Hunting for Success: The Halfway Article (Patreon)

So, we have finished our lengthy jaunt through the entire hunt table and reached a point where the full break down allows for an extensive analysis of its makeup. Doing this means we're better positioned to understand the odds of the basic event portion of a hunt and exactly what it does to your party. We will be moving on to each individual monster next, because we need to understand what they add to the mix, but this here is the base ingredients broken down.

The hunt phase is designed to wear at the survivors, chipping at their protections in order to soften them up before they reach the monster. It is intended to represent a journey in darkness, one where danger lurks around every pillar and even the landscape of your mind is not safe from assault. 

When it comes to a thematic and mechanical assessment, it has to be said that the Hunt Phase is actually quite brilliant. When you have two exceedingly heavyweight phases in a game, the third phase would best serve the experience if it is something a bit lighter. The Hunt Phase certainly is light, it is in fact simpler than games like Tokaido  and this is due to its ancestry. We'll discuss that briefly before moving on.

In 1995 Games Workshop released the grail game classic Warhammer Quest (WHQ), this random dice chucker had a lot of rough edges, but at the core was a superb loop of procedurally generated phases. 

• Adventure in a dungeon
• Travel through the wilderness to civilisation
• Buy gear, drink in the tavern, level up and try not to get too badly dinged up while being in a settlement

This loop was taken wholesale from WHQ and converted across into the three phases we have in Kingdom Death. However, the third phase was bulked up considerably by having the players construct their own civilisation - turning the settlement you return to into its own living, breathing character that grows and evolves. Add onto this the simple fact that the Showdown Phase is a hulking beast of gameplay mechanics and you end up with a game that already takes a considerable amount of time to get through a cycle. 

This is where the Hunt Phase fits in as a breath of fresh air, it is a solid and interesting abstraction of journeying expressed in board game form, you get to see snippets of the world the survivors live in from their perspective. You have moments you can speculate on, catch sight of other quarries and marvel at weird beasts/moments/characters. It's exactly the length I want it to be and exactly the depth it should be. It's probably the most perfect and polished of the three phases. It's also the most maligned, and I after all this time diving into the phase, I think that's not a correct position to have. Could it be more than it is? Yes. Could it have more mechanics? Yes. Could it feel like a hunt with a different system? Yes. Should it change?  Absolutely not.

Now I do not mean that the Hunt Phase events themselves are fine, this is the portion of the game which could be considerably improved and refined. Too many of the events are random dice-fests with zero decision making involved. You're not asked to choose to take a risk and possibly get punished, instead X happens, suffer Y. 

But that is NOT the fault of the mechanics, not at all, it is the fault of the events themselves. Things like the Harvester or Sinkhole or the Gambler should not exist in the form they present. Things like that have dominated the metagame for years now, and will continue to do so. Stuff like the Grim Muffler only exists because the player base has (rightfully) refused to interact with instruments because of the Harvester. But it is at best a band-aid that comes with its own considerable downsides. 

Just like the settlement event deck, the basic hunt table is filled with bad design decisions from someone who firmly believes that a 50+ hour campaign with perma-death is well balanced by having 'rocks fall and you die' as a main theme for mechanics. It's what's known as artificial difficulty, it doesn't really make the game harder, it just makes it more randomly punishing.

So, all of that written, it's time for us to get into the actual breakdown of the hunt phase, or more specifically, what tools/elements are the most beneficial and which ones are the most harmful. In short, what should one bring on a hunt and what should one avoid?

Whips 

A huge winner in this phase are whips, this is unsurprising because one of the major objectives given to Zachary Barash was revising the basic hunt phases and making whips more valuable during them. Effectively pouring large gollops of Indiana Jones into the game by having whips become the catch all solution to life's adventuring problems. A problem comes along? You must whip it. A bird attacking a friend? You must whip it. A friend falls in the hole? You must whip it. It's not too late, to whip it, whip it good.

Now, the problem with this approach is a failure to understand why Whips are so underused in Monster. The issues wasn't with having enough utility around whips, it was a combination of limited gear slots (we don't get to have hunt phase slot gear vs. showdown slot gear), poor statlines on the whips, a lack of options and an underwhelming mastery. If we were not in a situation where we have exactly 4 whips (+1 upgrade to them), things would be different. (Also the fact that the Rawhide Whip needs ammonia, which also the Hunter's Whip requires, means that there is almost no position in the game where you'd make the Rawhide Whip).

However, Whips are a HUGE winner when it comes to the Hunt Phase. They are the single most useful gear card with relevance in 8% of hunt events (that's almost twice as often as the next best positive thing). This means owning a single Silk, Leather or Rawhide Whip can make a massive difference during the hunt phase. As long as the individual suffering the event isn't the whip wielder... It can help score you resources, protect gear and even gain population.

The Whip protects against some of the nastiest events in the table and you should be always trying to work out if you can fit either a rawhide whip (if you are not going to attack with it) or a Silk/Hunter's Whip into your hunt party because the benefits are huge. 

Sickles

We have but one sickle available at the moment, the Bone Sickle, and it is the second most beneficial entity one can bring with you for the hunt phase as it has a positive impact in 5% of basic hunt events, helps gather acanthus, contributes during the Mineral gathering and also provides access to the wonderful Herb Gathering Special Hunt Event. This one is essentially a must have as soon as you are able to spare the leather to construct it.

Pictographs

The surprise breakthrough (not really) into the top slots is Pictographs. This innovation which gives access to the Warhammer Quest 'run away' chart, used to be something that was abused during 1.31 Monster because you could run away at absolutely any time you felt like. It was (rightfully) fixed and has now become one of the least important innovations in the game for most strategies. Only really turning up in settlements that seek to use Last Man Standing or the Red Ring of Death.

But, this is not to say that Pictographs is completely useless. It has a massive impact in the hunt phase, not only providing access to benefits in 4% of the hunt table, but also unlocking one of the most powerful tables - writing into the Scribe's Book. While you would not go out of your way to innovate Pictographs, it is worth remembering that it is the third best thing you can do to improve your hunt experiences AND it doesn't add any more innovations to the innovation deck.

Pickaxes

Close behind pictographs comes the Pickaxes, which are a pure resource (iron) gaining machine, you are going to be using one of these for sure when you transition into the mid/late campaign. 

Pickaxes have a huge amount of benefits, not only giving you access to iron, but also being the only way you can get the superb Crystal Skin ability into your settlement, and you can read more about that here.

The Rest

When it comes to the rest of the beneficial things, they have very small impact, so I'll briefly itemise them. 

• Graves vs. Cannibalize - identical numbers of events they help on. Graves gives Courage/Understanding/Survival while Cannibalize gives basic resources.
• Song of the Brave affects 2% of events positively and 1% negatively. However the negative is disorder related, so minor.
• Leader has a positive impact in 2% of events and can gain population.
• Unconscious Fighter is the only way you can be sure that a male hunter will not get neutered and lose the ability to pass on stuff to descendants. Always take Unconscious Fighter on male hunters (otherwise, just use females).
• Hours Ring has a very strong benefit in one hunt event and coupled with its amazing ability, it's something you should consider making whenever you hunt the phoenix and score its butthole.
• Strategist is how you get access to the Gregalope
• Momento Mori has two positive events.

Now let us move onto the negatives.

Insane

Being insane is one of the single largest punishments you can suffer during the hunt event. 1% of events are positive for the insane, 8% of them are negative and the downsides include death. However, the largest punishments are reserved for parties who depart with an entire roster of mentally damaged individuals. Just one or two sane survivors can help the insane avoid the worst of the situation. Also Survival of the Fittest now stops the party wipe that happens for a fully insane party during Feet. Nice.

Noisy

The original Grue of the hunt phase, forever Noisy has been a keyword trap that results in the end of the life for your first musician and then an avow to never use an instrument again. This of course changes for those people with access to the Gorn and the promotional Grim Muffler, but overall the noisy problem, that is the fact that the Harvester event completely deletes noisy survivors with no counterplay, remains.

In addition, noisy punishes you in a few other places; but coprolalia (a typical symptom of Tourettes syndrome) has an upside when you encounter the Trollbird. It's not enough of one to make up for the previous paragraph. So avoid being noisy unless you can muffle it.

Soluble & Fragile

These two are less problematic than Noisy, but you do have to pay close attention to them. Both keywords are capable of 'self deletion' that is the gear they are attached to can be archived by hunt events. Fragile more so than soluble (3:1 ratio). However, this is a more acceptable downside to deal with, because if you don't use the item, you don't get the benefit. Just try and avoid making fragile gear a centerpiece of your strategies.

Disorders

We've already mentioned Coprolalia above, but there are several other disorders that can have quite negative effects. Binge Eating is one such case (it can be cancelled with a broken jaw), but also watch out for Squeamish, Haemophobia and Anxiety. Honorable is one of the few "positive" disorders, but mostly because it self erases when it becomes an issue.

Twilight Sword & Marrow Hunger

Honorable mention to the Twilight Sword and Marrow Hunger, both of which cause Murder to visit your settlement. There's not much one can do here outside of follow the usual 'murder bait' strategies (leaving high XP savior/Phoenix aged survivors in the settlement to suck up the murder and protect the survivors who actually matter).

Other mentions

Watch out for Extra Sense, it causes you to wander into a dream occasionally and gain +4 hunt XP in exchange for a basic resource. Quixotic in combination with Monster Droppings should always be a consume (30% chance of getting immortal + perma-Quixotic) and the following Innovations all have positive benefits on hunts, just in a very low number of cases.

• Memento Mori
• Sculpture
• Drums
• Hovel
• Lantern Oven
• Symposium
• Records
• Storytelling

Blind and Deaf are both mostly positive events (watch out for the Dead Warrior Percival promo if you are deaf) and 3+ understanding/courage is always a positive.

We're going to pick up next time with the White Lion's hunt phase and discuss exactly what it brings you when you hunt it. So you can combine this generic list of benefits with the monster specific ones in order to really smooth out your hunts and make them a delightful walk through the darkness!