The Settlement Phase #3: Events: The Good, The Bad, The Irrelevant and the Ugly (Patreon)

Ah Settlement Events, the bane of any structured settlement and one of the filters that separates those who enjoy a structured experience and those who embrace the chaos. As a perennial "roller of ones", the Settlement Event deck tends to cause far, far more harm than good for myself and the people I play with. I am not as disadvantaged as Wil Wheaton is famed to be, but it often takes one a lot longer to succeed in pulling down monsters than the average player would experience. This is part of the reason why I have learned mitigation, positional and defensive play in this game in such detail. When the stakes are so high, you have to do everything you can to avoid making the rolls in the first place.

Which brings us back to Settlement Events. That deck of cards that randomizes each settlement phase and inflicts pain or joy (or boredom) upon the players. It's one of the rougher areas in the game and ripe for an official upgrade. I get the desire and need for some kind of randomization of events during a campaign, without these settlement events there would be a large reduction in emergent storytelling - but right now we don't have much variation in numbers or style and very few that have much impact beyond 'this happened this year, done'.

Before we move onto categorising and starting to break down all the settlement events into individual sections, I want to first of all point out a repeated mechanic that is present in these events. Where they scale based on the number of players. An awkward mechanic that doesn't seem to be well tested, it works fine when you have four players, but the cards can get distorted or weird when you are dealing with less than that - even to the point of having some promotional material being completely unobtainable when playing the game solo.

The most commonly agreed decision when dealing with these cards is to pick as if you had 4 players, the second most commonly agreed decision is to quickly grab enough people to get it up to four by bribing passersby with cookies, chocolate or 2 euros. 

It's a silly mechanic and very, very non-technical in design.

I've dug through all of the events (again) and they categorize into roughly four categories, which are as follows:

Good

The impact these events on your settlement is mostly positive, they tend to help your survivors and any negative results are either minor, can always be placed onto a Janitor/Pleb or are completely optional.

• Stranger in the Dark
• Triatholon of Death
• Open Maw
• Lights in the Sky
• Hunt Reenactment
• Elder Council
• Silk Storm
• Season of the Spiderling
• Slenderblight

Bad

These mostly trend towards the negative, but they do have leverage points that can provide advantages for the savvy settlement. Or at least the negatives can be negated or mitigated in some fashion. They hurt, but they do not often cripple.

• Skull Eater
• Rivalry
• Glossolalia
• Acid Rain
• Clinging Mist
• Gorm Climate
• Sword Hunter - this one is absolutely Ugly if you draw it right after getting Excalibur.

Ugly

The worst of the worst, these when they hit cause massive damage to your settlement in ways that you can rarely avoid or mitigate without massive metagaming strategies. They are the cards that get discussed for removal more than anything else and cause incredibly bad feelings in players who are not masochistic. 

• Plague
• Murder
• Cracks in the Ground

Irrelevant

They might do something, they sometimes do, and when it does happen it's usually positive. But a lot of the time you draw them, read the contents and then don't interact with the card much at all. This is not actually a bad thing, non-events give a settlement breathing room.

• Weird Dream 
• Heatwave - this one even gets archived permanently by the Christmas Stan strain.
• Haunted 
• Dark Trader
• Dark Dentist
• Phantom

As you can see, the split between negative and positive is roughly 50/50, but the addition of the "neutral" irrelevant cards means that on the whole the Settlement Phase trends towards being not harmful for your settlement, but that's a bit of a misnomer because these irrelevant cards can have negative effects as can some of the positive ones.  

Ultimately, the average Settlement Event card contains things that are harmful for your settlement, you will at times push out ahead of this, especially when you are playing in a careful and methodical manner but at times this phase will absolutely wreck you, devastating your progress with irreparable damage. You might be able to rebuild lost gear, or retrain dead survivors, but you will never get the time spent on the lost items back.

The Ugly

We'll take a look at the Ugly ones right now and then next week pick up with a look at the others. I do not intend to drag this portion of the series out too much, but it depends on how much I have to say about each grouping of cards.

1. Cracks in the Ground 

Threat Rating: Varying between ★★★★★ and ★★✰✰✰

Initial Impact: This card is one of the few that breaks the covenant that the game has established between itself and the players. We are told (most of the time), that while survivors may die from year to year, archiving gear is a very rare event that 

Honestly, fuck this card for what it does, even if it's not deleting every single survivor who dared have even a single lone heavy piece of gear equipped then 40% of the time it's killing one of the returning survivors (these are your highest value survivors) with no inbuilt mechanic to mitigate this.

Oh if you beat the odds, you get a founding stone... woo.

Lingering Effects: Prevention of all home endeavors is pretty neutral as 'negatives' go, it is rare that this will be an issue as most home endeavors are low priority and can be done in a later year. It impacts on: Bed, Partnership, Settlement Watch and Shadow Dancing. Shadow Dancing is the only one that might need to be immediately activated, the other two can wait.  You also get a +1 to Nightmare Training rolls, that's the one upside to this card worth mentioning.

The other two lingering effects are Vapor Visions - A shrine based ability which costs 4 resources and should only be used on a fresh survivor (or an ageless one who has completed their mastery). Mad Oracle is basically +1 evasion token each fight because everyone runs with a Rawhide Headband. It's a solid ability for a tank or bruiser type survivor.

Vapor Scar - this Scarification based ability is another one that should only be used on new survivors, it also costs 4 resources, but the upside is way smaller than Vapor Visions and the downside is way larger. Either you die, or you become immune to Bash via Burnt Nerves.   That is actually not a bad result for a tank, you get the leather armor set bonus ability forever. So if you are in the process of training up your new tank, this might be a place you visit if you are swimming in low value resources.

Overall this event has very few benefits and mostly harms the settlement in a way that nothing else compares to. 

Mitigation Strategies: The main one is something I've been advocating for a long time, be very cautious about using heavy gear,  there are downsides to quite a few different keywords, but nothing apart from noisy compares to how negative heavy is. This will only protect you from the 1 result though.

The other main mitigation option for this are the classic anti dice roll options, the Fighting Art Otherworldly Luck will give you +1 to this table and remove the worst option permanently, while Survival of the Fittest/Infinite Lives gives you re-rolls to try and mitigate any survivor death at all.

I think we all live in hope that this card gets a revision in Campaigns of Death. Because it's not engaging, interesting or fun and it can often result in people abandoning campaigns.

2. Murder

Threat Rating: Varying between ★★★★★ and ★★★★✰

Initial Impact: The Original Gangster 'fuck you' settlement card, this one isn't as much of a covenant break as Cracks is, but your first encounter with Murder can be absolutely demoralizing for a player.  You are losing the survivor with the highest hunt XP and the survivor with the highest Insanity is responsible. These two individuals are almost always very valuable members of your settlement because those two statistics are gained from hunts. 

Depending on your society choice, what happens to the murderer varies. Having no principle means that 30% of the time they're slain, 40% of the time you get a +5 insanity boost at the cost of -2 survival on your departing survivors (bad deal, having everyone be insane is awful for a Protect the Young settlement) and 30% of the time you get a "badass", who gets some lovely bonuses and gets to wear the head of her victim as a helmet.  However, murder comes back in 1d5 years time. That's not as bad as it seems, because knowing when murder is going to hit allows for some mitigation strategies.

If you have Collective Toil (fen's preferred society), then 60% of the time you lose the murderer but get compensated with Stranger in the Dark 3 years later plus a random fighting art for all departing survivors. I like this deal, Stranger is almost always good and more fighting arts are great. It's very important as well to highlight that when you gain a random fighting art under the Romantic society, you draw three and choose one to keep. Very strong.

The Accept Darkness one is the classic that people think of when considering murder. 30% of the time you get a temporary buff for departing survivors but 70% of the time the murderer becomes the new chief, gains +3 hunt XP and a selection of fighting arts and disorders.  Some neat combos for this are:

• Preparation for True Blade: Ghostly Beauty, Narcissist, Immortal, Abyssal Sadist, Crazed, 
• Dagger user:  Hoarder, Quixotic,  Backstabber, Timeless Eye, Sneak Attack
• Other Dagger User: Secretive, Quixotic, Backstabber, Timeless Eye, Burning Ambition (cancels out Secretive)
• Dodge This: Hyper-Sensitivity,  Extra Sense, Abyssal Sadist, Thrill Seeker
• The Flash: Hyperactive,  Harvestman, Double Dash
• If I Bleed, I can kill it:  Clutch Fighter, Unconscious Fighter, Transcended
• The Wall:   Delicious, Unbreakable, Tough, Unconscious Fighter, Shielderang (choose 3)
• The Immortan Joe:  Rageholic, Immortal, Ghostly Beauty, Abyssal Sadist, Crazed, Tough

On the disorder front, if you're not building a specific disorder based combo the following are good: Immortal, Spiral Ganglia, Quixotic, Immortal or Hyper-Sensitivity.   Also, Emotionless is very good in People of the Sun on a Hellfire survivor as it ensures you can't accidentally cook yourself to death with +1 strenth tokens.

Good generic fighting arts include any thing you want to sculpture; Abyssal Sadist, Otherworldly Luck, Timeless Eye, Convalesor, Infinite Lives, Infernal Rhythm, Shielderang, Strategist, Rolling Gait and so on.

NOTE: It has now been confirmed from multiple different sources that Gloom Man does not work with Stark Raving or Husk of Destiny, you always need 5+ Insanity to activate Gloom Man. It'll apparently be in Campaigns of Death or an updated FAQ at some point.

Generally there are a host of good disorders and fighting arts and this is an opportunity to build some absurd combos, I'd love to see yours!

Lingering Effects: None, apart from the feelings of loss, regret, frustration and annoyance. Sometimes the Lingering Effect for this card is to see it removed from the campaign.

Mitigation Strategies: Getting a society as fast as possible (15+ population) is your first mitigation goal, because the results for both societies are better than not having one (which makes sense). But also you can mitigate the worst of the impact by employing Murder Bait (see previous article), this can be done via the method mentioned previously or by employing the Giant's Blood Strain Fighting Art and eating a skull, this will let that survivor be selected as the murder victim and reduce the impact.

The only other method is to not over invest into a single survivor at any one time, I rotate 8-12 viable hunting survivors each campaign and because they progress up more slowly across the board, I lose less progress when a murder hits.

3. Plague

Threat Rating: Varying between ★★★★★ and ✰✰✰★★ 

Initial Impact: When this hits you is the largest determining factor of how devastating this card can be. The earlier it turns up, the more it hurts, this is because it targets hunters (survivors with at least 1 hunt XP) and early on you have less of these to spare, generally your survivors with 1+ hunt XP in the early game are your core roster.  In addition, the two mitigation innovations that exist for this are not ones often innovated early on. Ammonia may have been drawn via the White Lion or Gorm, but Bloodletting is unlikely to be present because it is an ammonia consequence with limited uses - most of the time it exists to cure disorders or a few select injuries. It is however a 'terminus' innovation, it adds no additional cards to the innovation deck, so it is more valuable than some other options.

Lingering Effects:  Even performing the treatment via Ammonia is a slow and awkward process, unless you roll 9+ (20%) you are going to be spending multiple endeavors, which stunts the development of the settlement and forces hard choices between progression and saving survivors. 

Mitigation Strategies: The primary mitigation strategy is innovating Ammonia and Bloodletting. But later on, not having access to one or both of these becomes easier, because there tend to be Irregulars and Retirees you can inflict with the plague and then you have less pressure to treat everyone because these lower value survivors take the hit. Saga gives you even more protection because Potentials now have hunt XP and can get sick without ever having spend precious hunt slots on gaining that XP. 

The other mitigation strategies are the usual duo, Otherworldly Luck for the +1 (per infected individual) and Lifetime Rerolls (Survival of the Fittest).

That's the worst of the worst out of the way, next time we'll take a look at the other rotten apples and see how to handle those, either with preparation, growth or just avoiding taking the risk in the first place!