Mini-light reviews: Winter Solstice Lucy (Patreon)

Winter Solstice Lucy was Kingdom Death's newest 2020 winter holiday content, much in the same style as the previous holiday releases. Coming with a 50+mm miniature and a 35mm miniature of the same character. This year it is Monster's very best girl (though Echoes III Monk is a close second) - Lucy.

The choice of Lucy as this year's character is especially appropriate, because in Sweden on the 13th of December it is Saint Lucy's day. A Christian feast day that commemorates the saint Lucia of Syracuse. Now this saint apparently brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs and is also one of the variants/adopted aspects of the greek goddes Demeter.  She is celebrated most of all in Scandinavia and Italy as a Lutheran saint. There's a lot of great stuff you can read surrounding this on the web, here's the wikipedia article on St. Lucy's Day and the accompanying one about Lucia as a starting point. According to legend she was eventually martyred a virgin for refusing to marry a pagan.

Survivor Lucy herself here doesn't physically reflect much of the lore surrounding St. Lucy. Which is a bit of a surprise because St. Lucy is often depicted carrying eyeballs (by hand or in a chalice) and wearing a wreath of lights. I don't often critique the stylistic design choices on the miniatures, but I do think that here the more generic Atnas/Christmas aesthetic is  inferior. 

The miniature sculpts themselves are both just fun things for hobbyists to paint, to the 50mm version is a decorative pin up model for artists and even the 35mm model is not very well clothed for in game use. She is wearing some (as yet) unidentified crown, the Grim Muffler, Cloth (body, waist, arms) and Screaming Leg Warmers on her legs. She also has a nice looking lantern and what appears to be a variant Xmaxe (Twilight Knight Holiday promo). The notable missing element here is any form of noisy gear hidden inside her robes, as this is what the Grim Muffler is designed for (see discussion below) it's a little odd that she's not got a Christmas style drum, harp or even cello. 

Both these models are going to be best painted in parts and assembled afterwards. This is because of the cloaks and all the parts that cover up other areas. They're not easy models for the casual painter. I am also disappointed that once again the 35mm Lucy does not have a narrative or stone face base - considering the premium paid for these models the plain plastic face just doesn't cut it.

Onto the Game Content!

The Grim Muffler (Pattern Gear)

Pattern Gear #14 (yeah #13 is currently unreleased) is one of the most significant and important pieces of promotional gear released in recent times. It is also an example of how pattern cards should be designed, creating new space within the game for solving previous problems and/or helping enable new builds or even new hunt party styles.

With thanks to patron timberwolfl for the images.

Crafting Recipe

The crafting recipe for this particular item is very straightforward, you require 1x cloth (starting item, you'll have x4 or maybe x6 of these depending on the number of players in the campaign) and1x hide as the consumed resources. You also require 15 survivors minimum (one who will become bald, probably Allister) and you need to have gained an Organ in the last showdown. That's cheap and craftable in the early game, but it is a meaningful cost. Hide is the best of the three resources and cloth is something that's used in other valuable builds such as Vagabond Armor. 

All of this means that the Grim Muffler itself needs to be good. Well it is.

The Grim Muffler Gear

The Grim Muffler is a body accessory that provides +1 armor to the body, gives a super useful right blue affinity and if that affinity is connected you can ignore survival lost from "cold" hunt events. It's not entirely clear what hunt events are classified as "cold" but this is one of those promotional items where you just need to use your common sense - if it involves ice, snow, or other verbal indicators that the area is cold (i.e. Hunt Event #2 Corpse). It works to prevent that survival loss. I know some rule pedants are going to have problems with this, but this is KD:Monster - technical precision is not something these rules have going for them. You'll have to use your judgement, just like Scoopy Club asked you too.

The final ability on the Grim Muffler is, however, the big one. This little line of text unlocks so much of the game and it is genuinely a shame that this gear is seasonal and costs $60 to purchase because of how much if opens up playstyles in a significant manner.

"One of your gear loses the noisy keyword as you hide it in this cloak."

Yes, that's right, after years of the community avoiding noisy gear and complaining/house ruling the Harvester hunt event to be less restricting, APG have finally provided a promotionally official gear card that lets us bring along one noisy gear without having a 1% chance of having the survivor getting deleted with no mitigation possible. Unfortunately it is stuck on a HEAVY keyword item, which is the second worst negative keyword - so there is still risk involved. But we are often forced to take those risks anyway due to the overwhelming reliance on heavy gear in the late game of Monster's campaigns.

Still in exchange for that you get to bring along options from the following items, things which you've never used before! (Or if you have been using them, you're either brave, foolish, or live in a world where the Harvester has somehow 'disappeared'. Oops.)

I am sure in the future I'll be discussing the impact of these in more detail, but for now the obvious things are:

1. Rawhide Drums + Leader

(Or any other Encourage based ability)

2. Whisker Harp against mood based quarry monsters (Sunstalker, White Lion etc etc) or in combination with Infernal Rhythm from Echoes II.

3. Vespertine Cello + 3x Gorn (non-noisy instrument) to allow for a hunting party of musicians who get +1 luck for the Horns.

Just these three areas which I have initially spotted are exciting enough to make this promotional content significant and important, but as time passes this is something that can only grow in strength. So the heavy keyword; while it is a bummer, is an acceptable price (grumble grumble) for such a significant piece of gear.

Final words

I am biased, I think Lucy is the single best survivor we have out of the known "named" ones (2nd is Echoes III Monk, 3rd is Amanda from the intimacy couple, 4th is Zachary and 5th is Aya) so I have a lot of appreciation for this release. However, if money is not an issue for you, this is objectively a significant and important piece of promotional content on par with the Xmaxe (Christmas Twilight Knight), Vagabond Armor (Aya Before/Beyond the wall), Black Ghost Dagger (Halloween White Speaker) and of course the Ringtail Vixen. 

So if you can afford it, or you want to paint this as well as play with the content mixed in with your other patterns. You should get it as soon as it becomes available again.