Black Hole Sun. Won't You Come and Wash Away the Rain? The Comprehensive Review of the Sunstalker Expansion (Patreon)

Considering that Soundgarden’s epic is about nothing in particular it seems absolutely fine to appropriate the second part of the first verse in order to open up this review about the Sunstalker expansion. Great music for a great expansion.

Needless to say, spoilers will follow as I prefer to go into a reasonable bit of detail about these expansions because you can’t really explore what it is that makes one good otherwise. So, if you want to know the short version without spoiling anything, skip down to the Where? and Score? categories at the bottom of this post.

Who?
The Sunstalker is a 4x4  monster that arrives in lantern year 9. At the moment it is the second to last monster to arrive, with only the Lion God turning up later in the timeline.

The Sunstalker is themed around light and shadow, providing one of the most unique and enjoyable showdown fights in the entire game. Not only is the Sunstalker itself an unusual foe to attack, being very fast despite its lumbering form, it is also has a special mechanic that represents the building up of dangerous heat, the creation of shadows and it will even bring shadelike minions to the fight (which sadly do not have their own miniatures).

This expansion is truely something special and if you can get over the way it appears; perhaps via some tasteful modification, accepting that despite its appearance that front tendril is for laying eggs or maybe gluing a black censorship bar across the whole thing before complaining to the local TV Network for showing this monstrosity at a time when kids are still awake; then you are in for a real treat. Because the Sunstalker Expansion is the shining, golden standard that all future expansions should be compared to.

What?
As a large box expansion you expect to receive a little more with the Sunstalker than you would with something like the Gorm or Lion Knight. In fact, the Sunstalker has one of (currently) only two fully fleshed out alternate campaigns (The Flower Knight has one, but it’s woefully underdeveloped and suffers from poor balance decisions – it’s basically the core game with a few twists).

So you get a thicker rulebook than normal, 51 gear cards, 7 rare gear cards, a pile of the usual AI, Hit Location, Resource and Hunt Event cards. But you also get a new kind of terrain – salt (for the Twitch generation), new fighting arts, disorders, some secret farting arts (nice typo there Poots – next time save it for the Frogdog), a new armor set (Cyclopian), a new weapon mastery (Katanas), three settlements (2 campaign specific and 1 for when you hunt the Sunstalker) and the very cool Solar Track.

The model is very easy to assemble and fits together with few obvious joins and it’s solid, it’s really solid and durable. The only real issues you have are that the eyestalks are vulnerable to breakage and that the tentacles hang over the edge of the base. Apart from that the entire thing is very robust.

The survivor/weapon/armor sprue is well designed, with a spare set of female legs if you want to make a hybrid set (I wish we got more of these items) and the weapon designs are all beautiful. The Skleaver, Sky Harpoon and Denticle Axe are among the most gorgeous weapons in the game, they have a Celtic and/or gilded look to them that is intricate and enticing. In truth the only complaints I have is that the female armor looks a little stupid around the legs, the hoods all look rather meh, there is no Sunspot Lantern sculpt and the Ink Sword is very boring looking. In addition, the two People of the Sun models you get have utterly bland poses, gorgeous clothing, but they might as well be T-Posing they are that generic.

That might sound like a lot of complaints, but they are all very minor niggles to be honest and they are more than made up for by the awesome design of pretty much every single piece of gear in this expansion - stuff like the Ink Blood Bow, the Sunshark bow and the aforementioned Skleaver and company are all amazing. In truth there is such a huge smorgasbord of items available that you're almost never going to be able to craft everything from the Sunstalker in one campaign!

Everything else is up to standard; which means that the cover of the rulebook collects fingerprints like it is working for CSI: The Great City as per usual, but everything else is pretty good. There are a few irritating oversights however, in particular you do not get enough of certain rare items. For example the story event where you gain the eye patch actually gives you three of them to hand out, but you only get one copy of the eye patch rare gear card. All I can do for that one is slow clap.

How?
How does the Sunstalker fit into the game? How would you use the tools it provides? Well, the Sunstalker gives us two ways to use it. The first is to insert it into the campaign as a quarry, where it can be hunted, carved up into little pieces and turned into pointy things to poke with or flappy things to cover your shame with (not that the ignorant savages we call survivors have any shame in the first place). The second is to play as The People of the Sun, which is an alternate campaign where you play as a group of survivors drawn to a pool of nutrient rich liquid and bathed in the warm glow of The Sun. I will explore this alternate setting first.

People of the Sun
This entire campaign is loosely structured around a Japanese tragedy and is unusual because there are no nemesis fights until the last 5 years, but if you lose a single nemesis fight the campaign ends in failure.
In addition to this there are other changes to the game; the settlement automatically starts with Survival of the Fittest and uses a special intimacy table involving water birth. There are two campaign specific locations; one of which allows you to purify your survivors so they become more potent and less likely to die in childbirth and it also has a bunch of campaign specific gear you can construct.

People of the Sun cannot wear heavy gear without a Secret Fighting Art, which limits access to certain types of gear, but apart from that the campaign is quite receptive to expansions. As long as you are careful. 

The Slenderman, Lion Knight and Manhunter will all make the campaign harder if they are brought in (Slenderman basically turns up once and then never comes back unless his settlement event card is drawn) because if you lose to them then game over.

There are some expansions that work very well in this campaign and I can highly recommend the following: The Dragon King, The Lion God (that’s right, this is a campaign MADE for hunting the Lion God) and the Dung Beetle Knight. Spidicules can be used if you introduce it later in the campaign instead of allowing it to replace the Screaming Antelope – do not lose the Screaming Antelope, it is a vital quarry in People of the Sun. VITAL.

Some people wonder if you could hunt Sunstalkers in the setting or not, there is nothing against it in the rules. However when you consider the nature of the story – it does not make sense for the People of the Sun to be hunting Sunstalkers, they are a bunch of dupes, tricked into raising baby Sunstalkers on behalf of The Sun. Literal cuckoos in the nest so to speak. 

So it is a real stretch for the People of the Sun to be able to hunt adult ones, because then the penny would drop and they'd realise the betrayal too soon. It is your game however, so I am sure you can twist the logic to suit if you really want to get Sunstalkers into the campaign. It’s just, well Cyclopian Armor should not be allowed in a setting where Warriors of the Sun exist. Cyclopian Scale Armor is how you get pseudo-Warriors of the Sun into the other campaigns.

Sun Chasers
While People of the Sun is a fun alternate way to play the game, the real meat, bones and shark teeth of this expansion is when you insert the Sunstalker into a campaign as a huntable quarry. As before I am going to provide a list of all the reasons why the Sunstalker is great; nay, why it is the single best expansion in the entire game so far.

1. Skleaver
Apart from the super hard to make Perfect Slayer, the Skleaver is the premium grand weapon in the game. Now you will see me write often that I extol the virtues of low speed, high strength, high accuracy weapons because they trigger less reactions, hit the trap less often and offer more control in a fight.

There is an exception to this, and it is the Skleaver. The Skleaver is a high accuracy, high strength, 1 speed Grand Weapon that has a feature unique amongst all the grand weapons currently out there. It does not have slow, this means you can give it to a survivor with additional speed and they will hit more often. Why is this good here? It’s because critical hits scored with grand weapon specialists knock down the monster and cancel all reactions apart from the trap. That’s huge and it is in general limited by the fact that Grand Weapons are slow. Not if you have a Skleaver.

The affinity ability of the Skleaver isn’t important, but if you can activate it, you should, because it protects you from nonsense that targets heavy gear.

I love, love, love the Skleaver and I think it’s the perfect example of how to gate weapons properly, you have to beat two level 2 Sunstalkers to build a Skleaver, which is a somewhat scary proposition in itself, but it is so much worth.

2. Denticle Axe
If you are not sure what a denticle is, then before we start looking at this item you just need to know that it is a small tooth-like or bristle structure, like a shark’s skin. The Denticle Axe is a Celtic looking beast that may well be the best constructible axe available in the game right now. I’d maybe judge the Lantern Glaive to be better, but that requires the Rainbow Wing Belt from the Dung Beetle Knight to function properly.

The Denticle Axe is the ultimate rogue weapon, when combined with the Cyclopian armor it lets you become a backstabbing beast, dealing massive damage to a monster rapidly and with relative safety. Denticle Axes are one of the weapons I most like to combine with Blood Paint. Twin Golden Axe mayhem ahoy!

Just like the Skleaver the Denticle Axe is well gated, you need to beat one level 2 Sunstalker to get the strange resource required to build it. This does mean that sometimes I end up hunting four level 2 Sunstalkers in a row in order to build 2 axes + a Skleaver, but the carrot always works better than the stick.

3. Ink Blood Bow
Both of the next two ‘Ink’ items are gated behind the level 3 Sunstalker which means it’s considerable pain and difficulty to get them. The Level 3 Sunstalker is one of the most challenging quarries in the game at the moment, not as dangerous as the level 3 Lion God or Dung Beetle Knight, but its threat level is about on par with a level 3 Phoenix I think.

This means that the Ink Blood Bow should be worth the effort, and on one hand I can report that it is. It is a superb bow that has just one downside – it is cumbersome in the light (see light and dark in the negatives list below). However, bow masters ignore cumbersome so that is not a problem. It also has the ideal amount of speed (2), great accuracy and strength. In fact there is only one downside to it, and that is the same downside every other bow in the game has.

The Ink Blood in the hands of a bow master is easily one of the two most powerful bows in the game (the other is the Arc Bow). And FYI; the most powerful bows are in order 1. Ink Bow, 2. Arc Bow, 3. Sunshark Bow, 4. Vespertine Bow. (Don't be fooled into thinking overpowered =/= best, Vespertine is the best bow for the price you pay and when you get it, but it's not the most powerful)

4. Ink Sword
OK, so the Ink Sword was a nightmare to understand at first, it took clarification from Poots in order to figure it out. The Ink Sword does not work unless it is in darkness. Darkness only occurs when the Sundial card is in play because that is the card that defines darkness. This means that the Ink Sword only works when you use it against the Sunstalker and when you have someone else holding a Sunspot Lantern.

As it stands, the way you employ the Ink Sword is as follows. One survivor holds the lantern and stands between 1 and 2 spaces away from the monster. The Ink Sword survivor then stands in the shadow cast by the Sunspot Lantern (use the Sundial trait from the Sunstalker here because it needs to be in play in order for the sunspot lantern to do anything – don’t ask me if this means all the other shadows are cast or not. I have no idea at this stage – it’s a mess).

From that position you get to attack the monster with one of the most ridiculous weapons in the game. It has deadly 3 as a base (4 with a luck charm) and against certain monsters, especially ones with few super dense locations, you can decimate them in a matter of moments. This is one of the few weapons that I feel is the exception to my usual Low Speed rule.

Hard to use, hard to get, hits hard enough to be worth the effort.

5. Sunshark Bow
The Sunshark Bow is the smaller, easier bow to make and in the ‘bow tree’ it sits above the Arc Bow in power, but below the Vespertine and Ink Blood. This one is a very different bow when compared to its colleagues. It is designed for use with the Cyclopian armor, up close and personal, driving arrows into the backs of monsters from the blind spot. It is an unusual beast for sure, relying on sharp + the user for most of its strength and also able to be wielded as a melee weapon if the circumstances require it. Though I must admit I’ve never had a reason to do so.

I like what the Sunshark bow represents, it’s different enough to make it useable and it is one of the only bows that encourages blind spot archery.

6. Salt Statues
Salt statues are a new form of terrain included in the expansion, they act just like additional columns most of the time, but during the Sunstalker fights (and if you have a Sunspot Lantern) it is possible to break these statues in order to get the Salt strange resource. Apart from letting you make jokes such as ‘it’s so salty’ and ‘my salt levels are rising’ salt is used in multiple different Sunstalker items and also has benefits in cooking (relevant if/when 1.5 makes Cooking clearer to understand and easier to get the ingredients that is).

The thing I like best about this is the Salt Statues sit at the far side of the Sunstalker showdown board, far, far away from the place where the survivors start on the board. This creates an extra dynamic to the fight, it’s not just about killing the Sunstalker, it is about grabbing that Salt which you need for your gear – and then surviving the solar flare after you have destroyed your protection.

7. Sundial/Sun Track/Minion Mechanics
On queue it’s time to mention the unique aspect that the Sunstalker brings to the game. As time passes energy builds up until it reaches a critical mass and the entire place is bathed in light. This can be avoided by hiding in darkness, and that creates an interesting ebb and flow to the entire encounter where survivors advance and retreat as appropriate. Grabbing the cover of darkness wherever they can.

Tied into this are the Sunstalker’s minions, shades that appear to be created from the very shadows of other survivors. They are different enough from Spidicules’ minions that they remain interesting and unique. I find them very exciting, adding more strategy and tactics to the encounter and increasing the number of relevant decisions that need to be made.

8. Sky Fishing
Sky Fishing is a new Special Hunt Event that works in the same manner as Herb Gathering and Mining in the core game. It allows survivors equipped with lures to attempt to catch strange fish out of the skies. The ultimate reward for doing this is to end up with the Filleting table innovation, a superb passive innovation that increases the amount of resources you get. However there is a lot of risk involved in sky fishing and generally it should not be attempted without a Harpoon as well as a lure. Not all survivors have a Survival of the Fittest Reroll available to avoid death from above.

9. Sky Harpoon
The Sky Harpoon is a new mid-to-top level tier spear included in the game. In addition to providing bonuses when Sky Fishing it can also be used to attack. It has good stats with 2 speed, 5+ accuracy and 5 strength, but it also has reach of 3 and a once per showdown ability that has a 50% chance of causing an automatic wound and moving the monster towards the harpooner. There are very few non-rare spears I prefer over this one, in truth it is just the axe/spear hybrid Lantern Glaive that I feel edges it out. In addition, it’s a spear and spears have one of the best specialisations in the game.

One of my all-time favourite builds involves Cyclopian Armor, the Blue Charm, a Beacon Shield, Monster Grease and the Sky Harpoon. It gives you a survivor who is durable, hard to hit (3 Evasion), has decent armor and is able to cancel a drawn trap on a 7+ followed by a 6+. It is my favorite spear build alongside the Rolling Armor/Lantern Glaive one.

10. Shadow Saliva Shawl
I adore items that reward you for building around their limitations and the Shawl is one of those. Once activated with green affinities it gives you a huge boost to your Evasion in exchange for the ‘cost’ of your weapons all becoming slow and you not being allowed to wear, heavy, soluble or shield gear and you are limited to armor that has more than 2 points in each location.

I am honestly not sure why more people are not extolling the virtues of this gear piece and I can only assume it is because not enough people are hunting Sunstalkers. Slow is not really an issue in this game, in fact one line of thinking (which I ascribe to) is that it is better to use high accuracy, high strength, low speed weapons to attack monsters in order to avoid triggering too many reactions. Likewise the relatively low amount of armor that this item limits you to is still high enough to allow wearing of rawhide and Cyclopian armor. This is fine, as evasion is in most situations superior to armor, especially for support characters who generally get to avoid the scariest attacks and employ a great deal of range which means they are targeted less overall. It also does not stop you wearing accessories, so things like Masks, the Regeneration Suit and so on are fair game.

If you combine this Shawl with the Green Ring from Spidicules, Cyclopian Armor, a Quiver, a Regeneration Suit and a Vespertine Bow you get an unbelievably powerful support character who is tough as nails. Or you can go another route and build evasion based grand weapon tanks.

It’s an amazing item, and the game needs more things like this that encourage unusual builds.

11. Correctly Gated items
As you can see from the descriptions of many of the items above, the Sunstalker includes a lot of very powerful gear, but the thing I like most of all about this is you have to work and take risks to get the best stuff. Nothing in this expansion comes super easy, you have to work hard for the power.

I recall one campaign where in lantern year 5 I took my crit farming builds (Lucky Charm + Rawhide + Katars/Rib Blades) off to hunt the Flower Knight and gathered sufficient resources to construct three Vespertine Bows in a single year (only one Necrotic Mistletoe event triggered as “punishment”. In addition the Necrotic Mistletoe gave me an Acanthus Doctor on my Ageless Green savior. Suddenly I had a party that shot at ridiculous range while one super tough tank wrestled one on one with the monster. I ended up shelving the campaign because nothing short of the ridiculous level 3s (Lion God, DBK) were threatening enough to scare me.

What is my point with this anecdote? Well simply put, the Vespertine Bow is not correctly gated, it turns up too early in a campaign for the amount of power it puts out and it can be made in too large a quantity. To get that many Ink Blood Bows I would have had to defeat three Level 3 Sunstalkers and I would not have the ability to get an Acanthus Doctor either.

Powerful items are cool, but the Sunstalker shows us how the correct amount of work which should be involved in getting them.

12. Cyclopian Armor
I have left this one till last because it is quite literally the crown jewel in the set. Cyclopian Armor is a light armor set that; when completed, gives you evasion, plus rogue-like abilities and most importantly of all it gives you Prismatic. Prismatic might be one of the most powerful abilities in the game as it makes every single half affinity you have be all colors at once. Suddenly you can join together items that did not work before and create exciting new builds, the only other ability that I have seen which comes close to this is the super difficult to get Ageless Apprentice Secret Fighting Art – that lets you rotate gear cards 90 degrees to create new affinities.

On top of this Cyclopian armor is very powerful if combined with Iridescent Hide (if you choose to use expansions in People of the Stars, which I recommend you do, it’s fine) and it’s completely broken when combined with saviors in version 1.3 of People of the Lantern. Like, utterly nuts. You have not lived until you have seen a Green savior rocking double digits in armor on each location, a Red savior who never misses or even a blue savior who can hit the monster from almost anywhere on the showdown board with a melee weapon.

13. Katana Mastery

Ok, so this one took a while for me to understand, but seriously Katana Mastery is one of the most amazing pieces of "show don't tell" storytelling in the game. I would never change it, ever.  I'll write a piece on it in the future.

However...

As always there are some things which do not work as well in this expansion and here they are.

1. Light and Darkness.
This is badly explained in the book, in fact it’s not explained at all. After digging through various forum posts and the like I eventually came to understand that everywhere in the game is considered to be ‘in the light’ with the exception of the strictly defined areas created by the Sunstalker and the Sunspot Lantern. Apparently you are supposed to but the Sundial trait into play when you use the Sunspot Lantern, but I do not know what orientation it is supposed to have or if it casts shadows behind terrain etc. (as per the Sundial card) in addition to casting a shadow behind the survivor holding the lantern. If I apply thematic logic to the situation I feel that there should be shadows everywhere when a Sunspot Lantern is used but I cannot be sure about this - it is a mess and one of the reasons why KD:M needs a dedicated rules query channel.

As such I hope that the new Sunstalker expansion includes an updated section explaining about how to use the Sunspot Lantern and Ink items outside of fights with the Sunstalker.

2. Typos
There are some unfortunate typos and poor wording in this expansion, which to be honest is business as usual for Kingdom Death. The absolute gem is the presence of ‘Farting Arts’ instead of ‘Fighting Arts’. This isn’t the right expansion for that kind of joke.

3. Unclear rules
As per Light and Darkness above, there are other things which just do not seems to make sense, there is a whole event which kicks off if you get 6 bleed tokens vs. the Sunstalker, but the way you get to that situation is not entirely clear and requires a few leaps of logic to understand properly. It’s a really cool event and it’s going to have people looking at the book thinking ‘how does that happen’? But good luck figuring it out.

4. Incorrect amounts of rare gear cards being printed.
Eye patches is the best example of this. You get 1 copy of a card that is not unique, but on top of that you get given 3 of them during the event that hands them out. That’s not great quality control there.

Why?
Why would you get this expansion? Well the question is actually, why would you not get this expansion? There are only two reasons, the first is because you cannot afford it – in which case wait for the next Black Friday sale and pick it up when it is discounted and the second is because you have a problem with its front facing noodley appendage – this can be solved with some knife work and a little sculpting. If that is beyond you I recommend either getting a small cover for the offending issue, say a blanket, or hiring a professional to assemble and perform tentacle surgery on it. I understand why you might do this, ovipositors are kind of disgusting.

Seriously though, you need this squid/shark/sun hybrid in your life, I was not spouting hyperbole when I called it the gold standard for expansion design. It is that good.

Where?

Displayed in the dead center of my display cabinet with a black censorship bar covering the front “tentacle”, sat next to an "apology" note for anyone who might be offended by it.

Score?

This expansion is the standard to which all hunt quarries and big box expansions should be compared to. I give it Eleven Sunstrokes out of Ten and a recommendation you apply factor 3000 sunscreen to all exposed skin. 

11/10