A Review of Indomitable Survivor - Ballistic Brayonet Belvedere | Kingdom Death: Monster (Patreon)

She scaled the twitching mass of the monster, driving the haft of her weapon under the struggling membrane of its eyelids. The entire monster quaked, shaking her from her foothold. She clung to her weapon until its lever dislodged the monster's eye, sending it flying in a glittering arc. She landed back on the ground, in the clinging miasma of its final emissions. The smell caught her off-guard, painful sobs choking her airways as she doubled-over beside the dying beast.

Contents

1x Ballistic Brayonet Belvedere miniature with flat base

1x Copper Ocular Ring indomitable resource card

1x Ballistic Brayonet indomitable pattern card

1x Ballistic Brayonet indomitable gear card

1x Install guide card

1x living glossary card for Disarm rules

1x Pair of Disarm Tiles (White)

1x Large matte art print of Danny Cruz's illustration of Belvedere

Note: The Frogdog Expansion is required to make use of this white box in game.

The Frogdog is one of the Quarry expansions released in recent time that had a notable reduction in the amount of Indomitable Resources that came in its box. The Gambler's Chest established that each monster came with at least 3 Indomitable Resources and associated Indomitable Patterns which I felt was a good baseline level, but since then both the Frogdog and Screaming God seem to have walked this back. The Frogdog only had two Indomitable Patterns and one Seed Pattern and the Screaming God has just one Indomitable Pattern and zero Seed Patterns.

This is of course not great for us consumers as Indomitable Resource Patterns only tend to become an interesting dynamic system when you've got at least three different possibilities to draw from. When you have just one single option it ends up just being a fancy version of the old Level 3 guaranteed Strange Resource drop like the Cat Fang Knife, Crest Crown and similar. A system which functioned, but didn't really spark joy because there was a lot less interesting resource drops when you went for your second L3 monster of the same type.

I bring things like this up each time I review because I want the best for the game and that can't happen without people buying up the new releases so Team Death can get back to cooking up even more exciting designs and maybe even new games set in their world. It is so disappointing for me to see spots where just a handful of additional cards would push something from being excellent to being perfection. The Indomitable Resource situation we're in right now (and the Seed Pattern removal from the Screaming God expansion) is one of those areas that just needed that couple of more cards to get there for the pattern portion.

Now an additional issue in respect to Frogdog Indomitable Resources is that the gear which comes from them is at its best if it doesn't require additional copper, this is because the Bullfrogdog gear requires a lot of copper to make and the primary way of getting it – Noodling of Death – is a terribly unbalanced table that exists to turn Lure Lanterns into Lost Limbs, not copper. It's one of the things that's pushed me away from using the Frogdog as much and returned me to the Crimson Crocodile, I don't like having this interesting variant monster be undermined by the fact that I can't craft much of the gear from it and the entire designs in that crafting location are so incredibly parasitic in that the weapons and armor set need each other to function properly. It's a mess to explore and it's made the Bullfrogdog something that doesn't get to the table as much anymore. Which is a shame.

I write all of this before getting into this review because it's an important part of assessing any additional content added to the Frogdog expansion. Does it help the copper situation or add more strain to it?

Well as you'll see below, the answer is yes to both.

The Miniature

Belvedere's design showcases a variation on the normal Frogdog Wetsuit, with it being more akin to a corset and skirt over the more combat styled versions worn by her armor kit cousins. There's enough of the original design still in here to link them together, but there's more pomp and circumstance to her design. The Ballistic Brayonet, which is an advanced form of the Vertebrayonet has echoes of its ancestor here in the blade and hilt shape, but it is also its own thing.

Short version is, I dig what the designer(s) of this character and miniature are putting down. Belvedere looks elegant and deadly. Also not having an “S Lantern” is something I always appreciate as I do not like painting that lantern design much at all.

The Gameplay

Crafting Cost: 1x Copper Ocular Ring, 1x Copper, 1x Gaseous Bladder, 1x Vertebrayonet (1x Mossy Molar, 1x bone)

So the first snag here is that this weapon costs two Copper. The first is a copper of any source, but the second one is the Copper Ocular Ring itself. This is the second Copper Indomitable Resource that drops from the L3 Frogdog and there is a real tension in respect to this type of Indomitable Resource/Pattern combo because of the aforementioned copper shortages that plague the Bullfrogdog crafting progression. You have to immediately ask yourself, am I crafting this gear card or am I investing this copper into Bullfrogdog gear.

It's a tough question and one that I encountered the very moment I got my first Copper Ocular Ring, I knew I had to craft the Brayonet in order to try it out, but I really wanted to just put it towards the Bullfrogdog Armor set and associated weapons. Which isn't great.

With my hand forced, I did spend a second precious copper and crafted the Brayonet. It is an interesting weapon in that it has two modes of use. The first is as a traditional dagger, where it combines its (1/4+/3) attack profile with Onslaught.

Onslaught: A gear special rule. If all your attack rolls hit, double your wound attempt totals for the attack.

With the Brayonet, unless you have additional speed you're always triggering Onslaught on this weapon, which means its strength of 3 is deceptive. The actual wounding results that the Brayonet puts out before any additional bonuses such as survivor strength and similar is between 10 and 24 (I've excluded that 1 and 10 as a 1 result means an automatic fail and a 10 is an automatic wound so otherwise the range would be from 0 to 26). That's a significantly stronger weapon that it appears on first glance and the weapon performed very effectively in game. It's a very fresh, new way of designing a slow weapon, with it almost guaranteeing a wound against most monsters, but not providing additional wounds through Devastating.

The alternative use mode is a fun one that leans into the trope of firing a detachable blade, which is of course very deadly because Throwing Your Sword Always Works. I know it is guaranteed to work because Polnareff can have Silver Chariot do this. I don't mention JoJo/Polnareff/Silver Chariot just for no reason either, because part of how the Ballistic Brayonet works involves shedding armor points to deal a long range attack (this is why the weapon has Reach 1 from the start) with luck points. Shedding armor and firing its blade are both things that Silver Chariot is capable of.

For the Brayonet itself, the design here is to combine with the Frogdog Armor's ability to inflate, you can activate the Frogdog Vest to add 1 armor point to a location covered by gear with the armor keyword. It is worth noting that this is not a “heal” either so it is an ability that can not just replenish armor points after the Brayonet fires, but it is also able to increase the initial armor point number before launching. It's just not that fast.

One of the earliest things I did with this is combine it with accessories to increase armor points on the initial launch. Arms are one of the most common places this can be done, with the Spidicules Rings offering a couple of extra points and if you have the Frogdog + White Lion + Slender Man together in the campaign you can even build the Gloom Bracelets that add an extra 6 armor points to your arms.

Outside of Frogdog Armor, Silk Armor also proved to be effective with this weapon as while it doesn't have the same renewable level of replenishment it does have some replenishment and the armor set bonus allows you to move hits from the monster away from the now unprotected spots. Given how hard the Ballistic Brayonet hits when fired due to that combination of high luck and savage it's quite effective.

Once you've fired the blade, the excellent Disarm rules come into play, with the weapon being disarmed until you get to the spot adjacent to the monster where the blade fell after impact. This gives us a fifth pair of disarm tiles, meaning that we finally have enough disarm tiles to cover a hunt party with a scout. That's good, there's a bunch of places where we don't have enough basic components to cover the normal number of survivors when the scout is in play (Infectious Lunacy, Spiral Age, Terrified, Second Stomach etc) so I very much appreciate it even if the odds of all 5 survivors being disarmed at once is incredibly remote. It feels boutique to have all options covered, even if they are edge cases.

Final Thoughts

I think that this is pretty much an essential purchase for people who play with the Frogdog in the same way that Survivors of Death 1 was because it also has an Indomitable Resource with the copper keyword. These Indomitable Resources are so vital not just for their specific Indomitable Weapons (Bully Hammer, Ballistic Brayonet) but they have proven essential in helping complete Bullfrogdog Gear loadouts due to how the rest of the Frogdog expansion falls incredibly short due to not even the Bullfrogdog dropping some Burnished Encephalomatter as rewards for its showdown.

The model is pretty, the weapon is powerful and fun in a new way that meshes well with Frogdog Armor and it's more copper in an ecosystem that lacks it so terribly. Yes, it's a bit of a band aid to a problem it didn't cause, but sometimes that's the best we can hope for.

Recommended for owners of the Frogdog Expansion.