Hunting: Preparation, Preparation, Preparation (Patreon)

It's been a long time coming, but with the completion of all the basic hunt event cards I'm now going to move into an analysis and breakdown of the core game hunt phase. To be clear, this series is not going to be a critique of the phase, there have been plenty of those elsewhere, instead we are going to be embracing the hunt phase as an integral and vital part of the game experience. We'll be looking at how to approach preparation, handling the process and even drilling into the game theory of why the hunt phase is the way it is.

As the updates have shown, until (at a minimum) we reach the Abyssal Woods/Inverted Mountain setting, this design is here to stay and its integral to the way that the new encounters are being built. Accept it, embrace it and enjoy it, because it's the best option we have right now (yes, playing with the official rules is the best version here).

Theory of the Hunt

So what is the hunt phase trying to achieve? 

It is a somewhat abstract charting of the hunt party's journey through the darkness as they seek out their chosen quarry. It is (to quote) an opportunity to create suspense and surprise and it should be "read aloud without revealing the possible outcomes". 

In short, it's a roleplaying experience, built around the old journey tables from Warhammer Quest, but also providing a lite version of the "red line" journey that roleplayers take when they are on an "A to B quest". It's the things that happen along the way.

Mechanically, it has a different function under the hood. The Hunt seeks to wear down the survivors with its combination of damage, survival losses and occasional destruction of gear or survivors. Survivors who arrive at a showdown without any hunt damage tend to succeed more than they fail, and the longer the journey one takes, the more variance involved.

Each hunt is constructed as follows:

• 1 Starting Survivor Space
• 1 End 'Starvation' Space
• 1 Overwhelming Darkness / Forest Gate
• 1 Monster Space
• 2-5 Monster Events (which can trigger more basic hunt events)
• 1-2 Top level Basic Hunt Events (including Object of Desire, Baby & the Sword, Dead Warrior, Sword in the Stone as well as basic hunt events from the table).
• 0-3 Special Hunt Cards (placed in addition to other cards on the space)

That's right, basic hunt events, as in the ones which appear on the table, make up a tiny portion of the initial deployment. But, because of monster cards, backtracking and any empty space causing a basic hunt event (such as when the monster moves away from the hunt party). The number of basic hunt events can be much higher than initially anticipated. We'll look at this in more detail when we consider each monster's individual hunt.

There is an overwhelming number of variables involved in the hunt phase, it's got one of the most intricate step matrices in the game, with plenty of loops, exceptions and other possibilities. So there is a huge amount to consider when you look at navigating and mitigation. But we will start with the core fundamentals.

Fundamentals of the Hunt

Any settlement can build in support of a good, healthy hunt, if they choose to embrace the hunt phase rather than dismiss it as 'monopoly' or 'the worst part of the game'. Yes the Hunt Phase has some frustrating elements, but one would argue here that it is exactly what it needs to be as long as players understand that they are constantly making choices which influence their hunts. 

Because the hunt will attack survivors on a number of different fronts, event damage, event brain damage, archiving of gear, bleeding, survival losses and more, there are a huge amount of options you have towards protecting your survivors and/or leveraging advantages from the hunt phase.

Lets get to the important categories:

Principles

While there are multiple, overt references to principles during the hunt phase, there is one choice which dominates your play style.

Birth Principle

Your birth principle has a very dramatic and sweeping effect on how you should play the game. There is categorically no RIGHT choice between Protect the Young and Survival of the Fittest, they are very close in terms of power, but you have to adapt your playstyle and choices to reflect which one you've chosen. 

A Survival of the Fittest (SotF) settlement can be far more reckless and rash than a Protect the Young (PtY) one because they have chosen to invest in individual survivors over the settlement as a whole. They can avoid losing as much on the hunt thanks to their lifetime rerolls, and they are more durable when they reach the showdown; but Protect the Young settlements have invested in an overall more stable and safer population number. 

• SotF are less likely to lose survivors in the showdown and have some mitigation during the hunt, but they suffer hard from setbacks, especially lost hunts.
• PtY are less likely to lose all their population and are more resistant to accidents and set backs.

In People of the Stars in particular these two Principles are neck and neck in power because of how strong the Intimacy table is in that campaign.

In respect of the hunt, one of the most important things to understand is as a PtY settlement is you need to take the hunt phase more seriously and pack more mitigation. You can't spend a red shirt's reroll to save a favorite hunter. So you need to prepare and think about every situation in more detail and with more consideration of consequences.

One of the biggest things a PtY settlement can do is bring along two whips on every hunt (until they have a Prepared survivor who can avoid being the straggler while carrying a whip). Whips allow for a LOT of mitigation if they are not in the hands of the straggler - but if the straggler is the one with the whip. Then that's not going to work - but if you have two whips, boom.

So I do, really consider the Rawhide Whip to be a useful hunt tool, even if it is a kind of terrible weapon (unless you have a super beefy survivor), so once you have access to ammonia you should be considering if you'll be spending 2x bone and 2x hide to get this protection online.

Other Principles

Of the other principles, they have less of an impact on the hunt phase; but to summarise:

• Graves is a better choice than Cannibalize always
• Accept Darkness has more synergy with SotF
• Collective Toil is more powerful than Accept Darkness and also has more synergy with PtY
• Romantic is streets ahead of Barbaric

Gear

While one sometimes showcase 9 slot gear grids for unique, individual survivors that can do interesting things. Overall one advocates the design of 7-8 slot builds. Leaving 1-2 spaces for support items on all survivors. While most traditional support items are loaded onto a single character (Cat Eye Circlet, Bandages etc), there is a lot of benefit towards loading one character with many support items, there are also some which should be spread around, in part because they provide other benefits and also to avoid the 'all your eggs in one basket' situation.

The most important pieces of hunt event gear are:

• Rawhide Whip (*)
• Bone Pickaxe  (*)
• Bone Sickle
• Sky Lure & Sky Harpoon
• Reverberating Lantern
• Tool Belt
• Almanac - relatively unimportant

There are sometimes other pieces of gear referenced during the hunt phase, but these are the core tools. You'll typically carry them in singles with the exception of the ones I've marked with a (*)

I've already discussed why the Rawhide Whip is so important (but you can subsitute in a Hunter's Whip or Silk Whip if you're actually using it as an offensive tool. The Silk Whip in particular is very competitively priced and powerful for the early portion of the game - it's 1x large appendage and 1x bone, so double bone with no need for ammonia). Note that Whips stop you getting Crystal Skin.

Pickaxe/sickle/lure & harpoon all function in the same way, they provide additional events that can give out resources, unique abilities (crystal skin) and ways of regaining survival. The Tool Belt helps support this by giving big benefits to a survivor who choose to fight with a tool.

The Reverberating Lantern is one of the single most powerful hunt tools out there, not only is it a lantern, but it also provides a huge boost of either survival or insanity when the hunt party needs it. It, along with the Tool Belt and Deathpact are all amazing items that can't be ignored.

Before we move on, it's time to lament one casualty of the hunt phase.

Instruments

Sadly, because of the existence of the Harvester hunt event:

Instruments are an incredibly high risk piece of gear and should be avoided with the exception of the Gorn (which is not noisy) or if a survivor has coprolalia (aka the most common known form of Tourette's) and is noisy regardless. The way that this card just deletes a single survivor with no mitigation is the single most dominant part of the "gear meta" in the game. There's not a lot you can do about this, the dream of the wandering band with drums, cello, horn and harp is nothing more than a meme because every single time you roll on the basic hunt event table there's a 1% chance that a Shai-hulud will "super-doomed" kill you. This is the only part of the hunt event system I wish would change, hopefully we see something in Campaigns of Death, but it might be we have to wait until the Abyssal Woods / Inverted Mountain hunt events to get something different happen. 

Innovations

Innovations provide two different benefits in hunts, the first is the more overt form given in a higher survival limit, survival when departing and the reroll provided by the War Room. The War Room (Manhunter) is in particular very notable, because of the reroll it provides. 

Still, there are plenty of other innovations that have an impact on the hunt, and we'll look at those when we drill into various important hunt events, but they tend to boil down to two different categories. Either they're essential/powerful innovations (like Symposium and Drums) or they're niche ones that have a marginal ability but unlock several different things (like Memento Mori or Pictographs).

Now because you have little, to no control over what basic hunt events are going to turn up, 

Fighting Arts

There are precious few fighting arts that can be used to mitigate and control the flow of the hunt phase. The most famous of these is Otherworldly Luck (OWL), which gives you an optional +1 bonus to any roll - I can't remember if it's been ruled otherwise, but remember that the hunt event table is a roll.  

There is also the Infinite Lives strain fighting art, which provides a massive pool of replenish-able rerolls at the 'cost' of locking your survivors in place and stopping them gaining any new fighting arts.

There is also Seasoned Hunter from the Manhunter  (because it is the hunt event expansion), but to be honest the mitigation/benefit it provides is so small it's not worth keeping over other options - so if you have it, fine it might do something for you, but eventually you'll end up replacing it.