Pagan Poetry – What's the Place for the Flower Knight in 1.6? (Patreon)

Several years ago, when Adam was asked what the plan was to solve the way that the Vespertine Bow dominated the games where it was crafted, he responded with the off-hand comment that he'd make it strength 1. Which of course, at the time had people feeling incredulous because such an action was an incredible overreaction due to how it would move the bow from being overpowered to almost worse than the White Lion's Catgut Bow.

Fast forward to 2021, with the mixed bag that is the “Legendary” Card Pack landing on people's doorsteps and we are now able to see that this off-hand flippant response seems to have become the best solution that anyone at APG was able to come up with. One of the few updates to the expansion content and it's a ham-fisted, callous move that has pushed the Flower Knight from being 'a good expansion for players who are struggling with the game' to an absolute ??? when trying to assess what its part in the game is now.

So we'll be approaching it from scratch in order to try and see what the benefits are for this expansion. Now, I have two hats when it comes to approaching KDM content, the first is one that casts a critical eye over the content – taking a reviewing and designer's assessment of what the content brings to the game. When I am writing like this I am aiming to highlight the strengths, weaknesses and oddities that content brings. Everything gets assessed as harshly as possible in order to let the real gems shine bright.

The other hat I have is the one I wear as a player, one of the great things about KDM is you don't have to engage with the content that you don't want to. Even if you play 100% official, you still have choices in respect to what campaign you play, what expansions you add in, what quarry monsters you hunt, what nemesis monsters turn up (especially Slender Man vs. King's Man) and what gear you build. That's the part of Kingdom Death Monster which is hardest to translate to the outside person, once you get very experienced with the game you are building your own sandbox to play in, both with the layout of the world you've created and also with how you interact with it.

So, I'm going to first of all dismantle this in a critical fashion, and then I'm going to switch hats and look at what can be done with the new Vespertine Bow as player. This means there will be a tonal shift because I'm very comfortable holding two (or more) dissonant opinions on a subject, I can call the Flower Knight an unbalanced, broken, twisted thing that's best left out of campaigns and still take immense pleasure from pushing all the levers and buttons the expansion gives you when you're a player with it in your campaign.

With that written, let us first break this creature down to its component points and highlight each aspect.

The Flower Knight is an expansion which seeks to deal with themes of impermanence, obsession, elegance, dance, art and fencing. It has much of the Renaissance baked into the core of it, from its feminine design (including a bustle! Warning, the reason for the existence of the bustle is closely tied with racist colonial exploitation) and close association with floral themes to the heavy linking towards art via events – thematically the Flower Knight is an absolute slam dunk, and this is one of the things which causes people to gravitate towards the creature and hold her in high esteem. Something this beautiful can't be a poor aspect of the game, because if you appreciate her beauty then she must be perfect? Right? (Also a lot of the influences on the Flower Knight's design can be found in Björk's album Vespertine; with one card being named directly after a song from that album. It's called Cocoon and the video for it is a serious trip that has clear influences on some parts of KDM's style – warning for female nudity if you look for that video).

Well, unfortunately while the thematic aspects of the Flower Knight are top notch, the mechanical expression of this is something which just doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. The Flower Knight has many areas where it is woefully unbalanced (ironic considering how well she can dance). And by unbalanced we don't just mean weak, we can also mean too powerful. You see the Flower Knight has always had severe balance issues within the mechanics of the game. It has many portions which are exploitable by players for extreme benefit, to the point that they can trivialise the gaming experience in the hands of an expert. It also has portions which are so weak that they are just ignored. I'm going to walk through each aspect now and briefly explain why they land where they do.

The Showdown itself is one of the most problematic portions of the expansion, while it is still a thematic masterpiece, it's a mechanical pile of dog shit. The level 1 Flower Knight is the single weakest monster in the entire game, weaker than even the Prologue White Lion, which is intended to be fought with 4x cloth, 4x founding stone, fists, feet and teeth. Yeah, when you are weaker than Percy Prologue the White Lion yet you first appear in lantern year 5; you can be sure that something has gone horribly wrong.

You see the design of the Flower Knight during the showdown needs a complete re-haul from scratch. It was intended that players attack the Flower Knight with gradually increasing levels of luck in order to eventually learn Fencing and allow them to overcome the Flower Knight's Parry mechanic (and also leverage this against the other Knights in the game). When you play Green Armor campaigns, this is an essential and welcome portion of the experience, having a tool to use against Parry is pretty fantastic.

However, the issue is, it turns out that high luck/critical wounds style is pretty much the best way to play Monster against everything except for a few rare exceptions (such as the Butcher). It generates more resources and it allows players to bypass reactions. So the Flower Knight adding additional benefits onto that already heavily leveraged play style means that it doesn't do anything new or unique. Players are already running high luck builds; all the Flower Knight does is let them lean even more into that, resulting in a monster that can be punched to death while generating resources by the fistful.

Before we move on, what this means from a balance perspective is the Flower Knight occupies the same space as the Screaming Antelope. It's a loot piñata and it always will be until it gets at a minimum a new Hit Location deck and statistical rebalancing. It is more fortunate than the Antelope in that the problems do not also spread into its AI, but when a monster is this flawed at the core of its design then it becomes something that's incredibly difficult for players to house rule into balance. In short, it's one of those monsters which is flawed at the core of its design and needs a 2.0 version reconstructed from the ground up.

I have little to no qualms with the hunt portion of the Flower Knight's design. While the Hunt Phase itself could do with taking notes from Peer Sylvester's excellent 'The Lost Expedition' within the existing frame work the hunt phase does a good job of skirting between the goals of providing exploration in an alien world (both to the survivors and the players alike), and the only real criticism here is that it does provide easy post-overwhelming darkness spots for Mineral and Herb Gathering actions. That compounds with the easy way that players can generate resources during the showdown and creates a monster that just keeps on giving and giving.

Post showdown, the Sense Memory event is a wonderful concept, the resources that players have gained are fleeting, and the opportunity to craft Flower Knight stuff only occurs right after the showdown has completed. It's a great thematic idea, and mechanically it works fine – except for a few hiccups. This phase is one where you can gain easy access to Otherworldly Luck (probably the best utility Fighting Art in the game) if you have Pottery innovated; and set up to get hold of one of the most powerful Secret Fighting Arts in the game (Acanthus Doctor). This was a major part of old strategies, players would head out and punch the Flower Knight to death in Lantern Year 5 – generating enough resources to construct up to three Vespertine Bows (one is all you need for the trigger) and triggering an event 4 years later (Necrotoxic Mistletoe) that unlocks a promotional basic resource (Lump of Atnas) and also in combination with Sculpture gives a 40% chance of giving a survivor the Acanthus Doctor SFA. This would then be repeated in multiple lantern years while the settlement also hard pushed to unlock Sculpture. Then there would be multiple Vespertine Bows and Acanthus Doctors, both of which would then stomp the monsters flat in future because of their combination of overwhelming strength and defence.

On the gear front; outside of People of the Bloom; there are four key gear packages. The Badge, The Foil & Satchel, The Bow & Arrow and the Music.

The Flower Knight Badge remains one of the strongest element of the expansion, this is a free gain for defeating your first Flower Knight in the campaign (along with gaining Petal Spiral, an excellent innovation)  and it's just a really strong item, with a decent affinity and two powerful abilities. It's very good, very pushed and kept in check by being unique. There's not much more to discuss on it, you'll stack it on a tank survivor along with other evasion tools and it'll help keep monster damage down through its evasion while also giving utility through the tactics cards.

The Vespertine Foil is one of the game's failed experiments, it's a deadly sword that requires constant feeding through flower resources, but because those resources are fleeting, you end up needing to combine it with a satchel, and then still hunt the Flower Knight every few years to stock up. Something that constantly drains your resources every year needs to be very good to compensate for that, and the Vespertine Foil's Deadly 2 almost makes the cut. In fact there is a build you can use this in, but it has major overlap with the build that the new Vespertine Bow wants to use; and the bow doesn't require trips to beat up the Lady Faerie Knight every couple of years, so it's even harder to justify these days.

Rest in peace Original Vespertine Bow, gone but not forgotten.

The Vespertine Bow used to be the top dog for most of the campaign, only really getting left behind at short range by the sheer power of the Sunshark Bow and beaten at long range only by very specific Arc Bow or Ink Blood Bow builds. It was an easy plug and play, use with Rawhide, this survivor is set for the campaign build. These days it has to leverage its only remaining advantage – an early bow with Deadly, and while I do have a working build for that, it is quite an investment and you're going to struggle to replace it if that particular survivor dies early on – because the replacement gear lives with the L3 Flower Knight. Here, you'll be using the bow either for deadly shots early on and later on in combination with the Gigalion's Dense Bone Arrows. But we'll look at that in the next section.

Last of all, we have the Vespertine Cello, now the only way to use this one without having serious problems with the Harvester hunt event is by using in combination with the Grim Muffler and Gorns. The Grim Muffler cancels noisy on the Cello, the Gorns are the only non-noisy instrument in the game, and by doing this you get +1 luck for your entire survivor group – which can be stacked with other luck bonuses in order to create a critical wound focused hunt team. Turns out the Brass Band is the best way to make monsters give up their precious resources. Doot Doot!

Before we move on, I'd like to repeat that True Blade is one of the best designed and most powerful Secret Fighting Arts in the game. It's the bit of the Flower Knight I love the most.

So; let us get to what one should be doing with the Vespertine Bow. Well to put it simply, you have to have a plan and work towards that. As such you're going to want to pick the Understanding principle and spend rerolls (if you have them) to get +1 luck for your bow wielding survivor.

Then when the Flower Knight turns up you will choose that survivor to gain the Sleeping Virus Flower. Through the event (please note, if you're playing Green Armor, this is a somewhat risky move cause if you lose this item, you'll have to go hunt some L3 Flower Knights. You intend to do that anyway, but losing the virus flower early slows down getting the best parts of Green Armor rushed.

This is then combined with the Vespertine Bow, Rawhide Armor, a Lucky Charm and one set of arrows (can be a Vespertine Arrow at first, Dense Bone Arrows are the best choice though) to create a survivor who stacks luck as much as possible in order to get Deadly + 3 luck (survivor, charm, graves) and then they have a baseline 50% chance of critically wounding a location (if they can). It ends up looking like this:

As you can see, it shares a lot with the Vespertine Foil build that you'd put together at the same time.

Similar concepts to the bow, except you'll have to keep returning to the flower knight every few years (depending how many satchels you keep in the party). It is VERY good on a high strength survivor however. So if you can get it to generate more resources than it costs, it is a great build.

About the only thing I really don't like about  this build is the constant need to go back to the FK. It makes the campaign feel really monotonous. However, if you play People of the Bloom, where you can fetch flowers for an endeavor. This build REALLY sings and can even be upgraded with Petal Spiral or Vagabond Armor.

I'll explore the Musical Band sometime in the future if people are interested, it's a bit too complex to walk through at this point, because it's four builds rather than just one.