A Post Mortem on the Dung Beetle Knight (Patreon)

There once was a lowly beetle that was hopelessly attracted to Phoenix droppings. Their strange qualities evolved the beetle rapidly. One day, the Phoenix migrated to a sacred grove and the beetle's food came under the fierce protection of a Flower Knight. The beetle emulated the knight in order to reach its meals without incurring the guardian's wrath.

Resourceful and hungry, this cunning species has evolved a knight's shape to fool booth predators and prey. It rolls a massive resin ball formed from spit used to collect rare faeces for its meals. The Dung Beetle Knight is an extremely difficult foe

• Dung Beetle Knight lore

Unused art of the DBK inscribing language onto the interior of the dung ball. Something which was only partially explored in the Flower Knight introduction.

So, you voted overwhelmingly for the Dung Beetle Knight to be the next feature creature to get a deep dive, investigation and visual guide. The Dung Beetle Knight is; for myself, the third most interesting and enjoyable of the “Node 3” monsters, ahead of the Phoenix and behind the Dragon King and the Sunstalker. The latter two represent the most interesting and synergistic pairing of quarry monsters in the game and I cannot highly recommend that pairing enough.

However, the Dung Beetle Knight (DBK) expansion is a different beast from those two expansions, it offers an almost seamless integration into almost any combination of expansions you wish to use. It has the capability to be both a main quarry target, where you hunt it over and over for the best of its gear and use it as the backbone for the settlement's gear builds and as a 'splash quarry' where you just hunt it occasionally for specific purposes while focusing on other targets as the main goal. It's pretty rare for a monster to be a comfortable fit into the second role and incredibly rare for it to also be a good main quarry to boot. We'll look at why it fits into both of these, but before that we'll explore the lore, thematic and mechanical construction of the DBK in detail.

Rest in peace TOM, you deserved so much more, but a glorious death in battle is all we can give you.

Poopy Lore

The DBKs place in the world of Kingdom Death is currently quite a small one; it is a form of scarab beetle which has evolved through its diet. Consumption of Phoenix poop has a wide range of unusual effects on survivors, and this species of scarab was also not immune. They were impacted by the Phoenix's time altering capabilities (which are held in its cloaca) and experienced hundreds of thousands of years of evolution – allowing them to grow from a small insect stature into a bipedal form capable of tool use.

Their dependence on the Phoenix is so strong that when the species mostly fled from nesting in the Plain of Stone Faces because of the events that caused the end of the White Lion civilisation and the rise of the Watchers they followed into the safety of the Abyssal Woods, though they prefer to spend their time collecting poop from the plain; probably because Phoenix dung in the abyssal woods doesn't reach the ground as much as they would like. We read about one of these DBK making its journey in the Flower Knight introductory story – from the perspective of a survivor who crawled inside a dung ball.

The other interesting aspect of the DBK in respect of its migration to the Abyssal Woods is its decision to mimic the Flower Knight rather than confront it. This stands a bit counter to the mechanical understanding of the two creatures, DBKs are some of the most fearsome monsters in the entire setting and more than capable of dunking the rather puny Flower Knight because she is nowhere near their weight class. This suggests a level of respect and understanding about the Abyssal Woods and its relationship with the Flower Knight. Killing the Flower Knight both appears to be a waste of time as she seems to come back each time she is slain and it also might be harmful to the Abyssal Woods itself.

It is also very interesting that the DBK constructed their own blades, the Calcified Juggernaut Blade appears to be constructed from dead or shed DBK parts as it is built from either its own shed shells or the parts of its ancestors. This both ties into the clear sentient tool using portion of the species and also a part of its pop culture references. Likewise the art 

Ultimately the DBK is a very interesting portion of the world, but it is not as well fleshed out as it could be. Which is where its inclusion with the highly anticipated Abyssal Woods is so exciting. Wave 4 can't come soon enough!

Real World Inspiration

In order to fully understand a monster it is also worth coming to understand its real world influences. In most cases every monster is a chimera, a blend of multiple different concepts, often a mix of real world stuff and pop culture, this smashing of bizarre concepts together results in some unique and memorable entities. The Dung Beetle Knight however wears its real world inspirations on its sleeves, it is literally the combination of a Scarab Dung Beetle and a medieval Knight. It has a few other references baked into it, but they are all just little pop culture memes, the vast majority of its concepts come from this idea of 'what if a dung beetle was big, and was a knight?'

All dung beetles belong to the scarabaeodia superfamily (scarab beetles), however it is possible to narrow down what specific kind of dung beetle the DBK most resembles with a great deal of ease. The large horn and the specific references to rainbow colouring make it clear that it was based on Phanaeus vindex, also known as the North American Rainbow Scarab. Which makes a huge amount of sense because this is found in the eastern US (where APG is located).

Phanaeus vindex is a pretty neat little scarab, like all dung beetles it is a vital part of the ecosystem, they help keep the amount of faecal matter in the world down, which keeps the fly population under control. But also this particular species pairs up and digs burrows under poop, which moves it down into the tunnels below for their young. It's pretty disgusting to us, but heaven to them. This is where the DBK gets its tunnel network concept from. Something it employs both offensively during the fight and also uses for its farming.

It's worth noting that insects are supported by an external skeleton, aka a carapace. Exoskeletons are an excellent way of protecting a lifeform, however they have one serious issue – they cannot support growth beyond a set size. In order to grow to a large size you require an endoskeleton like our metallic calcium based one. This means that the DBK must have some form of internal skeletal structure. You would expect to see thin bones, bone cartilage or gristle inside in order to help keep the DBK able to stand at this size without it just breaking apart or being unable to move.

In respect of the Knight portion of the DBK's behavior, we have already seen how this creature chooses a non-confrontational way to co-exist with the Flower Knight, but there are numerous references to the honourable way that these creatures conduct themselves. Most notable is the very tragic tale of Tom (The Old Master) which is a rather heart wrenching tale of a warrior with dementia/Alzheimer's seeking death in battle against his lifelong survivor friend rather than becoming nothing other than a mindless savage.

It is also worth acknowledging that portions of the DBKs knight-like behaviour are also references to the Samurai, but given Adam's weeb nature these references are mostly pop culture samurai rather than actual historical samurai. This is often the case in Monster, real world cultural references are filtered through pop culture rather than directly from history.

Which leads us nicely into...

Pop Culture References

There are a whole bunch of tiny little pop culture references laced into the DBK, some of which are nothing more than a single card or line, so we're going to push through them with a bullet list as that works best here:

• Century Carapace – The DBK strikes a sentai pose in homage to Kamen Rider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamen_Rider). While he is no Mumen Rider(https://onepunchman.fandom.com/wiki/Satoru), the Kamen Rider is a beetle costumed Japanese super hero who had some influence on  American culture in the 90s.This series has been running for years and there are some excellent YouTube videos on its history and cultural impact.

• Basketball/Dodgeball – The DBK literally dunks the survivor who is impacted by the trap into the dung ball in one of the most spectacular and dangerous traps in the game. The DBK also engages in dodge-ball, a particularly cruel portion of American gym and also a rather amusing movie staring Vince Vaughn, Christine Taylor and her husband Ben Stiller. There's a LOT of basket-dodgeball in this one, like a lot.

• Dragonball Z – The DBK can literally power up into a new form, this is further supported with the currently forgotten Perfect DBK / Super Survivors Wave 4 content. Oh Wave 4, please come back, I miss you so much.

Look at how amazing he looks, rest in development hell my friend.

• Samurai – in addition to the knight-like traits, there are small elements of the samurai also mixed into this creature. You can see them, but they are very much subservient to the European Knight traits. It was probably intended that the DBK is more samurai than knight, but the final execution lands firmly away from samurai.

• Small World – Just a quick little reference/play on words in the Smell World status card.

• Botflies – a couple of cards make reference to this absolutely horrific pest, the botfly lays its eggs in mammals and the young cause a lot of distress and/or damage before they hatch out. This suggests that the DBK has more mammalian traits than you would think, if Botflies hang around DBKs then they must be warm-blooded and a capable host for the parasite.

• Lacking sword skill – it is shown in a few places that the DBK lack finesse and skill with their blades, they are capable of dealing a lot of damage with them, but their parries are sloppy and their strikes lack the talent and training of the Entity they mimic.

• Regeneration – it seems clearly demonstrated that the DBK have marvelous regenerative properties, if not slain one can likely regrow lost limbs and they possibly even use this ability to create their blades, breaking pieces off themselves and combining them into a sword which regenerates together. Hence the name Regenerating Blade.

Underground Farming is one of the amazing new mechanics included in the expansion.

Mechanical Construction

We can't finish up without an examination of the DBK's incredible set of showdown mechanics, this is because it represents one of the few true insights into the design process and how difficult it can be to get a monster working correctly without breaking the AI. In the case of the DBK, Adam was the primary designer for its behaviour, but he was unable to get it to work correctly, it would throw the Dung Ball once and then ignore it for the rest of the fight, which was not what he wanted. He had hit a wall with the job and so he handed it across to Zachary Barash to see if Zach could fine tune this thing. Zach took a broad hatchet to the monster, he hacked off an entire special AI action that the DBK had and discarded it before working on getting the DBK to interact more often with its ball and in a more dangerous fashion. He also tweaked the DBK so that it would instinctively rejoin its ball whenever it didn't have a target. The hacked off portion of the DBK was later on added to the Lion God, that ability is the utterly terrifying “Rampage”.

Next, we should look at Burrow, the single most interesting and game changing trait any monster has received to date. This incredible change plays with the DBK's Carapaces by making them a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation and was installed onto the DBK without the APG testing team EVER beating an L3 DBK. They confessed publicly a couple of times that they didn't think that it was possible to beat the L3 DBK (let alone TOM), which gives you a bit of a horrifying insight into what the internal testing was like back at that time. One would hope it is a bit better now, but given that they still do not appear to have independent external testing – you wouldn't be wrong to bet that they don't.

Despite these concerns the DBK has come out the other side with top marks, it remains one of the most interesting foes to fight, because of how the ball mechanic works the DBK remains a real and serious threat right up until the moment it dies. You have to concentrate on every single turn of the fight, failure to pay attention can result in the maiming/death of a survivor within a turn or two. This makes the fight a breathtaking experience and one for the players who enjoy a challenge on a razor's edge.

However, that is not all that makes the DBK such a triumphant expansion, there are plenty of other very hard monsters that require a lot of work to not slip up during the showdown, but either they have very poorly designed cards with no answers (Earthquake – Lion God), frustrating hunt cards (Dopple Den – Dragon King) or the risk of the fight just does not match the reward (Lion God, Phoenix) and that is why the DBK is such a popular creature, fighting it is hard and filled with risk, but the gear that you get from this fight is so varied, interesting and powerful that it is worth it.

The carrot is always a better way to get players to take risks, even if the carrot is stuck in a pile of dung!