain +1 strength token, +1 speed token, and 1d5 insanity.

Ignore the "slow" special rule on melee weapons.

A frenzied survivor may not spend survival or use fighting arts, weapon specialization, or weapon mastery.

A survivor may be Frenzied multiple times.

I've broken the paragraph apart here because Frenzy has a lot of small rules all rolled together into one mechanic and it helps to see them all split apart individually when assessing things that inflict frenzy.

In effect we are trading away our ability to use survival actions via survival spending (alternative methods like Red Fist will still work and we're not locked out of spending survival during the hunt phase), we're losing fighting arts/knowledges and any weapon proficiency benefits but we do get some benefits in trade. +1d5 Insanity, +1 strength token, +1 speed token and ignoring slow on certain weapon types is a fair trade if you have ways of getting around the survival action lock out. In particular there are some slow weapons that become incredible when you are able to surpass that 1 speed lock put in place on them, Grand Weapons in particularly are a great example of this type of weapon.

It is also notable that while you can't use Weapon Specialization/Mastery when Frenzied you are not locked out of gaining Weapon Proficiency advancement, so this is an excellent option for levelling up our bread and butter proficiencies of Shield and Fist & Tooth, both of which are boosted greatly by the +1 strength and +1speed due to the usually poor base stats these weapon types boast.

Final Score: B is for Berserker

The Lost Echo – (Elsbeth)

Our art here depicts Elsbeth, who is pretty much 1 to 1 translation of the generic hero line Lost Princess and therefore is an echo of a character from another time and place that has seeped into the world of Kingdom Death. There isn't much variation between the Generic version and the Kingdom Death version which kind of suggests that the Lost Princess really did leave her watercolored reality and entered this plane for at least long enough to leave her imprint upon it.

This impairment is another one of the type that can be useful to a hunt party, we get a survivor who can act as a lightning rod (quite literally in one hunt event) which ensures that not only can we be confident that the other survivors will be untouched by the straggler events, but that we'll never have to deal with the situation where multiple survivors roll the same lowest number and become the stragglers plural. That's a valuable tool for a player to be able to utilise, someone has to take the straggler hits, but if you know who that is going to be you can build your hunt party to take that into account.

Final Score: C

The Unfettered – (Survivors of Death I)

The Bullet Dancer makes her in universe appearance kitted out in gear that we still don't have the name for, though likely it's related to People of the Sun in some fashion due to the overall style. The Bullet Dancer is what happens when you take a Grammaton Cleric from Equilibrium and blend them with a practitioner of raqs sharqui.

This is a hard cap on what gear options you have for the survivor, no heavy gear and nothing with a 3+ for armor points. That means we're limited to early game armor sets and Cycloid Scale Armor. For the early part of a campaign this negative barely impacts upon play, Rawhide is more than good enough until we need to switch to Leather and even after that we have some solid options that can be utilised for a fairly long time.

The real parity breaker however is Cycloid Scale Armor, which is an incredibly strong offensive orientated armor set that fits into every restriction that The Unfettered has (likely by design given the ties to People of the Sun), but also we have things like Crystal Skin, Marrowism and additional armor point sources such as shields which can let us run an Unfettered survivor with a lot more durability than you'd first think. This is a relatively easy impairment to dance around, so I'm pretty happy to include it most of the time.

Final Score: A - if you're playing with the Sunstalker and have access to Cycloid Scale. B - Otherwise unless somehow you've built a campaign with all heavy armor and virtually no light shields.

Final Thoughts on Impairments

While there are a few situational members of this list, I find that the overall optimal choices are pretty telegraphed, we don't want things that make survivors unpalatable for showdowns so there are a few that can pretty much be left in the box most of the time, especially if you have access to the promotional ones. As such I'd break them down in the following categories and ranks

Generically Palatable

The Unfettered

The Impetuous

Disorderly

The Lost Echo

Situationally Powerful

The Hunger

The Dying

Mostly Negative but has Potential

Out of Sync

Do Not Want

The Clumsy

The Unlucky

The Lonely

Which means for my currently preferred play style I am going with, which is Arc Survivors with Marrowism I'm picking The Hunger and The Unfettered due to how they both click into Marrowism builds perfectly and then the remaining two will be selected from from The Dying (If I want Homicidalism in the campaign, which usually I don't, the play patterns it promotes are a bit too strong for what the game can handle), The Impetuous, Disorderly and The Lost Echo.

As for future Impairment design, I would like to see more of the kind that punish players for leaving them in the settlement; or offer a trade off such as say -1 accuracy +1 speed, or force limited build selections such as 'no two handed weapons' or 'no blunt weapons' in exchange for some minor positive in the style of The Hunger.

It's far more interesting to have things that say 'hey in exchange for this punishment you get this opportunity' rather than 'don't bring this survivor on hunts unless you're desperate' aka coprolalia. This is the kind of thing I think that Team Death will naturally get better at, all three of the additional character cards we've seen here represent that latter category, you can see they've all made it to the highest bracket and are among the first choices I'll make for a campaign.

That's an indication of good design. In contrast the three I have placed in my personal bottom most category of 'Do Not Want' represent the least interesting designs, which is one that has a negative that runs against player goals and motivations. We are looking to develop weapon proficiency, we like Critical wounds and we want to pass on our survivors progression to the next generation as much as possible.

If we're being asked to field survivors with that kind of a negative, we need some carrot to get us to accept the stick.