A Post Mortem of the Lion God (Patreon)

I've had a few requests now for some stuff on the Lion God, which is honestly one of the pieces of content I write the least about (others being the Phoenix (that's coming) and the King's Man (probably not doing anything until we see what Campaigns of Death does to improve the engagement level on this one, currently its best use is to create 8x endeavors via graves, whomp whomp). The Lion God however hasn't been explored much here because of a combination of factors; it's late game content, it's proven hard for people to get their hands on, it has little carrot to encourage you to engage with it and it has never managed to shake its rep as 'the hardest monster in the game' even when it's only in 2nd place overall.

So over the next couple of weeks (two or three) I'm going to use Fridays to expand on the Lion God content here, starting with a post mortem on the expansion, looking at what it was pitched as, where it sits in the lore, what it turned out to be and what are seeing in the future along with what we should hopefully see. My aim here is to hold a lantern up to what was meant to be, what is and what will be, so when Adam posts up stuff on the Silver City and Campaigns of Death you are better educated and able to assess the direction things have taken and feed back accordingly. Adam is pretty good at reading through the comments on the Kickstarter and (at times) responds, so the hope is when the Lion God returns to focus on the Kickstarter y'all have the tools available to assess what he's showcasing and express pleasure or dislikes appropriately based on what you want to see.

Before we get into this, I have to drop a little disclaimer out, it is REALLY HARD to find information from APG/Adam these days. This is because Adam blurred the lines between the Kingdom Death kickstarter account and his own personal life, backing things for himself and his family via the official account - people noticed this and eventually he made the Kingdom Death account private. This compounds with his tendency to write things in the comments and then never cannonize them officially anywhere else - even his Twitter is easier to comb through than the mess that is the KS Comments, it would take a team to get everything he's written tracked down and logged these days. I find this frustrating, but Adam's always been finding his way, he's not a business manager by personality, he's a design lead and creative director. So things like this happen, hopefully less now that he is delegating more.

What this means is I can't track down everything, Adam's written throwaway lines like "[The Lion God]   likes to collect them! ( the lanterns ) hehe." here and there about so many different things and they're buried in tens of thousands of comments on a site with navigation almost as bad as Patreon's. So you might find other official things, if you do please add them in the comments below and I'll take a look.

AHEAD ARE SPOILERS, BIG SPOILERS. FOR BOTH THE LION GOD, THE TYRANT AND OTHERS.

What was it Pitched as?

We will take the words from the lion's mouth itself here:

" The Lion God is both a monster your survivors can hunt and an upgrade for the White Lion monster that comes in the core game box. This expansion has a few new gameplay features including mixing some of the AI cards from both monsters to create unique challenges and a revenge mechanic, wherein if you kill too many of the God's younger kin ( making all those lion armor sets no doubt ) there is a chance the Lion God may roll up to your settlement to take you out!

Since most encounters with this legendary entity are so "high level" I felt it was important to add a bit more campaign depth and extend the life of the good ole White Lion. That way its not just pure boss content that only enduring campaigns get to mess around with." 

So in essence, the Lion God's original pitch was a strain based Gigalion style monster, not a pure creation standing on its own, but a story based "punishment" for overhunting White Lions. 

One could imagine it working under the current frameworks we have as a milestone tracker for slaying white lions with various points that might/would trigger the strain unlock, at which point the Lion God would turn up as a pseudo-nemesis monster and slap the settlement around a bit. That's an interesting concept, but it never came to fruition. So what did we get instead?

How the Lion God Manifested

As is often the case with things Adam works on, the Lion God was 'subject to change', in fact it experienced both shifts in its lore and changes in its mechanical design. It has never been publicly admitted, but from various stories about its creation and the final product it is clear that the Lion God was a troubled production.

However, the new lore that the Lion God holds is a significant improvement over the original pitch, I've written about the lore in the past, but I never really delved deeply into the Lion God and the Silver City because the very potential of the upcoming expansion means that the lore is up in the air. There is a tendency for the lore in the game to get shifted and changed when revisions/new expansions land (and the stuff Adam writes in the kickstarter comments might as well be non-cannon at times because it gets lost and forgotten about by almost everyone - kickstarter comments are a deep hole into which only the mad and optimistic scream). 

Still, the Lion God's released lore, as contained in its expansion book, is a tantalizing and potentially wonderful look at a lost civilisation and what happens to its god when its people are broken and scattered to the winds. 

"There was once a ruler that outlived their kingdom. As their body began to petrify, they were visited by a worm that offered them power in exchange for their memories. Now a mindless beast, silver oozes from its nails and warps its bones as it rages in the ruins of its city, always in pain.

The Lion God was once the ruler of the Silver City. Now, inhabited by a large parasite known as the Knowledge Worm, the ruler has taken on this monstrous form and stalks angrily through the abandoned streets of his city. "

-- Expansion Book opening "pitch"

"There once was a ruler who outlived their kingdom. As their body began to petrify, they were visited by a worm that offered them power in exchange for their memories. Now a mindless beast, silver oozes from its nails and warps its bones as it rages in the ruins of its city, always in pain." -- Showdown Lore

We also got some new terrain, the sinkhole which leads into the Necropolis (during the Lion God showdown, otherwise it is just a hole) and the Lion Statue, a sculpture of the Lion God with hieroglyphics written on them. 

And here are the two pages from the various artifacts which can be found during the sinkhole event:

Those entries link to the Wailing Smoke, Lonely Tree, Butcher, Bone Witch and the Lion people themselves.

There are also other bits of lore scattered around in both blurbs and art, but there are gaps. 

So what one can piece together about this all is as follows, and this is a combination of hard facts as printed plus educated speculation based on the clues which have been left scattered around. 

We know that the Lion God was the ruler of the White Lion civilisation before it fell, the content for both the Lion God and the White Lions makes it very clear that the White Lions were once more than the sad, mindless beasts they have become now. The Lion Statue shows that the Lion God's current appearance is also the one that it held at the point where its civilisation stood tall. A civilisation with a lot of Egyptian influences to boot, they have Sphinxes, undertake embalming and more besides which I am sure we will get to explore when we get the Silver City.

We also know for a fact that the Lion God's civilisation was destroyed before the Knowledge Worm became part of the equation, that it was already sat, lost and mournful in the ruins of its land and it allowed the worm in to help stave off the petrification it was suffering. It traded its entire personality and the memories of its people away in exchange for survival. This is very similar to the Tyrant's goals, the Tyrant ultimately trades his life and the memories of his people in exchange for the survival of his people. While the Tyrant ultimately succeeds in reigniting his people and creating a new line of Dragon Kings, these Dragon Kings are savages, taught that might and strength is what matters and they are a poor echo of the originals. The Lion God's people are everywhere, reduced to predators in the Holy Lands and the Plain of Faces - used as pets by the Holy Land's Manhunters (who make an appearance in the hunt events for the Lion God). 

Now where we move into speculation is trying to understand why the civilisation fell, which should be made clear in the Silver City, but there are some hints which we have already. In short, I believe that the culprit for this was no other than the Golden Entity and the Holy Lands. The two places hold a lot of parallels, the Lion God's lands are based around the 'silver' theme while the Golden Entity has taken one step further up and settled on a golden theme. There are clear signs of jealousy or imitation of the Silver City in the Holy Lands, much of the Holy Lands stuff includes strong lion motifs. The Lion Knights, the White Knights, even the mothers and grandmothers hold them - and many of the other creations demonstrate remnants of lion parts - the Forge God has a huge amount of similarities to the Lion God for example, they were both sculpted by the same artist, they have a similar 'hood' into which parts of them can be withdrawn, they have intestinal "leakage" and the Forge God's faces are straight up lion/penis hybrids. 

You can see so much of the Lion in these creatures, it's very prominent in the art below:

Either the Golden Entities works were undertaken in jealous mimicry of the Lion God's civilisation or the people of the Silver City were the base material for the initial "cooked" designs - the Golden Entity bakes a large amount of its population from slaves captured by Manhunter "drones".

Personally I speculate that the Golden Entity is a small entity that jealously copied and destroyed the Silver City in order to cement its power and position in the world. It broke the People of the Silver City, humanoid Lions, and devolved them into the savages we see now. That is why they have "humanlike hands, a humanlike curiosity and sad faces". They were once a great people, but they have devolved, broken by the machinations of the Golden Entity and possibly the involvement of the "corrupter" - the entity responsible for polluting the Plain of Faces and harming the Gold Smoke Knight (the "elemental" who protects the lands in the Plain of Faces and has a Lion Motif itself). I still think that the Ethereal Dreamer is the main force responsible for the breaking of the Gold Smoke Knight's lands, but the Golden Entity would have helped if possible.

How the Lion God plays

 The creation of the Lion God was almost certainly rushed and underbaked. Now, I am going to go into the specifics of the Lion God's mechanics next week, but I wanted to paraphrase a story that highlights why the Lion God is getting revised AI cards and an entire expansion dedicated to itself. This comes from Zachary Barash, the programmer/designer behind the Gold Smoke Knight, the Dragon King and the Manhunter (amongst others) - this is paraphrased from the stories he told and is a mix of both first and second hand information:

Adam was the lead designer for the Dung Beetle Knight (DBK), but there was a big problem with the expansion. The DBK would toss the dung ball at the start of the fight and then ignore it for the rest of the showdown, slapping the survivors about with normal attacks rather than making the ball important.

Zach B was brought on to take a look at  the AI and see what he could do to fix this. He eventually removed a trait from the DBK and that created the space required to get the DBK interacting correctly with the ball, eventually it turned into the monster we all know, respect and love. One that you have to absolutely keep away from its ball at all costs.

The trait he removed? It was Relentless, a core mechanic printed on every single one of the Lion God's basic cards. In short, the Lion God's core mechanic came from a discarded DBK one. While I do applaud the recycling of a good mechanic (and the murdering of that mechanic on the DBK, great humility and insight there from Adam, Zach and the team in general) - it highlights the heart of the problem. The Lion God was built mechanically from a rejected trait, it didn't get its own theme, it is at its heart a DBK without a ball and when you look at it in that light, you can see it. The Lion God tosses all terrain around instead of one specific piece and while its personality is well expressed in the AI cards, it has a choppy, messy way of behaving, that sort of reflects its scattered, mindless nature. But you can see why it is getting new AI cards. 

This AI issue, in combination with the lack of reasons to hunt the Lion God in the first place (no monster specific resources, no crafting location, most valuable rewards are with the L1) are at the heart of why we are getting the Silver City and the new "God Cards".  While the lore for the Lion God benefited from the changes in the pitch, the mechanics did not.

Which leads us to the final question for this post.

The Silver City: What should we expect and demand for the Lion God's future?

We are currently in the world of 'where the heck is Wave 3' and the Silver City is left off in wave 4. But we are going to (hopefully) see some additions to the Lion God with Campaigns of Death. As information comes out, it is possible for us to shape things a little with feedback on the Kickstarter comments. You should, hopefully, be forming your own opinions on what the Lion God needs to thrive as a piece of Node 4 content, and I do not want to form your position to match my own. But here are some things I think we deserve to see (they may, or may not be coming).

• A new HL Deck to support the God Cards AI deck

The God Cards deck is a great (if space unfriendly) idea which gives the "God" class monsters more room for flavour and mechanical text. However, I would posit that if the team are redesigning the AI cards they could do with revisiting the HL deck as well, overall the Lion God HL deck is disappointing and doesn't integrate well with the AI. The pitch mentions a HL Godly Disposition, but this is not clear if it is a trait or a full new HL deck. The latter would be the better option.

• Craftable gear

The various things you find in the Fight and Necropolis are interesting thematically, but on the whole they are either very niche, underpowered or just not worth the effort of getting. If they revisited the HL deck, they could also create a Lion God specific resource deck (given that it is petrified this would be interesting) and instead of having the Circlet/Plate/Statue as automatic rewards they could be crafted from parts - we could also have additional gear that supplemented the themes of the original White  Lion set. While we are seeing some narrative armor sculpts in the Silver City the normal experience will remain stagnant without something more on the rewards section; just think of what a Petrified White Lion Armor set or a Silver Lion Armor set would be like!

Now yes, not every monster needs to have craftable gear, but the Flower Knight, Lion Knight, Lonely Tree and Lion God have demonstrated the problems that expansions with little usable crafting gear have. Their engagement levels are a lot lower and the expansion ratings/sales figures suffer as a consequence.

• Less cards like Woeful Majesty

Those (few) of you who who have played the showdown have encountered the delight that is this card, there is an entire, awful, metagame experience built around this card and it's pretty dumb. I'll write more about this next week, but essentially the trait is poorly worded and also creates this daft situation where the fight is made mostly meaningless. I can't stand the card, not because it's OP, but because it's very reductive in design.

God Slurp (see below) is more the kind of card I think is great, so based on one card the new AI design looks a lot better than the old one. However, it is a Basic card and it may well be for the  L4 version of the Lion God (end of campaign)

• More lore

This one is a guarantee, at the least we are going to get snippets of lore through the Silver City encounters and exploration. Interactions with new kinds of terrain, the encounter monsters and story/hunt/dungeon events will give us a lot of new things to understand. The big things though are more details about what the Lion people were like before they fell, and why they fell in the first place. But the God Card update promised more besides.

Where do we go now?

The future looks hopeful for the Lion God, but things are not going to change until we reach Wave 3's delivery (at a minimum) there is a lot to come before that happens, for European people the inevitable Brexit nonsense continues and that could have an impact with the sole distributor for KDM currently located on the dumbest island in the world. So until we get to see the future stuff we're stuck with the current iteration of the Lion God and next week I'll dish out the stuff I was saving for the Great Game Hunters episode.

Links:

1. Original Kickstarter Page:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster/posts/378204 

2. Lion God original expansion contents image: Link here 

3. Side Options Price List:  http://kingdomdeath.com/ks_images/side-options.jpg 

4. Lion God Pitch image: Link Here 

5. Lion Gods (Material):  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster/posts/1019246 

6. Silver City Pitch:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/1776071 

7. God Cards:  Link here