The Sultans of Swing - A Musical Hunt Party Primer (Patreon)

Bards are great, if given a choice as to what class I would play in any D&D based game I would choose between a Shifter, an Antipaladin or a Bard every single time. As someone hailing from Wales; bardship is just something that is in the blood, be it singers like Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey or bands like the Stereophonics and Manic Street Preachers. Wales is just a country that produces great musicians and great actors. 

Bards have been a part of Welsh history stretching all the way back to the early years of the country; you all know one of the most famous Welsh bards of legend – though you know him by his Latin name rather than his original one. I refer of course to Myrddin Wylt, a chief bard and the speaker of several poems in both The Red Book of Hergest and The Black Book of Camarthen. His second name means "the Wild" and it was given to him by the Welsh Chronicler Elis Gruffydd.

Myrddin's legend comes from Welsh history, he was said to have been driven mad by the Battle of Arderydd in Arthuret, Cumbria and he then fled to the forest, lived with the trees and the animals and gained the gift of prophecy. You however likely know him from his modern depiction, where Geoffrey of Monmouth anglicised the character and gave him his Latin name – Merlin. Bringing him into the Welsh legends of King Arthur and making him one of many characters in that series of legends who are based upon historic Welsh people (Arthur himself was based on a Welsh warrior and it is the historical Arthur whom Wales is named after).

So yes, as someone who comes from the true home of both the Arthurian Legends and Myrddin Wylt – I will always feel some deep connection to bards and bardic lore. It is also why I greatly appreciate the card game Imperium: Legends because it is one of the few times I have seen a creator correctly attribute the Welsh names for the locations and characters alongside the Latin ones. I have always felt a deep sense of loss over the way that the English, French and Hollywood appropriate the Arthurian legends without acknowledging the people that they originate from, and I didn't realise just how important that sense of cultural loss was to me until Osprey Publishing with designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi gave back the legends to the Welsh with this act.

So, I have a natural inclination towards the musical instruments which come in Kingdom Death. I have advocated the use of the Whisker Harp in nemesis battles, I despair over what the Harvester does, I'll shout from the rooftops how much I love the Grim Muffler and I will always try and sneak a Gorn or two into my builds if I can justify it. I just really wish that the Harvester wasn't such a definitive and hard 'NO' to the noisy keyword, it's so challenging to justify taking out noisy gear when the worst case scenario of losing that survivor completely, without any way to mitigate it, happens with a 1% chance on every single basic hunt roll. That's not good odds.

So that takes us along to the premise of running a full group with instruments, despite the clear meme potential of such a group, it turns out that when correctly set up, you can both avoid the worst of the Harvester's impact and also deliver some exceedingly powerful showdown builds. However, this is one of those builds that is only made possible by the following pieces of additional content:

• The Flower Knight
• The Gorm
• Christmas Lucy Promo
• Echoes of Death 2

The first three of these are not optional, but while Echoes of Death 2 is. It also provides a useful Fighting Art that I am going to assume you have. If you do not – it just weakens the group a bit on the support options and you'll need to consider a Cat Eye Circlet or Wisdom Potion if your skill level needs them. 

As such, it's easiest to talk about what Infernal Rhythm brings to the table; so if you don't have it, you understand what's missing and if you need to adapt the builds for your own survivors.

Infernal Rhythm is a strain fighting that is unlocked simply by describing a dream where the survivor hears the Devil's Symphony (a song by Scooter) during the Weird Dream event. That's it, it's a pretty simple unlock and once you have access to it, for this particular playstyle you're going to want to get it jammed onto the Sculpture innovation in order to ensure that you always have 1-2 survivors with it. Here's what it does.

It essentially turns instruments into your gear grid into a super version of the Cat Eye Circlet.  Which is a really impressive feat, any time you can give a gear card a better version of one of the items in the game and keep its original abilities is just incredible. I don't think we'd ever be in a world where the Gorn was stronger than it is already, but here we are.

Without Infernal Rhythm you might have to remove an item in order to fit in some hit location control, because the marvelous thing about this fighting art is it allows an item to pull double duty which alleviates pressure on the remaining slots in the gear grids.

Next up are the two core pieces of gear which provide the heart of the build, these are the aforementioned Grim Muffler promotional pattern gear card and the Flower Knight's Vespertine Cello.

The Vespertine Cello is the lead instrument for this band, its rich, haunting, sonorous timbre is the center from which everything else builds. It isn't a gear card that gets much discussion, but without it we would not be able to build an effective bard card. Here it is.

Crafted during sense memory.

Cost: 1x lantern bud, 2x flowers

We could use it entirely without any support if we are going out to face a nemesis monster, but any time we're going on a hunt, we'll need to wrap this beauty up nice and safe so it doesn't draw any attention to it. That's where the Grim Muffler comes in.

Gained from Insight Pattern deck.

Costs: 1x Cloth, 1x Hide. Also requires the presence of an organ gained in the previous showdown and 15 survivors in the settlement.

This item is gained through an insight event pattern, if you're having trouble drawing it, you can increase the number of insight patterns you draw by gaining Graves + Saga and spamming babies, each one will immediately trigger insight when born and that'll unlock more patterns for you. It's worth noting that without house rules, you can't get the current patterns in People of the Stars, because they become 'Awake' instead of gaining 'Insight' upon reaching 3 understanding.

Those two items are going on the same survivor, hopefully also the one with Infernal Rhythm, so they can play a support tune and let the others get the + Luck tokens.

The remaining survivors all sadly have one choice when they are hunting, that's the only non-Noisy instrument in the game at the moment, the Gorn. The Gorn has a pretty solid ability and a good affinity, but its main use here is in effect gaining +1 Luck.

In addition, we're going to leverage this further by using a Deadly weapon and wearing a Lucky Charm as long as there are sufficient slots, the exact number of these used varies, because the survivor playing tank isn't going to be able to wear a lucky charm because of their need to use a shield, 9 slots is hard to fit everything into. But they can use a Zanbato or Greater Gaxe and make use of Deadly.

The exact Deadly Weapons we use in our other builds depends on what is available, but we have a preference for ones which have blue affinities because that allows them to connect to the Lucky Charm and get it active when used alongside most normal armor sets.

Great with Leader, bad with the Harvester existing.

It's worth noting that in nemesis fights you can swap the Gorn for the Rawhide Drum or the Whisker Harp, and in truth if one house rules the harvester out of the game in some fashion, you can indeed play Horn, Harp, Drums, Cello as a band. It's pretty good, but we work within official rules only. Which is a darn shame, because the Rawhide Drum has some great synergies.

So, with all of that theory, how does it work out in practice? Well here's an example set of builds designed to work with each other and using just the core game plus the additional elements listed above. You can vary these as you wish, you're just trying to keep Deadly weapons live, ensure that everyone has a non-Noisy instrument (and a muffled Cello) and activate as many Lucky Charms as possible.

Due to our lead survivor having to spend two slots on the Cello and the Muffler, we end up running them as our Infernal Rhythm Support Class. If you are uncomfortable with them not having a weapon, you can swap out the Scavenger Kit or Bandages for whatever weapon you like best on them. However, Scavenger Kit is an absolute house and something you should consider rushing to build every campaign now that it is easier to get.

Our Bass Beat is given to us by the classic Leather Armor tank. While they do not have room for the Lucky Charm in this build (Leather's only real downside is how poorly it works with the Lucky Charm, but this is compensation for how well it works with Monster Grease). If you have not been fortunate enough to get a Zanbato, the alternative is the excellent Greater Gaxe as follows:

Finally we have the various DPS survivors, there will be two in this build, which often turns out to be ample for any party, especially one where the Tank is also very capable of attacking. I've supplied three example builds, they should give you plenty of ideas how to  fine tune these. It's always worth noting that all of them are greatly strengthened by Cycloid Scale Armor (Sunstalker), but that is true of almost any build that doesn't care about survival spam or tanking.

As we already have access to the Flower Knight, the first two possible builds are designed around taking advantage of that monster - and also trying to give the new and reduced Vespertine Bow a place in the format. 

Of course, if you are fortunate enough to farm the deathblow on the Gorm, the strongest of these early game builds is:

This absolute beast of a survivor takes advantage of the fact that the Flower Knight gives you a Sleeping Virus Flower for additional luck and also the way that the Riot Mace decimates monster AI if you can chain Critical Wounds with it - which is a lot easier when you have Deadly + 3 Luck (+4 Luck if you use this with the Graves +Luck survivor). 

The basic principles you want to apply are simple:

• 2 Blue affinities
• Deadly Weapon
• Deep Survival Pool for spamming the Surge survival action

So you can easily transfer these builds to other armor sets that provide sufficient affinities!

Next week we're going to discuss the new Sun Lion Armor and Gear Card. It's a rather solid addition to the set and it's honestly more exciting than a some of the content that came in the Legendary Card Pack (LCP).

Note: Update on the LCP review, it is written, but I am waiting for a fresh copy of the LCP to arrive for photography purposes, I want to visually demonstrate some of the production issues it has and I need an unassembled - so it is going up as soon as it gets here. 

David from our The Last Standee podcast has been kind enough to send me a spare copy he had kicking around. So it's in transit from Germany right now.