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

This is the penultimate member of the series and will cover the remaining Gamblers Chest Expansion (GCE) Characters along with a revisit of the various promotional ones that have been released. Following this will be the current Legendary options and then we're done with Characters until new ones are released.

The Spear

Clad in Screaming Armor, the classic spear based armor set, The Spear is depicted driving their weapon into a foe. It's another dynamic illustration, but it doesn't tie well into the ability we gain here. That ability is trading away a blue affinity in exchange for giving Spears in the survivor's gear grid Block 1. How good this is will depend on your exact quarry mix; because while Block 1 is really powerful through the early and mid game portion of a settlement's lifespan, it begins to fall off as monster speed increases. So the sooner you can get a spear, the more value this ability will pay off with.

The early spears belong to:

The White Lion – King's Spear

Spidicules – Amber Poleaxe

Smog Singers – Spear of Life

And the relevant mid game spears are:

Phoenix – Finger of God

Sunstalker – Sky Harpoon

Crimson Crocodile's – Fear Spear

We also have some powerful end game spears that you may still make use of because at this point you will not usually be employing the spear as your front line tank weapon having Block 1 on a weapon as an option is great unless you are utilising Blue Affinities in some fashion and can't afford an extra one.

Blacksmith - Lantern Glaive

The King - Adjudicator

The King – Partisan

The most significant part of the downside for this ability is the -1 blue affinity is aimed a disabling Spear + Blue Charm, Screaming Armor in particular can just about manage to activate a Blue Charm on its loadout, so the -1 Blue Affinity can be relevant. However with expansions you can manage to reach 6 blue affinities in a gear grid so you can get around that if you want.

Final Score: S

The Sword

The Sword is a phoenix armor clad sword master holding a Rainbow Katana and therefore making a strong case that Team Death should put the sword keyword onto all Katanas, because while not all swords are katanas; all katanas are swords. In addition to that the character miniature is called Swordmaster of Deadrock and “She met her end trying to steal a sword from a living statue.” Which is a reference to Hunt Event 88. “The Sword and the Statue” which also refers to Muramasa as a sword. Which means, in my opinion, it's time to start pushing for Team Death to make sure that every katana also has the sword keyword because they thematically consider katanas to be a sub-genre of sword.

As for the mechanics here, +1 accuracy and +1 strength with swords is huge, both of these stats are great to have, and these two bumps also make the Bone Sword into “almost a bone axe” and the Scrap Sword becomes a viable mid game weapon because at 3 strength it never represented sufficient forward progression even though it also can have deadly. I add this one in always because swords are a very common weapon type with a lot of additional synergies built into various fighting arts, secret fighting arts and knowledges.

Score: S

The Tough

Another community favourite character, The Tough is part of the human population who isn't normally covered in Kingdom Death's miniature range and also he's depicted in a positive light. This is a model I absolutely love even if his loadout of twin Denticle Axes is completely nonsensical due to them being a weapon with expensive opportunity costs and not having paired.

+1 to all severe injury rolls is a massive increase, it halves the odds of dying from severe injuries to every location except the head (it's a 25% reduction there) and it is incredible when combined with Gorment Armor in particular because a full 5 slot set of that provides regeneration of all non-fatal severe injuries at the end of the showdown. Even if you are not making use of the Gorm in the current campaign, this is a great ability to have on a survivor because of this reduction in lethality. Sure the best situation is to not take severe injuries in the first place. However survivors don't normally have the luxury to say 'no' when the dice land that way. Given that this doesn't take up a knowledge or fighting art slot I absolutely want this one around because it's great on any hunter who you want to go the distance.

Final Score: S+

The Watched

Our last GCE Character is a bit of a weird one when we consider the thematics, The Watched is wearing Dragon Armor and given the name you'd probably think that they are from a settlement with a Watcher at the heart of it. That makes sense right? The Watcher watches The Watched. Except no, if we go into the specifics of this survivor via its lore there's a very different story here.

“Champion of the Goblin

He Knew he was destined for great things. As the settlement cheered, he ascended beyond the sky. Face-to-face with his patron god, in its gaze he only found death.”

So he's a survivor from a People of the Stars settlement with the Goblin constellation and Dragon Armor (People of the Stars is the campaign where constellations come into effect and not a place where you'd hunt the Dragon King normally due to well, the ONLY Dragon King is sitting on his throne in the middle of your settlement). So yeah, unless Campaigns of Death sorts this out somehow, this survivor's armor and weapons don't make a lot of sense.

As for the mechanics? This is good, +5 armor points is a huge deal due to how it can shift monster damage breakpoints by increasing the number of hits a monster needs to score a severe injury. It absolutely does get weaker as monster damage climbs, but having a baseline soak of 14 (5 armor + 9 injury boxes) via a slot free ability is huge and there is not a single hunting survivor type who doesn't benefit from this ability.

Final Score: S+

The Challenger

The Challenger represents the survivor Guinevere and plays into the Black Knight a bit via her mechanics and more significantly her base depicting the Black Knight's showdown board. The Challenger interestingly plays into one of my preferred play styles, which is having two different types of showdown survivors. Those who fight quarry monsters and those who fight nemesis monsters.

Luck is an amazing stat, though of course it is less valuable in campaigns where you have The Butcher, so if you are going that route you want to make sure that your other nemesis monsters can be harmed by crits in a meaningful fashion. If you're playing with The Manhunter for Nemesis Node 1 then there's so much value to be had here. As such I think The Challengers is best suited for campaigns with The Manhunter, Any Node 2 and The Black Knight (as indicated by Guinevere's name and base design). I would happily have four of this this character in every nemesis showdown and I wouldn't even be upset if I was running them in the Butcher Showdown because they can still critically wound one hit location and there's large benefits for doing so. This one is pretty much a staple for the deck at the moment.

Final Score: A

Natural Healer – Survivors of Death I

Natural Healer is our Monster version of the Hospitalar she's kept a lot of her original design here while still translating it across to a full set of Bullfrog Armor along with her Bully Club. The one real issue here is that you're unlikely to be able to construct full Bullfrogdog Armor and the Bully Club due to the copper bottleneck that throttles most attempts to properly explore the Tuskworks settlement location. However, that's nothing to be held against the art and sculpt, I really like what has been done here and honestly think that the Hospitalar has one of the closest translations from the generic hero line into the Monster line we've ever seen.

The Natural Healer character card is a really cool one, it is especially good for tanking types because they can use this to top up their most damaged hit location including all injury boxes. That's something that scales through the entire campaign and also manages to help solve the “Body gets hit twice as often as anything else” dilemma that impacts all survivors due to how current armor design doesn't bolster the body slot (I am of the opinion that all body slots should have at least +50% armor points rounded up added to them, more with higher level armor. I'm tired of “dodge the body hit” being pretty much the automatic decision unless a hit location is threatening severe injuries). I also really like that Team Death limited the window for this one use ability to be “at the start of your act” rather than letting it trigger at any time or during survival windows. It means that it rewards good resource management and timing, which are skill/knowledge based choices.

Even if you're not tanking this is a slotl ess full heal for one hit location, which is an amazing little boost to gain at the start of your act.

Score: S

Soloist – Basara White Box

Basara (Called Bah-Sara or Bassoon here) is our Soloist. I've always liked Basara's miniature even if it does lean fully into the 'assless chaps' vibe that the other Singer Armor sets skirt around. I'm not opposed to nudity or sexy elements being on miniatures and art in this game, but I prefer it to be used for humour/satire rather than simply titillation. Still, I can't manage to defend it regardless when chatting with other content creators though as KDM is still broadly considered to be the “Murder and Boobs” game when looking at it from the outside. If we're all honest that is the initial presentation that one can get and I see why one would draw that conclusion. Anyway, to get back on topic, personally I like Basara, though I wish that the small miniature and artwork had the same weapon.

How good The Soloist is depends very much on other elements in your collection. If you just have the normal instrument and noisy support options, then there's the classic issue caused by “Team Death hate music” aka “We keep doubling down on The Harvester hunt event even though it greatly limits design space”. Over and over they try to improve the carrot side of the Harvester with powerful instrument based cards, but until they address the stick, which is an unavoidable 1% chance per Basic Hunt Event of automatic death they are not getting anywhere. This is simply because dying on the hunt due to gear load out is not acceptable, because of how fast a showdown can go wrong when you're undermanned and how disengaging it is to be eliminated from the game before you even reach the monster. As such without a specific piece of promotional content, instruments should be firmly relegated by players to Nemesis showdowns only.

With the Grim Muffler Pattern Card, which comes with Winter Solstice Lucy however we have a way to use Instruments on a single survivor in the group. That means with that pattern gear crafted we are able to utilise an instrument on our Soloist and then they get a solid little benefit while also synergising with The Gaiety character card (entry below this one)

I live in hope that Team Death build us play environments without such a frustrating element in the future. Instruments and Thrown Weapons are the last to big portions of the gear design that need some genuine love and attention.

Final Score: D without Grim Muffler protection. A with it.

The Gaiety – Lune White Box

Lune, the character depicted here, is one of my favourite characters because she is so different from the normal Kingdom Death sculpts, she's lithe and ethereal in a way which doesn't match the normal design we see. She feels like a classical piece of art in a manga museum, and I love her for it.

The Gaiety has a similar problem to Basara above, so I won't go through all of that again here. With the limitations mentioned above we'll either employ The Gaiety during Nemesis Showdowns only or we'll have access to the Grim Muffler on one survivor and then take these Gaiety survivors out all the time because this ability is absolutely great when you have the right tools to utilise it. My personal favourite is when used in combination with instruments that can be used repeatedly. As such the best ones are:

Smog Singer Instrument Weapons

Infernal Rhythm Strain Fighting Art (Echoes of Death II)

The Catarium's Whisker Harp (you can always strum it even if there are no moods in play)

If you don't have an activation on the instrument then you won't want it. That means things like the Rawhide Drum, Frogwhistle, Vespertine Cello are all no good here.

It's also worth noting that this is a pair of tokens that are generated and you can scarf down those beauties with the right Gormandism knowledge (Arc Survivors) in order to convert them into permanent buffs. Tasty.

High power ceiling, really low power floor.

Final Score: With the right support this is an S, without that support the character card doesn't do anything. That means an F for settlements without ways of activating instruments. So plan your campaign set up accordingly.

The Versatile – Survivors of Death I

Finally here we have the Investment Sniper, who brought with her a new form of ranged weapon in the crossbow (giving us hope that we'll get both Thrown and Crossbow masteries in the future). The Investment Sniper herself is depicted holding that very crossbow along with a sword, which supports the mechanics of this particular character card. I do like that she has an eyepatch, which is a reference to how the Generic Investment Sniper will close one eye to when shooting.

This character card isn't great, but also isn't terrible. If you have two weapons in your gear grid then you can effectively “surge” right after an attack with the first weapon to activate the second weapon a single time during the showdown. This is something Paired survivors can make use of even if the second paired weapon has lost most of its bonuses outside of its stat profile (that changes if we consider paired weapons with different names). Overall? I'm not super excited about this one, but it does work quite well with a founding stone as that converts your survival into a wound with the highest probability. Otherwise if you are not using paired you're probably running a “Sword & Board” build and you want it to give you a single turn where you can attack with a weapon and set a block. I understand the decision to make this a once per showdown phase ability, every turn would be too good, but putting the survival cost onto this really holds it back a lot for much of the campaign.

I think there are a lot of stronger Character cards you could have in your deck, but it doesn't hurt to have this as an option, especially with how it scales when weapons get stronger.

Final Score: B

Next time will be the Legendary abilities and then that's another part of the Gambler's Chest all wrapped up as I continue to move towards eventually reviewing the expansion in its entirety. But before that it'll be a review of one of the most excellent ancillary products I've had the pleasure of using in years.