One of the overall design focuses of Champion knowledges is that they are overwhelmingly powerful, but seek to kill survivors as fast as possible during the showdown. They achieve this via the use of Dangerous Observations, something we've seen here and there in other philosophies such as Optimism but never to the degree which they are utilised by Champion.

This is the dangerous observation zone and Champions are locked in it for the ride.

Dangerous Observations are not in themselves that complicated, in addition to the normal Observation rules they have very little extra overhead, boiling down to the following two elements.

A type of observation. Filling in observation boxes on knowledges with dangerous observations can have negative consequences for the survivor or settlement. – Dangerous Observation glossary entry

Dangerous observations, must be performed/recorded even if they are forgotten during gameplay. Some knowledge cards have no observations. – Observation Glossary entry

Outside of that they have no real inherent properties that set them apart from observations, they're a different colour, not optional and might have negative consequences but that's it. They're edgy, angsty teenage observations looking to stand out as unique by causing trouble, but without additional text on the knowledge cards they can be rather tame.

All of the Champion Knowledges have the same ultimate result from the completion of their angry little observation boxes, they trigger Rank 4 in the Champion Book, which results in the death of the survivor who has them. As we covered last time, the showdown death in particular is so catastrophically ridiculous and wide reaching that I decided to just illustrate how much of the showdown board it can cover.

The Showdown Board is a 16x22 grid of squares, it is represented by the rectangle with thick black lines, the survivor suffering Rank 4 is the black square and all the blue squares are spaces hit. It's so large that I had to include rows Q to V in order to fit the full 10 spaces splash zone into the image. Considering the punishment that this tactical acid bomb delivers to any other survivors in that get splashed we need to be smart if we are going to trigger this during the showdown. Generally you want to corral the monster towards one of the short ends of the board so your Champion survivor can pop with most of the splash zone off the board, leaving as much space as the other survivors to avoid being blinded and burnt horrendously with those three random severe injuries.

In order to manage or control this big splat death we have a few tools in our arsenal, some of them are tied to the core tenet of this philosophy (Chosen) so I'll put those with that entry. Another one is being very controlled with the use of the ways that you can advance the observations before replacing them at the Forum. This is fiddly, but it's something I do with other knowledges that I want to stop their evolvotion/advancement.

The big mitigation tool we have is one that applies to both the showdown and settlement deaths is that these dangerous observation boxes do not clear when the observations are completed, you only trigger Rank 4 once per knowledge on a survivor maximum and unless that survivor loses their observations or the knowledge itself it'll stay completed.

So if we can survive the deathblow that Rank 4 delivers, we get to keep using the knowledge without any further consequences, cheating the Champion in a delicious manner.

We have a few ways of doing this, with the always available option being the Green Charm from the Barber Surgeon. This gives us a 6+ roll to inexplicably survive the Champion's phlegm (hopefully you've observed safety protocols for the other survivors on the showdown board and kept to a safe distance).

We can also make effective use of the tools that Deadism provides, a Rank 4 Deadism survivor with the “Dead Again” ability may well perish when the Champion comes around, but they reconstitute a fresh version themselves right back into the settlement (though they only have Deadism, Dead Again and the name of the Dead survivor, they will lose everything else). That gives us a potential carrier for a Champion knowledge as a kind of “Kenny from South Park”, they will die every showdown they're in, but if you're able to slap a fresh Champion Knowledge onto them in the following settlement phase it may well be worth it.

The other Deadism “one trick that The Champion hates” though is the knowledge Evermore, or to be more precise Evermore I. This is a knowledge that requires a lot of careful love and attention to maintain because if the same survivor uses it three times it will evolve into Evermore II and lose the Undeathable Bonus, which is another version of the Green Charm, only for survivors with gear grids that don't have lots of green affinities. The trick with Evermore I is to replace it once it has triggered 1 or 2 times in a lantern year, I will always remove it for another knowledge at that point, never risking it on a hunt if it already has a box filled in. That means unless a survivor manages to die and inexplicably survive 3 times in a single lantern year Evermore I can remain to help those Champions survive.

The another piece of the puzzle for the Undeathable mechanic is Survival of the Fittest and/or Dreamism, a 50% chance of surviving isn't the best odds, but when you have a Lifetime or Guardian reroll available you can push the odds of survival to 75% and if we have other tools we might be able to push that a bit further.

Once we've successfully pulled off that “I'm not dead!” trick, unless the Rule Party Poopers turn up with errata we can now use the completed knowledge for the rest of that survivors career, and as we'll see these knowledges are very, very powerful.

But before we get onto those it is time to look at the “intended” way to hold back the completion of Dangerous Observations and that is the core tenet of Champion.

Chosen

Chosen I advances quickly and when at Chosen II we have 3 “free” erasures of observations before it will evolve into Chosen III. Due to how Champions all line up at the exit of the settlement whenever you decide it is hunting time, it is hard to keep Chosen in its best form (Chosen II) and it will escape containment, becoming Chosen III fairly quickly. I have a preference for keeping my Champions as low in number as possible, but even just one Champion will generally manage to get Chosen II completed fairly quickly unless you toss them onto the Stone Nose of Sacrifice (or other ways of killing survivors with high risk activities in the settlement) before that happens. That is an option, and one can do that with the goal of getting Chosen II + one other Dangerous Champion Knowledge onto a survivor from a different philosophy, but it is a lot of work and effort to maintain.

If it does advance to its final form, when unlocked Chosen III allows the Champion Survivors to record permanent injuries in order to erase observations. That gives us access to a bunch of injury options a Chosen Champion can gain in order to keep running for as long as possible. 18 in total, but some of these are rather career ending, Story of the Archer is a bow knowledge, bows are two- handed so you can't really pick that for archers. In the remaining options :

Broken Hip disables Dodge (we don't want to combo that with Gloaming)

Destroyed back caps you to weapons with 0 or 1 strength

Dismembered Leg disables your ability to dash

Intracranial Haemorrhage stops you using or gaining survival (manageable if you have Red Fist in the settlement, otherwise usually career ending)

Intestinal Prolapse takes away wearing waist gear (Marrowism stays winning)

Shattered Jaw stops consume plus encourage

Hamstrung means you can't use knowledges any more (whoops).

Now there's also a bit of a rough spot where the rules are concerned on this, because unlike most complicated board games, Kingdom Death doesn't provide glossary definitions for terms like Inflict, Suffer and Record. This is a problem that runs through a lot of Kingdom Death, because the game uses certain words without specifically defining them we're left with a lot of grey areas that can cause problems for players, especially ones who do not speak English as a first language.

To be honest even if you are a native English speaker, there's still a lot of places where you just have to make a decision and move forward. In the past I was a certified Level 2 Magic: The Gathering Judge and also I worked in a job that required detailed understanding of the UK's legislation, so I'm used to reading rules and still I run into points where I have to shrug and wait for someone to inform me that Taste or Team Death has made a ruling and not also put it on both FAQ and Glossary (it should be on their website for as many people as possible to access).

Every year Fantasy Flight Games refine and update the rulebooks for their Living Card Games because of how complicated they can be, we don't have a digital rulebook for KDM in the way that we do for Arkham Horror/Marvel Champions, but we also don't have an up to date official Kingdom Death glossary we can reference either. Discords are a fine enough place for answering questions, but they are a terrible place for looking up answers after the fact, that's what an FAQ and/or searchable glossary are for. If I sound frustrated or a bit snarky it is because I've run into the glossary and FAQ contradicting each other a few times recently.

So why did I get into that side tangent? Well it's because we have no definition for the difference between “suffer” and “record” in respect to Permanent Injuries, but fortunately we do have a definition for a Permanent Injury at least, so I was able to navigate this issue somewhat, but it's honestly on shaky ground. Here's the six year old definition for a Permanent Injury from the online Living Glossary.

Permanent Injury: An injury to a survivor that does not heal with time. Its effects always apply to that survivor unless cancelled by another effect.

The reason I've had to go into this is because so many of our tools that work against severe injuries use the word “suffer” and Chosen uses the word “record”, I spent a fair while with this and without the Permanent Injury definition I would be just shrugging and saying “It's your game, they've not covered this, do what you think is best and no, this is not a Rule of Death situation.”

As it is, we can see that Permanent Injuries can be cancelled by other effects, this includes things like Bed for healing, but it also includes gear cards and knowledges. At the most simplest end this means we can pop a Dried Acanthus to stop one activation of Chosen III, but at its most “gaming” end we can use the Regeneration Suit from the Gorm expansion to remove all the Permanent Injuries we generated by Chosen.

You can see why I went on a tangent about Record vs. Suffer when we look at the green affinity puzzle ability and then decided to use the one element they've actually defined in the glossary. The Regeneration Suit gets to remove all those Permanent Injuries we recorded during the showdown as long as the Champion survives the showdown, and it even has a bunch of green half-affinities to help with a Green Charm. Gorm is still one of the goats.

Another neat option is Gourmandism's Juggernaut, this has our powerhouse survivor (Juggernaut plastic miniature when APG?) spend two positive attribute tokens to ignore a severe injury. Gourmandism survivors are very good at generating positive attribute tokens and so a Juggernaut can really leverage them for use of a Champion Knowledge.

So unless a Darkest Party Pooper turns up, says this doesn't work and makes it official in the FAQ/Living Glossary it seems that any and all options that let us ignore, cancel or heal severe/permanent injuries are on the table for managing Chosen and that's a pretty cool space for players to do neat things, discover synergies and feel clever. Which is one of the main things that makes the Gear + Philosophy system the best player unit design in any boss battler or dungeon crawler to date. Kingdom Death: Monster holds its place as the number 1 boss battler in part because of how good the survivor/gear/philosophy/innovation systems of constructing units are. Nothing else comes close because other designers are stuck in the 1990s mimicking Warhammer Quest rather than building upon the innovation Adam, Anna and Team Death gifted the board gaming world.

Chosen can also be used against other Philosophies with dangerous observations, though at the moment Optimism is the main one and the penalties there for completion of the observations are not worth the price of severe injuries. Oh and before I forget you can also walk backwards on Evermore I with Chosen, which is a really neat interaction.

Overall I like Chosen's design, it's unique, interesting and as the philosophy options expand further to utilise Dangerous Observations more this is something we can build on further. Though I'm still waiting for a Prosthetics settlement location extension to be added to the Barber Surgeon and when that comes out one can use Chosen III to create the Princess of Prosthetics, bask in the glory of all their replacement parts.

Story of the Hunters Arrow

Being locked to ranged weapons puts the Story of the Hunter's Arrow in an interesting spot, at the moment it is only Bows (plus Arrows) that are rounded out and developed enough to be something we utilise, but there are both Crossbows and my beloved Thrown Weapons waiting in the wings for their time to shine (and also there's the potential for gunpowder weapons, but that's probably beyond the scope of most settlements unless they figure out how to use the Gold Smoke Knight's corpse in pursuit of the way of the gun - The Survivor with the Golden Gun sounds neat). This means if you don't have a ranged weapon on the survivor with this knowledge, the knowledge does nothing at all except occupy space (which might be scary if you have The King knowledge on another survivor in the hunt party).

The observation trigger being on hit also makes using higher speed ranged weapons a bit hard to manage. If you're planning to score 2 hits with stuff like Devastating/Savage and then dump the knowledge before it explodes its user. We do however have some excellent lower speed options in the bow selection, but as always bows are not a part of the generic development lines, we don't normally have access to bows without expansions, seed patterns or monster selections giving us access to them. So one probably wants to think carefully about campaign construction if Champion is on the table. Incidentally, the 15 Lantern Year survivors offer a bow as part of the Blacksmith extension, it's not guaranteed every campaign, but I will recommend that white box again for rounding out generic gear options.

Outside of that; like all of these Dangerous Champion Knowledges, the effect is very powerful. We're not going to hit the trap, we hit exactly the hit location we want to hit every time. Combining this with luck/deadly can allow us to score crippling blows on monsters almost immediately in the showdown and if you have this with all its observations completed on a Rank 4 survivor the experience is absolutely merciless for the monster, we're even allowed to select the trap, which might seem like something you don't want to do, but putting all those potential permanent injuries or resource generators back into the deck for more shots may be desirable, especially as ranged weapons are more likely to be able to hit the trap from a safe distance (depending on the monster).

Story of the Gloaming

Automatic wounds, especially ones that bypass the Hit Location deck are in contention for the best kind of wound in the game (Critical Wounds are probably better), Story of the Gloaming gives us one of the strongest forms of defensive fighting we've seen in the game. We get to turn our block/deflects into a steady stream of “risk free” wounds if we want to and this knowledge doesn't trigger on any “Ignore” or “Dodges” either so we can still utilise other methods of protection if we're being a legit Champion and using Chosen to erase the observations.

If we make it to a full set of observations and survive Rank 4 this Knowledge becomes obscenely powerful, especially when handling Nemesis monsters because automatic wounds tend to be more desirable than Critical Wounds there because Nemesis monsters trend towards offering less resource gains on critical wounds (there are exceptions i.e. Manhunter). One doesn't have to worry about nonsense like First Strike, Protean or the Butcher's almost critical free HL deck if you're not drawing cards from it.

Story of the Four Hands

The Melee counterpart to Story of the Hunter's Arrow is the Story of the Four Hands and this gives us access to the absolute dominance of Critical Wounds as long as we're getting up close and dirty with the monsters. In recent times I've come to the conclusion that Luck/Deadly is one of the weaker aspects of Monster's overall design, the mechanic itself is a fun and exciting one, but it is a little too freely available to players and when it is heavily utilised it tends to eliminate a lot of the tools that a monster has.

Bypassing the monster's toughness in particular is quite a problem. It doesn't matter if your monster has 50 toughness, if there hit location can be critically wounded then players can get around it. In fact I'll go as far as to say I think that the Luck Charm should require Heat and Scrap to craft and those requirements should be removed from the Monster-Tooth Necklace, effectively swapping them in the development order.

Story of the Four Hands is kind of the natural end point of this journey, Deadly 9 is effectively 2+ Critical Wounds against most if not all monsters in the game, except for those without many Critical Wounds on their Hit Locations and those monsters with their own Luck protection mechanics such as Luck tokens (and even Luck Tokens can be bypassed or removed with the right combos).

When we're using this knowledge legitimately it's a massive temporary power spike and if one uses it on a ranged survivor who will punch for the critical wounds and then switch to using a bow before removing the knowledge next settlement phase, when we have a powerful knowledge that can be rotated around survivors or maintained via Chosen. If this is on a survivor who has lived through Rank 4 however the monsters are in for a bad time.

Story of the Rootcrown

Story of the Rootcrown is a weird little card featuring a funny little weird guy (as I mentioned last time I like silly little weird guys in art ); this knowledge is only unlocked by Champion – Rank 4 and it is given to another survivor who witnessed the survivor's “death”. This requires either being hit by and surviving the showdown nuke or the settlement being at CC 60 when a Champion – Rank 4 happens during the settlement phase. Interestingly this is one of the things that makes me set up Rank 4 during the showdown because I am not interested in this card being in the knowledge deck at the moment.

What the Rootcrown gives us is a weird way to potentially use survivors as explosive blood-ordinance against monsters. A survivor who is able to encourage the Rootcrown survivor will explode dealing monster level wounds if they are adjacent to the monster. You can do this once in a showdown without the Champion turning up and gobbing at you, but there is a potential case that in combination with the death and observation mitigation tactics mentioned above that you could engineer a group of Regeneration suited, Green Charm, Chosen, Evermore I, Story of the Young Hero survivors who fall over and then shout at each other while exploding in fountains of blood that shred the monster. It's worth noting that this is less effective against Core/Finale monsters because they are generally Level 1.

Most of the time however this card is going to not do much because it's a lot of work and leans on surviving death which is usually a dice roll. I'm not entirely sure about the interactions with Homicidalism here, if a homicidalist has Story of the Rootcrown, will the blood explosion survivors add to the body count? Currently I am leaning towards yes.

Final Thoughts

Champion is a weird one for sure as it has a design that's fighting against itself in many different places; you don't want to field too many Champions because of their disposable and volatile nature, but if you are able to navigate through the chaos of their dangerous knowledges and rank 4 you can end up with survivors that just look at monsters the way that Jotaro Kujo looks at enemy stand users. It is a lot of fun, but the shine can wear off when the puzzles and challenge that monsters present are trivialised. This is just the nature of games though, every game system has areas where it can strain and break down, that's a big part of why most long running campaigns have a natural end point. You can try and keep raising the stakes, but eventually you have to do some sort of reset.

The real bottom line though is I don't personally like what Champion is trying to do, when you work with it legitimately you're basically working against it, aiming to stop or mitigate the punishments it is seeking to dish out. The most “fair” way one can do this as a player is by extending the life of the knowledges through Chosen observation removals or removing knowledges before they reach the end point and disposing of the Champions during the settlement phase or via a “natural” death at the hands of a monster or some event. That is just too much of a treadmill for me to really enjoy.

Abusing Champion's weak spots to push past the intended balance is a fun experience to have at least once, but it's not one I'm keen to repeat because of how much it can feel like deploying cheat codes against the monsters. Our opponents in this game are driven by a random selection of pre-programmed actions from a pool of options, they don't have the capability to adapt to this and to be honest I don't want them to. Monsters that were designed to stand against Champion Knowledges at the top of their power are not something that would work well for the rest of the game and if Kingdom Death wanted to move to a higher power level I'd rather see a fresh start in a similar way to how each Cycle in Aeon Trespass: Odyssey makes old gear worse and thereby forces players to leave behind old favourites and step up to the new standard.

Champion and Ambitionism are both different takes on the concept of what a Tier 3 survivor is, currently this tier offers massive power for the survivors, but the individual journey of these survivor types are intended to be shorter than their lower tier fellows. Bright flames that burn out faster. Ambitionism I feel manages this better, those survivors have an arrogance that limits you to one Ambitionism survivor per hunt and they offer strong, flexible tools that don't push too far against the game's mechanics. Champion on the other hand forces you to deal with all of your Champions trying to run out the settlement gates before exploding on the showdown board and causing lots of devastation. It is a funny image though.

I also don't much appreciate the “gotcha” that is employed by the first time you hit Champion – Rank 4 during the showdown, you are warned by the use of Dangerous Observations that it probably won't be good, but the size of the splash damage is frankly egregious and it would not feel good for players first experiencing this as they're incredibly unlikely to be able to anticipate it or be outside of its range by chance.

I really hope that we get multiple new Tier 3 philosophies because I like variety, but also because I think Champion is the kind of philosophy that you play just a couple of times and then retire (unless you like the power fantasy of spanking the inanimate black box that is Kingdom Death: Monster really hard, which is fine, it's your game). I don't think there's any real way to “fix” Champion, you could tweak numbers here and there but it's always going to be either a hassle to deal with or completely busted nonsense. There's not much room for nuance in this one, it's more style over substance and I'm sticking with Ambitionism for the future until we get new options to explore. Ambitionism has a more textured and nuanced experience which suits my playstyle more.

Left in this series now we have Dreamism, Gatherism, Monster Knowledges and Wanderer Knowledges. After that I'll just be covering new Philosophies after they are released.