Fully Grounded: #6 Obsidian Tower (Patreon)

This is part of the terrain series, other entries can be found at the contents page here.  

Terrain from Emporium Miniatures. Link:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/EmporiumMiniatures 

• Number: 1 (6 maximum only during Dragon King fights)
• Size: 2x2
• Passive: No
• Activate: Yes
• Obstacle: Yes
• Classification: Defensive/Resource

This expansion based piece of terrain comes with the Dragon King and it is intrinsically linked with the Lava Pool, both from a thematic perspective and mechanically (when fighting the Dragon King).

Most of the time you will encounter just one, single one of these out there in the wild. And it's existence is one of the reasons why I recommend having a King's Spear or Bone Club in any party as soon as possible. Because this destructible column variant is similar to the Salt Statues in that it can be smashed for resources. Iron (or scrap)!

Any place where you can get more iron is a very valuable situation, and this means that you shouldn't hold back on getting this Tower cracked as soon as possible. The ability to potentially gain +1 strength, in combination with the fact that this terrain will get destroyed if the monster passes over it means that it should be smashed up near the beginning of the fight. 

With no club/heavy weapon you will typically get a Broken Lantern from this, which is not that useful, but it does remove it from the deck, improving the rewards at the end of the fight. You should note that the odds are 30/50/20 on the reward split without a club/heavy so that means more often than not this is beneficial.

With a club/heavy the odds shift a lot, this is because you roll 2d10, and that changes everything. You switch from a straight set of odds in 10% increments into a bellcurve. One that really improves the situation for you. Here's the chart of the rolls from anydice.com.

As we can now see, you have a meager 3% chance of getting hit by the worst result. 25% of the time you will get just a broken lantern. 72% of the time you will score an iron and 15% of the time you get a bonus +1 strength in addition to that iron. So yeah, always take a club or heavy weapon if you have the Obsidian Tower in the pool of potential terrain cards, it's worth it.

The other place where Obsidian Towers turn up is when fighting old Godzilla himself, the Dragon King. While attacking DK he will spawn Lava Pool tiles on certain events, such as critical wounds. The Meltdown event can potentially turn those Lava Pools into more Towers, which means the Dragon King is a better source of stats and iron than he initially appears to be. Getting Lava Pools isn't the most common thing, but it is always worth paying attention to it and trying to get him to convert the pools on a meltdown so you can reap the rewards.