We're looking at two weapon categories this week because they both represent small sections of the game that have not (to date) been fleshed out properly. One of these is a hugely underdeveloped and bizarrely denied a weapon specialisation/proficiency (even to the point of the glossary very specifically excluding this) and the second has only two 'weapons' and a bunch of upgrades hidden away in various parts of the game.

Thrown Weapons

These weapons start out very strongly; with one of the most powerful and enduring bone smith weapons in the Bone Darts, however once past this there are very few thrown weapons available and they do not really return in any strong form until you get to the LY9 monsters.

The issues with Thrown Weapons are multiple, they have no proficiency, which means that they are at best relegated to something used as a secondary weapon by a shield or fist & tooth user. They tend to have very awkward statlines that hold them back and increase the risk of using them and as a whole they lack a real identity. Bone Darts set them as being the 'high strength, slow, inaccurate ranged weapon'; but they are really the only member of that category. The "high" end thrown weapons tend towards support abilities, and they can be quite good at those, but ultimately the (frankly shameful) lack of a weapon proficiency for Thrown Weapons pretty much eliminates them from the game a lot of the time. One lives in hope that Poots' strong 'anti-thrown' proclivity is toned down in the Wave 4 expansions, but until then they're relegated to the Phantom Zone a lot of the time.

Fist & Tooth

(I've attached the various different combinations of Fist & Tooth abilities to the bottom of this article along with a printable A4 .pdf version)

You start out with access to this weapon and it's one of the most important in the entire game thanks to its weapon specialization.

The Mastery is just a nice stat boost for completing the weapon progression, and for the most part it's absolutely nothing to look down on. It becomes very strong when combined with the Storm Constellation in Stars, but it also helps your Fist & Tooth Master move onto a new weapon. (It's also so amazing

It is important here to note that once you are have added in all the expansion fighting arts, innovations and similar as per the official rules, your fist and tooth survivor should absolutely be female. This is because Females have access to Death Touch via Choriea (remember that thing? I harp on about it a lot). If you get that music (Spidicules) innovation together, you should seriously consider sending your female F&T user to dance with some pleb male whenever you have spare endeavors.

In the Fist & Tooth section we're going to explore the various different bonuses you can get along with how you can get them rather than discuss the weapons themselves. If you want to read about the ultimate Fist and Tooth weapon - the Speaker Cult Knife - it's in the dagger article.

But before that, we'll briefly pour through the Thrown Weapons as there are some legitimately useful pieces of gear here.

Thrown Weapons

Bone Dart - Bone Smith

Power Level: Early to Mid Game

Speed: Very low, in fact it's too low for this weapon, which is one of the reasons why you will stop using it. It could have been 2 speed, but then it would be very strong. Note that it's 1 speed but not slow, so you can make good use of this weapon on a +speed survivor.

Accuracy: 40% accuracy is the other severe negative of this weapon and its combination with 1 speed can be a source of frustration. It never feels good to do 'nothing' with your attack turn after turn and the bone darts are more likely to achieve that than most weapons.

Strength: Really good for the cost and the crafting location. I've mentioned it before, but I rate Bone Darts as being one of the best early game weapons (LY1, LY2 and LY5 - L1 monsters) and their strength is a big part of that. Even when you're onto better weapons, you often still carry around the bone darts in case you get caught out of position.

Affinities: 1 red affinity in the best possible position. Once can't complain about that at all.

Ability: Range 6 is massive on these darts, it's the other reason why they are so powerful, not only does it allow you to get around ground fighting on the White Lion, but it also helps with Spidicules and combos with the Giant Stone face (which you can get via the Tactician fighting art). It's more range than a weapon like this really should have.

Frail becomes an issue later on in the game, but we're all very experienced in avoiding Super Dense locations now and even if you do hit one. Even if you do hit one; it's probably not a loss because you you're likely just using the darts as a back up by that time

Summary: One of the strongest early game weapons out there, the cheap cost combined with decent/acceptable stats and range means this one should be on everyone's shopping list.

Throwing Knives - Spidicules

Power Level: Early Game

Speed: 4 Speed is a risky stat, but it's also one of the few things that makes this weapon feel unique. In particular there's a space for combining this speed with Timeless Eye to ensure that every hit on the first successful attack is a Perfect hit. But even without that, 50% of actual hits this weapon produces under normal attacking conditions will be a Perfect hit.

Accuracy: As we started to discuss above, this weapon is designed to be inaccurate and then gain accuracy as the fight progresses. It is a very cool mechanic and on a different weapon with some actual punch to it (and an actual form of weapon progression) this would be interesting.

Strength: Here's where we hit the second stumbling block of this weapon, the strength is absolutely terrible, even for an early game weapon. Again you could forgive this weapon if Thrown was a class that had progression, but it doesn't and therefore the strength on this one is a massive deal breaker.

Affinities: Strength could have been mitigated here if the weapon had the right affinity, a left red affinity would smoothly bring the Monster Tooth Necklace into play and push it to a quick 4 strength (with Rawhide). That at least would have helped mitigate the strength issue.

Ability: I like the ability, I like the range, this weapon's design space has a lot of potential. Just not with the baseline weapon we have here. You could argue that you use this weapon to build accuracy tokens and then apply that to a different weapon, but you're just spending activation to make low impact attacks.

Summary: Interesting idea, but falls short in so many places. There's few real reason to craft these knives. So just leave them in the box unless you are looking to use them for 'scrubbing' (the act of removing useless hit locations in order to get to the resource related ones back into play).

Dragon Chakram - Dragon King

Power Level: Early Game

Speed: I never have any complaints about a weapon being 2 speed. Though it does feel really weird that a Chakram can hit twice, I guess it's once on the way out and once on the way back?

Accuracy: Standard accuracy.

Strength: This is a HUGE problem, this weapon is ridiculously underpowered on the strength front. As you can see in the ability section, the idea of this weapon is to lead off with it in order to give everyone an effective evasion bonus. But the strength on this weapon is so low that it's hard to justify using this against monsters. -1 evasion isn't that important, it's nice, but it's not worth failing to wound over and over against a monster that can be very problematic if it hits you with reactions.

Affinities: N/A

Ability: Apart from being the coolest sounding weapon in the game. The Chakram is a very short range weapon that suffers from poor stats holding back a decent ability. You can use this with attack spam (multiple attacks a round stack) to give everyone else a lot of accuracy buffs. This means it works as a temporary buff for everyone who attacks afterwards and that increases the amount of hits scored per round, but at the cost of risking being harmed when you have to try and wound with a strength 3 weapon. Just to really stress the point, strength 3 is white lion weapon strength, node 1. That's not good.

It's nice that the ability still triggers even on traps though.

Summary: Not worth it. I'd rather it be this instead.

I don't think I need to explain why this is a weapon almost worth crafting from a LY8 monster unlike the official version.

Sky Harpoon - Sunstalker

An amazing spear with the thrown keyword for no real mechanical benefit (currently) in the official game (It has an interaction with the Black Lion gear though). For more details on this one, check the Spear portion of this series.

Sunspot Dart - Sunstalker

Power Level: End Game

Speed: 4 Speed seems like a scary number, but it is one of the absolute strengths of this weapon, and we'll explore why below. At the moment it is enough to say that this weapon represents one of the ways that you can make high speed an interesting design.

Accuracy: 7+ accuracy is a bummer on this one, it's pretty fair for this weapon if I am honest, but unlike most high speed weapons I would have been a lot happier if this was a 6+ or better.

Strength: 3 strength is in the "not good because it's a LY1 weapon strength level' but that is mitgated somewhat by the addition of Deadly onto this weapon. Deadly is what really matters here, well Deadly and its ability.

Affinities: The right red isn't very useful most of the time, as we've discussed many times before, right red is the worst position for a red affinity.

Ability: This is where we reach the reasons why the Sunspot Darts are one of the most important and powerful weapons in the game. While this weapon has a couple of large downsides (activation limit of 3 times, thrown weapon type). It has Deadly and most importantly it has the single most powerful 'on hit' ability in the game alongside the Hollowpoint Arrow.

Each hit with these darts, which can score up to 4 hits per attack, generates 1 survival for each adjacent survivor. If all 4 survivors are adjacent that could be up to 4 survival each per attack (more likely to be 40-50% of that) and you can do that 3 times.

This means this weapon represents a huge pile of survival. Up to Dart Speed x Adjacent Survivors x Activation limit amounts of survival. (4 x 4 x 3 = 48 point maximum). While the typical amount generated is going to be a lot lower than that, more probably about 12 or so. That is still more survival than any other single gear card can offer you and that means they are unique and incredibly powerful in their own right.

On top of that, the darts have deadly, so they can contribute towards crit farming monsters while doing this.

Summary: One of three genuinely great thrown weapons (Bone darts and Sky Harpoon are the other two), this unique piece of gear has a place in every single hunt.

Fist & Tooth

Acid Palms

There are two relatively reliable ways of gaining Acid Palms, an ability which is arguably the strongest option for any F&T user. The first is via the Gorm L2 hunt, where you can gain it on the Blind Exit from the Gorm den (30% chance), but this comes with the downside of being random and inflicting -1 movement. It's a solid way to try and set up a new F&T survivor, but it's not the easiest.

The other, more direct route, is to have the Dragon King as a huntable quarry, in LY8 he will turn up briefly during his introduction event and "gift" a survivor with Acid Palms and the cursed Husk of Destiny.

It's worth thinking that this gear card here is basically your 'weapon' because it's tied to gaining the Acid Palms. So while you "lose" a slot, you've gained an appropriate level of power. Always being insane is sometimes a downside, there are also some strong positives to it.

In addition, Acid Palms mechanically works like Sharp, but it's not actually Sharp itself, which means that you can combine Acid Palms with things like the Speaker Cult Knife or Iron Jaw (see below). It's an incredibly powerful ability, effectively adding +5.5 average strength to your survivor's fist and tooth attacks for the rest of their existence.

Death Touch

This female only Secret Fighting Art is gained via an innovation dice roll at one of the best innovations you're probably still not using (Choirea from the Spidicules Expansion). It's another of multiple reasons why females make the better hunters in KDM and it also has a nice 'side effect' of often creating useful male hunters (very rare) who have the Harvestman Fighting Art.

It has a small buff to accuracy, and also comes with an inbuilt version of the Beast Knuckles katar (that weapon that's almost good enough to talk about, but not quite). This ability is best utilised by having other survivors surge inside the Death Touch survivor's attack so they can also take advantage of the -1 toughness she generates.

Monster Claw Style

While there are a few direct ways of getting access to Monster Claw Style (Bone Witch for example) the only really reliable way is via the newly released Ringtail Vixen White Box content. (Link here, currently sold out at the time of writing). She's born with it, and she'll be about for slightly more than half of your campaigns (you automatically get her in the first campaign you use the micro-expansion and 50% of the time after that).

It's a decent fighting art and one of the best places where Savage is utilised. While none of the buffs are staggering, they all lean into what helps make F&T strong. I don't think you Sculpture this one, but you do appreciate having it.

Iron Jaw

Gained via the settlement event Dark Dentist (because every medical professional in the world of Kingdom Death is either an edgelord or silky). This one is just a way of getting Sharp on your F&T Survivor for a relatively cheap cost (2x Iron). It's hard to guarantee, so there's not really much advice except where possible having Iron and Scrap laying around in your settlement is a good way to increase the chances of success. Sadly even if you've paid the price, you need to roll on a table to not die and have it succeed. I recommend this one for SotF settlements only as they have the rerolls to spare.

Other Boosts

There are also three pieces of gear which are particularly relevant to F&T users, these are the Lucky Charm, Monster-Tooth Necklace and the Death Mask. The Lucky Charm and MTN are cheap ways of increasing your Luck + Strength in order to make fisting more effective and they combine well with Rawhide Armor + a left red weapon (I recommend the Greater Gaxe because it has Deadly) so they provide a reliable way to have an effective survivor who is training up F&T.

The Death Mask only really becomes an option if you get it via the Mask Maker or you manage to Deathblow the Butcher early enough in the campaign and unlock that location. It's one of the reasons why I really advocate stalling out the L1 and L2 Butchers as much as possible and always going for the Deathblow kill.

Outside of that, ways of gaining more strength (Young Rivals, Giant's Blood) can be options, but those come with their own downsides.

Conclusion

Due to the lack of any kind of thrown weapon, along with only having few options, Thrown weapons barely exist outside of the Bone Darts and the Sunspot Darts. While these two options are very powerful for the portion of the game in which you would use them, there's just no real argument to use any of the others. This is a shame, because it limits diversity of options across the board - but perhaps in future expansions, with Adam reversing his anti-thrown (and anti-bomb) position of no proficiency plus printing more options, this may change. They're a cool weapon type, but they have little place in the game right now outside of Bone and Sun options.

Fist and Tooth on the other hand has a weapon proficiency, and as we've discussed above, it's one of the most powerful ones in the entire game. But because F&T itself has such little in the way of reliable upgrades or variation that it's really just a chore to level up. Gear that would have represented 'brass knuckle' or 'punch glove' type equipment has been rolled into Katars and that's limited your options.

You want a F&T master in every single settlement, that's absolutely not up for debate, but making one is a thankless task. Unless you've gained Acid Palms or similar; invest in an alternative Deadly weapon (LBK, Zanbato, Greater Gaxe) to cover all the attacks after you've inflicted your first wound with your fists.

Downloads

Content

Overview:

Fist & Tooth

Thrown Weapons

Bone Dart - Bone Smith

Throwing Knives - Spidicules

Dragon Chakram - Dragon King

Sky Harpoon - Sunstalker

Sunspot Dart - Sunstalker

Fist & Tooth

Acid Palms

Death Touch

Monster Claw Style

Iron Jaw

Other Boosts

Conclusion

Files