Kingdom Death: Lordsruin Titus Indomitable Survivor White Box Review (Patreon)

In the strobing darkness, Titus struggled up the dizzyingly forking limbs, groping blindly, testing the unyielding branches with his wrenching grip. As he tugged at the frozen bark, a bolt of soundless lightning arced, lurching downward, striking the joint beneath his grip. It exploded soundlessly, impossibly bright, sending him flying. Titus sailed through the charged air, clutching his prize in one fist and swinging wildly with the other. As he crossed from within to without, a lucky blow collapsed the monstrous entity into a sizzling heap, the peal of its crown against the ground breaks the oppressive silence.

Lordsruin Titus is the latest in the line of Indomitable Survivors, and somewhat surprisingly instead of giving us a Spidicules or Flower Knight based Indomitable Pattern, Team Death has gone direct for the King, the current latest game monster from the Gambler's Chest.

The Model

The Indomitable series of miniatures has yet to deliver a poor sculpt, and the streak continues with Titus. Danny Cruz's striking line work has been translated into another high quality sculpt. Deathking armor is ludicrous in all the best ways, and what we have here is another excellent edition to the entire line. I will note that the face of the sculpt doesn't look like the artwork, but I bring that up not to criticise; instead I mention it because Titus's head looks like Josh Brolin when he was acting as Cable in the second Deadpool movie. Which isn't a bad thing.

About the only part of this model sculpt I'm not sure on is the exposed leg, I don't really know what to make of this decision at all, it's not bad, it's not amazing, it's simply really weird. So if the goal was to make Titus look odd or strange in some manner, it's worked. What do you think about this artistic choice?

Outside of that (which I do not consider a mark against the model) this continues the trend of high quality sculpts that is a hallmark of the Indomitable Survivor line. Crisp details, strong pose, full of character. All elements that make this a success.

The Gameplay Content

The very first thing we need to acknowledge here is this is an Indomitable weapon for The King. The King is a monster that turns up in lantern year 21; and you need to kill a Level 3 King in order to get that gear. That means lantern year 22 is the first time you can achieve this (which Trent “Big Deno” Denison has done on video so we have evidence that this early kill is very much achievable), but you are not guaranteed the Lordsruin Indomitable resource due to the King already having two Indomitable resources. So you could get this off your first King, or it might take 6+ showdown battles without any sniff of it, that is always the cost one pays with getting more indomitable resources though, if you want a specific one it is chance, but if you are fine with whatever and replay campaigns a lot it will even out in the end.

This is less of an issue for earlier monsters, because there is more time to fight them per campaign; however late game content, like The King is naturally going to be encountered less because some campaigns fail before they get there and even if you are a player who gets to the end game (virtually) every time, you'll still face The King less than other monsters because of time constraints.

All of that, in addition to this being Indomitable content for a monster that is in the most expensive expansion for the game, means that realistically only a portion of the player base will be in the position where they might draw the needed indomitable resource. That, coupled with the 1 in 3 chance (which could be altered further with more Indomitable resources down the line) means this is very much something for the die-hard players. The costs, odds based acquisition, place in the game's product line and time the monster is on the campaign timeline all contribute to this. The First Hero may help solve the last of these issues, but overall if you're not already facing the King in most of your campaign runs, this is really extraneous to your needs.

Lordsruin

Crafting Cost: 1x origin branch, 1x hollow crown, 1x deathmetal, 2x leather

One large benefit here, is if you do draw the Origin Branch, you will almost certainly be able to craft it immediately, because the King's resource deck is small enough that getting all the resources is close to guaranteed. This is a trend that exists in most indomitable weapons and it is a clever trick of design that I enjoy highlighting.

Lordsruin itself on a power level really needs to be superior to the Kingsmith and “secret” crafting location weapons as they can potentially be gained before constructing the Lordsruin is on the table. Statistically it is not, this weapon about on par with the other King weapons, but it does feature the massive ability of Deadly 4 and it is a scythe, which is an incredible weapon class as long as you own the mastery card.

Scythe Mastery with just the Lordsruin is not something one will achieve easily; in fact, if you don't own the Dragon King expansion, you do not even have the Scythe Mastery proficiency card. Fortunately, even without proficiency, this weapon is powerful, interesting and still has the Grand weapon type. Multi weapon type keyword weapons are some of the most exciting tools to utilise because they have additional synergies to discover and play with.

One of the most intriguing parts of the weapon is the activated ability, this ability which requires 3 blue and a red affinity (a challenge with Deathking Armor due to the King faction having a 'no affinities' theme), means that the negative of gradually giving the monster Luck tokens (thereby making it harder to critically wound each time you wound) can be overcome with that activation.

This play pattern I found both interesting and fun, it creates a small ebb and flow, with the added benefit of being able to remove negative luck tokens from adjacent survivors to boot. That does help contribute to making the weapon more than just stats, deadly and a scythe/grand on a stick. It has character.

Summary

Lordsruin is a solid enough mini-expansion if you are part of the target audience; that audience is (hushed) players who get to the King and battle that monster in a regular fashion enough to be comfortable against the level 3 version. That's not a large group of people, but with the extra power in the Gamblers' Chest it is a growing demographic. For players who have not yet experienced the Indomitable Resources that come with the King in the Gambler's Chest, I would urge that you do not worry about picking this up before then. The Indomitable Survivors seem to remain in stock, and honestly if you did miss out on this, it's not a huge loss.

In the future, players with The Gambler's Chest, the Dragon King and the First Hero expansion (which will allow for engaging with late game content more often due to being able to skip the earlier times) will certainly benefit from this expansion. However, I will note that currently I'm of the opinion that the King gear is so strong that it is overwhelming the late game monsters in the current campaigns, so the real value is if Team Death raise the stakes by creating 40 or 50 lantern year campaigns with Node 4+ versions of monsters so players can jump in with the First Hero and play at a higher power level from the get go.

This is a good white box indomitable survivor; it's just tied to content that you should experience before you worry about adding this in, which means you can be patient and take your time before picking this up (as long as you can win the battle against The FOMO nemesis).