Draft Format Kingdom Death (Patreon)

So this one is a variant for those of you who've played a few times and want to explore the space of the game in a simple, but new fashion.

The idea of this is to set up your campaigns as a group by drafting elements of the game to include and exclude from the experience. This is mostly limited to Monsters, Fighting Arts and Disorders, because Innovations have a self limiting mechanic built in.

That written, you could apply these mechanics to innovations as well, but it's going to be very volatile and could create unplayable situations.

For those of you who are not aware of what 'drafting' is, I'll give you a simple overview before we move into some Kingdom Death specific variants. 

Drafting is typically a part of deck building games (technically the Innovation deck is a drafting mechanic) and what it involves is choosing an option from several different ones at the cost of losing the other options, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently.

I'll walk you through the process I use for Fighting Arts/Disorders with pictures and then you'll get an idea of how it works!

Step 1 - Prepare

Take all of the Disorder and Fighting Art cards in the game and place them in two piles.

Step 2 - Deal

Deal out three sets of three disorders + three fighting arts as above (other dealing methods are possible and I'll mention them later).

Steps 3, 4 & 5 - The choices

Now it's time to choose one pile to remove from the game

One pile to reshuffle back in

And one pile to keep!

Then you put the chosen ones to one side, ensure the decks are shuffled and return to step 2.

Eventually you'll end up with a pile of selected disorders + fighting arts, a pile that has been eliminated and a pile of unselected stuff that's under 9 disorders and/or fighting arts.

What you do with that final pile is up to you, but I prefer to eliminate it entirely from the game, it makes reshuffling cards back in a scarier prospect.

From here you have a small card pool of fighting arts and disorders which are going to flavour your experience for the rest of the campaign. You'll have to make do with limited resources, some innovations won't be as good because you don't have that fighting art in the game and you may discover neat new combinations that you had never experimented with before. It's surprising how much you can improve at something when you're denied the tools you usually rely on *cough* otherworldly luck *cough*.

You can do something similar with innovations (but keep the core ones from Language in no matter what) if you want a very unique tech culture and you can even do it with the monsters!

In fact, when you do it with the monsters (use a set of proxy cards to represent each one, like say a piece of gear from each monster) then you end up in a very unique situation at times where you have to eliminate a monster you really like because you need something to hunt at lantern year 1 and the White Lion and Gorm both turned up at the same time!

For many of you, this may still be a bit to early in your KD:M experience to want to experiment with, but it is something worth remembering, because it will both refresh the campaign by creating a new sandbox and it will also

Other Draft Variations:

Deal out 2 pairs of 1x Fighting Art + 1x Disorder per player (so if there are 4 players then there will be 8 'pairs' to choose from). In turn each player chooses a set to keep and a set to remove. Change who gets to go first each time you lay out a new set. You'll eliminate half of the cards from the game this way.

Do Fighting Arts and Disorders separately, but you deal out five piles of two and you only get to keep two of these piles.

Rochester Format - create piles of 2 x number of players +3 disorders and fighting arts. Starting with disorders everyone takes a pile, picks one to keep for the campaign and then passes the rest to the person on their left. Continue until there are two left, these are lost.  Repeat until all the disorders are picked and then do the same for fighting arts.

There are a load of other ways you can do this same thing, you can look around at a whole host of different places for ideas on ways to customise your fighting art/disorder experience - before I go, I'll give you one more example.

Start with a small pool of disorders and fighting arts. Say 10 of each, randomly chosen. Then at start of the settlement phase each lantern year, you draw 2 pairs of 2x disorders plus 2x fighting arts (eight cards in two sets of 4) and you choose one pair of disorders/fighting arts to mix into the campaign pool - removing the other four cards from the game forever. Over time things will become more and more diverse!

Hopefully this is food for thought, Kingdom Death is a game that can be filled with variations and they'll keep the game fresh for you for years to come. Especially when we have access to shorter campaigns!

Until next time, happy homebrewing!