Planning Your Progression in a KDM Campaign (Patreon)

Something I get asked here and there is about the creation of a campaign goals guide/list. This is a fairly reasonable question, but the answer I've always had to give is that it doesn't exist and honestly at the moment it can't exist because of the fundamental texture of how Kingdom Death: Monster is structured. We'll start with a look at what is meant by that, before going in depth into why it is a reasonable question to ask, games where it does work, why it's close to impossible to answer in respect to KDM and finally giving the closest match that KDM's structure allows.

The request?

The nature of this question comes down to the simple concept of wanting a form of guidelines to give structure to a campaign. When should one be hunting Level 2 Node 1 or 2 monsters? When is it time to hunt the Node 3 monster at L1, is that straight away as soon as they arrive or later? What node/level of monsters should one be hunting in lantern year 16?

In short, a timeline guide that says in lantern year X hunt your Node Y monster at level Z. It's a perfectly reasonable request to have, other games can follow this kind of structure and give players goals to strive for, why is it something that is so difficult to put together that my honest opinion is if someone definitively says “You should be hunting a Level Z monster in lantern year X” and you believe them, well I've got a bridge for sale you might like to purchase.

To help explain that we'll take a diversion into looking at other boss battlers; now there's a whole bunch to pick from, but for this specific example we'll look at two which are probably the closest to Kingdom Death. That is Oathsworn: Into the Deep Wood (Oathsworn) and Aeon Trespass: Odyssey (ATO). In particular ATO is the closest to KDM out of all the boss battlers out there because it is the only (currently) available game that employs two decks with distinct behaviors. These are the AI deck and the BP deck (which is somewhat similar to the HL deck, but also very different); because there's a bunch of different terms across various games what I use the term Active behaviours to cover AI decks, because they are proactive things that the boss will do on their turn and the term Reactive behaviours to cover what the boss does in response to player actions.

I have just deleted three paragraphs here where I got completely off the subject in hand and started writing about the history of AI in dungeon crawlers/boss battlers because, while I find it fascinating, it's not the point and I ramble off enough already.

The point that I was trying to get at here is that while Oathsworn and ATO are both excellent Campaign Boss Battlers, they have a different structure and ethos from KDM due to both being deep narrative games with a story to tell. Kingdom Death's campaign narrative is a bare bones scaffolding. There's a settlement, there's a monster at the heart of the settlement, there's some quarry monsters in the area, there's some nemesis monsters that will attack/challenge the settlement in set years, there's a core boss to overcome and then a final boss to claim campaign victory. There are no lead characters (apart from the Nemesis monsters) and any printed story from the designers is rarely more than a couple of paragraphs. It's very different, more of a Slay the Spire approach to storytelling over Baldur's Gate 3.

Apart from things like the Squire Campaign (which is a narrative campaign like Oathsworn and ATO and even has lead characters), Kingdom Death's narrative is about the various monsters; the stories & tales that surround the settlement and the emergent stories of the survivors. Their triumphs and defeats, brave individuals who face a hopeless lone final stand against an enraged phoenix and come out alive or foolish survivors who have their head bitten off by the Butcher in the first round. Dynasties of survivors born from scarred veterans, elders who no longer venture out or generations of sacrificial lambs who get almost nowhere because of bad luck or poor choices. It's all emergent storytelling brought forth from the player's starting Pillar choices along with the fickle nature of the dice and the stories that come from hearts of the players around the table.

To directly contrast that, in ATO there is a running narrative thread both for each individual adventure, each cycle and a core thread running through each of the cycles to tell a complete story with multiple setups and payoffs. You can draw some parallels in that each Cycle has a Primordial that functions as the Big Boss of the cycle, a persistent foe that hounds the heels of the Argonauts and attacks in a somewhat unpredictable fashion and then there are cycle specific Primordials that make up most of the battles. These Cycle specific Primordials are as close as ATO gets to KDM's quarry monsters, but they have a far, far more curated and specific intent to their design experience.

In the first cycle one will always encounter the Hekaton and Labyrinthauros beginning at Level I, then after three encounters they will go up to level II, three more encounters at level II and they increase to level III and so forth as determined by the cycle sheet. It's a calculated and measured experience that gives players a chance to not just grow stronger through superior gear and titans; it also introduces the players to the Primordial in a gentler fashion. You get a couple of fights where the Primordial's nastier tricks are not online, and then as each level increases another layer of the gloves comes off and the Primordials really begin to let loose. One not only learns about the tricks each primordial utilises, the game also gradually hands out the tools to resist these mechanics over time. This is a philosophy that also takes place on the macro level in each individual battle, where the AI and BP decks start off at Tier I, then escalate upwards as the Primordial suffers damage. Giving a mechanical and narrative escalation to each conflict as both titans and primordials become more dangerous the closer they grow to death (unless you're like me and are a champ at drawing the card titled Disembowelled).

All of this gives a measured, controlled and guided experience; which ATO uses deftly to navigate players through a continuous raising of stakes both mechanical and narrative. As such one can look at the ATO timeline and say definitively that a player will be facing a Level I Hekaton or Level I Labyrinthauros on Day 7 and a Level IV one on Day 55 (if I've counted correctly). On top of that, the Pursuing Boss doesn't level up and when the Cycle Boss is encountered it also doesn't level up*. That means a more solid guide can be put together for each cycle, because there's less noise and randomness in boss selection. We know roughly when each technology is unlocked and that means we have a more concrete understanding of player progression as days pass.

*Yes, losing toying is kind of a level up and you can also end up facing Pyramid Snail at L2 in Cycle I, but those things generally need the players to take extra steps in order to cause that change. Also it's not what I'm getting at here!

Kingdom Death is different, a L2 White Lion isn't locked behind you defeating a certain number of L1 White Lions, you can jump in as soon as you feel ready. Though that is the rub here, how do you know you're ready? In what lantern year are you ready for an L2 White Lion?

There's multiple answers to that question; for example, one of the perfectly valid strategies at the start of a campaign is to innovate Surge or Dash and jump straight into a fighting an L2 White Lion. Seeking to rush it down as quickly as possible through a combination of founding stones, fists and whatever weapons you managed to craft. It's also perfectly valid to play more cautiously, building your strength against L1 monsters and going after the L2 White Lion when you have full leather, a shield, surge, dash and better weapons.

Neither pathway is correct, but they can have a massive difference between when the first lantern year in which they square up to that L2 Kitty is. I personally prefer the slower approach because I enjoy fighting the L1 Node 1 and 2 monsters a great deal, they're simpler to operate, but still full of flavour and surprises because of how their AI deck is constructed. Skipping straight to rushing down an L2 White Lion pays out better and can turbo charge a settlement's initial progress, but it also has a higher failure rate and requires either a willingness to fail and reroll, or soak up greater losses early on in exchange for that boost of power.

That's just one example; one could also look at Deja Vu, Clinging Mists or even the cyclical nature of the Gambler's Chest (where if you do well enough, the next Gambler's Chest campaign gets a weapon to start off. I've most recently stashed a Perfect Slayer for my next run, always wanted to do that). Or even the most chaotic portion of all, which is how the selection of quarry and nemesis monsters have cascading effects on the game's campaign texture. A campaign with access to Gorm weapons over White Lion ones for example has a far more powerful start and a different focus on early game weapon types, a mid game where one hunts the Sunstalker is incredibly different from one where the Phoenix awaits with time-bated breath.

This is the beauty of Kingdom Death's approach, players are free to experiment, push the boundaries, go too far and fall down. It's a rough, jagged game experience and because it lacks the guided approach that ATO, Oathsworn and many other campaign boss battlers follow (Townsfolk Tussle, Vagrant Song, Aeon's End for example) we are left to experiment, iterate on past experiences and gain a feel for what works, what doesn't and when we can step outside of the established safety zone.

There's more than that though, in truth because of the power of crit farming strategies, where you build for luck and dismantle the monsters piece by piece for all those juicy extra critical wound resources, hunting an L1 monster can quite often be more profitable than hunting a higher level version. In fact, outside of Collective Cognition there's an argument that you should skip L2s unless they have specific resource drops (and I've spoken with more than one person who skips the L2 Gorm for reasons that I understand even if I have a different perspective).

However, KDM does have some structure, and that is focused around its Nemesis monsters who turn up at set intervals on the timeline and provide the main structure outside of timeline events. That's where one can provide something of a guide, because each nemesis monster presents different challenges and delivers its threat through varied manners.

So with that in mind, let us look at the core game's timeline and see what it is asking players to achieve in given years.

With that we can break this timeline into the following sections.

Lantern Years 1 to 3 – Preparation for the L1 Butcher

Lantern Years 5 to 8 – Preparation for the L1 King's Man

Lantern Years 10 to 12 – Preparation for The Hand

Lantern Years 14 to 15 – Preparation for L2 Butcher

Lantern Years 17 to 18 – Preparation for L2 King's Man and Core Boss - Watcher

Lantern Years 21 to 22 – Preparation for L3 Butcher

Lantern Years 24 to 27 – Preparation for L3 King's Man

Lantern Year 29 – Last chance for Preparation to face the Gold Smoke Knight

We also have two overarching sections of preparation, the first being from LY 1 to LY19 where we prepare for The Watcher and LY21 to 29 where we prepare for the Gold Smoke Knight. This will be rolled into the rest of the guide. The key points for these two here are that they are the two basic targets your are building to beat because they feature the only non-population related game overs. So any time you have managed to skip ahead of the curve mentioned above because you've got say, the Blacksmith open around lantern year 10, everything becomes easier.

The second point specific to the Watcher is every year you are forced to push back The Watcher because you're not ready to fight it both makes the Watcher stronger and increases the odds of losing against the Gold Smoke Knight. So while you've got a longer time to get strong against The Watcher, slipping in this portion impacts upon the latter part.

Weapon Choices in the Base Game

Before we move onto this example progression guide/journey, there is one more thing to consider and that is the weapon types we have available. We want to focus our weapon proficiency on Fist & Tooth and Shield in every campaign due to how universally transformative those two masteries are; then our remaining weapon proficiencies should focus around the most consistent weapon options we have available. If we can run a weapon type for most of the mid game and all the way to the end game then we should be considering it for proficiency training

Our best progression chains in the base game are as follows:

Axe: Bone Axe → Counterweighted Axe → Sonic Tomahawk → Lantern Glaive → Oxidized Lantern Glaive

Bow: Catgut Bow → Arc Bow

Club: Bone Club → Bone Club + Lantern Armor (Skullcap Hammer or Whistling Mace is a solid alternative once you have Lantern Armor)

Dagger: Bone Dagger → Scrap Dagger → Lantern Dagger → Oxidized (this line is a bit shaky and depends on additional strength from elsewhere)

Grand: Zanbato → Dragon Slayer

Shield: Leather Shield → Bacon Shield → Crispy Bacon Shield (Beacon Shield + Oxidized)

Spear: King's Spear → Finger of God → Lantern Glaive → Oxidized

Sword: Bone Sword → Scrap Sword → Lantern Sword → Oxidized

Twilight Sword (Falls off after the Watcher dies)

Whip → Hunter's Whip → Ring Whip → Oxidized (Note, this requires high strength survivors to run, Rawhide Whip isn't worth using outside of a support hunt item to help with checks except when you have massive survivor strength to bolster its pathetic base strength of 1).

Katars are absolutely dead weapons in this campaign, while the Lion Beast Katar is a great weapon, it should be used on your Fist & Tooth survivor not for Katar progression. This changes if you have the White Gigalion expansion because then you can do late game Oxidized Lion Beast Katars.

Lantern Years 1 to 3: The Journey to Hack City (L1 Butcher)

The Butcher is a savage, wildly inaccurate opponent that seeks to kill via a overwhelming number of actions, bleed damage and direct head severe injuries. It also employs a lot of Bash and brain damage. The lack of accuracy is compensated for via additional attacks but one key thing about evasion is it works against every single attack without any diminishing returns and it also gives Dodge and Block a huge boost because cancelling 1 hit of 2 is far stronger than 1 hit of 4.

This means in combination with The Butcher's stat profile, things that work against the Butcher is a good total strength on attacks (at least 4), bandages to manage bleed, ways of repairing brain damage (Screaming Helm for example) and extra evasion (Rawhide, Monster Grease). As such the main goal for portion of the game leading up to them is to build at least one full set of rawhide armor, a monster grease, a bandages and some decent weapons.

It's also worth noting that Reach weapons are fantastic at handling the reactions both of the Node 1 Nemesis monsters output because their HL decks like to harm adjacent survivors.

Also survival limit isn't hugely important in this period because of how Infectious Lunacy works. This means that against the Butcher you should spend your survival before Frenzy kicks in and disables it (so increasing your survival limit isn't as useful) but there is certainly value to the Dash survival action because it can cancel one of The Butcher's two actions in a turn due to The Butcher having relatively low movement.

That means by Lantern Year 3 you want to have the following minimum benchmarks:

Full set of Rawhide Armor

Bandages

Monster Grease

Offensive Weapons, preferably with Reach/Range

Whisker Harp (Mood control is very good against Nemesis monsters, and noisy has no relevant downside when you're fighting just outside of the settlement).

Additional Survival and Survival Actions are not mandatory, but they can be helpful by either allowing survivors to try and burst down the Butcher (Surge) or cancel some portion of the Butcher's attacks through Dash-Cancels as mentioned above. If you have the choice between the two, I personally feel that Dash is overall the stronger of the two options due to how well it plays against the L2+ White Lion and The Phoenix, but there isn't a right choice if you drew both at the same time and needed to pick one or the other. It's also fine to be going into this showdown without those survival actions, just spending all your survival as soon as possible on Dodge and Encourage tends to generate enough value to secure a victory.

Lantern Years 5 to 8: Steps into Silence (L1 King's Man)

This part of the base game experience is really tough to prepare for, this is because the King's Man scales up both its damage and durability a great deal, while it is possible to keep pace with the damage, the durability of this monster moves beyond what the settlement's development can cope with unless you have expansions.

The reasons for this is the base toughness for the King's Man is 12, and its damage per hit is ~3 with increased speed and accuracy over the Butcher. It also employs Bash a lot more and while it has a weak spot in the rear (-4 toughness in the Blind Spot) it also attacks survivors in the Blind Spot every turn before its AI is drawn.

So the King's Man not only puts pressure on your tank, but it also threatens your offensive survivors because if they can't get past 12 toughness normally (need 7+ strength or good +luck stats) then they have to attack in the spot where the King's Man AI initially targets. Against the Butcher we can keep its focus on the target(s) that stand in front of it, so our Damage Dealers can get away with a lot less protection (especially if they are ranged/reach attackers). We don't get that luxury here and it's part of the reason that the L1 King's Man is such a meat grinder, it's a horrifically strong monster for the Lantern Year you encounter it. Especially if you're still learning the game.

Now what this means in the base game that, because the White Lion and Screaming Antelope weapons are 3 or 4 strength, we would want to rely on the Weapon Crafter weapons in order to step across the gulf that attacking the King's Man from any angle other than the rear presents. However, the Weapon Crafter weapons outside of the Zanbato do not offer much strength, our best non-perfect resource option is the Counterweighted Axe, which is an excellent weapon due to its perfect hit ability bypassing toughness, but it is still only base strength 4. This is in my opinion one of the larger weaknesses of the Weapon Crafter, it's got a lot of weapons that barely count as an advancement over the Bone Smith ones and are often at best equal to Node 1 and Node 2 monster weapons. The biggest example is the Bone Club vs the Skullcap Hammer and Whistling Mace's strengths, but also the Scrap Spear vs. the King's Spear is another example of failure to progress.

All of this means we need to get strength from some other source or sources because until we're into the Phoenix, Blacksmith or hit some lucky hunt events the best we're going to get is the CW-Axe, the Scrap Sword and maybe if we're lucky a Zanbato. Fortunately we do have three solid options. The first of which is the Survival of the Fittest, a very strong tool that offers us not just +1 strength but also +1 evasion which can occasionally help against attacks (this also helps us so much in the early game where the strength pushes many weapons from 'good enough' into 'great' while also combining with Tall Grass or poor monster accuracy to improve defenses.

The second tool is the Monster-Tooth Necklace, this item is either +1 or +2 strength depending on the number of red affinities a survivor has. It's usually straightforward to get 2 red affinities as all the armor sets offer 1 complete red affinity so we only need a left facing red to connect to the necklace. Also as a quick note, the Scrap Dagger is a solid choice if you're flailing for something here because the King's Man has a specific weakness to Daggers and that means quite often the Scrap Dagger gets +3 strength while also offering more red affinities. You can even utilise the Bone Dagger in this role and that weapon connects to the Monster Tooth Necklace directly, though the Scrap Dagger is a superior weapon overall. However, this tends to work just as a magic bullet and it's tough to keep using daggers. There is the Hollow Sword with the Phoenix, and it now has good stats along with the Dagger weapon type, however you'll need to keep an eye on Super-Dense locations to use that weapon. It's a (2/5+/5/Frail) Sword/Dagger which gains strength equal to the monster's damage attribute, it is good in this fight as long as you don't break it.

There is also a third tool we have; Drums, the starter for the Music line is the superb Synchronised Strike attack, which provides a boost of extra damage and Rhythm Chaser offers even more evasion and because we're fighting a nemesis monster we don't need to worry about our noisy instruments attracting lethal attention.

As such the broad goals here are:

1+ Leather Shields

Complete Leather Armor Set

Strength 4+ Weapons

Monster-tooth Necklaces

Monster Grease

Screaming Armor or Rawhide Armor Sets for as many other survivors as possible

Cat Eye Circlet (especially if you are leaning into daggers)

Whisker Harp or Drums to use with Rhythm Chaser

Dash and Surge

Increase Survival Limit

Drums for Synchronised Strike and Rhythm Chaser

Lantern Years 10 to 12: Put Your Hands Up in the Air (The Hand)

Oh goodness, what a stark difference between the King's Man and The Hand there is. The Hand requires very little additional preparation because the foundational elements are already in place. Also, as a glorified quick time event where The Hand toys with our survivors or punishes them for daring to think they could attack it, there's not a lot of preparation needed here beyond more defenses to soak the damage and perhaps a little AI manipulation to shorten the length of the showdown (Rawhide can cut through things faster by speeding up the durations and the Whistling Mace can tuck AI cards at the bottom of the AI deck).

Once The Hand is faced in its allotted window it will depart from the campaign unless called back with the Heart Flute. As such, the goals here are actually to prepare for the L2 Butcher who's coming after this, but even then the main thrust of that preparation is to increase our defenses and offenses by working towards the Blacksmith, this location is where the vast majority of our non-Phoenix based power is located now.

Lantern Years 14 to 15: Chop to it (L2 Butcher)

The main power increases we can get here are surrounding Phoenix gear and innovations. Phoenix Armor offers us a powerhouse bruiser/off-tank set that works really well with reach weapons such as the Counterweighted Axe or Lantern Glaive. We also have a few strong weapons to grab here such as the Sonic Tomahawk, Finger of God and Arc Bow. If you want to be a hipster memelord you can lean into the Rainbow Katana, but it doesn't really compare to the other options here.

The other ways we can increase our base power lay within the newborns, specifically Clan of Death (Home tech tree) and Saga (Music tech tree) give us stronger, more experienced children who can step up and take over. With the addition of Family, we can even ensure that the fresh new generation of survivors arrives with knowledge of how to use the preferred weapons.

Lantern Years 17 to 18: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (King's Man L2 and Watcher)

At this point we should be well set up and progression into Blacksmith gear is the main goal. Outside of that working on Twilight Sword proficiency if we need that silver bullet for the Watcher and other weapon progression should be in place.

The L2 King's Man is honestly one of my least favourite fights in the game due to how much the Silent Hymn trait bogs everything down in endless admin. It's why we often refer to the L2+ King's Man as either The King's Accountant or Adventures in Bookkeeping here. It's also why we run either the Lion Knight, Atnas or Slender Man every single chance we have. My general goal here is usually to “prepare” for it by lining up four sacrificial lambs to send into the fight, I often have a B-team of survivors who are OK, but not headliners and they're used for Nemesis fights because sometimes amazing survivors can come out of those showdowns, but this one? Not a chance, no-one of value will be sent, no-one of value will be lost.

If you do want to legitimately fight it, you're looking to overcome 15 toughness (So 10+ strength) and soak ~4 damage per hit (with speed being around 4). It's a really rough spot to be in if you haven't reached the Blacksmith by this time (I'm not looking forward to it in my play through with Justin because we've been wrecked by outlandish freak occurrences, including one that I've never seen before and will probably never see again).

Lantern Years 14 to 19 overarching goals

Our gear goals across this portion are:

Phoenix Armor

Sonic Tomahawk

Arc Bow

Finger of God // Lantern Glaive

Lantern Armor

Beacon Shield

Blacksmith Weapons to match our chosen proficiencies

Post Watcher Game

Killing the Watcher pretty much changes everything and our goals now become working on oxidizing as many weapons as we can. There is also the excellent Crest Crown from the L3 Phoenix, which should turn up as a natural part of this process, but overall we're seeking to complete the previous selection, improve our defenses and offenses while taking advantage of any useful random elements that the game has gifted us.

The objective is to become durable and powerful enough to be able to withstand base (4/2+/4) attacks (they can get higher) and wound 27 toughness in a regular fashion. That's a tall ask so Oxidized weapons in combination with Lantern Research (aka Super Innovate) and buff survivors is how we'll get there in the base game. It is also taking a moment here to note that outside of deliberately building a terrible selection of monsters, I feel that the core game is the hardest version of People of the Lantern there is.

All of that brings us to the end of what is kind of a primer for playing basic people of the Lantern and hopefully an explanation as to why you can't be told what node, type and level of quarry you should be hunting in a given year because it's not how the game is structured. Focusing around the nemesis monsters that you have, especially the Core and Final ones is the way that you should be focused because the Quarry monsters should be targeted to create the gear and innovations that you need to beat those Nemesis targets.

What About the Expansions?

Well in truth, the Manhunter and Butcher are almost analogues, they attack on similar lanes with bash, bleed and brain damage. The Manhunter shares the lower accuracy and also like the Butcher some of its reactions are defeated by Range/Reach it is however weak to critical wounds (though can punish you for some of them). So the progression goals tend to remain the same with the addition of Deadly & Lucky Charm being even more powerful.

We have more variation in progression when it comes to the Lion Knight vs. Slender Man vs. Atnas vs. King's Man. Slender Man is the toughest of these, but it also has the strongest synergy with the core three monsters. It gets more complex with how you handle each of these alternatives because of how significant their various gimmicks are focused, the Lion Knight is foiled by its own costume change mechanics, Atnas is either harmless or absolutely terrifying and is best burst down. The Slender Man is the member of the alternative trio who's harder than the King's Man, but the core preparation for it, just like all four of these, is kind of the same thing.

Armor that's as good as Leather Armor, Shields and whatever weapon options that can wound on at least a 5+ or have Deadly for at least an 8+ critical wound range (Slendy in particular is a great target to critically wound, the silly river dweller that it is).

When it comes to Node 3 though it's simple, if you have the Black Knight, you're playing it and if you want to work well against that, in addition to the normal options, you should be looking to make the Clasping Shield seed patterns in order to help further, at least until you get used to how it plays. As for a specific guide on the Black Knight, I'm a while away from doing that, it'll come in video form first I think and otherwise I'd highly recommend you watch any of the showdowns that Trent “Big Deno” of this YouTube channel that I will always point people towards where he tackles the Black Knight. Trent is an incredible gamer with a deep grasp on showdown strategy and positional tactics (and a masterful artist). Or you can practice with the Squire campaign, it's a really good teaching aid!

I love how much the Black Knight brings home the significance of positional play in KDM, standing in the right spot each turn is a massively important skill to develop, and coordinating that with other players is also a huge challenge. But it's satisfying as heck to see it all unfold because, you know, we all love it when a plan comes together.

Final Words

I've written a lot to sort of explain why I personally can't say “In lantern year 5 you should be hunting an L2 Gorm” or similar and why I think it's not truthful to try and claim otherwise at this stage. It straight up impossible to template quarries due not just to the staggering number of cascading decisions and randomisation points that have brought each of us to a given lantern year, but also due to the wide range in player experience and even which expansions you are running.

There is so many different possibilities in this game, a standard deck of 52 playing cards has 52! different possible combinations, to write that out it would be 8 x 10^67; or if you prefer it that's an 8 followed by 67 zeroes. Kingdom Death has more cards, plus dice, plus a board where you position the miniatures on. It's a staggeringly large number that I wouldn't want to even start going through.

Of course if you're using Arc Survivors, the pushed power they possess and collective cognition's constant drive towards a fresh canvas to spill blood on, then that's an entirely different matter, you should be hunting L2 Node 1 or 2 monsters by Lantern Year 3 at the latest there. Collective Cognition guides you nicely, and if you're still not confident about doing that, the Smog Singers are an excellent punching bag even at L2.