Understanding the Gold Smoke Knight (Patreon)

OK, so I had a chance to get some additional information on the Gold Smoke Knight which helps explain its motivations. It's been admitted by Poots as well that they didn't do the best job in providing the players with the understanding for this motivation.

I'm not allowed to cut and paste the text directly, so I'm going to re-transcribe it with my own wording.  

Needless to say, spoilers follow...

Knights like the Gold Smoke Knight are sort of area guardians (described as "Elementals").  They have a particular area they deal with and are linked to.  It's clear at this point that there are knights who call themselves knights (like the Lion Knight) and then there are Knights who are these armored Elementals (like the Gold Smoke Knight and Flower Knight).  

Originally the Gold Smoke Knight was just the Gold Knight, and it was in charge of the area where the People of the Lantern set up.  Looking after it in whatever fashion it deemed best.  

However, an Entity (currently not disclosed) took over the area and messed things up badly. This has corrupted the Gold Knight into the Gold Smoke Knight - Now, watchers are a part of this problem, they're parasitic infections on the landscape in that their lantern hordes/chamber that they create to hibernate in and lure tasty survivors over to are boils festering in the landscape.

Lorewise - Watchers are apparently very powerful, as noted by their ability to keep other monsters away from the settlement.  They're too powerful for even the Gold Smoke Knight to handle, so the Gold Smoke Knight doesn't turn up until after the Watcher is slain.  Once the Watcher is gone the Gold Smoke Knight comes to salt the earth and destroy all remains of the Watcher, especially because the Gold Smoke Knight fears the innovations that could come from the corpse of the Watcher.

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While all of this now makes sense for the motivations of the GSK, I am still not satisfied with People of the Lantern as it stands.  Statistically the Watcher is weak, far weaker than the Gold Smoke Knight, and in addition I do not see why the Gold Smoke Knight is afraid of the hibernating Watchers at all.  This seems like the best time to strike.  Now I'm sure that there is some lore reason why the GSK is unable to get close to the Watcher's Lantern cocoon. 

However...

However! I find myself thinking that People of the Lantern would have been a better experience if the Gold Smoke Knight turned up before the Watcher woke up and, tried to destroy the settlement at a time when the The Watcher had not attempted to devour it's meals.  Once the GSK was then slain this means that The Watcher remains lurking as the ultimate threat for the settlement, allowing it to remain the iconic box art creature for People of the Lantern.

However, this would have required a redesign of the Watcher to make it a more dangerous creature (not as hard as it seems to be honest) and a change to the Watched story event. None of this stuff would have been very difficult to achieve and I think it would have made for a more interesting story experience overall.

However, it should be very interesting to see what the Ivory Dragon expansion, which extends the timeline post Gold Smoke Knight, will do in giving us a peak into what the innovations/technology that the GSK was so afraid of and may even give us a narrative ending that feels more satisfying.

One lives in hope!