Dark Herald Updates: Red Witches & Oblivion Mosquito (Patreon)

As bizarre as it is to be writing this, in a refreshing change the Oblivion Mosquito Dark Herald was released a whole day before the end of the month. If you told me back in 2016 when this Kickstarter was first pitched that I'd be commending the team for beating a self imposed deadline by one day, I would have laughed and shook my head. However, here we are, it was and even though that's such a tiny thing, it's an improvement over the previous month releases.

Because both the Red Witches and the Oblivion Mosquito were so content light, I decided to roll discussing them into a single post, I do not see the point of releasing two separate response/takes for the sake of generating content.

For reference and your reading here are the original pitches for each along with the Dark Herald articles. I'm not going to pad content by reading out the articles before reacting to them:

Red Witches:

Original Pitch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/1768889

Dark Herald: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/3469853

Oblivion Mosquito:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/1762522

Dark Herald: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/3494626

One of the most striking omissions from these articles is the Black Knight, this was scheduled to be talked about alongside the Red Witches and it was simply ignored. We didn't get any direct in article acknowledgement of the situation and that is something to always be concerned about. We know that in the past a completed expansion (Nightmare Ram) was scrapped and redone – so we can't be confident that the Black Knight expansion, despite being demoed at Gencon several years ago, hasn't experienced the same fate.

There are some defensive comments from Adam about the overall situation in the comments, but having to trawl through http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/poots/comments to find things he's written is always a very laborious task. It's also NOT how things like this should be addressed, some of us just read the emails when they're sent out – which is quite fair given the toxic level the comments have reached due to the push from disgruntled backers and the unnecessary push back from the White Knights. Without pointing any fingers directly, there is one individual in this community who has made the comments section so awful that I don't go there any more unless I can avoid it.

It's likely that the Black Knight hasn't suffered this 'do it again from scratch' fate, but based on past behaviours it's best to assume that unless we see evidence of a thing, nothing worth talking about has been done on it. This is hopefully not the case, but I'm not going to ever reward someone if they don't show their workings.

The Red Witches

When you look at the original pitch and what we now see in the Dark Herald update you'll see why I'm bringing this up. The Dark Herald update contains only a small amount of stuff that's new or evidential.

We get to see all the models in resin print form, and they are for the most part excellent translations of the original proposed artwork. Sage carries the light sniper bow, Nico still has the bone bladed bow and Bral has both the best sculpt and the close range option. The initiate models vary in quality however, some of them are good, one of them is absolutely awful (the one with the leg poking out of the front like some three legged anatomical horror). It does however look like the initiates have their sensory depravation suits on. It's the black portions of this artwork we've seen before.

The big thing we see follows after the artwork however, there's a small amount of detail about how each of the three sisters will act. Bral is going to be tough, close range and in the faces of the survivors, Sage is going to be very long distance and fragile, while Nico is a mix between the two, apparently fielding ways that she can fight multiple opponents, but apparently with weaker hits.

I've looked and looked and without context the three images A, B and C which follow this paragraph really have little to understand, they're not the base artwork for the three White Speakers as we get to see those later and they don't match up, so your guess is as good as mine.

The sole AI card we get to see is one of Nico's, now I don't think this is sufficient detail here to understand or appreciate any work that's been done. I'd expect to see at least one AI card from each Red Witch along with a demonstration about how the Hit Location deck is going to work. Instead we get what will become a classic pattern, where we have a card that provides some information, but also has a Bolded reference to some other Trait or Ability. Information without providing information.

What I can say from what I see here between the two web pages is that the Red Witches are going to be quite laborious to mechanically operate. Moving a single monster around is fine, moving two or more around is more tricky, but having three, plus up to five initiates, plus teleportation swapping is going to absolutely be a pain to handle and require a lot of mental processing. 

The initiates are even on smaller base sizes, so swapping them with the larger sisters is another level of processing required. You're going to be able to do it, but you can be absolutely certain that it's going to also cause lots of questions on Board Game Geek's Kingdom Death forum (and the people asking the questions won't even have the decency to use the right expansion forum for the questions!) So expect mental fatigue during sessions, which tends to increase the number of unforced errors during play.

The two weapons we have shown demonstrate the same tendency to hide things away from the player base, we can assess the stat lines of the two weapons, but we have new Keywords and worst of all new Abilities. Without knowing what Surpass X or Follow Up are exactly we can't really judge these weapons fully.

Though, having written that. I can say that unless Surpass is a terrible ability that weakens a weapon the Brawler's Bow is already going to be one of the strongest weapons in the game. This is because it improves upon the Sunshark Bow – it's a ranged + melee keyword weapon and in addition to that it's very high strength and has the katar keyword. It's a first striking tank/front line weapon. It's an exciting prospect, but it also demonstrates a lot of power creep. We might well end up in a situation where old expansions do not work well with new ones simply because the old ones offer few gear choices that we actually want. Why would you craft the Sunshark Bow in a campaign where you can get the Brawler's Bow? You can't even really use the Sunshark Bow as a back up replacement weapon in case the original user dies and the Brawler's Bow is lost to irreplaceable, because the Sunshark Bow doesn't have the Katar weapon type. Tricky.

The Seer's Bow is more conventional, it's clearly a long range deadly bow, but there is a condition to getting the Deadly and we're not told how to achieve that condition. So one can't really assess what it's like, it'll either be broken as heck or absolutely useless and only knowing how Follow Up works can explain that.

Then we have confirmation that the Red & Black armor is still a thing in the expansion. We don't know if it still requires the Gryphon spit to unlock this extra thing or not and we also don't know what the weapons the armor sets resin prints are holding represent either. I do like the armor set designs, but mostly that's because they heavily wear their Dark Souls inspiration on their sleeves (so to speak). 

Overall though, if you're talking about armor without giving a couple of gear cards and maybe the set bonus. It's. Not. Good. Enough.

Finally, the largest other omission on this entry is the Pariah and Fade, we know that the original pitch included interactions with the Pariah, a Three Year campaign where you play as the Red Witches hunting the Pariah and interactions with the Fade promotional white box character (as in the lore the Red Witches killed Fade for her pregnancy, but couldn't kill the child because Fade summoned a Harvester to protect it, possibly as her dying act).

I can understand a sentence or two saying something like 'This expansion will have interactions with the Pariah and Fade, but we want to keep the full details of that under wraps for now'. Though personally I would have just bundled Fade into the Red Witches expansion anyway, she deserves it.

Oh and I couldn't help but laugh at these commenters:

If you ever read this guys, bravo, that was very funny.

Before moving on to the Oblivion Mosquito I'm going to outline what I think should always be included in these updates but was omitted:

• All abilities/traits referenced have some text or cards to explain what they do.
• Examples from both the AI and HL decks
• Detailed explanation of any cross expansion synergies, so people can make an informed decision if they want those other expansions or not.
• Any Mini campaigns get a paragraph or two for an overview, is there campaign specific gear?
• We don't see weapons on miniatures without some explanation of where they come from.

In short, less meaningless opacity and more details, if you're going to leave something shrouded in mystery, at least address it with some fun cryptic tidbits or rhetorical questions. One doesn't want to get all the way to the Emerald City just to learn that the Great and Powerful Oz is a complete con does one?

The Oblivion Mosquito

Another Node 2 Monster, this time a Quarry one. The Oblivion Mosquito seems to be following the mould set by Spidicules, in that it provides a lot of pain for a settlement. This is a very tricky place to be, because if the rewards (both mechanical and intangible) are not dopamine inducing enough, a design like that just risks becoming something that gathers dust.

We've seen the physical sculpt of this miniature many times now, because it was revealed in May 2017 by Thomas David (https://art-thomasdavid.over-blog.com/2017/05/kingdom-death-the-oblivion-mosquito.html) and it's wonderful 100mm creep of a monster.

It does seem that this creature has undergone some revisions for its lifecycle, because the original pitch doesn't fully line up with the Oblivion Pupae's new concept. But that's fine and not something to be concerned about. It's what happens to pitches, heck it's what happens to the game's established lore.

The showdown description here is once again not quite detailed enough to really help decide what it's going to be like to fight and as per usual the AI card we have pictured points to some trait that isn't also really described in a mechanic form. This makes it very difficult to assess what the monster is going to be like to fight, we can see that it has a White Lion level attack profile here. We do however get to see a different trait card and this I appreciate, it's a clear card with obvious counter play (Encourage) and that's great. There's no Hit Location card though, boo.

We see something similar with the two gear cards demonstrated, the Doom Sickle looks baseline terrible unless Empty is something that can be activated easily. (2/6+/3/Paired) is a not a good place for a weapon to be in, but the strength boosts on the Empty trigger could make this playable. It's also something that very much could reward higher speed. So caution about this one for the moment - Node 2 Monsters with weapons that have less than 4 strength should generally be avoided, but it has potential. 

The other positive is that it's also a sickle and a tool so it has uses during the Herb Gathering event and provides a combo with the Manhunter's Tool Belt (interesting coincidental aside, the Manhunter's reprint was originally announced alongside the Kickstarter announcement of the Oblivion Mosquito - Beware the Mosquito-hunter!) The weapon also has finesse, which means it works with the Polishing Lantern from the Blacksmith.

The Oblivion Brush on the other hand remains an enigma, without some kind of support from other gear cards, this tool as we can understand it right now is terrible unless combined with the Manhunter's Tool Belt. However, if it does its job, well it is kind of busted in how it enables a whole bunch of crazy Perfect hit abilities to trigger more often than they should. 

What I mean here is; this is the kind of design that either ends up being too weak to bother with or completely broken and expansion defining. We'll only know the answer when we see what else the expansion (and other expansions) provide in support. But for now, it's clear that the Tool Belt goes a long way towards making this tool powerful, so there is potential. Before one moves on however, it is important to note that the Oblivion Brush design is the kind of thing that only becomes more and more powerful as time passes and we get more releases. So even if it doesn't work out of the box, don't count it out.

On the armour front we're fortunate (I guess) to not just get the original artist renders of the armor set reposted from the release article and we also got some example sculpts with helmets and mirror helms, but to be honest here without any examples of armor gear cards there's very little actual information. The armor sculpt looks exceptionally detailed and fancy (to a point that it looks more advanced and sophisticated than anything that comes later in a settlement timeline) and we see evidence of a spear, a mirror shield and what looks like it might be a sword/whip. 

The frustrating element here is, we're informed that the armor set will be 'modal' which is something that the Spidicules set already is (and that armor set is mostly a flop) – but without a couple of cards it's impossible to see how this armor set is going to overcome the design flaws that plague and hold back the Silk Armor.

Finally we get the Oblivion Pupae, which are for some reason mentioned as a 'new entry to (the) Encounter System' when the original pitch for the Oblivion Mosquito had them as the first place Encounters were pitched during the kickstarter. I guess it's been such a long time since that pitch was made that the Dark Herald can't remember all of the things Adam claimed. It's strictly true though now that the "Gamblers (Scope) Creep Expansion that was supposed to be a rewards box, not a whole Kickstarter Campaign' has expanded all over the table with flabby disregard for the original kickstarter.

The models themselves are suitably creepy and weird, and even though they don't completely fit the original pitch for the lifecycle, things change in the world of Kingdom Death all the time and this new rendition is very Junji Ito inspired. However, if you go back to the original pitch you'll find that we were told: 

'...the rewards are often great for offshoot inspirations... like hybrid armor sets and gear modifications' 

but we do not get to see any of those here as examples. It's a bit empty to showcase the models and very little else. What a customer friendly trend we have here.

Which means that ultimately these two updates are a lot of nicely written style and very little substance. There has always been a strong desire to keep the curtain up over the designs where Adam is concerned, and while that's cute if there's a relatively short length of time between the tease and the release – here the unprecedentedly long gap makes the small amount of teased content look like very little has been done. That is probably not the case, but optics matter in situations like this and well, lets face it, the optics are not good.

Actions, not words, are what we see. Show your workings APG, back up your claims with evidence. You don't have to spoil the entire recipe - I'll do that when the stuff releases - but give us a bit of each expansion's ingredient so we get some flavour. 

Going ahead; I will continue to write takes on the various Dark Herald updates, but if they continue to be as milquetoast in content as these two are I'll continue rolling them together into multiple updates per written piece. That isn't to say there has been nothing of interest in these updates, the Dark Herald continues to prove their writing capabilities, but they are clearly hamstrung by the details they're allowed to release. One hopes that this will change in the future, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Early Game with Expansions Visual Guide (plus explanatory) notes next Friday*!

*These Visual Guides take so much time to sort through!