Endeavouring for Success: Industrious Insects: Dung Beetle (and others) (Patreon)

We can't wrap up our look at the Dung Beetle Knight without going through the endeavours; however, we've mostly dug through the black harvest portion already and that just leaves Round Stone Training. As such I'm also going to take a moment to look at the Lion God's one innovation and the non-People of the Sun endeavours from the Sunstalker, that brings the number up to a reasonable five innovations rather than just two.

Subterranean Agriculture

I don't think I need to go breaking down Subterran Agriculture again as I've written about the cycle used in the Black Harvest in the past (click on the Dung Beetle Tag at the bottom of this post). The short version is, if you do not want to be crafting gear then you should be sending either one single lone farmer to do the Underground Sow job (and another one to harvest) every time it is available. The risk of your departing survivors gaining Vermin Obsession and being crippled by a random bug patch is very high. If you do want the highest roll for the three year cycle you should hunt the Sunstalker in that year because it does not have random terrain at all. That ensures that an errant Bug Patch won't cause a complete and unavoidable total party kill.

Unless you have specific gear from the DBK you want to craft, there isn't much reason to add 1x Preserved Caustic Dung to level up the harvest, but if you do have the Black Harvest  happening at the same year as a key fight, the second level of the harvest does give some combat benefits, so levelling it up if the Black Harvest happens on say the same year as the Watcher fight (or some final nemesis) is a good move. You can make the decision based on how much caustic dung you have available and what nemesis/quarry monsters you intend to fight on the year the Black Harvest comes in.

Oh and don't bother making the Wet Resin Crafter unless you plan to hunt the DBK more than just once to unlock this innovation. It is purely for making the gear, wonderful, powerful gear.

Train - Round Stone Training

Cost:1x endeavour, 1x resource

Type: Permanent, Random

Effect(s): 10% gain Motion Sickness, 10% gain Crossarm Block, 60% gain Tumble, 20% gain +3 Insanity and your choice of either Carapace of Will or Propulsion Drive Fighting Arts

Note: Carapace of Will and Propulsion Drive are not Secret Fighting Arts, they are normal ones. The Innovation has a typo, one of many in the DBK expansion.

Round Stone Training is gained either by innovation after you have gained the Nightmare Training innovation or through the Dung Beetle Knight's introductory event. Now the preferred way to gain this is of course through the DBK introduction and that is one of many arguments for always including the DBK as a quarry (even if you're not going to hunt it) and therefore this makes it one of a couple of quarries that is sometimes metagamed into a campaign even if there is no intention to hunt it (The Dragon King is another because of how it turbo charges the F&T trainer).

Ways of repeatedly gaining good fighting arts are always powerful, they allow for a settlement to focus around unusual strategies and that is one of the reasons why Sculpture is such a strong and popular innovation. While Round Stone Training is not as reliable in what it supplies, most of the time it gives the survivor who uses it a beneficial fighting art. Crossarm Block is not that strong, but there are some builds that can make use of it, especially when you have the Slender Man as an option and can construct the Gloom Bracelets in order to give you a well armored location that can suck up hits (the Gloom Bracelets + Armored Fist remains the stronger combo though).

Tumble is just an all-round good fighting art and has some decent benefits when fighting the DBK, because Tumble triggers when 'something' collides with you it works not just with monster collisions, but when the ball collides with you also, effectively giving you a 6+ saving throw vs the ball's damage. I consider Tumble to be one of the more useful fighting arts to take with you against the DBK and having such common access to it here is great.

The final roll on the table however is the one that gives the most exciting options. Both Propulsion Drive and Carapace of Will are build defining fighting arts, by that I mean they give such power that they define how your survivor should be built. Because you get a choice of which one to pick on a 9+ (8+ With Otherworldly Luck, never forget how powerful that fighting art is); we'll discuss in a bit of detail how each one can be used.

Carapace of Will

This is the defensive one of the two fighting arts; it gives the survivor the Steadfast status which allows them to exchange their entire movement (knight) for a steadfast token. As long as they are not knocked down they will keep these tokens until they spend them. This is done when they have 2+ tokens and all the tokens can be removed to ignore one hit. In essence if you do not move twice, you get a free 'super block'.

That means a survivor who wants to best manipulate and use the Carapace of Will wants to get into position and not move much. There are two types of survivors that do this best, the first is the obvious tank, another survivor will manipulate/control the monster AI as much as possible to ensure that the tank survivor does not have to move to do her job – then you get a bonus “block” every so often. Note that you can still move through other options such as Dash, leather boots or similar.

The other way this is used is a more haphazard and incidental way, this is where damage dealing or DPS (Damage Per Swing, from the MMO term Damage Per Second) survivors will grab steadfast tokens during the turns where they do not need to move to attack (for example if they are blind spot attacking and the monster's attention is on the tank at the front). They will typically use these tokens as protection from either reaction hits, or in the situation where they take hits unexpectedly because the monster has done something unusual.

Propulsion Drive

The more obvious and offensive of the two fighting arts, Momentum rewards you for doing the opposite (and combos with Tumble). You will be constantly moving during the showdown, sometimes running in “loops” in order to ensure that you move at least four spaces every single time you have an opportunity. Once you have at least 5 momentum tokens, your next attack will gain +1d10 strength and luck for its first selected hit location! I think we all know what we're doing with this one; stick it on a DPS survivor with at least 4 movement, run around every single turn and then slap the monster when you know, you just know that it's not going to hit the trap. Mmm, resources.

Rating:5/5

The Knowledge Worm

This one is not an innovation as such, but it is hard to fit a space in to discuss the passive benefit of the Knowledge Worm anywhere because it's such a small thing. So we'll slot it in here. In essence, the Knowledge Worm, which can be gained from killing any level of the Lion God (as long as you don't already have one, either as an innovation or inside a necromancer) gives you one extra scrap every single lantern year. It's not much, but in a game like this every single resource mounts up over time and scrap becomes iron.

When we get to the Lion God again I'm going to do a whole piece on the Necromancer as it's a reliable style of play you can make and you 'only' need to beat the L1 Lion God to get set up.

This is one of the reasons why the Lion God (same as the DBK) is a monster you can just put into all your campaigns, you can hunt it just once at L1 and you'll get the most efficient return on your investment.

Such wormy goodness!

Rating 5/5

Final Dance - Shadow Dancing

Cost: 1x endeavor, a survivor died during the previous hunt or showdown.

Type: Permanent, Random

Effect(s): 50% gain +3 insanity and a random fighting art, 50% chance of getting the Sneak Attack Fighting Art.

So I've long said that anything which triggers from the death of a survivor needs to compensate you as much as possible for that death, survivors dying is inevitable in this game, and that is why Graves is so highly rated, it provides the ability to regain population through intimacy via its endeavours. It's also why Cannibalize is not highly rated +1 basic resource does not make up for the advance towards Game Over.

Shadow Dancing almost makes the cut, it's very suboptimal but with a few tweaks it could have been a great place to endeavour. I would not seek to innovate Shadow Dancing, but Final Dance in combination with Romantic can give a lot of options.

The big get in this one is Sneak Attack, Sneak attack is a really underrated powerhouse of a fighting art, it's +4 strength whenever you attack a monster in the blindspot, for the entire attack. That's a huge bonus and it is the existence of the 6+ roll doing this that keeps this innovation from landing a 1/5 rating.

Ultimately I would have liked to see the 1-5 roll tweaked to allow you to either gain a fighting art that the dead survivor had or a random fighting art (your choice). This would have giving Shadow Dancing more of a thematic feel to it while also making it a more interesting choice for legacy elements in a settlement. Good legacy elements make players feel less bad when their survivors die and therefore enable them to take more risks. I hope Shadow Dancing gets a bit of a tweak, until then it's just a place where you try and hit Sneak Attack on the odd occasions where you've actually innovated it.

Rating: 2/5

Advanced Cutting - Filleting Table

Cost:1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Random

Effect(s): 50% dismembered arm, 50% gain trick attack.

Now if it was not for the “free” way that you gain this innovation (by catching one of each different type of fish during sky fishing) this innovation would be almost complete garbage. Trick Attack is a once per showdown fighting art (these are already borderline useless) that lets you put the priority token on one survivor when you attack in the blind spot. But the survivor has to be adjacent to you.

This is a flavour win for sure, it's a rather funny idea that you hit the monster and then point to another survivor, but having it trigger only once and also require a survivor to be adjacent to you when you're in the blind spot means that most of the time you're not going to be able to pick an optimal target to drop the priority token on. Also this is just once per showdown – it certainly couldn't be every single turn, constantly priority locking a monster makes them far too easy to kill – but perhaps if it worked once for each other survivor? So normally it would trigger 3 times? That feels like it's more interesting and useful.

As such, I'd consider this endeavor more useful if a) it didn't cut your arm off 50%! of the time (like maybe only 20%?) It had some 9-10 result that did something different and Trick Attack instead was worded a little something like this:

When you wound a monster from its blind spot, a survivor adjacent to you may gain the priority token. Limit once; for each survivor in the showdown.

Rating:1/5 for the Endeavor; 5/5 for the Innovation