What's in an Affinity: Monster Flavor (Patreon)

Previously we have looked at the themes of affinities, the trends in armor and the trends in weapons. So this time we are going to look at the other form of theme based mechanic used. This one isn't used for all monsters, but it overrides the other rules we've seen before and creates a lot of exceptions. However, as we'll see, the overall choices tie well into the thematic designs of the monsters and they are often married strongly.

First of all, we'll walk through each of the monsters in turn and note the total number of affinities in each colour (and a total of the gear without colours at all). Here is the criteria I'm using: I am counting the total number of affinities across all gear regardless of directions (though I may note if there is an interesting dominance of direction for a particular monster/colour combination), all gear that can be gained by interactions with that particular monster are being included - for example as you get the Hidden Crimson Jewel from the Dung Beetle Knight's post showdown it counts for that monster. In the case where you can get a monster specific piece of gear from more than one monster I'll count it for both - for example you can get the bladder for Blood Paint via the Screaming Antelope or via a Spidicules Settlement Event if you have a Legless Ball - so it counts as specific for both monsters.  I don't care how rare the circumstances under which you get them are, just that you get them.

For the sake of my sanity, I will not be counting the activation affinity colours this time, but if I had the time I would indeed add them to this analysis. I have made an exception in the case of the masks because they are designed as affinity collectors not providers. I am aware this skews things a bit, but it helps cement the designs of the core three monsters and also gives some colour to the Butcher (not that he's getting an individual piechart).  This is not a perfectly scientific analysis, but I am not a tenured professor of Kingdom Death, so there!

White Lion/Gigalion

I believe it is absolutely no surprise to anyone ever that the White Lion family are an exceedingly red subset of monsters, being heavily linked into bones, blood and animalistic nature their design and gear is strongly crimson.  What is extreme is the degree to which it is split, we have almost 2/3rds of the chart dedicated to red affinities.  That's crazy, but it is in part because of the method of counting, items like the Hooked Claw and Cat Fang Knife are adding a lot of red to this.  Still, there is no doubt that White Lion based gear designs should feature more red than blue or green combined.

Gorm

In stark contrast to the White Lion, on paper the Gorm almost looks equally balanced. However, when you drill into the breakdown, you'll find that most of the red affinities sit on weapons (almost all of them) while the armor set is mostly green, with very little blue. In fact precious few good blue gear cards exist at all. 

So this is a good example of how this kind of breakdown can disguise large issues within the monster itself and you have to undertake additional analysis.  With this additional insight we can see that the Gorm's themes are split more on the crafting material wheel - bone = red, hide = green, organ = blue rather than any particular monster based theme.

Screaming Antelope

I don't think there is any monster in the game with as much involvement in different locations/crafting as the Screaming Antelope. It appears in the Stone Circle, Sacred Pool, Barber Surgeon, Dark Water Crafting and the Lion Knight Hybrid Armors. If there was any single monster that defined the heart of Kingdom Death: Monster, it would be this one.

The split is amazingly close to an equal one, with red sitting behind the other two, one of the few rare monsters where this happens. Which suggests that there is no real theme to the Screaming Antelope, and that holds up when you look at it thematically, there's not much to this one outside of it's introduction, the fact that it's a prey animal for White Lions/Spidicules and the Mad God's links to the Hand.

Spidicules

As always, Spidicules is a well designed expansion held back by a few absolutely terrible decisions, so it is no surprise that it has a relatively well balanced pie that reflects the experience of a what life would be like if there was a specific 'leather armor monster' (Its armor is in essence a variation of Leather Armor when you consider affinity numbers). 

The slight increase in green reflects the way that Spidicules tends to have more silk (and silk = hide) 

Flower Knight

There should be absolutely no surprise to anyone that the other twilight monster, the Flower Knight (vespertine) is mostly blue with a large slice of green when it comes to its gear. 

Phoenix

Despite being the old "Rainbow" monster, the Phoenix's issues once again come to light with a thematic failure. Now if we also used the 'requirements' section of the affinities, we'd see an increase in the number of overall affinities, but it would be across the board.

The main red shift in this is because of the Phoenix's involvement in all of the People of the Sun items and they are very, very red pieces of gear because strength is a major theme of the campaign. If you take the Sun gear out, the Phoenix shifts more towards the rainbow section, but still doesn't quite get close because of the weak affinities on the armor set and the large slanting towards red on many of its pieces of gear.

Sunny D

The sunstalker demonstrates the opposite, ignoring prismatic the Sunstalker skews heavily towards the blues and greens. Which you notice when you use its gear parts in mixed sets. Most of the red affinities sit on the bone/teeth based weapons and the armor has a lot of affinities with just one red, so it skews this quite hard. 

This one surprised me somewhat, because my in game experience trends heavily towards a lot of red gear from the Sunstalker and precious little green. 

Best Boi, Mecha-mode

The Dragon King is another almost prismatic monster, but the Dragon Skull Helm skewed things quite hard towards red (it's a very, very red item, one of the most red pieces of gear in the game). 

The Lion God

An echo of its people/worshippers, the Lion God thematically nails it by having a similar look to the White Lions, but with more diversity thanks to the various Mehndi. There isn't much left to say at this point because the Lion God story has a lot of hanging threads and the expansion is rather hollow.

I look forward to revisiting things when we get to the Silver City.

Dung Beetle Knight

The Hidden King Crimson Jewel is skewing things heavily red here as the DBK is not an expansion with a lot of gear cards in it. Still, this mix is not entirely surprising when you consider that the primary way the DBK tends to kill is through crushing, bleeding and direct severe injuries. So I think that the affinities on this one are quite a thematic success.

Slenderman

I've referenced Slenderman before as being a strongly red/blue creature based around themes of memory and bleeding. Here's the split, not a lot of gear cards in this creature's repertoire but they ooze theme. 

Others:

The Butcher, King's Man, Hand and Gold Smoke Knight currently do not have any affinities directly related to their gear. The Hand is thematically prismatic, the Butcher is heavily red and the King's Man has no affinities to go with their loss of identity/"suvivormanity" but we do not have enough information to pin down what the Gold Smoke Knight is going to be, one can speculate that it'll trend towards Green as a natural opponent to the Blue themes of the Watcher, but we'll see.

As for the King's Man/Hand and Butcher, we'll likely get more information when the Wave 3 stuff is finally released... In 2022, probably. 

Interestingly the two Holy Lands monsters (Lion Knight and Manhunter) do not show much in the way of colour trends at the moment. They have precious few items of gear between them, so it's a ridiculously small sample size, but it also splits between Red/Blue and a mild amount of green. Given what we know about the Holy Lands so far, I would imagine that Red/Blue is the dominant affinity colours, while green wouldn't be as strong. This is because the Holy Lands appropriate the natural and pervert it into unnatural - but they still use biological processes at the heart of their hive structure. 

Twilight Order/Watcher

We know that the Twilight Cloak is made from Watcher parts and that there are strong links between the Watchers and the gear used by the Twilight Order (they likely use the bodies of their chosen foe as a weapon against them). So anything from the Twilight Order should be heavily blue affinity focused, be it gear from the Allison scenario Adam designed or from a huntable watcher.  Blue is the colour of Twilight, the mind, memories and the Watchers in general.

So what does all of this mean and how can you use it? Well I've already demonstrated above in the Twilight Order/Watcher section that if you wanted to make a thematically linked and genuine feeling Twilight Order expansion you would trend towards blue as your main colour and keep green & red to a relative minimum (Red is the colour of the White Speakers and they are very much antagonistic to the Twilight Order).

Also, if you're looking to make mini-expansions of extra gear to craft, you can do so by looking at these pies and working out where you should skew things, combined with the previous articles in this series you should have all the information you need now to make informed decisions about using, assessing and even designing your own custom affinities.

And don't forget, sometimes no affinities is as good a choice as putting affinities on something, a strong item with zero affinities is both an interesting challenge and a good balance check. Just because you could stuff your gear with a smorgasbord of every single wish listed ability and affinity you want doesn't mean you should. Pay attention to what APG has set as the bar and work around that, always, you do not know better than the official designers do, no-one does.  It's too easy to build overpowered and overbloated homebrew stuff for this game, sometimes less is more and that applies to affinities equally.