A Review of Male Survivor - Guy | Kingdom Death: Monster (Patreon)

Guy was a survivor bitten by the Kaiser Centiwolf, infested immediately with a bad case of Lithoslycanthrophy. Now his blood runs cold, and baring an uncontrollable compulsion to bellow at the Frozen Star. His partner Rena created his sword from the stone-fur shingles that shed during his shifts - a desperate attempt to keep his complete transmogrification at bay... but she knows its only a matter of time before he loses his mind completely.

1x Guy photoresin miniature and standard flat base and base

1 x Gear Card

1x Secret Fighting Art

1x Living glossary card

1x Large Matte Art Print

1x Character Art Card

Lithoslycanthrophy is a wonderful little portmanteau that combines the ancient Greek words of Lithos, Lycan & anthropos (Stone Wolf Man) which creates an evocative little picture of the part of the world where Guy exists. The Centiwolf sounds like another potential all timer monster, especially if they lean into the hundred legs part of the centipede and create a truly blursed abomination.

The Miniature

It is always welcome for the range of male survivors to be expanded with more entries. While Guy trends more towards the impractical “gym bod” he doesn't cross that line and instead looks like more like a hunter of nameless monsters. I do think that it is a shame he isn't showing more of the features of the Centiwolf, especially when you consider how the content that comes with him leans into fist & tooth. Guy here just doesn't look like he's got any of that going on, this means he's just not a good fit for tabletop use and that means he's pretty much getting a fail on that front.

Nice sculpt, but combine the photoresin design with that vulnerable sword arm and the lack of any stone-wolf aspects and the fact that he doesn't represent the Fist & Tooth focus of the game content and I'm going to be leaving this one in the box.

The Gameplay Content

In order to unlock this beta Secret Fighting Art one has to have a Barbaric conviction settlement and then a survivor with either [D] Rageholic or [FA] Monster Claw Style may spend two endeavors to gain the [SFA] Feral Form. Barbaric is a part of the game which is in desperate need of some additional elements to make it worth picking more than Romantic, right now there is very little reason to pick Barbaric, especially outside of Arc Survivor Campaigns where you need Romantic to filter through the Fighting Arts. This is a small step in the right direction because we really need more reasons to pick Barbaric. I've written in the past that I firmly believe every principle should come with a Philosophy and that baseline Barbaric needs a boost to let it keep pace with Romantic, but outside of that happening this is at least something. It's not like Barbaric is completely unjustifiable, but there is a noticeable power imbalance between the two.

Before we move on past how you gain this, I do want to commend the addition of the Disorder Rageholic here, one of the problems that has happened with other releases is they require Fighting Arts which are effectively soft locked away from Arc survivors. I've been watching Trent (Big Deno) struggle to get Leader for the Guidon Lances very recently and it's highlighted just how much all of that needs a revision in order to stop the game feeling like two separate games.

Feral Form is a really interesting little SFA, we have to Frenzy ourselves in order to unlock the Feral Fists and then the survivor becomes something of a liability. That 8+ breaks us out of Frenzy, and it will work even if we didn't deliberately trigger the Frenzy in the first place. However, if we don't get the 8+ then we're going to be chasing after the closest survivor and mauling them if we catch up. Of course the flip side of that is, any other Frenzy triggers have our survivor lashing out to boot.

This is however manageable, we can't control if the survivor is going feral mode, but we can control if anyone is within movement range or not. Also if we have ways of activating survival actions that bypass Frenzy (such as Red Fist) then we can still use the survivor a bit depending on good positioning.

Why would we go through all of this though? Well the answer is the Feral Fists “gear” card.

This is placed over the top of our normal Fist & Tooth and is a huge upgrade to the normal version. More speed to combine with Barbed 4, and a lot more accuracy plus strength. We even have Deadly 1 potentially becoming higher, something that we can combo with an axe master if we're willing to be patient with which survivor we activate the once per campaign gaining of Feral Form then we can combo them together.

I really like what we have got here, this is especially fun in Art Campaigns where we have a good selection of Fighting Arts that can be combined with Feral Fists. It's possible with to do it with Arc Survivors but that's a bit less smooth due to Vaultless locking out Monster Claw Style (but we do have things like Frogdog Kick as possible alternatives).

Final Thoughts

This release is evocative, powerful but with risks that balance its power in a fair fashion. I think that this is an improvement to just about anyone's game because of how it adds something to Barbaric. It isn't enough to tip the balance, but a few more releases like this and we may be getting towards an interesting place where we have a tough decision to make when it is conviction time.