Protect the King: Twilight Knight in Training Variant Campaign (Patreon)

This one is for those of you who are looking for a real challenge that uses Allison, Alister (The Twilight Knight version), The Order Knights or any of the other Twilight Order miniatures and that is the Twilight Knight in Training Variant for your campaigns.

This variant campaign spins things in a different way to the previous two we have looked at, instead of changing up your survivors with a set of rules to alter their baseline abilities. Here everyone is set based on your normal rules unless you add another variant into the mix; (Twilight Knight in Training of the Sun Skull Bloom anyone?) and provides one of the most challenging and harsh defeat conditions in the game.

Lets take a look at the Twilight Knight in Training variant.

• When you start the campaign , nominate one survivor to be the Twilight Knight. 
• The Twilight Knight starts with the Twilight Sword gear in their gear grid and 3 weapon proficiency ranks in Twilight Sword.
• The Twilight Knight cannot gain Age tokens, can still hunt when retired, never checks their Skip Next Hunt box, and must always depart. 
• The Twilight Knight does not leave the settlement when they reach max weapon proficiency with the twilight sword. 
• If the Twilight Knight dies, the players lose.

That's it, it's pretty simple and for those of you who are familiar with how KD:M treats people who try to protect their favourite survivors (and the problematic clash that this game has between how it wants to be 'settlement matters' but constantly tells you 'individuals matter') you'll already be looking at the settlement deck and considering sliding a couple of cards out of it and back into the game box.

Yeah, good luck finishing this one, but that in itself can be a fun experience as long as you go into the situation knowing this in advance. 

Big Sword, Big Power

One of the ways this variant twists the game experience is how powerful you are early on, because you get the Twilight Sword with 3 Proficiency from the very beginning, you have an overwhelming  amount of firepower for the first couple of fights. 

Not only do you get to ignore Cumbersome from the very start of the campaign, but also the base line accuracy for this weapon is 6+ (and it only improves with every fight).  That is a huge deal, this weapon is strong enough to tackle many L3 monsters and you get to run around with it from the prologue and your TK survivor will never leave the settlement. Whatever I may feel about the Twilight Order and their awful existence, a 1/6+/9 Slow sword is nothing to sneeze about.

However, there is quite an issue left to overcome, the weapon is sentient, so it cannot be used without being 3+ Insanity. I have resolved this issue by adding the gear from the Allison white box  (recommended for any Twilight Order dupes/fans) because of how the Dormant Twilight Cloak works.

Honestly this piece of gear should just permanently be a part of the core game because of how it fixes/improves one of the more obnoxious and problematic experiences in Lantern (everything to do with the Hooded Stranger just S U C K S). This is technically a house rule, but all those white box elements are in essence house rules anyway so, whatever!

Big Power, Big Catches

However, the catch is that automatic defeat condition. If your TK dies, that is the end of the campaign and they have to go out for every single fight. So how can we try and lessen the chances of that death happening?

Well, the single largest opponent to this campaign is our old friend the Murder card. Because your TK will always be out hunting, they gain the maximum possible hunt XP (though they are immune to Phoenix Age Tokens). Which means they are always in the frame for being murdered due to being the survivor with the most hunt XP.

The way around this is to bring out the same three supporting survivors every single fight also, you want to lean into this by getting your survivors all to level up the same amount and hit retirement at the same time.  Retired survivors in this campaign are good, each one you have means one less murder card that can hit your max hunt XP Twilight Knight.

So that means, you get to run the same four survivors over and over for most of the early campaign. It also means that Phoenix Aging is a good thing! Which is a rather neat change to the optimal play style of rotating survivors as much as possible and avoiding retiring them.

The other big killer is the Heavy keyword, due to things like Cracks in the Ground which automatically slay heavy keyword survivors, fortunately you should already be very shy of heavy gear as it is, but in this campaign you should never, ever put heavy gear into the grid of your Twilight Knight.  You should also avoid the noisy keyword, but we're already doing that so it almost goes without saying.

There is one further wrinkle in this entire thing, if you play People of the Lantern, the Hooded Stranger is going to still turn up, however, you should be fine because you already have multiple ranks in Twilight Sword, so you'll get bonuses for the table.

Protect the Queen!

So what other things can you do to help keep your Twilight Knight alive for as long as possible apart from heavy and murder dodging? Well the first and most obvious thing is that this campaign is an 'individuals matter' style of game, that means you are going to want to take Survival of the Fittest, which will help protect your key players by having access to rerolls.

Role?

The Twilight Knight in Training has a very specific role within the hunt party, they are one of your primary blind spot DPS attackers. Positioning them there allows you to reduce the threat to them while giving the best offensive bonuses possible. 

You do not want to have your Knight be the tank or support due to the simple facts that they have one of the strongest offensive weapons (so they should be attacking every turn) and you lose if they die (so they should be the last member of the showdown party alive if others do start dropping).

Gear?

Second set of armor after outfitting a specific tank should be going onto the Knight. The reason you are picking the second set and not the first is because the first set being on a tank, who is going to take most of the AI attacks (if possible) means all those armor points on the tank are 'virtually' on the Knight as well. 

Typically the best armor sets are the offensive orientated ones, which means that you want to be picking from this list once you are past the Rawhide stage:

• Screaming Armor
• Phoenix Armor
• Cycloid Scale Armor
• Dragon Armor
• Rolling Armor

Of these, Screaming Armor has the added benefit of allowing you to 'top up' your insanity if you fall under the required 3 and also gives you access to Acanthus Plants for healing. So it's my highest recommendation, but if you are running a Screaming Support survivor on one of the other party members then you can switch to one of the other three, all of which can give you strength boosts to bolster the already exceptional strength of the Twilight Sword. Rolling Armor is a bit of an exception, it doesn't help with strength but the Rainbow Wing Belt does give you a lot more accuracy which can matter a lot when using a slow weapon.

There is one other option, and that is to run a Gorment Armor Suit, it becomes more useful in this campaign because you want to avoid crippling severe injuries piling up on your Knight, using that will let you do so.

Other pieces of Gear that can be very useful are those that prevent death, stop severe injuries, provide armor or avoid targeting . So we're going to run through some of them quickly now:

• Dried Acanthus - Acanthus/Organ Grinder
• Bloom Sphere - Phoenix
• Healing Potion - Gorm
• Life Potion - Gorm
• Bird Bread - Phoenix
• Leather Shield - Leather Worker
• Bandages/First Aid Kit (On someone else)
• Gloom Mehndi - Slenderman
• Oxidized Lantern Sword (if you want Deflect tokens without carrying heavy gear)
• DBK Plates - Dung Beetle Knight
• Silk Body Suit* - Spidicules
• Full Green Armor - XD
• Green Charm - Stone Circle
• Hunter's Heart - Manhunter

*Better hope your Knight doesn't get taken!

I prefer raw armor points for protection of the Knight over evasion, because most damage dealt to non-tank characters tends to be reactions and outside of a few exceptions (i.e. White Lion) reactions do not deal damage via attack profiles.

If you really want to protect your Knight  I recommend the following loadout (need Sunstalker + Manhunter):

• Twilight Sword
• Cycloid Scale Armor
• Hunter's Heart
• Green Charm
• Dried Acanthus

That gives you lots of power, two ways to cheat death, Dried Acanthus as the backup/anti-severe injury tech and loads of survival gains + other abilities. You can run a shield in one slot if you prefer, but I would keep the Hearth & Charm as they are also protection against Murder, Cracks in the Ground and other similar non-combat events.

In respect of Fighting Arts, you don't have much choice initially, but if you go with the Romantic principle (you should) you can start to improve your choices a bit. Aim for anything that increases survivability such as Tough or Unbreakable and things that give you more survival such as Thrill Seeker (because more survival = more surges and more dodges).

So yeah, while it's a bit of a meme campaign, there's a lot you can do to increase your chances of success and you can also apply all of the above strategy and thoughts to any campaign where you are trying to protect one particular survivor, even if it's only for a temporary period where they are trying to max out weapon mastery or complete a constellation.