The Successful Endeavor: Part 1 - Fundamentals (Patreon)

Endeavors are one of the parts of the game that tend to get brushed to the side in discussions about Kingdom Death. It is agreed that they are important, or at least when players get experienced enough to realise that converting endeavors into population a lot is a key element of success. But often, outside of a few small areas, they are not used to their full potential. So this series of articles intends to go through all of the uses that endeavors have in the game, highlighting the strongest ones, why they are so strong and the same for the weakest. But we are also going to pull through all of the most interesting type, that is the situational ones.

I am a long standing proponent of the position that there is no reason for strictly bad mechanics to exist in games. If something is just terrible, it needs to be revised and updated. However, something that is bad in most situations, but amazing in a few of them is a different matter entirely. Situational abilities are amongst the most interesting and skill testing elements of any game, and the endeavors are no exception to this. 

Before we get to the meat of this however, we're going to be taking a look at the overall concepts, mechanics and how we will be undertaking our assessment of each endeavor.

Endeavors the Resource

One of the core concepts which I want to introduce you to, is considering Endeavor tokens to be exactly the same thing as resource cards. While most of the time you cannot convert an endeavor into a piece of gear, they still hold a lot of similar mechanics and forms of generation. They are, at their heart, a resource which is generated by hunting survivors, but, unlike basic/monster resources they are a lot harder to 'farm' (increase in numbers) because there is no way to "crit farm" them during the showdown.

In general, you are going to return from a successful hunt with 1 to 4 endeavors, depending on the number of returning survivors. Every death reduces this number even further, and it becomes very clear when this happens just how important Endeavors are to the growth of a settlement. Especially early on.

There precious few ways to increase the ways of gaining more endeavors, and as a consequence these routes are more valuable than the alternatives. The most commonly chosen one is the Graves Death Principle, which provides 2 Endeavors whenever a survivor dies on the hunt. This gives you a buffer against complete party wipes, a way of potentially recovering lost population and also ways of exploiting various other mechanics to turn population into endeavors which become more population (via the Heart Flute + a Nemesis Monster with acceptable loss trigger, typically the King's Man or The Hand). 

In fact, the core concept of this, Endeavors as Resources, is why Cannibalize is so much weaker than Graves. There is no mechanical or game reason for any settlement to pick Cannibalize because it returns 1x basic resource on death instead of 2x endeavors (for hunts, 1x for settlement losses). That's half the number of resources returned, those basic resources rarely generate replacement population (Love Juice is the exception) and Endeavors are directly worth 1x Basic resource. So Graves is baseline twice as good as Cannibalize before you even get into the +1 Understanding and potential to get +1 Luck on a new survivor. It's one of two 'no brain' "choices" in the Principles (The other is Romantic over Barbarian, Romantic is so much better it's not even worth discussing).

So the first stop on any settlement's journey, unless they are being piloted by a very skilled and experienced player(s) or picked by a memelord hipster who just wants to 'not be meta' without understanding really why the meta is the meta; is taking Graves. 

There are two other core ways to generate additional endeavors, and these are the Principle Collective Toil, which gives you 1 endeavor per 10 population and Cooking. I've already called Cooking one of the strongest endeavors in the game, and I stand by that. People think it is because of the recipes. No, it's because the Endeavor is worth THAT much. I would straight up pick an Innovation that just read +1 Endeavor over so many other options in the Innovation deck. 

Collective Toil is an interesting one, because it is one of the few mechanisms outside of Gear creation that really rewards investing. In this case it's a reward for investing in population. Every 10 Population gives back 1 endeavor, which is actually a really incredible amount. A Collective Toil/Protect the Young settlement can leverage this to a great portion because they have a 18% chance of generating a 10 on intimacy, which (without Hovel, or with a Savior in your settlement) turns into +2 population. But even a good Survival of the Fittest settlement can achieve 30+ population without any mechanical abuse. You've got to just be smart about your endeavor usage and Intimacy rolls. My last settlement hit 20+ Population within 10 years even through multiple murders, for example.

It's also the only real way to "exponentially" grow your endeavor tokens, and while a 1000+ population gets pretty stupid with collective toil, it is fun to do it at least once so you can really explore even the most marginal of Endeavors (or create an effectively infinite pile of Stone Noses to sleep on, turn into walls, eat as soup etc etc).

In short, Endeavors are precious, they are worth almost as much as most monster resources and you should be measured, thoughtful and intelligent with your usage of them. Even though a lot of the time the correct answer is 'make more babies', because the game likes to attrition your population during the settlement phase a lot. (Case in point, the aforementioned  settlement of mine had around 15 deaths, only 1 was during a hunt/showdown).

Types of Endeavors

Now we shall get onto the places where you can spend your endeavors. That is Innovations and Locations. These Endeavors tend to fall into generating one of two different categories. Permanent and Temporary Bonuses.

Permanent Bonuses

Permanent Bonuses give you one of two things, either they are permanent upgrades for your settlement that cannot be lost, for example Locations. Or they are "effectively" Permanent unless something else causes them to be lost - for example Population, Gear, Resources and Innovations.

In general terms how permanent something is can be ordered as follows (from most permanent to least):

• Locations
• Innovations
• Gear
• Survivor Stat Bonuses
• Population
• Resources

Kingdom Death likes to tell us that Population is a resource to be spent, and in exchange it won't touch the other things, but it is, of course, just like it's creator - a bit of a major liar. In truth, it will take anything and everything from you if it can, but typically it doesn't take locations away and rarely does it take innovations (Except for the Gorm, because babies are selfish). Still, enjoy playing a game that can take 30+ weeks to complete that can, and will, undo your progress on a whim.

Temporary Bonuses

Temporary Bonuses are literally that, they're bonuses that will last for a set period and no longer. Often this is a lantern year in length, but it could be as small as 'during the next roll'. It entirely depends. What you do know is that you're going to be spending a resource for a benefit that is less enduring than the Permanent ones above.

As a result of this, you want Temporary Bonuses to be as good as they possibly can be for the circumstances under which you are using them. Temporary Bonuses tend to be far more situational by their very nature, so you want to be smarter with how you use them.

Random Bonuses

Finally, because Monster would not be Monster without them, there is a third sub-sub category and that is Random Bonuses. In these cases you could get a temporary bonus, you could get a permanent one, or you could even get a kick in the teeth. Who knows until you make that roll? They are, in essence a gamble, and that's the heart of Ameri-Trash/Thematic Games, it's corrupted, black, leaking heart. Variance. 

If you don't like these, you have to minimize the amount that you use them, but unfortunately for all, the Organ Grinder has a settlement essential location Endeavor which
is an exemplar of this exact situation. Augury. Woo.

We'll look at it right now in order to provide the template for the future articles.

Augury (Organ Grinder)

Cost: 1x Endeavor

Type: Random, Permanent, Temporary

Effect(s): -1 Resource, +1 Understanding (30%) or Roll on Intimacy Table (aka +/- Population) (30%) or +1 Survival (40%)

As the most important endeavor in the entire game, Augury is one of the few ways you can trigger Intimacy. It is found on the Organ Grinder and at its base line it is; 

Spend an Endeavour for:

• 30% -1 Resource +1 Understanding
• 40% +1 Survival
• 30% Intimacy

As a result, it is the first gate in gaining population and a large portion of why population control can be so frustrating. It can be further influenced by having a 3+ Understanding survivor undertake the Endeavor, which gives +1 to the roll and modifies the odds of the Resource/Understanding and Intimacy results as follows:

• 20% -1 Resource, +1 Understanding
• 40% +1 Survival
• 40% Intimacy

But that's only a 33.33% Increase in the odds of getting Intimacy to occur, so that is why other methods of generating Population, such as the Hunt Phase, Love Juice and Matchmaker are so valuable. So look out for ways to increase survivor courage to 3 during the Settlement Phase, because Matchmakers are an incredible support to this action.

If it wasn't so essential to the lifeblood of a settlement, the random nature of this endeavor would make it something to be avoided. But that is not the case, even settlements of the Sun which have an automatic Intimacy for Endeavor every year, still have to rely on Augury for the grunt work. This is the devil you know.

Rating: 3/5 but essential.

And that's it for now. Going ahead we will work our way through all of the various Location Endeavors and then the Innovation ones through the coming weeks!