Summer Aya Promo 2022 Review (Patreon)

Aya travels to the sand dunes below the larval pools that form in the iron clouds overhead. Here the sun never sets and perpetual summer reigns. The metabolic mutation of the skypoles super heats the fluids of the pool, roiling and bubbling over, occasionally disgorging them to the sands below. Massive globs of fluids rain down, creating cryptic glass formations in the sand.

Aya is my second favourite character in KDM; there are of course many Aya's due to the nature of survivors, but she remains a character that I aesthetically like and also the journey that “Aya Prime” has been taking over the miniature sculpts released is giving us insight into the trials and tribulations of survivors outside the settlement. We can identify that Aya by her unique gear, gained from her encounter with a Nightmare Ram in the rulebook comic and yes, Summer Aya is not wearing that gear, but she is carrying it.

I'm going to skip over commenting on the aesthetic for this particular model too much, it's a nice sculpt and it's tasteful (if pointless) in its partial nudity, but it's also going to contribute to the game's reputation as being “Nothing more than butts, boobs and monsters.” It is what it is, and models in the shop have been released with more and less clothing before.

Aya's model depicts not just the beta content card that comes from this pack, but also the result of carrying that gear with a baby Sunstalker impaled on the end of it. That's an interesting little tidbit of lore; it seems that some very small Sunstalkers wander about the world (though the specific one which Aya has killed is from a beach where there is a Sun slumbering - this Sun is likely very old due to its 'permanent' fixture in the sky).

The game content is It's two cards, one gear card, one strange resource that's generated by that gear card and nothing more. So, let us dive into the Survival Spear.

Gaining the Survival Spear

The spear is gained via interacting with the Survivor Corpse terrain card. If while activating it you roll a 10+ then you gain the Survival Spear (Limited to once per campaign). This is in addition to the normal benefits for rolling a 10+ rather than a replacement. You'll also gain +3 Insanity and the Skull basic resource. A great haul and it rewards the top roll (normally 6+ gives the insanity and skull).

This means that there is no control over when you'll get this, so how good it is and what you'll employ it for varies. We'll discuss the options when we get to the weapon itself, but suffice to say, it's going to be stronger when gained early.

Some may not like this random nature, because if they do not play regularly then they may be picking up cards that they never use, but I can forgive this one because it's expanding on a piece of in game content that previously has been 'Free Resource and Insanity'.

The Survival Spear

There it is, it's a very modest weapon, functioning initially as a King's Spear, but through repeated use of Survival Actions the weapon's strength grows with no cap (outside of your personal Survival Limit). A weapon that has strength scaling independent of having to suck up the lumps by attacking to increase your strength, is something that can't be overlooked. The obvious immediate combination is with Abyssal Sadist, a Manhunter Expansion Fighting Art that gives you +1 survival whenever you wound:

With just three survival actions this weapon is up to a Zanbato in strength, and it can continue to scale further and further as long as there is sufficient fuel for the fire. This means the weapon is very strong in the early game, because even one or two activations makes it equivalent to a mid game weapon, but it also means that it can remain viable in the mid game with the right fighting arts, gear, abilities or deep survival limit. A few options in addition to Abyssal Sadist include:

• Rawhide Armor Set Bonus (Core Game)
• Seasoned Monster Meat (DBK Gear)
• Dragon King Armor (Chest gives you max survival at the start of the showdown).
• Burning Focus (Lion God Fighting Art)
• Defender (Sunstalker Fighting Art – used by other survivors on the wielder)
• Headliner (Lion Knight Fighting Art)
• Thrill Seeker (Core Game)
• Transcended Masochist (Manhunter Fighting Art)
• Vengeance (Spidicules Fighting Art)
• Dried Acanthus (Core Game)
• Story of the Young Hero (Core Game – used in combination with bleed removal)
• Sunspot Darts (Sunstalker Gear – one of the highest Survival Gain Gear cards)

This is just the tip of the iceberg, survival is an area with many ways of replenishing it, so something that scales a key combat statistic through use of survival is a huge matter.

You can also activate multiple survival actions in a turn, Encourage can be used at anytime (even if the survivor you target is not Knocked Down), Dash is the most powerful Survival Action and Surge gives you +1 Strength and an activation to attack with which is a very neat package.

In addition to that scaling, this weapon gives you Reach 2 (Reach is one of the best weapon abilities) and the Unique keyword, but that is irrelevant in almost every situation because you're limited to gaining this spear once per campaign already.

The last piece of the puzzle however is its puzzle affinity ability. When active you gain the Fresh Kill strange resource. This is a dead baby Sunstalker and it is a ??? resource (wild/bone/hide/organ) that can be consumed to archive it and gain half your settlement's survival limits. So, if you don't have any of the neat tricks to gain survival listed above, the weapon itself provides a bit of extra survival at the cost of an action.

Alternatively the Fresh Kill can just be a “support” weapon, where you don't intend to attack with it (except maybe into the trap for a cancel/reshuffle if you've got access to spear specialisation) and instead it's a super basic version of the Survival Kit. This is a little awkward to set up due to the affinity orientations being green left, red up and red right – and all three of these must be connected to activate this, but there are builds that can accommodate this layout and a free “wild” resource every hunt that can be also converted into survival if the hunters are desperate is a good thing. This gives the spear a place in the mid to late game as a way of generating extra resources, and while a generic resource becomes less valuable the longer the settlement has been around (due to higher level monsters providing more and more resources) - this is a bone/hide/organ resource and that triples its flexibility. 

That means I can see using this weapon as a resource generating support item and having some other weapon (maybe also a spear) to start off with. This spear could still take over as the main spear if the fight ran long enough for total survival actions used to have increased

Yeah, this one's pretty good at most points in the campaign.

Summary

Summer Aya's content adds to the game's thematic and mechanical worlds with a net positive, this weapon's combination of survival scaling, spear keyword and generation of a very flexible resource every year it's taken on a hunt is a huge boon for a settlement. The method of gaining it is random, and this is going to mean how powerful/useful it is will be entirely contextual, but an early gain of this spear is likely to catapult a settlement towards the higher end of the power curve.

Due to this weapon being available at any point during the campaign, and it having a use either as a main weapon, or a back-up weapon/resource generator; this is an unusual gear item because it's close to always good when you get it. This means it makes Survivor Corpse terrain cards far more valuable, which is an improvement for the game's experience because the more meaningful terrain activations are: the more interesting situations can turn up during the showdown. 

Summer Aya's Survival Spear is a well designed and compact little piece of mechanics, and while it is unfortunately a little expensively priced due to the Beta content distribution model on the whole I can recommend this one for players who play Kingdom Death in a regular fashion.