Red Ring of Death: The Single Best Build in the Game (Patreon)

OK, so disclaimer. Once this is set up and running you've basically won the game unless you are very unlucky. Getting set up is a little tricky and requires some planning and direction, but once you are there you might as well just go read the end of campaign success results. Because unless you're playing People of the Stars (where you also need to get a constellation to win), you're going kill everything in the game.  Yes, even TOM (The Old Master L4 DBK), even the Gold Smoke Knight, even an L3 Lion God.  Basically nothing other than random events of doom are going to stop you.

The Red Ring of Death (RROD) build is a Spidicules/Slenderman build based around the combination of a White Speaker Story, a Spidicules Ring and a Slenderman Secret Fighting Art.

Here are the relevant cards, before we start:

Missing is Path of Gloom - which is a survivor status on the other side of the Gloom Man card. It means you require 5+ insanity to become insane, and then once you are insane you flip over to the Gloom Man (shown above).

And here is the Red Ring:

The Third part of this puzzle is the 'Story of the Young Hero' which gives you the ability. "At the start of your act gain 2 bleeding tokens and 1 survival".

The way this works is as follows:

Once your survivor is a Gloom Man, they remain so until they attack. This means that normally they can't hurt the monster without removing the Gloom Man effect.  This is undesirable, because while they are a Gloom Man they are effectively immune to anything that the monster does, except for things which do not specifically target.

However, the Red Ring provides us with a way of wounding a monster, without attacking as long as we are the AI controller.  All that is needed is a way of healing those bleeds, because you can't bleed yourself forever without some protection. Fortunately we have access to Bandages from the base game (or the Bloodskin from the White Speaker promo).

Nice and simple! All you need now are some items to help activate the Red Ring, things to do when your survivor's turn comes up (Circlet, Headband etc etc) and some support stuff to increase chances of survival during the hunt phase (whip, sickle, etc etc) and you're good to go!

So each time you have the RROD survivor as the monster controller, she bleeds herself and deals two automatic wounds to the monster!

There's a whole number of different ways you can apply this to a hunt party.  You can build with the Gloom Hammer and have that player sit to the right of the RROD - then they will be able to keep the RROD almost permanently as the monster controller.  Or you can innovate pictographs, run everyone else away asap, and then solo the monster, dealing wounds to it once every 4 turns. It's a ridiculously powerful support build, but it can also become an absurd solo machine.  There are few to no monsters in the game that can withstand the level of punishment that the RROD deals out.  I'll leave you to figure out which ones they are.

Getting to the RROD

Now, it might seem a little awkward to build around an SFA, but Clarity of Darkness is given via the Spiral Ganglia disorder and that is given to survivors with the Blotted Out fighting art during the Slenderman's Forgotten Fear timeline event.  

Once you have Spiral Ganglia, all you need to do is get 3 disorders on your survivors in a single showdown (as per the Darkness Awareness card text) and another survivor will gain Clarity of Darkness.  The single fastest way to do this is to line up 3 survivors in front of the Screaming Antelope when it's trap triggers - but you can also do it via Accept Darkness (and who wouldn't Accept Darkness when you're building Gloom Men?) or fighting monsters that deal brain damage like The Gorm.

The only other part of this build that's tricky is getting the Red Ring itself.  That requires making a Legless Ball, and if there is enough interest in the future, I'll write about the most effective ways to go about de-legging a Spidicules.

It's also worth noting and stressing that despite the power of this build, it still requires a HUGE amount of effort and work. All of the rings are well balanced and costed, you can't make them without hunting multiple high level Spidicules monsters and each one is individually well designed and fair for the amount of effort put into them. They're balanced for the period of the game where you can get them, it's only in combination with the Gloom Man and Story of the Young Hero that one (and only one) of the rings genuinely becomes game breaking. The others are powerful, top tier, but not overwhelming and as such the rings themselves are fine, they're in fact great, fun design and once of the best parts of the game.

So, there we are. That's pretty much the outline of the RROD build and a framework of how to get it active. How abusive the survivor is once you have them is up to you. They could simply be a super safe support survivor who automatically wounds the monster once every 4 turns, or they could be a soloing machine who kills monsters all by themselves (depending on the monster's instinct).  But the latter option, while funny for a short while, does wear thin eventually and these days I do not really bother playing RROD outside of support.  Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. :)

This build is not an endorsement for self harm, just because your survivor does it, doesn't mean you should too.