King of Tokyo: The Dragon King Deep Dive (Patreon)

Part One: The King Themes and Lore

Few miniatures in the Kingdom Death: Monster line inspire as much interest, excitement and awe as the imposing behemoth known as The Dragon King. Kingdom Death's take on the classic fantasy flying lizard is a blend of Dragon, Godzilla, Mech, Nuclear Reactor, Celestial Star and Walking Butthole. But it is also so much more than the sum of its parts, as to paraphrase a certain green swamp dwelling ogre 'A Dragon King is like an onion, it's made of many, many layers.' This is true on so many levels, because not only does the Dragon King have multiple forms, but each of those forms has multiple portions to it, and even the way that you tackle the showdowns against this Entity reward multiple different approaches.

We are going to dive into each of these aspects over the coming weeks, but to start with we're going to take a look at the themes, references and lore surrounding just the big old imposing ~20cm tall miniature – his humanoid form will come at a later date.

References and Pop Culture

Lets start with the simple and straightforward elements of this Entity before moving on into the lore based sections. At its heart the Dragon King is a smashing together of western and Japanese ideas, while Dragons do appear in many forms of mythology, the brutish hulking form that this creature takes owes most of its physical aspects to Western dragons, specifically the subset of dragon known as wyverns (due to it having four limbs rather than six). One of my personal favourite wyverns is Y Ddraig Aur (The Golden Dragon).

This was a flag carried by Owain Glyndwr who displayed it at Twt Hill (cute/tidy/spruce Hill) after successfully reclaiming Welsh territory from the English in the 15thcentury (before the Principality of Wales was colonised and annexed by England). Y Ddraig Aur is one of the predecessors of the current Welsh flag known as Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon) and you can see a lot of Aur in Goch's design. I could write more about this as it's a fascinating and tragic part of British history, but I'll just leave you with the information that Owain, Cynan and Arthur (Yes that Arthur) are all aspects of the fabled 'Y Mab Darogan' (The Fabled Son) who will according to legend return to free Wales from the English one day.

The Dragon King's form owes a lot to Western ideas of what a dragon looks like (including some religious iconography taken from Christianity), in contrast a lot of how it behaves is inspired by Japanese pop culture. The most obvious of these is Godzilla, which both influences the showdown's style and also one of the main weapons of the Dragon King – a Nuclear Blast. One of Godzilla's famed elements is how it is powered by nuclear energy after being awoken and empowered by nuclear weaponry. As a descendant of this massive entity the Dragon King inherits that and stands as another metaphor for nuclear weaponry. It, and Godzilla both also owe a certain debt to H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos series as one of the modern reinvigorators for the tropes of giant bipedal entities. (Of course, the concept has been around for as long as humans have had mythology).

However, while Godzilla's nuclear attacks are a mouth beam, the Dragon King instead utilises another Japanese trope for how it deploy its blasts – the chest cannon. This is something used by a whole host of different characters in manga, anime and even live action cinema – franchises like Mazinger Z, Gundam Wing, The Guyver, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (Which also influences the Herald of the Spiral and is a confirmed influence on Adam) and I think we'd be amiss if we didn't at least acknowledge that in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure part 2 Stroheim ends up with his own version of a chest gun. While we do have western versions of this such as Iron Man's Uni-Beam I think it's fairer to attribute the influence on this part of the Dragon King's design to Japan.

(Given that Adam is a huge weeb born in the early 1980s I'm surprised that we haven't had a strong Guyver reference armor set yet).

We also can't move on from talking about the Chest without admitting the rather unsavory reference that the physical design of the Dragon King's chest represents. It is a reference to an old website/picture known as Goatse. Something that was thankfully taken from the internet in 2004, and also has a far more paletable version here:

(I'm going to leave this one as a link for the curious, it's not graphic as it is food based, but it does imply/demonstrate how gross the original is – and is SFL, maybe NSFW.) 

Given Adam is one of the elders of the internet, it's not surprising that he knew of this early meme, though I do question his decision to make use of it in such a prominent fashion. I guess that's just another example of his scatological humour.

We're not done there though, because on top of all of these tropes, this melding of flavours doesn't stop here. The Dragon King is also filled with a lot of other pop culture references. The largest of which is that the Dragon King contains another smaller creature, the face that you see inside the chest sphincter is that of the actual Entity, known as The Tyrant, and the external portions of the Dragon King are manifested around this character, like a pilot summoning a flesh mecha. This concept is at the heart of Aeon Trespass: Odyssey, who are very overt about their references to the cultural icon Neon Genesis Evangelion. This anime series is one that has had a massive amount of impact on modern creators and while the end of the series is considered somewhat controversial, the concepts it brought to life live on, not just in Complex AI Boss Battlers, but also in other anime/manga and even the sci-fi horror roleplaying game Cthulhu-Tech features them.

(I've always loved the designs of the Tagers, plus it's a super fun concept to play cult spies who can "transform" into badass monsters in order to fight other monsters who are in service to the Dark Pharaoh - Nyarlathotep).

How exactly the Tyrant can manifest this form is not entirely known, we do know that the Tyrant is the last surviving member of its race and that the creation of new Dragon Kings is something that is theoretically possible thanks to the malleable nature of survivor physiology, but we'll discuss all of that more when we get to the Tyrant itself. Instead we're going to dig into the bits of lore we get about the Dragon King and the details of its outer form, which I'm going to refer to as 'the shell' here on.

Survivors are first introduced to the Dragon King through the Glowing Crater event, a survivor sees a fiery light slicing through the sky and they head out into the dark, certain that they are fated to encounter the place where the light landed. When they arrive they get to see the steaming, burning remains of the shell. As they watch they see an unharmed, naked individual stride away from the crater, sighing in a piteous manner (piteous, meaning deserving of pity, is an interesting choice of word here). The survivor leaps into the crater and starts to sift through the burning remains of the shell's husk, they burn their arms and imbue some form of nuclear power into them (hence the note that survivors are not really human, and are malleable forms of monsters, something like this would not transform a human into having super burning punches, it would instead transform them into a burn victim).

The survivor, now known as the witness returns to the settlement with their burnt hands, clad in a milky-green membrane, their eyes filled with a boundless look of peaceful resignation.

Oh dear, survivors really are just such idiotic savages, it's hard to not love some idiot who; in response to seeing a star fall from the sky and Saitama wander out of the remains of a giant beast, decides that the best thing to do is go in there, get horribly burned and then wear some part of the creature as a costume.

They don't even point out where the body is so that other survivors can go harvest resources, nope, they just spend their time cosplaying as a god. Bravo, such dedication to physical shit posting.

Resources

So what of those resources? What further information can we garner from them? Well, as is always the case, each resource contains information not just about it (through lore) but also from how it is gained (hit locations). To quickly walk through all of the parts here's a list!

Name – Lore/rules – Hit Location (if any)

• Cabled Vein – A Dense Bundle of Bloody Tubes
• Dragon Iron – It feels heavy, but when dropped falls as slowly as a feather*
• Hardened Ribs – Strong, Flexible and Hollow
• Horn Fragment – Nearby speech auses them to resonate – Serpent Horns
• Husk – A decaying layer of former skin
• King's Claws – Disturbingly warm, and sharp enough to draw blood with a touch 
• King's Tongue – Smooth, dry and sharp
• Radioactive Dung – Gives off smoke with an acrid odor
• Pituitary Gland – Consume to roll 1d10, on 4+ gain +1 permanent strength, otherwise you grow to giant size and die – L2 Dragon King
• Radiant Heart – When you gain this resource, roll 1d10, on a 3+ you burst into flames and die – L2 Dragon King (with Sculpture) & Death Blow
• Shining Liver – When exposed to light, it filters it into head and become darker – L3 Dragon King
• Iron – Standard Strange Resource – Breaking Pillars formed from Lava Pools

- Dragon Iron contains an indirect reference to a classic old physics question/puzzle where an equal weight of Iron and Feathers are dropped from a tower. Gravitational Acceleration for two objects of the same weight will reach the same top speed if you ignore air friction/resistance. So, the suggestion for Dragon Iron is that it has some properties that make it have massive air resistance.

- Shining Liver suggests that the internal light of the Dragon King is converted into heat, and also that Dragon King livers are prone to typos (It should be 'becomes darker').

- Oddly critical wounds on the talons give random resources, while the Serpent Thigh specifically gives the King's Claws from a toe. It looks like the Critical Wound text for those two locations is swapped.

- Radiant Heart is an odd piece of design, it has the inverse dice roll where rolling high is bad, in the rest of the game, rolling low is bad. Strange little oddity, it should be on a 9+ they're fine, otherwise boom, dead. The killing effect of Radiant Heart is also a reference to People of the Stars, which I'll discuss when diving into that campaign.

- The Serpent Wings have two hit locations that are different (this is another place where the design of the Dragon King breaks the norms). Either you get a Husk or a Veined Wing.

- The Pituitary Gland is a fun reference to both the Strain fighting art Giant's Blood, and to various medical conditions like gigantism, a serious condition often caused by an adenoma on the pituitary gland. This results in an excess of growth hormone during childhood. The suggestion here is that the Dragon King's massive form is caused by this huge pituitary gland, and ingesting it affects survivors with either a small size boost (+1 strength) or a catastrophically deadly one.

In addition to all of this, the Dragon King makes Lava Pools and can then meltdown them into iron pillars. It's an odd little ability, but given that we see a lot of evidence that the Dragon King's material portions are heavily ironlike, one can assume that it uses molten iron for bodily fluids.

I'd also like to just take a quick moment and mention that Dragon Armor is so, so hard to construct because you need Hardened Ribs for the Dragon Mantle (Chest piece) and that's one card in the resource deck with no specific critical wound for it. Not really lore related, but it's frustrating as heck.

All of this indicates that whatever material the Dragon King's form is constructed from, it's not part of the core individual 'pilot' but it's substantial enough that it is real stuff. This isn't unusual because we've already seen that the “Goblin” (aka the Sparrow King) and the Ivory Dragon (aka the Stan twins) are capable of manifesting a large amount of additional matter either from some internal growth/energy process, from some other dimension or from the surrounding air. Personally I like to think they're like the Tager from Cthulhu-Tech who manifest a being from another dimension as a shell around them – in a similar way to their inspiration, Sho Fukamachi from Guyver does (I only really know much about the series because Mark Hamill was in one of the movies and it's a power rangers style movie with absolutely horrific body horror that comes out of nowhere).

Here are some of the Cthulhu-Tech mechs, while they are sci-fi in origin, they have a lot in common with the Dragon King's overall trope design - a 'pilot' inside living creature. Mostly I'm posting this here because I wish Cthulhu-Tech had lived up to its setting.

Not even the People of the Stars campaign helps clear up these vague elements though, again I won't touch on it in heavy details here, that's for the People of the Stars spoiler article. But ultimately, we know that the Dragon King is a nuclear powered 'living star' and part of an entire race which is now mostly extinct.

This knowledge comes from the Dragon King showdown lore, and the Dragon King hunt event cards. Which will be our last couple of stops in this article.

“There once was a monster that was alone in the world. Abandoned in its grief, the monster crawled deep inside its aching heart until it broke and was set aflame. Now, the power of its grief and fury pours like invisible poison from the weeping face it hides inside its hulking body.” – Dragon King Showdown Lore

This lore references that the Dragon King is indeed the last of its kind, it's a unique creature and as we already have seen, it is capable of reforming its external body over and over, so the constant attacks of the survivors are in essence them bullying this lone immortal over and over. One would assume that this takes place before the events of People of the Stars, because unlike the Sunstalker hunt events, we see no references to the Stars campaign.

Hunt Events

In respect to the hunt events it is only the Cultivated Crypt, Settlement Ruins and Ornate Temple that directly reference the Dragon King's Lore (Lava Flow and Majestic Shadow are linked to the Dragon King, but have little in the way of lore implications beyond supporting Settlement Ruins) – Dopple Den and Thespian Troupe have lore impacts, but not in respect to the Dragon King, so we'll discuss them a little when we look at the hunt events in more mechanical detail. As an aside, I thematically love Dopple Den, also the Murder settlement event it spawns is a little easier to deal with because you can be prepared before starting to trigger it. Murder when you're not set up to handle it with spare retired survivors is the worst and one of the top end campaign killers (along with early Plague and late game Cracks in the Ground).

Cultivated Crypt is the resting place of many, many dead Dragons, it is a demonstration that the Dragon King is indeed the last of its kind and that its people were not just large monsters, but they had a civilisation capable of concepts such as burial, honouring of the dead and construction of buildings. Ornate temple is a little more vague hunt event, it references the past glories of civilisation, one would assume given the angelic (and gigantic) nature of the structure seen that this is part of the Dragon King's past civilisation (angelic/holy/Judeo-Christian themes are common ones for the Dragon King's “human” form – this is only present in the horns of the Dragon King itself, which are shaped as a celestial diadem/halo). Settlement Ruins is simpler, it just shows the extreme hostility and boundless, aimless rage that the Dragon King has. While I may have suggested you're bullying the Dragon King earlier in this article, it's worth acknowledging that in truth the Dragon King sees survivor settlements as being anthills filled with pests. You are not its friend.

Summary

So that's a semi-detailed comb through some of the aspects of the Dragon King, while we know more about the Dragon King than many other monsters in this game, we still don't know all of the details and at this stage, without an expansive lore book being released, it's unlikely we'll ever know much more about it. It's possible Campaigns of Death may expand a bit on the Dragon King's history and physical mechanics, but otherwise it may just remain a monster born of some mysterious past, imbued with the power of a living star (I've really not gone into that in enough details through this, but I'm not here to teach you about fission reactors, fusion reactors and the multitude of different stages in a star's lifecycle. I think we can, however, conclude that the Dragon King is in the latter stages of its lifespan, something we'll touch more on later.

Next time we'll look at "the carrots", aka gear and other benefits – because while the Dragon King gear is somewhat variable in quality (mostly due to lacking strength), there's a lot of other sweet options you can get from fighting this behemoth!