Let's put this out there right in advance, Swords are my least favourite weapon type in Kingdom Death (apart from the Twilight Sword). This is not an objective opinion that they are bad, but for me, they are uninspiring, awkward and very bland. They're just so basic and I would prefer to pass on them most of the time.

However, Swords do include the most powerful individual weapons in the entire game and they have a somewhat unique design in that a large part of the weapon "mastery" for swords is hidden inside Secret Fighting Arts. In short swords do not just gain mastery, but they also gain SFAs that allow for different styles, that's a cool idea, but somewhat frustrating in practice because SFAs can be awkward to gain, sometimes are very limited in number and cannot be passed on via TDDUP Partnership (or stored on Sculpture).

Swords are also unique in that they can be directly leveled up via the Flower Knight innovation 'Petal Spiral' where as most other weapon types need to use Nightmare Training.

On top of that, Vagabond Armor gives you access to a Sword Master whenever you need it at the 'cost' of wearing that armor set, which gives you those specialisation/master benefits and as such makes it a lot easier to train up swords at the same time. It also has a well documented and "unfortunate" interaction with the Black Sword, which we'll look at when we discuss that weapon below.

The actual specialization and mastery abilities are a big part of why I find Swords to be so basic. The Specialization ability lets you 'pre-roll' your first wound attempt and attach it to whichever hit location you want (really good with True Blade's increasing of Luck for swords), which is a solid ability and would be better if Deadly was more commonplace on the prevalent swords.

The Mastery is just, here, have some more stats. The accuracy gain is great, the strength gain is a little underwhelming and the speed gain ties into the weapon specialization ability to a reasonable degree. It's just, well, so basic and that doesn't personally excite me.

Still, that written, the part of Sword design that does feel exciting is the SFA integration, and despite the limitations of that mechanical style I can't deny that True Blade is my favourite SFA by a long margin - which means that despite the negatives, I'll often have the Flower Knight around in a campaign just for the purpose of hunting the L3 and getting that SFA.

The current SFAs of note for Swords are as follows:

Swordsman's Promise (The Hand) - Survival Gains
True Blade - Deadly +3 Luck, but at the cost of some troublesome disorders
Blackguard Style - Giving Block to all swords, plus stat boosts when you block. Can be passed on to new survivors

Block X

Blackguard Style brings us on to the other minor mechanic that some swords have. The element of parrying is played up by giving them access to Block X (or Deflect X in the case of the OLS); X is usually 1. This is a neat mechanic, and a good idea in theory; but in practice we've seen that the community prefers block to be tied to shields because they have extra benefits. As is often the case, the lack of armor points on these defensive/hybrid weapons means it's not used very often (Same issue with the Calcified Juggernaut Blade).

Having Block X on a sword isn't a detriment, but it's not really a major bonus because it's only going to be useful in edge cases or kooky builds like dual sword blood paint bruisers.

Swords also dabble heavily in Deadly as a keyword, with the Scrap Sword, Ink Sword and Vespertine Foil being examples of this sub-genre.

Weapon Statistics

Swords have the widest range of strength in the entire game. They run from 1 (Vespertine Foil) all the way up to 31 (Activated Black Sword in the Hands of a Weapon Master), so putting together the net graph in order to show a 'typical' sword was a little tricky, I had to eliminate certain swords from the averages to try and flatten the average to something that was meaningful.

If you look just at the net graph, the "typical" sword is decently strong, accurate, slightly faster than normal, with a lot of abilities and a moderate to low amount of affinities. (More than any of the net graphs released so far, this one gives the least accurate picture, it's more of a guideline).

However, the ranges here are pretty wide, a lot wider than most of the other weapon types we've looked at and I think they are worth listing also.

Accuracy: From 4+ to 6+
Speed: From 1 to 4
Strength: From 1 to 20.5 (31 if you want to include the Black Sword when it's active)
Affinities: From 0 to 3
Abilities: From 1 to 4

That's a lot wider than before, but also considering that there are more swords than any other single category of weapon, that's not entirely surprising.

Because of all of this, swords tend to break down into one of three categories; Deadly, Defensive or Plain. Deadly ones are luck focused, Defensive ones use Block to some degree and the Plain ones just smash face to differing degrees of power.

So in short, Swords is a catch all category for a lot of different weapons and styles, which runs somewhat counter to my original position of calling them basic, but that's still where I land on them. If you enjoy swords, good for you! They're not my cup of tea though.

Because there are so many swords, I'm not going to go through all of them here, that would be just exhausting. As always for these articles, we'll cherry pick the best and the most interesting to discuss, especially when dealing with non-craftable weapons.

Bone Blade - Bone Smith

Power Level: LY1 (Very Early Game)

Speed: Fine for what you want, though this weapon wouldn't be too problematic if it was faster.

Accuracy: 6+ is very good for this portion of the game, it's effectively better than a 50% chance of hitting overall because of the blind spot (same reason the King's Spear is over 50% last article).

Strength: 2 Strength is a problem on this weapon, losing survivors to a quarry monster in early part of the campaign (except in the prologue fight where you benefit from losing one) can result in your settlement hitting a failure to make resources death spiral. Strength is one of the more important aspects of this and we'll discuss below why 2 strength is not good at all.

Affinities: Standard left red, it's actually less useful here than on most weapons because the primary gear you'd use it with is the Monster Tooth Necklace and that requires heat - which means you should be past using it by the time you can make the necklace. irrelevant.

Ability: Frail is something of a non-issue, most of the time you shouldn't even notice its their unless you're struggling and forced to use the bone blade vs a Gorm or the Butcher. In short, Frail on the bone blade is something that compounds losing situations further and is otherwise

Summary: The Bone Blade would be a staple of the early game, and is probably a staple of most people's games, however it is absolutely an inferior choice to the Bone Darts (more on them soon). While many people feel more at home with 2 speed, 6+ accuracy and 2 strength, 1 speed 7+ accuracy and 3 strength at range is just a strictly better choice. I used to use bone blades, but as time has passed I have phased them out entirely for bone darts, which help avoid Ground Fighting, work well against Spidicules and just remain useful for a lot, lot longer than any other bone weapon in the game right now (apart from the Club).

The Weaver - Rare Spidicules

I'm breaking my rule of no-rare gear here because of how common it is to see the Weaver. It's given via the Spidicules hunt event 'Picked Clean' on a 9+, which means if you hunt the Spidicules often it's inevitable it turns up.

Power Level: Early Game

Speed: 3 Speed is at the top end of the 'optimal' range, but here it's supported by the ability.

Accuracy: Same accuracy as many weapons, nothing special to write home about here.

Strength: 2 strength is the largest issue this weapon has, and you are going to spend most of your time mitigating it if you want to take advantage of how the Weaver works.

Affinities: The Weaver has that precious left red affinity and a second up red affinity. This makes it a superb part of a DPS Leather "self healing" build with the Monster Tooth Necklace (MTN) mitigating the low strength.

Ability: The Weaver has a very unique ability in that it is one of a small, select number of weapons that can heal its used. It is not as powerful as the Grinning Visage, but it also doesn't require survival and it doesn't need you to be able to chop all the legs off not one, but two Spidicules monsters in a campaign. This weapon encourages you to build strength and speed in a way that works, you're rewarded for hitting fast and repeatedly.

However, my goodness this weapon has a ton of bookkeeping involved in using it. If you're not using dials or tokens to track your armor, this thing is going to make you consider doing so.

Summary: I think the Weaver is a well designed weapon, it's got a strong drawback (strength) that can be mitigated, and the ability the weapon has encourages you to find a way to do that. Whether you end up using it with Cycloid Scale, Phoenix, Dragon or just the MTN and survivor strength, you're rewarded for doing so and that makes it one of the best designed rare weapons out there.

Vespertine Foil - Sense Memory/Flower Knight

Power Level: Any

Speed: 4 speed is insane when combined with Deadly 2 and a Lucky Charm.

Accuracy: 5+ means that this weapon isn't just fast, its very accurate as well, especially for blind spot attackers, which is what you should be using this one for.

Strength: The strength on this weapon is almost irrelevant, it is entirely a Deadly based weapon because the speed and high critical wound chance require that. The strength exists as the balance for the weapon, you're going to get punished hard by reactions if you can't manage to crit.

Affinities: The affinities on this weapon are perfectly placed. Red is in the optimal position to join with the MTN and Blue fits into the Lucky Charm perfectly. This essentially hands you a simple pre-built survivor who uses MTN, Foil, Lucky Charm, Rawhide Armor and a Satchel as their loadout.

Ability: Deadly 2 is super strong, there are few weapons that climb to this level, let alone this weapon which is available in lantern year 5. However, if you pick it, you are tying yourself to using the build I have written above because you need to be returning with a flower resource every single hunt. This is less of an issue in People of the Bloom, you just take a satchel + a fresh flower via the forest run every time. But for non-bloom campaigns you are committing yourself to hunting the Flower Knight every other lantern year in order to keep it going. This weapon can pay for itself, but you do have to ask yourself if it's worth it outside of Bloom.

Summary: This sword is so nearly 'meta', every time I go back to look at it again I get closer and closer to wanting to really make use of it, however outside of People of the Bloom the need to go back and fight the Flower Knight every other year (or carry a lot of satchels across your hunt party) makes this weapon just too frustrating to use.

In People of the Bloom however I can recommend using it once you have a Satchel, it just requires a Forest Run each year to support and it pays for itself very well with its 6+ critical wound chance (PotBloom survivors have +1 luck baseline).

I also like how it's designed to not combo with the Death Mask, intentional or not, that was a fantastic balance check.

Steel Sword - Rare

I'm breaking my rules to put another Rare weapon on the list, like the Weaver you will see Steel Swords more often than you'd think because they appear in multiple basic hunt events, one of which is 'tutorable' by a Barbaric settlement (Legendcaller). It's also an example of a perfectly designed rare item, so I felt it warranted discussion.

Power Level: Late Game

Speed: Because of its extreme weight (I guess, in KDM steel is super heavy or all the steel weapons are oversized, but who knows, Survivors have no problems with Grand weapons...) the Steel Sword is slow, which is kind of irrelevant because it's also a speed 1 weapon, but it does mean that this weapon never interacts with the Sword Weapon Specialist ability and ignores the speed gain from Mastery. That's pretty interesting.

Accuracy: 4+ is really good for any weapon. You rarely get better than that.

Strength: 5 strength baseline is great, but it also has sharp and +1d10 additional strength on a Perfect hit. This weapon is very powerful - in Perfect Hit situations its rolling 3d10 (average 16.5) + 5 + Survivor Strength for its wound checks (but that's only 10 to 20% of the time).

Affinities: None, which is fair enough.

Ability: So in addition to slow and sharp and the Perfect hit ability all modifying/limiting the strength and speed of this weapon, it is also irreplaceable. This balance consideration means that the Steel sword is a 'use it till you lose it' kind of weapon.

Summary: The Steel Sword is one of the weapons that always tempts me across to using swords for a while, it's great as a primary weapon for a fist and tooth or shield proficiency survivor because once they have scored their one wound for the proficiency tick they have a powerful weapon to use in back up.

Scrap Sword - Weapon Crafter

Power Level: Early/Mid Game

Speed: Very average

Accuracy: 5+ gets no complaints for me.

Strength: This one is a little on the low side, the Perfect hit ability gives you potentially +4 or +8, however that is not a reliable trigger - you can't really build around something like that. It is worth mentioning that when you do hit one of these triggers it often pushes wounding the monster to a 2+ in this part of the game, but that's nowhere near as potent as the Counter-weighted Axe.

Affinities: I am not a fan of the old Up Blue affinity, however I think that it must be acknowledged that it works with Leather Armor to help get the deadly online. But that build is a little rough and hard to make work.

Ability: The Perfect hit ability has been discussed above, the gain of Deadly on this weapon is very interesting and one of the main reasons I've included this sword in the list here. It is hard to activate this and get the Lucky Charm stacked into the build as well.

Summary: This one is just 1 point of strength short of greatness (like a lot of the Weapon Crafter weapons). And while it does get better when used by a Timeless Eye survivor, I personally think that it's better to try and leverage the Deadly portion of this weapon. It becomes very strong when you have access to the Sunstalker because you go Scrap Sword + Lucky Charm + Cycloid Scale Armor before transitioning to the utterly beasty powerhouse that is the Ink Sword.

If you can get the Lucky Charm and the Deadly active in your build this one is worth the effort.

Hollow Sword - Phoenix

Summary: I'm not going into detail on this one, it's just not an interesting weapon at all, but I did want to list it as an example of what a bad sword looks like. The idea of this weapon is an interesting one, it's a high speed high risk weapon because of Frail. You can end up busting your hollow sword over the monster as you spam attacks at it.

But as the mechanics of the game dictate, if you do not have a high level of strength, spamming attacks is just a recipe for disaster. This weapon costs too much (1x Hollow Wing Bone, 2x Bone, 2x Hide) for the stats you get and if it breaks that's too high a price to pay.

Rolling 6+ dice in an attack sounds like amazing fun, but when it's tied to 3 baseline strength on a weapon that comes from the Phoenix, it's a hard pass. This weapon needs a review in Campaigns of Death (along with the Sonic Tomahawk) and I hope it gets that.

Blast Sword - Dragon King

Summary: Here's another sword I'm just going to put on a brief discussion of rather than all the categories. The Blast Sword is actually a fine piece of gear, but it's not a weapon, not really. The stat line on it is awful for when you get it, just awful. You've already graduated to weapons with 6+ strength if you're fighting the DK on the regular, 4 strength doesn't cut it offensively anymore.

However, this weapon is a way of getting free surges as a block turn after turn, or generating survival along with blocks on a bruiser. It's actually very useful as a support item in this fashion, either you always have Block 1 up (at the cost of your surge), you can turtle to regain survival or you can combo this with blood paint and another weapon to build an alternative to the Shield/Blood Paint Bruiser builds.

I like this piece of gear, but for its ability and affinities only, it's not got enough strength to be used as an offensive weapon, it needed 1-2 points more.

Ink Sword - Sunstalker Level 3

Power Level: End Game (except vs. monsters immune to critical wounds)

Speed: 4 Speed is usually too much for a weapon, but when you have this much Deadly that doesn't matter one jot.

Accuracy: As mentioned elsewhere 4+ accuracy is very high for a weapon, and in combination with the high speed this weapon hits often.

Strength: Continuing the meme and making you wonder why this weapon isn't a Katana, the Ink sword has 4 strength, which would be utter garbage, but you are absolutely not aiming to wound with

Affinities: A down blue affinity isn't very valuable, but it might have some potential. It's certainly better than nothing.

Ability: There's so much to unpack here, this is one of the few Reach 3 weapons in the game and even more incredible it has Deadly 3, this can be stacked with a combination using either the Death Mask or the Lucky Charm with True Blade for an absolutely staggering amount of critical wounds. You will shred monsters to tiny pieces very quickly when you do this.

All this power comes with a downside, you need Darkness to be able to attack. Darkness is only generated when the Sunstalker is on the showdown board or when a survivor has a Sunspot Lantern (L1 Sunstalker only support gear). If you have the Sunspot Lantern then another survivor (not the Ink Sword wielder) has to use it and then they cast a shadow behind them (Poots confirmed that the Sunspot Lantern should cause the trait - Light & Shadow to be in play for any showdown fight so it can work).

Additionally this sword is Fragile, that can suck hard on hunt and leave you in a terrible position.

Summary: The best sword that no-one apart from Fen seems to use. I love the high power, but tactical/positional requirements that the Ink Sword brings. Generally it's at its best when used in a 3 man line (Monster -> Tank -> Spear Master with Inkspot Lantern -> Ink Sword), but it can also be a lot of fun when combined with just a spear user or a mobile archer.

This weapon is a great example of how to make high level versions of monsters rewarding to fight and it's absolutely obscene on a survivor with True Blade. Powerful, hard to use, risky and cool. The pinnacle of the Deadly swords.

Sword of Silence - Fade Promo White Box

Power Level: Mid scaling to End Game

Speed: Average, fine, nothing much to see here.

Accuracy: 5+ is great if you get this weapon anywhere in the early to mid game.

Strength: 6 Strength is the threshold for the mid game and this weapon manages that, it also has access to Sharp in the hands of survivors with 5+ understanding, so it can transition into the late game.

Affinities: So many affinities and the blue and green ones are in fantastic positions. It's rare to see a weapon with this many affinities.

Ability: There is a LOT to unpack with this one, first of all it is gained via the Baby & the Sword Fade Basic Hunt Event. (I have less than a dozen basic hunt events left to layout at this point). These 'top level' hunt events sit above the normal table and include the Sword in the Stone, The Lonely Tree, Dead Warrior (aka Percival's fate) and so on. They occur more often than your normal hunt events as a consequence, so you will get the chance to grab this sword a reasonable amount of the time.

It is a sentient, irreplaceable, unique weapon so it has a number of issues when wielding it, generally you want a Screaming Armor survivor in the party because they can top up your insanity when it dips too low.

Out of the showdown this weapon has two drawbacks, one of which is very large indeed. This weapon cuts you off from access to the White Secret event - that's the Max Understanding one and it's very valuable indeed. It also denies you access to the White Speaker event triggered by Storytelling, which can give you the powerful 'Story of the Young Hero'.

So there is a point where you have to decide to dunk the Sword of Silence out of the game by sacrificing a survivor wielding it. There are a few ways you can do this, you can take them out on a nemesis fight that you're going to intentionally lose, or you can bring them on a hunt against something that will cause them to leave the settlement, such as Spidicules. Or you can just deliberately let the monster kill the survivor near the end of the showdown.

Summary: It's interesting that there is a weapon which provides so many benefits and power, but has palpable downsides plus a way of disposing of the weapon for good. I think that the Sword of Silence and the Fade white box in general represents some of the best content that we've seen in this micro-expansions to date.

I am a little sad that there is no bonus interaction between the Sword of Silence and the White Speaker Sword Hunter. Sometimes she just licks it and gives it extra strength before moving on, I guess she doesn't care about the weapon's status the way that other White Speakers do.

Lantern Sword/Oxidized Lantern Sword - Blacksmith

Power Level: Random

Speed: 3 Speed is quite a detriment to this weapon pre-oxidisation.

Accuracy: While the surface accuracy to this weapon is 5+, Early Iron adds in an added complication that 28% of the time you will roll at least 1 one and that will cancel all the hits you've scored. This drawback makes this weapon feel really frustrating and weak to use despite the relatively decent strength it has.

Strength: 3 strength + sharp is okay, it's certainly interesting if you've gotten the sword from the Open Maw hunt event (you need to roll five or six dice and risk a 70 to 85% chance of dying to do this) because it means you can be rocking this weapon early on. But because of Early Iron's massive drawback, it's not as powerful as the Steel Sword.

Affinities: Left Red is fine, it's the best red position. Lantern Weapons in general have an underwhelming number of affinities, so business as usual.

Ability: See Accuracy and Strength discussions above, this weapon hits moderately hard (2.5 points higher than the Zanbato), but misses a lot more than most weapons. It's for the gambler in you.

When Oxidized this weapon loses Early Iron and gains +2 strength along with the very powerful Deflect ability. Deflect is considerably better than Block because of the way you can set it multiple turns in advance and forget about it. However, Oxidizing is an expensive, VERY expensive process and you would be better off prioritizing Beacon Shields, Lion Beast Katars, a Ringwhip and a Lantern Glaive ahead of a Lantern Sword. So this weapon is kind of a luxury item - and if you want a Luxury sword; the Ink Sword, Griswaldo and Black Sword are all superior.

Summary: Lantern Swords just kind of exist. I rarely consider crafting them, I oxidize them an even smaller amount of the time and they live in a world where there's always a better option. You want deflect? Oxidized Beacon Shields. You want high strength Sword? Black Sword. You want to wound the monster a lot without worrying about reactions? Ink Sword.

It just doesn't have a place in the game, even if you go pure core game, with no expansions and have access to oxidizing you're still going to have this one as a low priority choice (I'd often oxidize lantern daggers over the sword in the core game only).

Black Sword - Gormchymist

Power Level: End Game

Speed: The more powerful your weapon, the more acceptable high speed can become. This is a weapon that can be between 3 and 4 speed without breaking a sweat and it has the stats to back it up.

Accuracy: Solid accuracy is what you'd expect to see here and the Black Sword does not disappoint. As always with this weapon you need to consider what it's practical applications are, in the hands of a sword master (which is where this weapon is always going to end up), it's +4/+3 accuracy, massive.

Strength: 10 Strength is huge, but when a sword master gets their hands on this it climbs to a massive 31 base strength, wounding every monster currently in the game on a 2+. It's an admirable destination for the journey of training in swords. At least it would be if there wasn't a shortcut.

Affinities: None, which is fair enough here.

Ability: In addition to having a Perfect hit survival gain ability, the Black Sword's stats climb to utterly astronomical levels when in the hands of a sword master. This weapon isn't easy to make, but every settlement with a Gorm and time will eventually construct one, so it's not rare either.

The largest issue however is how the weapon interacts with Vagabond armor currently.

As you can see from just reading, Vagabond armor gives you the benefits of Sword Mastery (and specialization), which means you unlock the true potential of the Black Sword and give it +20 strength (plus mastery bonuses). It's not even easy to argue that it's not the intention of the armor set because the Aya model who wears vagabond armor in the box which you gain this has a Black Sword herself!

Summary: Hopefully the Black Sword is reviewed and adjusted in Campaigns of Death, because as it stands right now this weapon exists on another level, not even the pure chance Perfect Slayer or the jump through hoops to make it Griswaldo come close to this weapon which is constructed from organs, a handed skull, a collection of Gorm innovations and an above average roll that can be improved via spending of unwanted potions. I'm fine with super powerful weapons, but there has to be a reason for them to exist (the current monsters do not justify the Black Sword's strength) and the interaction with vagabond armor is very problematic balance. It's a shame because in isolation both the Black Sword and the Vagabond Armor are amazing, but not dominant.

I love this weapon, but I don't appreciate just how hard you have to work to avoid the temptation to break it.

Griswaldo - Green Armor/Flower Knight/Dung Beetle Knight

For Griswaldo see the Green Armor article, short version, it's really obscene, which it should be as it is not an easy weapon to make. In fact, it's one of only two pieces in the Green armor which is mostly in the hands of chance (you can tilt the odds hard in your favor) and it will be interesting to see if Campaigns of Death changes the way that green armor is gained because otherwise you will see people hitting the Verdant Lord without having had a chance to complete green armor.

Conclusion:

I would never actively seek to use swords as one of my main masteries to pursue because as a weapon type they do not bring anything specific to a hunt party, they're not the best mastery for tanking, damage or even jack of all trades type builds. However, I would also never, ever rule out swords from being used because with the right mastery and the right sword they can be absolutely dominant.

Outside of the Black Sword in isolation and when combined with the Vagabond Armor swords are a varied and interesting beast that cover a whole bunch of different situations. Often the problem is that whatever they do, a different weapon does better, they're not the best at defense, offense, deadly or anything really. They're a jack of all trades weapon class, and that means that they suffer a little when compared to the focused power house classes.

Swords; You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!