Endeavoring for Success: The Manhunter Innovations (Patreon)

The Manhunter cements its position not just though excellent gear, a tense characterful showdown fight and interesting timeline events - but also through a trio of incredibly well balanced and stimulating innovations. We're going to take a dive through the three of them today and really explore what they do, where you should use them and how the value of them slides around depending on your settlement's age, principles and timeline choices.

These three pieces of mechanical poetry are the Crimson Candy, Settlement Watch and War Room.

Crimson Candy

Cost: 1x hunter's heart to innovate, 1x endeavor to activate

Type: Permanent, Temporary, Random

Effects: 10% -1 accuracy, 50% skip next hunt, 40% heal Intracranial Hemorrhage and Gaping Chest Wound. At the start of the showdown each survivor gains monster level survival.

This is one of my favourite 'show don't tell' innovations in the game and it reveals quite a horrific story when you consider the settlement event that creates it (Bleeding Heart), the mechanics of the Hunter's Heart, the Crimson Vial resources, the text on the innovation and the grim, grim artwork.

The Hunter's Heart is a survivor/"human" heart (as close to human as these mutant freaks called survivors get) which has been encased inside a mechanical monstrosity. This heart not only produces the sweet crimson liquid which is found in the vials, but it is also capable of returning to its home destination and reconstructing a dead individual completely (memories, personality, everything - a copy that's so close it's basically the original and might even ACTUALLY be the original). This device is intended to allow manhunters sustenance over long journeys, but it also allows deceased manhunters to regrow themselves on death. The sugary crimson liquid that was their blood will form into solid lumps after a time and this becomes the basis for the crimson candy.

When you make the Crimson Candy, you are in essence taking the regenerating form of the Manhunter and sticking it in a jar, where it will endlessly create more and more flesh for consumption without ever dying fully. This is where the tortured face on that jar fits into the picture, the monster is never going to escape its fate now, a fate where it is consumed for its healing properties for the rest of the settlement's existence. It's like it was punched into an endless timeloop of dying over and over.

Mechanically this gives the survivors access to their own version of the Crimson Vials, candy they consume just before fighting a monster in order to strengthen their reserves of survival with the rush of the Manhunter's sweet, sweet blood.

The candy can also be used to cure two different types of severe injury, Gaping Chest Wounds and Intercranial Haemorrhages. It might seem a little odd to have these two be the ones it cures, but the thematic reasons for this are very strong and tied to the Manhunter's mechanics directly. Haemorrhages stop survival spending and Chest Wounds reduce strength. Strength and Survival are core concepts for the Manhunter. 

This one is at its best for the passive ability, but curing severe injuries, especially Intercranial Haemorrhage is really useful.

Rating: 4/5

Settlement Watch

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Random

Effects: 70% gain 1 random fighting art if you have none, 40% gain +1 strength if you have 0 or less strength.

More than any other innovation in the game, the value of Settlement Watch swings wildly depending on the other aspects of your settlement. That is an incredibly cool piece of design and one which I wish was more common in design. In truth, I think that this 'sliding scale of power' that the Settlement Watch has is one that occurred more through happy chance than actual intention. Irrespective of the why, the end result is an innovation that is valued differently depending on other choices made.

If you have picked Survival of the Fittest, then the 8+ result doesn't do anything, so the innovation is a bit less valuable for your settlement. If you've taken Saga then the 1-7 roll is likewise reduced in worth (because Saga survivors are born with Age 1, which gives them a fair chance at having a fighting art from the start). If you've picked Romantic then the 1-7 roll becomes stronger and so on.

In short, most of the time, when you have correctly pushed your endeavor economy to interesting levels (though Cooking, Tinker and Collective Toil) you can leverage things like this to make previously useless survivors new hunters. 

It's a really synergistic and appealing innovation that scales up and down in very interesting fashions. Having highly interactive innovations that feed into each other in the way that this one does (in ways that are not immediately obvious) is something more innovations and endeavors should aspire to.

Also, having a decent passive bonus helps!

Rating: 3/5 rising to 4/5 for a Protect the Young settlement. Score drops 1 to 2 points if you have Saga.

War Room

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Temporary, Random

Effect(s): +1 survival limit, Quarries cannot leave the hunt board (now defunct), survivors can resist moving backwards on the hunt board, gain reroll(s) for choosing the events on the hunt event table.

This little beauty used to be close to 'essential' in 1.31 because you needed to stop quarries from leaving the board when you were hunting certain L3 versions. 1.5 changed this because not reaching a showdown AND suffering starvation was crippling for settlements and had a strong potential to just cause people to stop playing. 

So, with that change, the War Room did get reduced in power, but the hunt event reroll is something that just cannot be ignored - especially when you note that it can be used multiple times and gives multiple additional rerolls (if you've been good and worked on your endeavor economy as always this can result in a lot of extra rerolls). These can help you avoid the worst of the events and even gamble at getting the better ones - in particular this is one of the main ways you can push to try and hit the Perfect Slayer/Adventure Sword/Muramasa/Etc because these additional rerolls give you more shots at hitting the events that trigger them. 

The 'roll to save against retreating' is something that you don't really think much about until you really begin to consider how wearing it is to be pushed backwards on the hunt track and how much long hunts wear at your survivors armor, insanity and survival reserves. Very useful when hunting the higher level monsters for sure.

And that +1 Survival Limit really helps push this one over the top. Once again tying this innovation back into the core themes of the Manhunter; this time survival and hunting.

Rating: 4/5