Invasion of Astro-Monster: The Dragon King Deep Dive 4 (Patreon)

Part 4: The Showdown

The Radiant Heart, the goal of some showdowns, but a deadly resource to collect.

Most of the time, the main reason (outside of a new experience) for hunting a particular monster is gear. Armor set, weapon, support gear or any combination of these acts as the driving force behind hunting a given monster over any other. However, the Dragon King is rather unique due to the nature of this expansion; in all his incarnations Kingdom Death's Best Boi provides physical growth and improvements to the very substance of the survivors who come into contact with him. This trope is the concept of mutation through radiation. While here in our reality prolonged contact with nuclear radiation will cause a build up of damage to the genes of a living organism until the death of the organism occurs – in the world of Kingdom Death the radiation that the Dragon King emits is twinned with the concept of the life giving god. Just as in our own culture, where sun gods often sit high up in the given pantheon or the sun itself is directly worshipped – the Dragon King's position as a star is that of a giver of strength and life. It is not a mistake that the two creatures that emulate stars (Dragon King, Sunstalker) have campaigns when most other monsters do not, it's an inevitable design decision that probably influenced the creatures respective designers (Dragon King – Zachary Barash. Tyrant - Anna Poots. Sunstalker Adam Poots) to create their own takes on this classic root mythologies.

All of this is a long winded way of writing: The benefits of the Dragon King include stat boosts to the survivors who fight it. That's why despite a lot of the gear from the Dragon King (especially the weapons) being a bit suspect, the monster is still a good one to hunt. It can give your survivors extra statistics and even an incredible secret fighting art that hoses negative tokens.

That gives us the main gains (along with Hunt XP/Weapon Proficiency points) so all that's left is to talk about the format this dissection will be in. We're going to divide this into three  portions; the overall mechanical themes of the monster – which will give one a good overall understanding of how to approach the monster and then we'll follow with sections that go through the peaks and troughs for each of the two respective behaviour decks (AL & HL). Peaks are points of extra danger where the monster is exceptionally threatening, while troughs are opportunities for additional gains where survivors can take advantage. You can consider these to be ebbs and flows in the conflict; points where either the monster or the survivors have the advantage.

Mechanical Thematics

One of the largest draws of the Dragon King showdown is how well the mechanics of the monster relate the feeling of being involved in a slugfest against a small kaiju. There's a real weight to its attacks and it's a lot of fun to tackle. I'd go as far as to say that the Sunstalker and Dragon King showdowns are premiere fights for selling a feeling that is very unique and thrilling.

Outside of the physical battering that the Dragon King unleashes with fists it will also employ its flight, powerful jaws, sinuous tail and nuclear reactor beams.

The Dragon King interestingly has just two core status cards (and a third that turns up with the L3 Dragon King). These are Irradiate and Unseen Agony – both of which relate to the radiation based portion of the Dragon King's existence. Irradiate is a reference that is called by multiple AI cards and it's similar to the White Lion's Grab in that it can't be stopped and occurs every turn. The Dragon King uses this mechanic to reduce its toughness and if it has less than 5 toughness tokens it will then trigger Unseen Agony which covers all three 'rings' of spaces around where it stands (10x10 area so 100 spaces minus the 16 spaces the Dragon King occupies) and deals an increasing amount of damage to survivors in that zone. This is a range that will reach just about all melee based survivors, so there's a lot of value in the employment of ranged weapons or tactical dashing (which must be done before Irradiate triggers).

Against the lower level Dragon Kings (L1 & L2) Irradiate is a sporadic nuisance and while it gets very dangerous at the higher (negative) toughness token levels it's nothing compared to fighting the L3 Dragon King, which pumps out an Irradiate at the start of every monster turn via the Smolder Trait.

When you reach 5+ toughness tokens then the nuclear heart triggers the 'meltdown' story event. This attack hits every single survivor in the Dragon King's facing (and Field of View, which means you can hide behind some terrain if its not destructible) and the four blind spots, plus it archives all destructible terrain, transforms any lava pools into obsidian towers and then at the end clears the negative toughness tokens, resetting the Dragon King's entire cycle. Being caught in this wave of radiation is a rough break, with either a ruptured muscle arm injury or a blind severe head injury occurring 40% of the time each. The 9 result knocks you back 7 and more significantly archives solublegear in your grid. The 10 gives you the Acrobatics fighting art. In addition the damage dealt is identical to the Unseen Agony mechanic in that monster level hit locations are hit for damage equal to the toughness tokens.

It's similar to the Sunstalker in that the Dragon King becomes more vulnerable

Before we move on, it's also worth noting the key stats that the Dragon King has, it's movement consistently remains at 10, meaning it's hard to 'cheese' the trap with ranged weapons, something that matters because the Dragon King's trap employs its basic action. In order to trigger the trap on the Dragon King without being in range of it you need 12 range, and at times even that doesn't matter because the Dragon King's large base size means that it can reach many spots on the board with ease. It occupies four times the space that the White Lion does and that makes a difference when you consider its movement.

Token Scaling is pretty normal, with it gaining more speed and damage as it levels up, but it also gains a Luck Token at L3, that's quite significant as critical wounds are one method employed by survivors to overcome higher toughness. So you'll need more leverage to break through, which at this stage you should have via Bow Masters or higher Deadly X weapons.

Without that you're going to have to keep pace with the Dragon King's toughness. It starts at 13, then climbs to 15 and finally settles at 17. In general you want to have at least 5 or 6 points of strength less than the toughness to ensure that you'll wound 50% of the time or higher (and that's the bare minimum) taking into account that a d10 rolls an average of 5.5 (5 to 6). As such the minimum weapon + survivor strengths I'd take into a Dragon King showdown are:

• Level One – 8
• Level Two – 10
• Level Three – 12

There's no problem running over the top of these because there's no such thing as too much strength, but going more than one point below is going to cause you to have a bad time. Due to weapons providing the vast majority of strength, you're also somewhat limited in the kind of weapons you can take – For example against the L1 Draagon King any weapon with less than 5 strength probably isn't going to cut it on a typical survivor outside of high levels of Deadly + Luck. In the core game that's a serious issue because the weapon crafter location just doesn't offer that level of strength on its weapons outside of the Zanbato. This is one of the reasons that the Gorm is utilised so much when stepping into fighting expansion monsters, it's one of the few early/mid game monsters that can give you weapons with a reasonable level of strength (Greater Gaxe, Riot Mace) or alternative wounding methods (Acid-Tooth Daggers).  Otherwise you're going to want to start investing in this gear card:

This has fast become on of my favourite gear cards for the mid game. It really smooths out the transition in power when you're trying to 'tier up' your gear.

If you're thinking that the Dragon King is "like the Phoenix, it's just another Node 3 monster, I don't see what the big deal is with wounding it" remember that the Phoenix has just 10 toughness at L1 and the difference between 10 and 12 is very significant for weapons in this game. 10 can be reached a reasonable amount of the time with just 4-5 baseline strength, 12 is at a threshold that many early weapons can't approach without support from gear, survivors or armor sets.

AI Deck – Peaks & Troughs

The AI deck pulls a dazzling range of different moves as the Dragon King likes to employ just above every single one of its tools. Expect to get punched, kicked, stamped on and blasted with x-rays.

Atomic Conclusion

This Legendary AI card is every bit the beating you'd expect it to be. It is a duration card which gives the Dragon King +4 toughness tokens and irradiate when it's first drawn. Then when it's drawn the second time (face up) the Dragon King pulls all survivors 5 spaces towards the monster before triggering Irradiate. This Irradiate will then trigger a deadly Meltdown due to the number of toughness tokens on the monster.

There's also an odd quirk with how tokens work in Kingdom Death, in Magic: The Gathering there are +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters (which are mechanically similar to KDM Tokens) and in the modern rules of that game if a creature has both +1/+1 and a -1/-1 counter on them the two tokens mutally annihilate due to cancelling each other out. In KDM this doesn't happen with tokens – they sit around independently. So that is why this card gives the Dragon King +4 toughness when its sat on top of the deck and doesn't hand out +toughness tokens, because they'd stack and sit there until the end of the showdown. This is an important thing to pay attention to if you want to make monsters that gain stats during the showdown, be aware that nothing short of monster death or cards/events that directly remove tokens will get rid of those tokens. So if you want to give a monster a temporary boost to a statistic for a single action, put it directly on the card involved, be very cautious with positive attribute tokens unless you have a specific design method to let the monster remove them itself.

Outside of that, pay attention to that flowstep just after the Dragon Kin gains -10 Tokens, not only is this an opportunity to score extra hits against a monster that momentarily has -10 toughness, but it's also a chance to Dash onto the Dragon King's flanks where you won't get drawn into the Meltdown zones.

Countdown is a weaker version of Atomic Conclusion (due to , it doesn't give the Dragon King extra toughness, it instead sets up the Dragon King to meltdown 1 to 2 times over the next two turns. The main goal here is to ensure that when the Meltdown is drawn, all survivors are not in the blast zones.

Crisis Crater

Another nasty advanced card, mostly because of that -1 accuracy token and bash that it inflicts on all survivors, which can leave them damaged and vulnerable to the basic action (which will trigger irradiate). You can however Dash out of this zone and you should be doing that, turning the card into a far weaker threat.

Death Descending

This card is rather fun because it punishes survivors who group up too much, the showdown gives survivors the opportunity to attack the monster from all angles, but typical deployment in a showdown like this has survivors grouping up. Here you want to ensure that whoever the target is, there's no-one in within 4 spaces of them because they'll get crushed with a pretty devastating amount of damage. If you get caught off-guard by this there is a flow step for either the target or the collateral damage survivors to Dash away. Noticing how key Dash is to this fight?

Lordly Roar

If you've paid attention to what the Hunt Events asked of you, you should have survivors with excellent courage levels. This card is a “free” wound in that case, without that it's a dangerous intimidate action. So bring high levels of courage if you can so you can capitalise on this card.

Mournful Strike

This one is mostly worth paying attention to because it causes unexpected shuffles of the AI deck, usually you will get a good read on what a monster is going to do once you've passed through its AI deck once, but this card denies that and can generate a lot of extra chaos. It's an interesting mechanic and one I'd like to see in more high level monsters.

Nuclear Blast

This one's another thing to be Dashed, the damage is pretty brutal, but no more than most attacks from monsters at this level. It doesn't deal hits, so watch out for that cause Block/Deflect isn't going to protect you here.

Rend Asunder

So this second Legendary card is way more favourable than Atomic Conclusion, it's a heck of a beatdown and you probably want to Dash-Cancel (Dash out of the way) of the first attack if you can, but the second attack is how you get access to Altered Destiny. It's always worth remembering that 50% of level 2 Dragon Kings have this card in their deck, and the SFA is just one of the sweetest in the game. It has combos with anything that gives negative tokens (such as the Harvestman fighting art) and it completely neuters the King's Man card Silent Hymn.

One of the 'farming' things I like to do when fighting the Dragon King is figure out which legendary card the Dragon King has and if it's Rend Asunder then I'll play slow, filtering out cards from the AI deck until the Dragon King has Rended as many of my survivors as possible.

Stuff of Nightmares

Only thing to really note about this is it is one of the few attack moves that crush Immortal tanks. Be careful running someone who relies on their Insanity to do stuff because this move clears that out completely.

Hit Location Deck Peaks & Troughs

As is normal, the Hit Location deck offers the largest potential for advantages moments in the showdown. The Dragon King though goes one step further than most monsters, as a part of his general thematic shtick the Dragon King's radiation strengthens survivors who are already powerful. The Dragon King admires strength, for weakness is anathema to strength. Be strong against this foe and its unusual nature will reward you.

It's a pretty neat aspect of the fight, you don't just come here to get new gear, you come here to make your survivors or perhaps their evil doppelgänger stronger. That's honestly a fun reward and it makes up somewhat for the uninspiring weapons that come from this monster.

The King's Mouth

Critically wounding this location is all you want to do because of how the reflex decimates gathered resources (or survival), once you've done that the location is archived and you get a King's Tongue. However, the tongue is only used in the Blast Shield and as we discussed in the past (see Dragon King Tag at the bottom of this post) the Blast Shield is not great as it has no place in a campaign where the Leather Shield exists (same problem that the Scrap Shield suffers).

Bony Chest Sphincter

A fun one when you wound, this can actually be used during a flow step to get a survivor out of trouble from an Area of Effect (AoE) attack like Meltdown. The critical wound here is a two edged sword, on one hand you get a King's Claws; something you want for crafting the Dragon Boots or Talon Knife but on the other hand you stack a bunch of negative toughness tokens onto the monster and almost guarantee a meltdown. So be prepared.

Engulf in Light & Microwave Heart

Not much to say here except be aware that they can increase the clock on the next Meltdown (and trigger Unseen Agony) in a surprising manner. Also note that Microwave Heart, despite its odd appearance, can be wounded, it's not Impervious – there are four of those hit locations in the deck, so don't mix it up!

Heartface

A great hit location to critically wound due to how it neuters one of his main mechanics, the survival gain is also wonderful because of how Dash intensive this showdown can be.

Serpent Chest

For a normal blow, this acts as another copy of Bony Sphincter, so that part applies equally here. The Critical Wound however is different and very sweet, you get a +1 Strength Token and +1 strength for 2 survival. This is a really good rate of return, normally it's more survival than that to gain strength, so I'd recommend picking it up if you feel you have sufficient survival to make it through what's left of the showdown.

Serpent Foot

Know what I wrote about strength being a good deal for 2 survival? Evasion's even better. While we're here we'll also note that the Serpent Thigh gives +1 accuracy on a crit with no cost and the Serpent Wing Talons give you +1 movement if you have innovated Forbidden Dance. That Dance is an excellent Music Innovation so this movement increase should be a freebie for most settlements.

Serpent Horns

It's Impervious, but like the White Lion Mane it gives you two resources for critically "wounding" it (The Glorious Mane is basically 2x Basic Hide and as a reminder, you should archive it back into the resource deck as soon as you get it when fighting White Lions). The Reflex reaction is 1 or 2 random disorders, that's pretty tame.

Serpent Tail Vertebra

Critically Wounding this one is a massive opportunity for the survivors, they get to cancel all monster reactions, which is huge and a window where you should hit with as much speed as possible.

Serpent Tail

One of the only Critical Wound hit locations that creates a Persistent Injury. This is a great chance to make Dash-Cancelling and Ranged Trapping work because the Dragon King's movement halves at times.

Serpent Talon

An opportunity to remove negative toughness tokens, this can stop an ill-timed Meltdown. Basic, but welcome. You may want to tuck this one away safe if you're playing Slow weapons + Cat Eye Circlet style.

Serpent Wings

There are four of these cards and they're actually two different cards with the same name. The Critical Wounds are identical, they give you resources and Lava Pools (which can become Obsidian Towers for Iron, and you should smash them as soon as possible because they're destructible - don't let that lovely Iron get disintegrated by the big lizard).

Cosmic Uppercut – Trap

A fun one, this removes a survivor from the board for a turn while they're punched into Low “Earth” Orbit for a moment. It's a trap that relies on the Basic Action, so with good movement and/or smart play you can neuter a lot of it.

I think thematically this is a really fun card, and it also shows that there is a void above the world of Kingdom Death (no sound or direction would be space). It's silly, a bit weird that the survivor comes crashing back down rather than ends up lifelessly orbiting, but darn if it's not cool.

Serpent Abdomen – Deathblow

Just remember to have a disposable survivor deal the Death Blow, they have a 70% chance of dying when they receive the heart. Everyone else (and the collector if they survive) gets nice bonuses mind you!

Hit Location Deck Composition

Before we finish here are the numbers for the Hit Location deck's distribution.

• 1x First Strike
• 2x Impervious
• 2x Super-Dense
• 5x Failure Reactions
• 8x Wound Reactions
• 5x Reflex Reactions
• 16x Critical Wounds
• 7x Immune to Critical Wounds
• 3x Self Archiving/Permanent Injuries
• 10x Resource Drops
• 5x Stat Gain (Some require Forbidden Dance)

As you can see from this breakdown the Dragon King does hold a lower amount of critical wound locations than normal, so often you just can't Critically Wound the monster. This issue should be compensated for by having your Deadly survivor with sufficient strength to reach the thresholds. Super-Dense also makes an appearance, but not in the quantities that it does on some other Node 3 monsters. It's possible to take Frail gear into this fight if you are using hit location control and a cautious playstyle.

Farming with slow play for just resources is possible, but like many Node 3 and later monsters the ramped up danger that they represent tends to limit this, usually through attacks that can bypass Block/Deflect due to their nature not being hits. Unseen Agony in particular is great at forcing a close range party to end the fight quickly or get overwhelmed.

It's particularly interesting that the Dragon King has Hit Locations that self-archive without becoming permanent injuries. I think this was a clever piece of design from Zachary Barash as these locations are ones that drop resources. It's both a good limiter to put in and cap the number of resources that can be dropped by a monster per showdown and it's also very thematically interesting.

I've mentioned it a few times above, but it really is worth noting just how generous this showdown is for gaining stats. Movement, Accuracy, Strength and Evasion are all here for the taking and you can do some really wonderful things with increases in any of those stats. This is a huge part of the Dragon King's allure and it makes the monster a great target for Late and End Game parties where you'll be swapping survivors about a lot less than earlier in the campaign.

We're moving on to two new topics over the next two weeks, because the Visual Guides often take a lot of work (can't make them look that shitty without a lot of effort you know) and the Dragon King one is no exception. So while I'm doing that 'in the background' the latest promotional content has reached my eyes and I can test that out. I've also had a patron request I'd like to fit in this month!