Settlement Events #6: The Good Stuff (Patreon)

We have arrived at the good stuff! The French Stuff!

The settlement events are not always either boring, humdrum filled with nothing or terrifying mayhem and tragic death. Sometimes the winds of change bring good fortune and the whispers of promise on their sweet breezes. 

These are those honeyed vows, the very best of the current settlement events, and while they do bring respite and benefits even when not utilised to their fullest potential, maximising their effects when they do turn up goes a long way towards mitigating the downward spikes that other events can inflict.

Welcome to the promised land.

Stranger in the Dark

Threat Rating: ✰✰✰✰★

Initial Impact: Five different possible strangers, only 2 of which have an negative side to them at all, and if you've been paying attention to my driving Hunter philosophy, only one result creates something negative and that is just 20% of 20%. Lets walk through them:

The Horizon Man: Gain three resources, a skull, a bone and a broken lantern. Nice.

Stan X ("Female" Satan): So, if you've been foolish and insisted on using male hunters, you're going to get punished here. But if you're part of the Amazonian strats (which is the strongest gender strat in KDM by a long distance) then this is nothing but a good roll for you. Stan even gets rid of your Guidepost if you have it. Which is a nice nod to Stan's role in disrupting the plans of other Entities - no Guidepost for you little Kings.

Lamplighter: As long as you don't make the mistake of having a survivor who matters do this one, there is little downside to worry about. Send a Pleb or a Potential to meet the Lamplighter and maybe they will get some nice buffs.

"Nobody": +1 Population with Zero Presence? Enjoy your nice new DPS character, they're very good with the addition of the Backstabber strain. Also the theme on this one is so on point.

New blood: +1 Pleb and a Founding Stone (which as we all know is basically +1 monster resource). Also good.

Lingering Effects: None

Mitigation Strategies: I've written it before, but I will stress it again here. There is no benefit to using Male hunters in this game unless you are using Choriea to make male Harvestman hunters (needs Spidicules expansion) and even then you should be keeping them to a minimum as much as possible (max 1). Whether intentional or not, KDM's world rewards women for hunting and men for staying at home. Good times.

Triatholon of Death

Threat Rating: ✰✰✰✰★  

Initial Impact: So you are picking four survivors to take part in a bunch of stat based tests. The higher their personal stat in each category (Movement, Understanding, Strength) the better they will perform in each category. This means that the Triatholon heavily favors Harvestman Hunters because they typically have extra movement from their fighting art, plus understanding and strength are gained. 

Your aim is to stack the buffs onto a useful survivor (1st and 2nd place), while 3rd and 4th Place goes to some Plebs. If you don't have a Harvestman survivor to stack the first event, then it's often worth just throwing 4x Plebs into this one and see if any good Potentials come out of the other side.

Lingering Effects: None

Mitigation Strategies: Don't throw four of your favourite Hunters in here, put one or two Hunters in (usually one) and then the rest would be Plebs or the Janitor (especially if the Janitor is badly injured from other events).

Open Maw

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

Initial Impact: None.

Lingering Effects: KDManager ran the stats on this one, and there is no reason to reinvent the wheel by recalculating them. The right numbers to roll is four dice for courage gains. There is no reason to roll more for the Lantern Sword early on because Early Iron is a terrible experience without the Rainbow Wing Belt to mitigate it. There is some argument to try and go for it when you are in People of the Lantern and you are seeking a Lantern Sword to oxidize, but even the oxidized lantern sword is a marginal item when compared to the other priority oxidize targest (Shields, Whip, Glaive). 

As such you should look on this as a chance to send Plebs/Janitor in with the intention of gaining courage plus Vermin Resources, that's the best you can hope from this. But I would only activate this location if you have spare population and endeavors. There are better things to spend your time on.

Mitigation Strategies: Simple, don't send anyone other than Plebs or the Janitor in here. Let Lee get his leg bitten off while Karen risks it all for the sword, never use someone who matters. Also, ironically, this event would be better if the worst roll killed the survivor rather than crippling them.

Lights in the Sky

Threat Rating: ✰✰✰✰✰   

Initial Impact: None

Lingering Effects: Welcome to the pinnacle of the good stuff! Lights in the Sky is the quintessential 'good event' providing you with an optional +1 or +2 to ALL endeavor rolls and also giving out 3 additional endeavor choices for the year.  Needless to say, get endeavoring as much as you can!

The Graves/Shrine endeavor on Lights is the most popular option, a 6+ (4+ on the dice) results in 3 extra armor to all locations for your departing survivors, this kind of boost results in an (almost) guaranteed success at the next hunt - especially against the L1 and L2 monsters. The Face Painting option gives you the ability to "tutor" Stranger in the Dark for the following year (see above why that is good), or gain Quixotic (one of the best disorders).

The Inner Lantern one however is a bit of a risk, while Skull Eater isn't the worst when compared to other settlement events, it can result in Murder turning up and that might be bad times. I do not think a 50% chance of gaining a Fighting Art is worth the risk of having Skull Eater turn up. Too little pay off considering how potentially devastating this chain could end up being.

Mitigation Strategies: None needed. Take advantage of this event as much as you can. Bask in the glory that the Lion God has spewed into the night sky.

Hunt Reenactment

Threat Rating:  ✰✰✰★  

Initial Impact: So please, please do not go picking Hunters here. Typically, if you follow "the rules" then the Janitor should end up playing the monster because people called Lee & Karen are always the least favorite part of any community, while your prize hunter plays the part of the Hunter. But that is not really the optimal way to run this, you risk your Janitor slaying your hunter and gaining Monster Claw Style as a "reward". 

Instead, if you are willing to be subjective about what your favourite and least favourite are (and I recommend this from a purely game/stats perspective, if not a flavour/roleplaying one) then you have a lot of flexibility in who you choose. I will typically pick two cool Plebs to play the parts and go from there.

The choice of what kind of defeated monster to pick (Quarry or Nemesis) is relatively straight forward. If you pick a Nemesis then the benefits are "+1 speed vs. that Nemesis" or Last Man Standing; if you pick a Quarry then the benefits are get set to 0 Insanity or all departing survivors hit max survival. So the Nemesis results are both positive, long lasting and useful while the Quarry ones are meh or temporary.

So typically the best thing to pick is always Nemesis and chosoe fromr The Butcher, The Manhunter or The Tyrant if you can. It depends which of these chaps you are going to face the most. However, be cautious when picking The Butcher, that monster tends to cause survivors to gain a lot of speed regardless (unless they have ranged weapons).

Lingering Effects: None

Mitigation Strategies: Mentioned above!

Elder Council

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

Initial Impact: This one depends almost entirely on how developed your settlement is. But you are (almost) always getting access to something useful. It's a range from +1 understanding to returning survivors all the way up to fighting the Beast of Sorrow, having  newbie survivor(s) get super charged with buffs or even a retired elder coming out for a hunt (usually not that useful, but situationally can be amazing.) 

Most of these are very straight forward, the one worth quickly discussing is the Beast of Sorrow, this is a legendary creature, so you can't repeatedly kill it. As a consequence, you want to pick your time to hit this one very carefully. It's an L3 White Lion, but it is weaker than your typical version because its stats are weaker and it has the Weak Spot trait from the King's Man. This means you're going to be tanking it from the front/sides and only really attacking it in the rear where its toughness is reduced. 

It's the easiest "L3" in the game despite being a L4 monster. But do remember that its level is 4, not 3. That matters.

Lingering Effects: None (apart from buffs, or having access to the Beast of Sorrow).

Mitigation Strategies: This event becomes stronger the more relevant innovations and hunt XP you have stacked across your settlement. Of the three listed innovations, only Saga is a genuinely strong innovation, so it is the only one you would be prioritising, but there's a bonus for the others.

This means most of what you are looking to hit should come from your survivors and in order to get the better results you want to be rotating hunt parties so your pool of 'safe' hunt XP each lantern year is maintained. Noticing a pattern on the Hunters? 4-8 women, rotated around so no one survivor has too high a percentage of the settlement's total hunt XP. Yup, that's how this game is designed to be played.

The other mitigation is to pay attention to how this event eats your endeavors to do stuff with 'automatic endeavors' the mitigation here is two of my personal 'must haves' Cooking and Collective Toil.

Silk Storm - Spidicules

Threat Rating: ✰✰✰✰★  

Initial Impact: In you happen to have Spidicules innovations, you gain +2 endeavors for those innovations and you should take advantage of that. The locations are; Legless Ball, Silk-Refining (Spidicules specific) and Choreia. Just make sure that you have a Pleb/Potential on Choreia, it sucks to have your female Hunter eat a male Hunter.

Also, everyone's grid gets gummed up with a piece of silk. you have to depart with an empty space unless you eat that silk off you with one of the lingering effects.

Lingering Effects: Talking to the Legless Ball gives you a chance at getting a Bladder. That makes Blood Paint, which is a way of getting Blood Paint even if you have removed the Screaming Antelope from the campaign. I spam this endeavor when I have the chance.

Silk Diet allows you to potentially gain vermin resources or even clear out your grid, but the food coma result makes this one unappetising for me. I tend to build 8 slot gear grids anyway (with one flex slot), so this situation hurts, but it doesn't break any synergies I have.

Finally we have the most insanely powerful option. If you are playing with Spidicules, then you can make a Silk Net for a Special Showdown against a Monster (any monster apart from the ones that cannot normally be chosen - so this includes The Butcher or The Hand alongside any quarry monsters). Here's the thing, this option is repeatable. So if you grab a Spidicules and generate enough Silk + resources to repeat the action when you return to the settlement, you can go again. Essentially; this offers a possible 'endless loop' where you go out and chain hunt Spidicules over and over - typically you need to do this versus the higher level Spidicules to ensure that you get the resources to repeat, but it is crazy that this is a possibility. Even hitting just a couple of extra hunts is a huge boost (despite Taken).

Mitigation Strategies: None needed really, you can stockpile Silk in a Spidicules game if you want on the chance that this event hits. It's one of (many) reasons why Silk is a very valuable resource and shouldn't' be spent on the armor set (at the moment).

Season of the Spiderling - Spidicules

 Threat Rating: ✰✰✰★★  

Initial Impact: So, there's a bunch of Spiderlings incoming, like a lot, like a LOT. And you're going to have to clear them out. Who you choose to do this is very subjective, it really depends on your settlement's survivor mix. 

The ideal choice would be to pick some Sane 3 Courage Potentials who you can use because they have the best chance of success and they're Somewhat disposable. But the truth is you're more likely to end up use Plebs or the Janitor. Survivors who you don't really care about. 

You do need to be careful with Insane survivors, having them decimate your population on an 8+ could be difficult for smaller settlements. But they can always kill themselves with that result if you want. 

Lingering Effects: Losing your Legless ball is probably the worst result here. That means it's time to go out and deal with the chore of balling another Spidicules. 

Mitigation Strategies: Just be smart with who you sent to clear out the Spiderlings. Yes it's great to get the extra weapon proficiency and strength, but losing Hunters is not a good result. Without a Legless Ball you don't need to risk much, but if you do have a ball watch out for the -2 penalty on the rolls (OWL and Lifetime Rerolls help).

Slenderblight - Slenderman Expansion

 Threat Rating: ✰★★★★  

Initial Impact: Let us not beat about the bush here, I consider this to be a good card, but it is threatening as heck. This Settlement Event can cause the Slenderman to slam its way into the campaign even if you did not pick it from the start. That can be quite a shock, but it's also a phenomenal and organic experience and one I love (not all Good cards have to be wholly positive, they just have to provide a great experience). 

There is also a lot to unpack on this one, it's a pretty wild card. But this article is getting long and I'm fatigued. So we'll just touch on it. Bloodletting is bad here, but you have to deal with it because you want that innovation to avoid the worst of Plague. The Records result is rarely going to spawn the Slenderman, Records is not a very high priority innovation so it's a rare settlement that has it.

Lingering Effects: None.

Mitigation Strategies: If you want to reduce the odds of the Slenderman overwriting the King's Man then do not innovate Records, otherwise do so. Not much else to deal with there.

BOOSH, that's it! So, going ahead now I will be once again open to taking requests for articles, if there is an area of the game you would like to have explored, please do let me know - I love to explore the areas you are interested in! This series will now evolve into an exploration of the various timeline events for the three campaigns, before moving into an analysis of the Hunt Phase.