Bonus Principles: Final Fighting vs. Ultimate Weapons (Patreon)

Before I push into this one, I want to preface why I have separated away these two principles* from Barbaric/Romantic. I'm sure if you have played only People of the Lantern, you would assume that these two principles should be part of the assessment of Barbaric/Romantic, because that is how you get them. However, that is not the case for every campaign and when you look at it, it seems that the actual "activation" criteria for these two principles are simply the following:

• Lantern Year 20
• Some change in the Settlement's Innovation source

This second point might be something that not all of you are clear on, it's where lore and mechanics intertwine. So we've got some spoilers coming while I briefly explain this. Big spoilers, spoilers for Lantern, Sun and Stars.  Skip onto the bolded Analysis header to avoid being spoiled.Survivors cannot innovate/develop new technologies by themselves, they are too savage, too clueless and too ignorant to be able to do so. Perhaps, with time, they would manage to do so - but the world of Kingdom Death is brutal and savage, with short lifespans for the "inked"** survivors who do not find settlements.What happens in each case we have so far, is that the survivors chance upon one of the 'honeypot' monsters that this setting has - these are The Watcher, The Sun and  The Tyrant.  

Each monster has its own agenda for which it needs survivors; the Watcher requires food in the form of memories, The Sun is dormant and gains babysitters for its young while The Tyrant seeks to recreate its lost race by reforging the tabula rasa of the survivors into new Dragon Kings.These honeypot monsters are the source of innovations, when you look at the location design, you will notice that the innovation section is specifically printed on the card that contains the monster. 

This is particularly overt when you consider People of the Sun and its two locations. These are split so the technologies, including the initial weapon building locations, come from the Sun. It literally exists to provide the source of innovations and gear for the settlement.  You will see something similar if you look at the Lantern Horde (where the Watcher slumbers) and the Throne. The Throne is also quite overt about this concept, its 'fear and trembling' table has a result where the Tyrant provides an additional way of getting innovations but the method is too much for the survivor and they are slain by the experience. 

In People of the Lantern; this is really brought home, because once the Watcher is slain, the survivors cannot innovate anymore. They start to perform oxidisation, which is something that scares the Gold Smoke Knight, but they lose all ability to innovate because 'The light of inspiration is extinguished.'  In contrast; settlements in People of the Stars and Sun are able to keep on innovating right until the end of the campaign, because their source of knowledge is still alive (Tyrant/Sun).  While Sun does not have the trigger for the these two principles, Stars does when The Tyrant changes into the Dragon King and Lantern does upon the discovery of The Watcher.  

It's this change of urgency that causes them to act - however when The Watcher is slain, the Lantern people lose their principle because they fall into despair at being on the bottom of the food chain, while the Stars people keep theirs - possibly because of their impending destiny to be near the top of the food chain.All of this is worth considering if/when you create a custom campaign, the current lore of Kingdom Death is that survivors cannot innovate without a monster of some kind to draw inspiration from. 

So one of your locations should include a monster or the lair of a monster.

Analysis:

Passive Bonus:Passively both principles are identical, they give the settlement +1 survival limit. A useful bonus, but there is no difference between these two principles at this point.

Winner: Both!

Active Bonus:

This is where the two principles differ, Ultimate Weapon lets you cherry pick one specific resource from the monster deck when you slay a monster while Final Fighting Art allows you to select a card from the discard/wound pile and put it on top of the AI deck.The applications of Ultimate Weapon are immediate and obvious; you can use this fighting art to hunt after specific resources that are less common. If you need a Handed Skull (Gorm) or Shimmering Halo (Phoenix) this is how you can get them.  

This principle allows you to construct certain gear cards that you have been lacking, making it simple to finish armor sets or construct late game gear like The Black Sword (Gormery).

Final Fighting Art (FFA) on the other hand does not look as simple to use or as powerful, it provides a once per showdown manipulation of the AI deck. This has a few uses, you can control the monster in a desperate situation by ensuring that it acts in a certain manner, or you can simply add a single AI card back from the wound pile to give another chance at scoring a wound on a useful location.However, the best use for FFA is when crit farming monsters that self heal (White Lion, Screaming Antelope, Flower Knight and so on). 

If you can control these monsters in their L3 form (which is very straightforward when you have good gear and tactics); then you can drain their entire AI deck via wounds, then pop the self healing card back in and let them heal up and attack the monster all over again. Performing this method is dangerous if you are badly damaged by the monster, but it will also effectively let you get a second chance to resource farm as much as you possibly can via critical hits, which is huge.  

So this is actually a tough one to call, Ultimate Weapon is by far the simpler one to utilise and requires the least effort to maximise effort from - in addition, not all monsters have self heal, so the best usages of FFA are limited in opportunity.

Therefore, I think I have to give this one to Ultimate Weapon, it's easier to use and it has a wider base of applications. 

Winner and Overall Winner: Ultimate Weapon!

While I would love to give this one to FFA and all of it's neat little tricks, sometimes simplicity of design and sheer power trumps over the clever finicky tricks. So Ultimate Weapon it is.

*Technically and mechanically they are Innovations from Principles, but I'm going to class them as Principles here just to be infuriating.

**Inked survivors are those written into existence by The Scribe.