Designer's Diary: Building Early Game Weapons (Patreon)

It's been a while since I've written a Designer's Diary, but a big part of that is because the three Weapon, Armor and Support gear series are a fundamental part of creating good, organic design in Kingdom Death. Without a complete and deep understanding of what makes for a good and bad piece of gear, and a detailed breakdown of what they are doing - you can end up creating stuff that just throws the ecosystem of the game off kilter. 

Overpowered custom gear can end up dominating the game to the point that it makes every settlement the same, while underpowered custom gear is just a waste of time and cardboard because it won't get used.

While I can't cover every single thing that goes into making a "good" early game weapon, I am going to try and explain the basics alongside the 'do this' and 'don't do this' rules that were used by the KDM Design team during their initial designs. Basing your own content on their rules and philosophy helps keep your weapons within the power level and thematic designs of the current stuff.

Now, if you were looking at completely re-hauling the entire experience from scratch with new core crafting locations, all new monsters and so on, then you would be able to move away from the numbers I write about ahead. But if you want your stuff to integrate in without the more experienced players highlighting problematic areas then it is absolutely best to stick with the kind of things which follow.

We're going to look at the following areas, each of which makes up the flavour, constitution, power and balance of a weapon.

• Thematics
• Weapon Type
• Speed
• Accuracy
• Strength
• Abilities
• Affinities
• Keywords 
• Costs/Innovations

Thematics

Early game weapons in Kingdom Death tend to be crude in their construction (with the exception of the Spidicules gear, which is more cultured and beautiful). One of the strong ways that the game expresses the world in which you are playing is by having weapons that draw on the monster hunter philosophy of 'looking like the creature they came from'.

This horn is the Deep Vero, which is constructed from the Deviljho.

As you can see from these two pictures, the Deep Vero is constructed to reflect the head of the Deviljho. It's not an exact replica because the Deep Vero isn't just a hollowed out head of a Deviljho, that would make for a terrible instrument. 

This is reflected by its crafting recipe:  Deviljho Scale x6, Deviljho Talon x2, Deviljho Tallfang x 3, Deviljho Saliva x2.

In Kingdom Death itself one of the best examples of the echoing of this design philosophy is the Rib Blade. It is constructed from 1x meaty rib, 1x hide.

This:

Is turned into this:

You can see where the bone and the hide are used in this item and also the way that it is designed looks crude and primitive (in an elegant fashion). This is in contrast to many later weapons which sometimes look more ornate and exotic. The gear for the Screaming God for example is very sophisticated looking in comparison to the Screaming Antelope stuff.

Ultimately, your flavor of design here boils down to three elements. Resources used, what these look like once they're crafted into a piece gear (art, avoid generic looking fantasy stuff for art, it just looks wrong) and the name of the weapon. Names in particular are a great way of telling the story without spelling it out. I'm going to briefly go through some of the best/most interesting ones from the official lines (Rib Blade above is one of them!).

Cat Gut Bow - While the weapon's recipe is a smidge on the side of a flavor fail (it's using sinew, not gut). Catgut is a real thing derived from the intestines of animals (often sheep, goats and cows). As an interesting aside, it's quite possible that catgut derived its name from kitgut/kitstring which is a Welsh word for fiddle string. It's also used in tennis rackets, so the idea of using catgut as a stringing material is not far fetched and my only criticism is that it should be 1x sinew, 1x organ and 1x bow for a real flavor success (plus it would bring the CGB back into line power wise).

King's Spear - The crafting receipt for this one is so on point, it's a claw + a great cat bone. And while there is fur on the spear itself, I can give it a pass (though White Fur as a third crafting resource would not be unbalanced). The real interesting part of this one is the reference to the King, it evokes questions about the link between The King and the White Lions, but it is more likely a reference to the Lion's position as 'King of the Beasts'. Either way, it's something that evokes more than just the resources it's created from.

Beast Knuckle - The real win on this one is the resources and the appearance of the weapon. It's a tooth knuckleduster, what's not to love about that? It looks brutal and the name reflects that strongly.

Gaxe - While the Gaxe lives entirely in the shadow of its Greater cousin, it's only there because the Greater Gaxe is too cheap and too pushed in power. The Gaxe itself is the superior looking of the two weapons. It has a crude, fleshy design to it and the name is a simple contraction of Gorm and Axe. I also love the concept of the Gaxe and Greater Gaxe, the idea behind having a weapon and a 'greater' version of it wonderful, especially if the growth design of the two weapons has the second one being crafted from the first.

Silk Whip - While a lot of the early Spidicules weapons are far more elegant looking than normal, the Silk Whip evokes so much flavor and (as per the earlier entries) the only real issue is that the crafting recipe involves 1x large appendage, 1x bone (no silk WUT?). However, the name itself is very basic, it's not as interesting as the Hunter Whip

While I'm here, I'd also like to point out a couple of naming pitfalls you may land in. The Cat Eye Circlet and the Hunter Whip are both names that feel like they should be using the single possession term. One often finds people calling them the Cat's Eye Circlet and Hunter's Whip, and it is not the fault of the person who does this. The names lend themselves to this. So when naming, take a moment and see if the name you've chosen might get mispronounced or misunderstood. You can't call the Rib Blade the Rib's Blade for example.  Another one to try and avoid is the Lion Beast Katar, this name is an absolute mouthful and it doesn't really achieve too much extra in the flavor.

Weapon Type

You have a lot of freedom here, but there are a few categories you should be very careful with. For a start, do not create early game scythes, scythe specialization and mastery are ridiculously powerful, which is fine under the context of the mid/late game position of the Nuclear Scythe, but having a scythe that can be constructed out of say nothing but bone from an early game monster is a large scale boo-boo.

Likewise Fist & Tooth and Shield are weapon categories you should be cautious about handing out with your Level 1 early game monster. The Knuckle Shield is an astronomically problematic "weapon" in the early game, it crushes the White Lion, Gorm, Butcher, Flower Knight and Screaming Antelope because of its ability to just activate and gain Block 1. So if you are going to make an early game shield, you should consider a combination of no Block, limitations on when you can trigger block and high crafting cost. I would also be very cautious about letting an early shield give armor points, anything that's strictly equal to/better than the Knuckle or Leather Shield should be avoided.

Fist & Tooth is a call you'll have to make yourself, adding in a decent early game Fist & Tooth weapon can help make the chore of getting a F&T Master lesser for players, that could be a welcome thing. But it will also make that weapon a 'must craft' and that will distort your early game meta. At the moment F&T survivors are either the support survivor or a Deadly weapon survivor with a Rib Blade/Lion Beast Katar/Greater Gaxe and Lucky Charm so they can switch to a superior weapon after they've inflicted their first wound. Also any F&T weapon you design has to bare in mind that it can get buffed by a bunch of different fighting styles and abilities.

There are some large gaps in the various early game weapons that can be plugged. When you look at the official early weapons you'll see that early settlements have access to good weapons in the following categories:

• Spear - White Lion, Spidicules
• Bow - White Lion
• Katar - White Lion
• Grand Weapon - Gorm, White Lion
• Whip - Spidicules
• Axe - Gorm, Spidicules
• Shield - Gorm
• Dagger - Gorm
• Club - Bone Smith, Gorm
• Thrown - Bone Smith

You'll notice that there are gaps in the line up for Sword & Katana . Also it is clear that Whip, Shield, Thrown and Dagger are very thin on the ground for options. Also you can see that the Gorm brings a LOT of extra weapon choices to the game, it's why it's so popular as a quarry. One could be forgiven for saying "Hey the Screaming Antelope has a Katar, what about that?" But the fact is, the Beast Knuckle has proven to be an ignored part of the meta, players move from the LBK to the Digging Claw to the Calcified Digging Claw (or Replica Lion Knight Katars) if they are pushing Katars, the Beast Knuckle is a mechanical dead end because it doesn't progress towards either crit farming or a tank build.

Also, if you want to make a strong ranged weapon without breaking the game too much, consider making it a thrown weapon over a bow. Thrown weapons can be very powerful because their downside is a lack of mastery and no ammo. There is a significant downside to thrown naturally built in.

Speed

Speed is relatively simple, you have a range from 1 to 3 for your typical weapons. Most weapons follow the template of 1 speed = high strength, 2 speed = moderate strength, 3 speed = low strength.

Now the problematic area in this design is that low strength + high speed is way worse than high strength, low speed. So if you are designing high speed weapons you should consider additional compensation through Perfect hit abilities, Deadly or similar. 

You can construct weapons which are 1 speed with slow if you want, but slow is not a required or essential element of the weapon and in fact the Gaxe demonstrates a great way of having a 1 speed weapon without it being slow.

The speed design on this weapon is exceptional, you can choose to have it as a 1 speed methodical weapon or move it up to a 2 speed savage weapon (which you should do). This kind of flexibility on speed is phenomenal.

We will discuss Paired in the abilities portion of this piece.

Accuracy

Accuracy is a very simple range in Kingdom Death. It rarely goes higher than a 5+ and rarely lower than a 7+.  The more dice (speed) you roll in attack the lower the accuracy of the weapon can be without being a serious design issue. 4 speed 7+ accuracy results in 4 dice that each hit 40% of the time, so you'd expect to get between 1 and 2 hits per attack, but the variance is a lot higher than 2 speed 5+ (which again results in between 1 and 2 hits). 

The main thing you're looking for here is how far away from the baseline you want to move. Most early game weapons are 2 speed 6+ accuracy (3 strength). High accuracy is beneficial for survivors with between 1 and 3 speed, it starts to become detrimental when you move up to 4+ speed. However, high strength can compensate for this detriment.

Strength

This category is the one where the most caution should be exercised. Early game monsters tend to have 8-9 toughness. Because the average roll on a D10 is 5.5 (5 or 6), this means that even with a meager 2 strength a weapon wounds an 8 toughness monster on a 6+ (50% of the time) and 3 strength weapons are up at 40% of the time. 

The Rib Blade is a particularly egregious issue here, its strength of 5 (and Deadly) is designed to be limited by the slow design on the speed, but play has made it clear that speed 1/slow is a neutral statline at worst and beneficial a lot of the time (in particular its existence in the same crafting pool as the Wisdom Potion is a HUGE contributing factor). 

In contrast the Riot Mace is even more powerful with its 2/5+/5/Deadly + another ability statline. It is, honestly, a superior version of the Rib Blade. But it isn't as overpowered because its crafting requires a deathblow (that punishes you) and it has a staggering crafting cost of 4 monster specific resources that has to be collected under the oppression of the Gorm Climate. This is fair and balanced in comparison to 'draw a meaty rib + 1x hide to make'. The Bone Club is another example, but to be honest, the Bone Club is meta distorting because of how cheap it is and how straightforward it is to get around cumbersome.

So I would recommend that you set your early game strength levels to between 2 and 4, with 0 or 1 strength weapons having significant upsides to compensate and 5+ strength weapons having huge downsides, such as cumbersome and something else.  When we look at the recommended example statlines next time you'll see what I recommend.

Next Friday we'll complete this article with a detailed look at the keywords, abilities, crafting costs, affinities and innovation links you can use. I'll also provide a nice simple set of guidelines you can follow to ensure that your weapon doesn't turn out to be overpowered or unusable.