Fully Grounded #15: Survivor Corpse (Patreon)

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

Most Terrain from Emporium Miniatures (not this piece as it's a newer release):

Link: https://www.etsy.com/shop/EmporiumMiniatures

• Number: 1
• Size: 1x1
• Passive: Yes
• Activate: Yes
• Obstacle: No
• Classification: Resource

So the probability breakdown on activating this one is very straight forward:

• 20% +1 Insanity
• 30% +2 Insanity, +1 random basic resource
• 50% +3 Insanity, +1 Skull basic resource

Most of the time this is an extra basic resource and some insanity gains, which makes it a very strong and useful terrain piece. Even the fixed result of a skull is very useful, both because it strips one additional basic resource from the deck before monster rewards and because of direct crafting recipes. 

The main options that use skulls (rather than just bones) are:

• Skull Helm - Early Game & later on used in Brawler Armor
• Man Mask - Some surprising builds possible with this hard to craft piece
• Gloom Hammer - The single strongest club we have available to survivors at the moment and one of the best options to use skulls, it requires 2 skulls so survivor corpses are very useful.

On the whole however, you would prefer to score the +1 random basic resource, because a chance of scoring hide is more useful to a settlement than bone. So this is one of those odd little entities where you'd rather roll the midrange result if you have a choice, but any roll of  a 3+ is welcome.

People of the Skull changes this, because the addition of the Skull Ritual creates a situation where every single Skull you find means big stat boosts for survivors. In fact, it's so strong that I would seriously consider spending a lifetime reroll during the showdown (especially from a support plebian) in order to get another chance at scoring that sweet, sweet skull.

The passive ability of this terrain piece is not something you need to consider too much, it's so marginal that it shouldn't really be an impact, you simply interact with the terrain and then it's archived. That means you can remove it on the first turn.

Which brings me to a balance point, I think it would have been a superior option to not have this piece of terrain archive when interacted with and instead limit the interaction to 'once per showdown' (which is easy to remember). If the body still remained on the field for the entire showdown it would provide some tactical challenges in edge case scenarios. That's something this game would benefit more from, because terrain creates variation and opportunity for smart play. So much of the terrain in this game either self archives quickly, or just doesn't do that much - especially given the overall lack of Monster Impassable terrain. But that is something we'll discuss when we capstone this terrain series much later on. For now, we'll keep discussing each piece individually, because you can never be sure what ideas, plans and thoughts may be sparked when you drill into even the smallest portion of the terrain deck.