A Discourse on Endings in Kingdom Death (Patreon)

So I am still waiting for the release of 1.5 to reach me, but in advance of that I did look at all of the material released because I don't care about spoilers for People of the Lantern, it's always been the weakest of the three campaigns available so far and I wanted to know if the 1.5 changes demonstrated a growth in Poots's understanding of what makes for a good game and what the community enjoys.  This means I've already read the victory and defeat conditions for the Gold Smoke Knight.

Beyond this point Spoilers are going to come for every single campaign released so far so only scroll past the Spoiling Antelope image if you don't care about knowing the endings in advance.  You have been warned...

The ending of any narrative based work; be it book, movie, TV show, video game, roleplaying game or campaign based board game is one of the most vital parts of the experience alongside the beginning.  The beginning is something that is needed to hook players into the experience and set up things in a way that is going to engage and intrigue.  The beginning of KD:M is a well crafted piece, it's short, it's poignant and it holds a lot of mystery, desperation and defiance.  It's identical regardless of the campaign you play, the variations come later on, especially in the endings.

As a typical Kingdom Death campaign is an affair that takes many hours to complete and is usually run over a period of weeks or months, the ending is a massively important part of the experience.  Someone who has reached the ending of the campaign has put in a massive investment into the experience and a well written ending can provide the sweet topping to this adventure where a badly written ending can sour the entire experience.  Kingdom Death is like watching a long running TV Show, a bad ending can turn people against a repeat experience with ease (See How I Met Your Mother's awful 'official' ending for an example of this).

People of the Lantern 1.31

The Watcher defeat ending of People of the Lantern is a superb piece of work, it provides some lore and it's quite interesting.  The whole watcher fight, outside of the awful balance issues, is a very exciting affair, with the retinues pushing in and giving a whole sense of the entire settlement under threat.  I have no problems at all with the defeat text for People of the Lantern.

The Original People of the Lantern victory ending was received with sort of a mixed response; a lot of people didn't really like the inevitable implication of 'your settlement will die', some did and then a few found creative ways to deal with the issue, either by looping the timeline via the Phoenix Deja Vu card/Clinging Mists or by using Sacrifice to endlessly push back The Watcher so it would never wake up.  I personally played through People of the Lantern once in full, experienced the ending and thought 'well that's kind of shitty, but I guess it's sort of open ended, potentially some settlements could last forever'.

People of the Sun

Then we have People of the Sun; again the defeat condition is absolutely fine, it provides lore and an understandable bad ending. However the "victory" ending has caused more disgruntled players than any of the other endings.  It's quite literally 'everyone lays down and accepts death' which stands completely counter to everything that the rest of the campaign experience provides, every campaign of Kingdom Death is about survivors fighting to live despite the odds against them.  A better ending here would have had the tattered and broken remains of the survivors gather together, pick up their lanterns and few belongings and press off into the darkness, probably doomed but maybe they survive.  An ambiguous ending that lets players who want to believe in a hopeful ending have that while those who enjoy the nihilism can be 'they have no chance out there alone now' and assume that everyone dies.

It's a badly written official ending that is closed and forces the writer's narrative onto people who have been playing a game that has said 'make your own stories' for most of the time it has been played.  It's not triumphant, it's not interesting, it's not logical and it's not fun to experience except for a certain group of personality types.

People of the Stars

People of the Stars on the other hand receives almost universal praise, it's the most beloved of all the three campaigns and the ending is a big, big part of that.  It was the only campaign written with Anna Poots as the primary (I believe the other two have their endings written by Adam) and to be honest, Adam needs to turn over the writing of the endings for all campaigns to Anna because she is significantly better at writing than he is.  

In People of the Stars; if The Tyrant/Dragon King defeats the Children of the Stars, he breaks down and goes on a rampage for an untold length of time attacking and killing any human he comes across.  This makes perfect sense and is completely consistent with the character of The Tyrant, the last of his kind who has put all his faith in these fragile, pink creatures and has seen that they cannot become Dragon Kings like himself, his race is doomed and he is the last of them.  

If the Children of the Stars succeed in slaying the Dragon King then the ending we get is so well written.  I can't do it justice so here is the text in full:

Apart from the jaunty angle this text is photographed at, this is an example of a perfect ending. The writing in it is superb, it ties together with everything that's happened before and it takes you on a vivid rollercoaster of emotions, leaving the final understanding of what has actually happened to the reader. (In case it's not clear, the Children of the Stars become Dragon Kings and The Tyrant's race is reborn from the ashes of his death).

Honestly I still get goosebumps reading those two paragraphs, it's a perfect ending.

People of the Lantern 1.5

Which brings us to People of the Lantern's new ending.  Which occurs after the Gold Smoke Knight (GSK) turns up.  So, first of all, there's no foreshadowing of the Gold Smoke Knight's appearance at any point in the campaign, he's been replaced in the hunt events by the Cyclops Knight (who is linked to the Twilight Order btw) so in essence it's literally 'this big dude turns up and wants to fight you all'.  Unlike the Watcher, which is somewhat signalled (at least in hindsight you can see the signs) the GSK is just "and a big bad dude turns up at the end".  That's pretty piss poor writing in the first place*; there is no motivation for the GSK, there's not even any given in the introduction text because there is no lore text there.  We know more about The Butcher than the GSK from the rulebook text, and that's garbage.

The fight itself is pretty decent, interesting and brutal, so I'm going to save writing about that for the full review I'll do in November.  But the endings are... well they suck more than even People of the Sun does (or at least one of them does).  

I actually have no issues with the defeat text, it's macabre and weird and that's fine.  But the victory text shows that Poots has learnt absolutely nothing from the community reactions, this is a terribly written ending - in essence it's telling players that no matter what they do in People of the Lantern it's essentially meaningless.  Win or lose the entire settlement dies, thanks for playing but unless you're into nihilism there's nothing for you here.

People of the Sun's ending is not well loved overall, but Poots has doubled down by making the Core game lose it's ambiguous ending/looping/sacrifice "win" conditions and instead kills everything with a deus ex machina.  I can't see people liking this, and I expect to see posters on BoardGameGeek and Reddit/r/Kingdom Death talking about how disappointed they are with things once they reach the end in a couple of months.

Now I do have some hope for the second generation of expansions, for a start we are getting 'Campaigns of Death' that will let the community create their own things and I expect that the very best campaigns KD:M has to offer will come from that book; but also Adam mentioned that Anna was working on one of the campaigns for the new expansions (Inverted Mountain iirc) - considering the work she did on People of the Stars this is very exciting as she's the writer I trust the most on the team.  However, I expect the ending for the Abyssal Woods campaign to be either 'everyone gets sucked into the black hole at the middle of the woods' or 'the real Goblin turns up and kills everyone'.  Cause I am pretty sure that Adam is the lead writer for the Abyssal Woods and his track record is now 0/3.

We'll see, at the very least I have cemented the ideas to how I want to end my own campaign more.  I want an ending more to Anna's standard than Adam's, I should be so lucky to write something as good as the ending to People of the Stars.

*I do not have the full text for the entire People of the Lantern campaign at the moment, if there is stuff that foreshadows the GSK I retract this comment.