Timeline Events: Monster Introductions (Patreon)

Most monsters have an introductory story event, these trend towards being beneficial for the settlement/survivors rather than harmful, and because they are set on your timeline and predicable both in what will happen (mostly) and when it happens you can set up some great opportunities with these. 

We'll run through them all in timeline order, and this will take at least two posts because of the sheer number of monsters that have these events, in truth only the White Lion, Butcher, and Gold Smoke Knight do not have any form of introductory event (Watcher we've looked at in the past, I'm not going to retread that here), everyone else has something. We'll work our way through them from earliest timeline appearance to latest.

The Approaching Storm  (Gorm - Lantern Year 1)

Notorious for inflicting one of the most persistent negative situations on a settlement, the storm brings with it a constant environment of Gorm Climate that does not dissipate until you can innovate Song of the Brave and beat a Gorm (fortunately Music is a VERY strong innovation tree). 

The survivor who Braves the Storm is likely to end up either with the somewhat crippling Absent Seizures disorder (20%) or Blind and +1 Speed (40%), the remaining result scoring +1 survival for returning survivors and Hovel innovated. 

As a consequence, you should be having a Pleb roll on this table, absent seizures is one of the worst disorders to have inflicted on you because it erases fighting arts. So a survivor with that is immediately benched/janitor status unless you can remove it (which is possible later on). 

The Blind & +1 Speed result however has potential to be usable. Extra speed is great on Spears, so a Pleb who is hit with this can be given a King Spear and used as a trapper. Overtime you might even manage to cure this injury. Of course, the risk with one eye is that head injury = retirement. So pack Dried Acanthus or a Gorm potion for protection!

Gaining Hovel with the 7+ result is a mixed bag, while Hovel protects you from some of Gorm Climate, the result it protects is one that promotes healthy hunting practices (rotating survivors), so it's not that great because Hovel adds a lot of very underwhelming chaff to the Innovation deck like Bed, Shadow Dancing and similar. The real standouts are Family, Partnership (Promo version only) and Clan of Death. This lot are all things which become better when your settlement has matured a bit, so Hovel is... well it's more bad than good at this stage because of how it hides away Symposium, Drums and Paint.

In People of the Stars this changes because of how important gaining constellations is and Hovel is at the heart of that. It's nice how a campaign can change priorities.

Endless Screams (Screaming Antelope - Lantern Year 2)

Another dice roll event, while you gain +1 courage for being the Voice of reason the table has a 20% chance of undoing that and giving the survivor a shattered jaw. Shattered Jaw is particually problematic early on because you tend to only have 2-3 survival actions (usually 2) and you lose access to 50% of it. In addition, the White Lion/King's Man is particularly savage towards targets on the ground and as you are without F&T Mastery here, it's often a 'retirement' sentence for the survivor who gets this.

So, on the whole I would recommend a Pleb rolling on this; in Lantern I'd go as far as choosing the Pleb who contemplated the Lantern Horde because they have 40% chance of gaining a second understanding, making them 2/3rds of the way towards becoming your Augury activator. In that state you can then take them out until they  hit the third understanding before deciding what to do. A similar benefit happens to the equivalent survivor in Stars and the advantage of using that particular pleb is the gain of Orator of Death on the 7+ result means you have a potent potential hunter there without ever sending them out. They'll be +2 Understanding, +1 Courage along with the Orator of Death Fighting Art and that's great for this portion of the game.

Young Rivals (Spidicules - Lantern Year 2)

Young Rivals offers you a choice once you know what you are doing with it. Either you can ignore it entirely by having no more than one single male gain hunt XP until it triggers or you can choose to try and leverage it by creating a 1 hunt XP male who is going to become the sacrifice for the other.

If you chose to go the sacrifice route, you're losing out on 1 hunt XP and the progression towards a weapon proficiency (basically setting back approx 1/4 to 1/8th of your hunt party progression, depending on how you play) in exchange for +1 strength, -1 evasion. 

Now the common wisdom out there is that evasion is huge, and it is, for the first 2 members of your hunt party, but members 3-4? They don't need it anywhere near as much, if at all because if they are getting attacked, things generally have gone wrong. As mentioned elsewhere before, strength matters, those breakpoints matter and even +1 strength is big, like really BIG. So if you are good at position play and monster control (both direct via headband and indirect via knowledge of general targeting) then you can leverage this to create an effective DPS survivor using unusual weapons (or making the usual ones even stronger). +1 strength can do a lot to make a marginal weapon like the Scrap Dagger or powerful but under-strength one like the Acid-Tooth Daggers or Silk Whip go a long way. Especially when you combine this with the Monster-Tooth Necklace.

Even if you were not planning the sacrifice in the first place, you might have an opportunity to use it if a male hunter is badly mauled in the first two showdowns, so don't dismiss this as nothing but bad, it does have opportunity baked into it the same as Giant's Blood does.

A Crone's Tale (Flower Knight - Lantern Year 5)

A classic event for building munchkin strategies, the Flower Knight hands out the incredible Sleeping Virus Flower, a +1 Luck all the Blue Affinities gear card that also allows for the equipped survivor to sort of cheat death by partially implanting themselves onto a new survivor.

The general use of this is to get it onto whatever survivor is leveraging luck/deadly and hold there, but you can also use it to protect a valuable set of fighting arts (just remember to read the Warm Virus entry so you understand what is not transferred to the host). But in green armor campaigns this is instead placed on a Pleb who is tucked into deep freeze in the settlement, that is because the flower is used to make Fetorsaurus, one of the most powerful items in the game, and with a bit of fortune and good planning you can have that item constructed by lantern year 10 (potentially LY8 or earlier if you rush blacksmith and get a lucky monster corpse) instead of having to get one from an L3 Flower Knight.

And one should always remember that Crystal Skin survivors can ignore cursed and hand this around as appropriate. Yet another reason to get Crystal Skin!

Phoenix Feather (Phoenix - Lantern Year 7)

Back to the random rolls with the phoenix. This one is 100% the job of a pleb to deal with. You get +1 courage for rolling, but the only good rolls on this table are 2-5 and 4-5 with SotF. Either you end up dead (10%) you gain a Phoenix Feather (40%/20%) you gain +1 evasion and honorable (0%/20%) or you get the absolutely garbage combination of +1 courage, Crazed Fighting Art with the Hoarder disorder. 

There are some, few, situations where Hoarder matters, Stars can make use of it for example to help trigger a constellation, but most of the time you cannot afford to lose that 1 resource each showdown, so you do not want a hoarder in your hunt party.   If you really want the courage and the evasion trigger, be prepared to spend lifetime rerolls.

I feel this event is ripe for a rewrite, it wrongly assumes that the 6+ result is better than the 2-5 ones.

Rolling in the Dark (Dung Beetle Knight - Lantern Year 8)

This is a tough one, now it's mostly beneficial because you get Round Stone Training. Boom, amazing, really powerful innovation there for free. 

But the part you have to think about is which female survivor to use, they're gaining +1 strength, but also gaining Vermin Obsession. Previously in 1.31, Vermin Obsession was problematic, but not crippling. 

Now it's absolutely crippling if it's triggered. If you have a survivor with Vermin Obsession then someone else has to dash flat out to get to that bug patch and remove it while the obsessed survivor stands there doing nothing at all. So I can see targeting a hunter with this one, but you will be seeking to cycle away Vermin Obsession as soon as you can because of how harmful it is. Pick a female hunter with 2-3 disorders if that's the case, or push towards the Barber Surgeon location hard.

Glowing  Crater (Dragon King - Lantern Year 8)

Note: Before we start, a reminder that based on comments from the design team, Gloom  Man's 5 Insanity requirement overwrites 'You are always insane' 

So this event gives one survivor of your choice both Acid Palms and the Husk of Destiny. That's pretty straightforward, think of the Husk as being your 'weapon' (it takes up a gear slot) and jam this onto your Fist & Tooth specialist. 

Outside of that, the only other thing to watch out for is you want to send them mining to try and get to the Crystal Lake and give them Crystalline Skin. Something we often advocate here!

Promise Under the Sun (Sunstalker - Lantern Year 8)

One of the strongest introduction stories out there (narrative wise), the writing on this one is excellent. The result however? Well your main prize is you can now beat up on the Sunstalker, wooo! and the Burning Ambition fighting art, woo... Which allows one survivor to ignore the Skip Next Hunt text.

For the most part this isn't a strong FA, but in combination with Backstabber and the Secretive disorder it is a very powerful way of having a backstabber every single showdown fight without having to deal with Hoarder.  (Also, have you noticed that for some reason the trigger on Backstabber's strain involves the Prey & Secretive disorders, but the fighting art uses Hoarder and Secretive? It sucks to unlock that one via Prey).

Unless you have someone who's skipping hunts often, it's just a nice FA to have, but you end up replacing it. Outside of Backstabber, pick anyone you like to get this one, but it's fine on Hunters & Potentials.

Silver City (Lion God - Lantern Year 13)

Hrm, this one is very much like a bad version of the Glowing Crater above, you get the Stark Raving disorder (always insane), but there is no upside except for the fact that it's a disorder, not a cursed piece of gear.

There are a few sentient weapons/items out there which are solid enough, so you may find Stark Raving beneficial in those cases. And there are a couple of other edge cases where being permanently insane can help, but on the whole? Eh... It's hard to get excited about this one. It's rather a non-event.

Next time we'll look at the nemesis monsters and then it's onto an inspection and investigation of Hunt Events! I've been putting off going through the hunt events and hunt phase in general for a while now, but we can and we should talk about it, because despite it's lack of complexity, it is a third of the game's phases and has a lot of influence on things.

No post Friday. I am fixing the typos in the Gnasher and I have a hospital visit to undergo this week so I have less time than normal. Normal service resumes next Tuesday and if I have the time I'll write a bonus post on the weekend on Deep Madness because I think that game deserves a spotlight.