Polarisation - A Look at Magnetising the Armor Kits (Patreon)

Those of you over on the Discord may have seen that I have been assembling and magnetising a bunch of armor kit models and weapons. There are two excellent articles worth reading in advance on this manner, the first is this one on the process of magnetising and the second one by Cymbaline is written as a con list along with a few extra clever options, I would recommend reading through both of those articles before coming back here because I'm going to refer to them at times rather than repeat the information that's already been provided elsewhere. 

In addition I think it is very important to also highlight the current magnum opus masterpiece of magnetising, which was done by Øystein Nesheim from Norway. You can see it here and the boxes here. He is a very talented painter with a lot of patience on this project - it's nearly perfect execution, though it does help highlight some of the cons (and a couple of areas where he has built stuff without understanding intimately how they work in game, so it's off - for example the Gorment and Rolling armor) so there are minor build issues, but nothing that undermines the excellence of the work overall. Also big props to Vibrant Lantern for his work on identifying how the kits should be assembled and recording it for prosperity.

Why Magnetise?

Simply put, the reason to magnetise is to allow your models to properly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). A computing term that was adopted by the Games Workshop community in order to ensure that players couldn't deceive on first glance by having one model represent a different loadout. It was an official rule in Necromunda and Mordheim, which are two games that absolutely inspire KD:Monster in some ways.

In Kingdom Death this is not an essential element, the monster will not be fooled by your Erza model actually being equipped with full Dragon Armor and a Sunshark Bow or your Allister actually wearing a gimp suit, sorry I mean Gorment Armor. It's fluff to help with immersion for the players. I have this cool armor, look at me wearing the bits of that inky star, so many tooths. 

So there is no mechanical or game reason to magnetise at all, but there are fluff ones. Likewise you might want to magnetise so you can paint some of the rarer pieces of gear,  the ones that turn up hardly ever so they don't deserve a unique model and that's the reason why I chose to do it.

What are the Alternatives?

Before we get into the pros and cons of the experience, I want to look at the alternative options for a satisfying armor kit experience. The one I generally offer clients is the 'I'll give them the optimal gear' options so they can have survivors that usually match what they're using. This means things like Rawhide + Katar, Rawhide + Bows and so on. We'll discuss back and forth and while normally they want stuff that's specific to the monster, so you do end up with some less optimal builds, it works out nicely and is a good compromise.  I have a list of the various 'optimal' armor + weapon combos if people are interested.

A second alternative is to assemble them after you've completed a campaign in order to immortalize the best survivors you had. This has a nice way of letting you construct a loadout you're familiar with and may use again, while also giving you a prompt for your memory to recall the highs (and lows) of a past campaign. It's not something I would do because I've had so many campaigns that only Hisen and Cheddar (fuck Cheddar) stick in my mind as my own survivors and Hisen is mostly memorable because there were five of her in the end. 

The third option is the one I was originally going to do with my spare armor kits, and I have left myself the option to still do it if I change my mind on magnetising (I'll just glue the magnets together).  This is to use a unique head for each weapon type in the game and build survivors that are always the same for a particular weapon type.  Here's a thread with some examples.

In essence you decide that 'Lucy is going to be my bow model' because Lucy is best girl and should be protected and kept at a distance. You then get your hands on a few extra unarmored armor kits because they have a bunch of unique heads on them, and you assemble a load of different optimal archer builds with the Lucy head.  This way you gain continuity on your models and some character as well, while also telling a story.

Ultimately I chose on a middle ground between these options and magnetising.

How have you done it?

Well I have chosen a hybrid of the options. Originally I sat down and built a set of unarmored survivors with full options for magnetising. They had large magnets in the waist, medium ones in the shoulders/neck and small ones for the head/hands.  However, once completed it was immediately clear that these models, despite the light weight of plastic, were going to do exactly what Cymbaline wrote about. When knocked they'd spin into odd positions, have broken necks, fall apart and just ruin immersion by needing to be repositioned over and over.  So it was clear that I needed to come up with a solution that allowed for customisation without so much breakage.

I ended up compromising on this:

Looks great right?

What we have here is a fixed 'narrative' pose for the legs, body and arms, but swapping options for the head and wrists. This gives me the ability to paint up a load of different heads and swap them around to keep survivor personalities and also to make sure that the models are properly represented on the weapon front. At times I'm going to have incorrect armor on the models, but I consider that to be a non-issue.  If a survivor has a partial set of Leather armor, I'm fine with using the model that most represents what they do have and attaching the weapons to it. It's the best way to protect the paint job and stop too much nonsense happening with the model when moving it on the board.

Additionally, because I picked up armor sets for criminally low prices in the last few years while people were offloading them before the second Kickstarter landed. I had enough pieces to build all of the current hybrid armor sets in quads.  Here are the Warlord models:

And these are the Dancer ones, the male Dancer model looks silly, it is clear this armor set was designed with the female sculpt parts in mind.

(I still need to complete the third model, but as I have the Pinup Dancer, it's been less of a priority)

I've also done the Brawlers, but I'm debating if there is even any point in magnetising their hands because it's a fist and tooth set. However, there are some builds that ignore the F&T part of the armor and just use it as a high armor White Lion Cloak damage mitigation set, so I think I'll keep them magnetised for "fun".

You can also see here how I sorted out the mask situation by mounting them onto spare heads. In fact I cut the front of the face off before attaching the mask because otherwise it just does not look right. If you want to cover everything, you end up needing 2 of each mask because the neck holes on the armor kits are different sizes for males and females.

OK so that's how I've decided to do it, but is it worth the effort? Time to list all the pros and cons!

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Pros:

• You can personalise your survivors to match the hunters in your group
• You get to accurately represent the weapon loadouts
• Rare builds that crop up through chance, such as the Adventure Sword can be represented
• Items that are low in number on sprues, such as the Rib Blade can be shared around more easily
• You get to paint weapons that you might never even use
• The hybrid approach allows you to create somewhat dynamic poses and you don't have the shoulder drooping issue
• The magnetising experience is very therapeutic 

Cons:

• All your models have to be exactly the same skin colour or they will look wrong. Kingdom Death is already pretty badly white washed as is, this way you're not going to get to represent diversity at all unless you want to do a huge amount of effort by having a set of weapons for each skin tone - essentially building 4x of every single weapon in the game.
• Increased wear and tear on the paint jobs as weapons/heads will have to be handled at times to swap things out.
• Heads and Wrists will still rotate randomly during play when knocked
• Two handed weapons can't easily be built without having a dedicated two handed pose on every single model
• Unless you are willing to follow Cymbaline's idea and drill magnets into the back of every single model, holstered weapons can't be carried and swapped out
• Some weapons just do not work when magnetised because of the unbalanced weight distribution. For example the Perfect Slayer and Thundermaul.
• The smallest hands are very hard to drill without damage
• If you place the magnets wrong you get weird angles and fixing it is very difficult
• It's a huge amount of time and requires precision plus patience.
• You are going to have to do a bit of greenstuffing to solve problems when they crop up
• There are going to be issues when Adam releases the narrative sculpts, depending on how he does it.

So at the end of this all? What's the right answer?

Sorry, there isn't one. Every approach has pros and cons, even if you had virtually unlimited wealth, you'd still need to pick up hundreds of models to cover every single option as a solid 'dynamic' sculpt and every time a new expansion is released this number would exponentially increase. 

So I believe the best options are:

a) Partial Magnetising - probably just hands

b) Narrative Personality Weapon Types - Bow Lucy, Club Allister, Spear Aya, Thot Erza and so on.

c) A few optimal builds so you're matching most of the time

d) Starting survivors and use your imagination

But there are also a wealth of options inbetween. However, if you want an honest opinion on the matter of magnetising. It's not worth the effort and we'll look at why.

You may have already noticed in a few of the pictures that the weapons are occasionally 'the wrong way up' that's just from moving these models a few cm (and I have the strongest magnets I could get my hands on here). But to demonstrate this problem, and another one, here's Lucy.

Now Lucy is the best survivor, this is just the fact of life here at this patreon, Lucy > All else (except maybe the Stan survivors when they come out). But you can see already that her head is pulled backwards slightly by the weight of her hair. Any survivor with hair on the back can end up with this odd upwards tilt at times, additionally her head does not fit well on certain torsos, such as the White Lion Cloak. But that's not even the main problem, here she is after I tapped the table.

"Unnng, these axes are too heavy for me!"  

Lucy is protesting the weight and that is a problem with a lot of the axe, club and grand weapons, they're so top heavy that they naturally rotate around the wrist axis and end up letting gravity win, the same way that it eventually beats all old men who spent a life without good supporting pants. 

It's not just isolated to longer weapons, the Riot Mace absolutely cannot be held upright as headless Miko can demonstrate here.

And that's the thing which is being concealed by a lot of these magnetised pictures, you pay as much as you can for the best possible magnets, but they just can't beat the combination of gravity and mass that is off the center of balance. Some of the weapons can be set to be two handed, but then you need to consider how you will position the arms. It's a really difficult situation and it's one that got me to stop doing this project for a while and take a long, hard consideration at it.  

The heads are pretty much fine, but hand situation is pretty untenable and that is moving me back towards painting models with single sculpts in the most commonly used weapon types for that armor set. 

The other issue is one of homogenization; every survivor has to have exactly the same skin tone. This is already a massive problem in KDM as it stands, despite the strongly African style and aesthetics of a lot of the armor and the setting (there are some Roman influences in Phoenix armor, Sunstalker armor is Victorian beach wear and the entire People of the Stars is Graeco-Roman), plus the clearly Japanese 'People of the Sun'. The game itself tends to portray survivors as Caucasian males and females, which is a shame in itself because otherwise the world of Kingdom Death is incredibly diverse.  I've never really pushed this point hard publically, darker skin tones are incredibly challenging to paint well without having them turn chalky and this is not helped by a lack of professional painters making their skin recipes more open and available. Goodness knows it's something I struggle to paint correctly.

But once you magnetize, unless you are planning to paint multiple different weapon sets in a variety of skin tones (i.e. one of each weapon for each different tone) you'll end up with having to paint the same skin over and over for every single piece you do, that might be your ideal situation, but it is not mine.

So, no, I do not recommend magnetizing your armor kits, this models were never designed with magnetization in mind and they have so many quirks foibles and issues that they do not lend themselves to this very well. Add onto that the fact that we're getting more and more narrative sculpts that are in a different scale (35mm instead of 32mm) and we're in a situation where the armor kits are becoming obsolete (they look quite ugly in some cases) and I believe we should start campaigning Adam to release kits of narrative sculpts for each of the old armor sets.