Rumblings in the Dark: The Dung Beetle – Part 2: The Hunt (Patreon)

The hunt phase is a mostly narrative experience where players get to experience an abstracted expression of the journey. A large part of this is wildly random, as basic hunt events are a wild swinging for the fences in their quality of experience.

The monster specific hunt events however are far more creative, refined and precise. They are tailored to support the monster's showdown with how they wear down (and assist) the survivors. Giving insights to aspects of the monster's behaviour, history, preferred prey/food and more. They're a window into the lore of the world through the filter of this specific monster. As such, good monster hunt event cards are unique, striking and precise in their focus. If they offer choices, the choices should be hard to pick from, and if they are random, there should be purpose to the randomness.

We're going to pour through the cards of the Dung Beetle Knight today and take a look at what the optimal decisions one should make when experiencing each one, and also decipher what windows into the soul of the Dung Beetle Knight these cards can offer us.

I'll walk through them alphabetically, starting with:

Abandoned Resin Ball

We know from the Flower Knight introduction along with the unused artwork pictured at the top of this post, that Dung Beetle Knights inscribe writings onto the interior of their dung balls. Why they do this isn't entirely clear, but what we can tell from this hunt event is that they are prophetic in nature. This means to some degree Dung Beetle Knights are prognosticators, that is, they can see the future. It is likely this ability was gained from their extended ingestion of phoenix droppings – the phoenix as a species has a large amount of chronological based abilities and it makes sense that a species that evolved through consumption of their magical poop would inherit some forms of divination.

This particular ball is probably either the ball of a deceased Dung Beetle Knight; or a discarded one – abandoned when it became too small for the growth of a Knight. The face, is of course, the Phoenix face that the Dung Beetles still revere due to the nature of the phoenix's guano.

In respect of the event itself; this one is relatively straightforward. If you can afford the survival loss, you should investigate and get that +1 courage. The random hunt event is, on average, going to be worse than the 'worst' result from this. Preserved Caustic Dung is a useful resource and worth 3 survival (as long as you can still survive the showdown) and the best roll on the event even rewards Pictographs in a good fashion; Stranger in the Dark is an excellent settlement event. Even without Pictographs you get +1 understanding.

Brown Ground

If you've ever wondered why some people call the game a 'bit childish' or why I refer to the game as 'gritty horror' rather than 'dark horror'. Here's a prime example; you get the option to go poo swimming. Hooray, I hope you brought stain proof speedos!

In respect to the lore; what we see here is that Dung Beetle Knights create massive pools of dung and let it ferment. These dung pools are effectively 'dead zones' where almost nothing goes by choice because of the stench. Falling in here is almost as bad as landing in the bog of eternal stench,

except there's no Sir Didymus and Ambrosius to help you out after they are bested by Ludo. We can see that this is an avoided area because of how it lets you skip a space on the hunt track if you navigate it, but if you go around there's a huge amount of basic hunt events due to everything being pushed together in their avoidance of the big stinky.

Mechanically, the main decision is made depending on two factors, do you have survivors with 10+  insanity that do no have Otherworldly Luck, and what would you skip over if you take this shortcrap? Most of the time, if you do not have any survivors who would die to the roll of a 1; you should take this shortcut, especially if you get the ambush option. Ambushing the DBK allows for you to avoid that initial ball hit – which can often be a massive problem otherwise.

Bug Man

This event lands in the mysterious world building category where it doesn't really fit in with anything. You can speculate on the identity of the Bug Man, it's probably some form of humanoid vermin, but it could also be a member of the Dung Beetle species who isn't a knight.

In truth, these are the kind of events that I really don't enjoy from a world building perspective, they feel like there's no background behind them – unlike the Brown Ground above, which has mechanics that support the theme, Bug Man is just an isolated encounter from some insect creature in a cloak. That's pretty much it.

On the mechanics front, this is a bit of a lose-lose situation. If your courage isn't high enough then you're going to be losing survival. If it is high enough you may be forced to add a Fecal Salve to your gear grid, causing the loss of some other item. The mechanical portion of the fecal salve is pretty thematic, it means that you're going to start the fight stinky, and therefore get targeted by the Dung Beetle Knight more often. But it's not good news – and this card is another argument for getting Otherworldly Luck onto as many survivors as possible. Because the optimal path through these dice rolls is: Roll equal to or lower than courage on the first roll and then on the second roll score a 7+. Outside of that, if you have a full grid of precious gear cards, you absolutely want to get hit by the Panic result – but that's in the hands of chance most of the time. You can't go organising your gear grids based on courage rolls.

Practice Dummies

In sharp contrast to Bug Man; Practice Dummies has some excellent world building baked into it. This card tells us so much about the Dung Beetle Knights, they do not just fight with instinctive skill, they train their art and they have a specific fighting style. Not only that, but you learn that their 'practice dummies' are at times abducted survivors used for live practice. It's a grim and awful fate for anyone to be taken away in from their home, tied up to a frame and then hacked at by a giant man bug.

It also highlights that the Dung Beetle Knights often see survivors as foes that have to be slain and 'less human' than they are. They are perfectly capable of communicating with survivors if they wish, but due to the way survivors treat them as a source of resources and meat – they dehumanize the survivors the same amount. The 7-9 roll is a very neat one, while Crossarm Block is not the best fighting art (there are builds that can use it, especially if you have access to Slender Man gear) – it is a hugely thematic to have a survivor learn that there is a fighting style at play here.

Over in mechanics land; there's not much to be done to adapt to this here, the main benefit you can elevate from this random table is taking sword users on the hunt so they can benefit from the 4-6 dice roll and also if your population is slow low you may want to avoid hunting Dung Beetle Knights because that -1 causes an unavoidable population loss. If you have no plebs (disposable survivors), exercise caution.

Rolling Fertilizer

There's not much to gather on the lore front, we know that dung is good for plant and insect life due to their biological systems being evolved to consume that. This plays into that by creating a herb gathering event – Herb Gathering is a nice way to regain survival and doesn't even need gear to support it.

The mechanical advantage here is to not bring along sickles and just gather a small amount to regain survival and get the Fresh Acanthus resource. It's hard work to get the 75+ result anyway and even if you do get it, the Swamp is not a great place to roll.

However, that +1 damage to the monster is not good news. The Dung Beetle Knight getting extra speed is worse, but extra damage is still not desirable. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about that, you've already drawn this card.

Sudden Rumbling

There's a bit of a question with this one as to who owns the ball that comes rumbling down towards the survivors. We know that Dung Beetle Knights are pretty much bound to their balls and suffer immensely if separated from them. They're driven to try and get back to their ball by an instinct so strong that it's called 'separation anxiety' (Something my dog Pamcha suffers from because I work from home and I'm almost always around her and she does not like me going to get the post without her).

So that leaves the question as to where the owner of this ball is? It might be a rogue ball previously owned by a Dung Beetle Knight who died/out grew it – it might have an owner who's currently in despair over its loss? Do Dung Beetle Knights have multiple balls and they only panic if they're not near their current favourite? We just can't tell.

On the mechanics front, this event is pretty evenly split between being good for high and low courage. It's very much down to that dice roll which follows up. But the main thing which is clear, the Stand Your Ground low roll is way worse than the dive away low roll, add onto that the fact that Propulsion Drive is better than +1 courage (Propulsion Drive might be one of the best fighting arts in the game). Sometimes, random stuff just randomly happens and you can't control it. This is one of those events.

Super Food

Here in our last card of the hunt events we get a reminder of how important the Phoenix poop is to the Dung Beetle Knights and the setting as a whole. The Rainbow Droppings here have been hidden in or around a stone face and it's caused the Acanthus Plants in the area to grow quickly and die. A neat little bit of temporal acceleration occurring to the plants as they feed on the temporal doo-doo.

Honestly, I don't think it's worth investigating this one most of the time, because you're going to end up with Rainbow Droppings (used for crafting the sub-optimal Rainbow Katana) or +1 Speed at the cost of giving the monster an additional +1 speed. Extra speed on Dung Beetle Knights is not a good thing at all.

However, I do want to applaud this card for the storytelling, on a low result the poop has been eaten by the Dung Beetle Knight and it's evolved into a 'rainbow beetle'; a medium result has just a bit of ageing and faster perception of time for both the Knight and the Survivor and at the top result: the droppings have not been consumed at all by the Dung Beetle Knight, so the entirely intact resource is retrieved.

It is just a shame that most of the time the Rainbow Droppings are too risky to consume (60% chance of death), but you may want to take them back to the settlement and feed them to a plebian who might become a Dagger/Perfect Hit/Speed abuser.

And that puts us to the end of the hunt, and it means we've arrived at the showdown. So strap on your best bowling gear ready for next week, because either you master the ball or become the pins.

As always if you want to read more about the Dung Beetle Knight, or the Hunt Phase. The tags are below.