Branching Out: Part 2: People of the Stars (Patreon)

In the first part of this 'how to build your campaign' we looked at People of the Sun and discussed a bit about the setting and which expansions we good (and bad) in it.

This time we're going to look at my (and almost everyone's) favourite campaign. People of the Stars - or as it's known at my table 'Kingdom Death: Done Right'.  I've written about how to go about succeeding in Stars before (over here) and I went over both these campaigns a while ago in the Expansions Synergy posts (here) but my opinions have changed somewhat since then.

So before we start, I'm going to go into some light spoilers about the campaign, this is because I can't really write in detail about why the relevant monsters are bad or good without touching on the core story and how it changes things for you and your players.

Like all campaigns released so far, People of the Stars is the story of a monster, told through the eyes of the survivors that are drawn to it. In Lantern we have the story of the... well Lantern's story is a mess, it was originally the story of The King/Scribe, then it was amended to become the story of the deus ex machina Gold Smoke Knight, but it's also kind of the story the Watcher.  People of the Sun's story is more coherent, because it's about the Sunstalker's life-cycle outside of the period where it's a hunt quarry (the Sunstalker and the Gorm are one of the few monster types we "completely" understand through the lore and game mechanics).

People of the Stars is the story of The Tyrant, who is the survivor's benefactor, protector, antagonist, mentor and god all rolled into one. He has a very specific goal in mind for the people he has gathered at his settlement, and he will succeed or fail entirely based on the actions of your survivors. Yes, if you succeed, this one has a super cool ending that feels earned and if you fail, you'll feel the cost and sorrow.

Suffice to say, I love People of the Stars, which earns every bit of praise it has received completely and fully.

Mechanically, you are aiming to create the special survivors and keep them alive until the final nemesis. Without these survivors you are not going to be allowed to win the game, without going into too many details, it is this mechanic that resulted in TWIST Gaming having to go in with only 1 survivor at the end of their run.

Everything you are doing should be moving towards this goal, and that is why I needed to put this semi-spoiler in front of everything. Because if I'm going to talk about these monsters, you need to understand why they help or harm your progress. 

There are no monsters that are 'do not add' to People of the Stars. The expansion book claims that you should not add any expansions at all, but I am telling you with a lot of experience in this campaign (I've played it now nearly a hundred times), that you absolutely MUST ignore that nonsense. Not 'can' but MUST, and as we move forward, you'll see why that is my recommendation.

Let us look at the monsters!

The Tyrant

Our lead for this campaign is a reoccurring nemesis monster who will fight against your survivors in a brutal form of training. He is looking for only the strongest survivors to make it, which is why he's willing to beat the heck out of you all. As you'll see during the campaign, our dearest monster's mantra is:

"Weakness is anathema to strength."

He's only interested in those survivors who show the potential to survive his plan, they have to be incredibly strong, durable and have more to their spirit than the normal ones. People of the Lantern/Sun need not apply!

Because of the way that his showdown works, and the hidden 'success' mechanic built into it.  (See my guide for more details). Certain gear types and innovations are more valuable than others. This changes the importance of the various monsters a great deal. Heavy weapons, Hit Location manipulation, Mood control and Surge are all more valuable in this campaign than they would be normally.  Additionally Hovel is very important, but we'll leave that for the strategy guide.

The Tyrant's showdown fight is the only thing that 'forces' the direction of your gear builds, and the requirements are only a few specific items.

Let's now move onto the quarries:

White Lion

Absolutely essential to the campaign; the White Lion provides Understanding gains, a heavy weapon (King's Spear), an early game crit weapon (Lion Beast Katar), Hit Location manipulation (Cat Eye Circlet), Mood Control (Whisker Harp) and a powerful range item (Cat Gut Bow). You're basically going to be hunting after those items hard in the early game because no other monster provides all of that as effectively. 

Rating: 5/5 and Essential

Screaming Antelope

The model of People of the Stars is 'protect your survivors' and the Screaming Antelope provides this by giving access to Acanthus in spades while also providing a good way to farm disorders and amazing light armor.

There's not much else to say about the Antelope, it's the best quarry monster in the game for farming outside of 'easy mode' aka the Flower Knight.  You will hunt it at least once or twice every campaign, and probably look to build it's armor set asap.

Rating: 5/5 because it's the freaking Loot Piñata 

Phoenix

This monster runs counter to the aims of the campaign, you want as long as possible in each survivor's lifespan in order to allow you to hit the goals on 'star bingo'. The Phoenix tends to age and destroy survivors with extreme prejudice if you do not follow it's stringent rules for survival (See Great Game Hunters podcast episodes on the Phoenix for more details).

In addition, there are very few items you want from the Phoenix, the Arc Bow and Hollowpoint arrow are great, but there are other options - especially because you can't stack the Hollowpoint arrow with the Shielded Quiver in Stars. So unless you are hybrid armor hunting for Warlord and Dancer armor sets (or playing with the Community Edition version of the Phoenix), skip on this bugger and get some alternative late game quarries.

Hours Ring is (thanks to Poots's latest ruling) the new most broken item in the game however. So it has that going for it.

Rating: 1/5

Now it's time for the expansion quarries!

Gorm

Gorm is good. Gorm is great. Gorm is 4th core game monster.  

Things are no different here, except that the Gorm provides an alternative (less random to get) form of Hit Location manipulation, and some excellent heavy weapons/clubs to use. There is no mood control in the Gorm however, so that makes the fight vs. The Tyrant harder to complete via the 'secret' route.

Gorm Climate, as always sucks, but that's part of the price you pay. And in People of the Stars, getting forced to innovate Hovel in LY1 by the Approaching Storm is actually good, this is because Bloodline & Empire are campaign essential, instead of optional the way that Family and especially the underwhelming Clan of Death are.

Rating: 5/5

Spidicules

As usual, Spidicules is a horrible mess that seriously screws with your campaign, so it's not something that can be recommended 'as written' for new players. Essentially, Spidicules is going to set you back when its story event triggers (unless you game it by having only 1 male with hunt XP) and you will have to slow your survivor development by having a sacrificial lamb to get 'Taken' every other fight. It's not fun, especially for groups with 4+ players.

However, if you do take this route, the Silk Body Suit is broken as heck and the Red/Green Rings are insane once you can get them. Also the Silk Whip is very good at Mood control, which helps if you have not got the Whisker Harp and want to avoid the Hunter's Whip.

Rating: 1/5 or 3/5 with the Taken and Young rivals House rules from the Spidicules Intergration Package.

Flower Knight:

Again, like last time, I've written in detail why the FK is a bad expansion unless you need to make the game a lot easier and more homogeneous.  So I won't repeat myself here. Personally, I no longer use the Flower Knight unless I'm playing Green Armor.

Rating: 1/5 (unless you want to make the game really easy, then it's 5/5)

Dragon King

Not a quarry in this campaign, for various obvious lore reasons. Don't do it. Don't be that guy. At the risk of spoiling things - It'll spoil the experience for your players if you face the DK as a quarry. It also doesn't make much sense.

Rating: 0/5 - DO NOT ADD

Dung Beetle Knight

When you get rolling the People of the Stars are very, very powerful. Not as strong at the Warriors of the Sun, but it gets very close at times.  Now because the Dragon King is not an option for this campaign and the Phoenix is so awkward to hunt without screwing up your campaign, you want to have 2-3 options for mid to late game campaign quarries, the DBK is one of these two, and to be honest I highly recommend it here. In People of the Sun, the lack of easy access to Surge makes the DBK fight a slog at times, but you have access to it in this campaign as a standard survival action, so it's a great challenge fight for your survivors.

I pretty much always put it into Stars.

Rating: 5/5

Sunstalker

As the late game quarry that the core game really needed, it's unsurprising that I highly recommend you place the Sunstalker into People of the Stars. It rounds out the weapon type options really well, gives you a whole bunch of extra strategies and has some fun synergies with the campaign specific mechanics.

So far, apart from People of the Sun, I've never seen a reason to not include the Sunstalker in every campaign. It really is an SS tier expansion.

Rating: 6/5 and imo Essential

Lion God

As the third viable late game option, the Lion God is very powerful, but not as scary as it's reputation suggests.  The main issue with the Lion God is that it's basically an Iron farm monster with a few interesting unique gear cards. So you'll run out of reasons to hunt it fairly quickly.

However, as a splash quarry to mix things up and give you a place to really test out the various combinations you should have built using the powerhouse survivors that People of the Stars creates, they're not as powerful as Warriors of the Sun, but they are still fun to test.

As always, there's basically 2 or maybe 3 fights worth of content with the Lion God, so it's not a main quarry type.

Rating: 4/5

Now let us run through the nemesis monster options.

Butcher

As the best of the nemesis monster options for People of the Stars, there's little reason to not include Le Boucher. The Butcher is basically the best nemesis monster in the game anyway, so I'm not going to keep singing it's praises over and over. It's here, and you'll face it more than most other nemesis monsters.

5/5

Manhunter

The Undertaker Genre Spanner is a solid addition to the campaign, with actually exceptional lore reasons for his presence. The first one is the Reverberating Lantern which hides his presence from most monsters, and the second one is that The Tyrant's philosophy is such that it would allow creatures like the Manhunter to engage with the survivors under The Tyrant's "protection" because if they are not strong enough to face down such a creature, they are not strong enough for The Tyrant.

Outside of that, it's just a good expansion, it brings difficulty and power in the right balance. However, as a special showdown, it will make the campaign longer.

4/5

Lion Knight

This expansion is trash, it's been trash for a long time. Don't bother with it unless you're playing with green armor. As mentioned before, it has a bad showdown, bad innovations and basically all you want is the Tactics cards, the Hybrid armor sets and the integration with Green Armor.

Save this one, for when you play a Green Armor campaign.

1/5

The Hand

The Hand gets a bad reputation from people who don't appreciate the style and nature of this showdown fight. In People of the Stars, The Hand is one of the key methods of unlocking constellations for your survivors and you are going to be grateful you have access to it at times.

I'm really comfortable and happy with the 'survive' rather than 'beat down the monster' type showdown, it's really refreshing and unique. 

5/5 and Essential

King's Man

The King's Curse runs counter to what you want to do in this campaign. Unlike People of the Lantern where your survivors are essentially identical and equally disposable, People of the Stars has some survivors who are mission critical.

In addition, because the King's Man is entirely optional in this campaign (most nemesis encounters are 'choose' rather than 'fixed') there's no reason to face the King's Man in this campaign at all unless you're looking to turn 4 plebeians into 8 endeavors via Graves.

It's around if you want to use it, but unlike People of the Lantern where you can afford to throw away nemesis encounters to generate bonus endeavors, every showdown matters in People of the Stars - so you'll want to spend those years on The Butcher or The Hand.

1/5

 

Lonely Tree

As a Special Showdown which is appropriately difficult it is hard to not recommend the Lonely Tree. Also the fruit provides abilities that can be combined with some of the constellations for interesting benefits. 

Basically, once you own the Tree, there's no reason to not include it in every campaign.

5/5

Finally we have two expansions that I rate for experienced players replaying Stars, but I do not recommend them for your first couple of runs.

Slender Man

This one makes the campaign a bit harder because it basically removes The Hand from the pool of nemesis monsters and also limits your access to The Butcher, which is a source of masks and scrap.

However, this does not make the campaign worse, it just makes it harder. Slendy is possibly one of the hardest, if not the hardest monsters in the game (outside of the outliers like high level DBKs), especially at Level 3. But the crafted gear you can make from Dark Water helps with battling the Slender Man and provides a lot of power. So it is fine. It's just Slender Man is not for the faint of heart!

5/5 

Green Armor

Once you have completed Stars once, you can enjoy the challenge pressure of trying to build green armor AND complete constellations. Green Armor absolutely makes the campaign easier, but it doesn't break things as much as certain other combinations can. Sure you get a ridiculous badass armor set at the end of it all. But you have to sacrifice a lot along the way to make it.

However, it's kind of hard to lose the final nemesis fight when you have it. So you might want to give that final nemesis some stat buffs. But honestly the final nemesis of Stars and Sun could both do with a higher toughness, more accuracy and more luck.

5/5

I will only do the variant campaigns if enough people request it here, as I'm not sure there is enough interest!