Erza of Dedheim – Seasonal Content Review (Patreon)

Led by Grozharous, the Pale Turnip King. Dedheim was established in the ruins of a forgotten town. The monstrous lord claims that within Dedheim’s crystaline gates the dead are collected. Erza of Dedheim guards the settlement's black tourmaline gates. She bars the denizens of Dedheim from leaving and spilling into the world of the living.

This year we received three new pieces of content for the Nos Calan Gaeaf sale (That's Halloween for those of you who are not familiar with the tradition's Welsh Celtic and Gaelic origins); we're going to look at Erza this time and we'll review both the Flower Costume and Reapokratis content together next week.

Erza of Dedheim is a selection of three “in universe” (Positive pattern number) gear cards, an oversized sculpt of the titular Erza (one of many Erza's in this world) and a more standard 42mm miniature that you can use to represent a survivor with the gear in game. I'm not going to dwell too much on the sculpts this time because in all honesty they're a lower quality than a lot of what we've seen in recent times. It may be the lighting/photography on the page, but while the larger sculpt has stuff to offer (especially for foot fetishists) the smaller one is frankly atrocious with its bizarre hand on hips modelling pose.

You might like this, but I find it really weird and wooden.

The three pieces of new content are all themed around the (now confirmed as in universe) settlement of Dedheim; a settlement ruled by a turnip – which is very thematic as in Scotland it is traditional to carve 'Neeps/Turnips for Samhain rather than Pumpkins – something my Great Grandmother used to have us do. I still have a preference for a carved neep due to how much darker and more fitting for the celebration of the end of summer it is.

Here is a painting by the Scottish Artist William Stewart MacGeorge depicting that tradition. So the Turnip King is a nice reference back to one of the original practices of this holiday.

I very much love this piece with its combination of warm colours around the neep lanterns contrasting with the dark, shapeless backgrounds, but it is the faces of these children and the obvious glee they have at being 'ghastly' that holds the attention.

Before we move on to the main review I would like to touch on the lore text at the top of this review, first of all a quick editorial note that the word crystaline should have been struck from the passage, you don't need to call something crystaline when you later call it tourmaline, a tourmaline object is also a crystaline one. That ridiculously unnecessary nitpick aside; this is another place where we're encountering the constant of unreliable actors; in this case Grozharous has made large and wild claims that the dead are collected in this settlement and held beyond the black, crystaline, tourmaline gates (see how you don't need both words in the same construct?) There's no evidence to provide the truth of this; but an Erza survivor has still taken up the task of guarding the gates - one would assume that she's going to be inevitably betrayed by her Neep grubstaker.

The monsters of Kingdom Death's world are notorious for lying to or deceiving the survivors; each of them seeks to hide their own vulnerabilities or plans by either untruths or simply failing to provide all the information. These unreliable narrators, both in and out of universe are a big part of what creates the game's world and it is nice, frustrating, but nice, to see this continues even to this point.

We shall now go through all three of Erza's new pattern cards; which one would assume are in part inspired by the fables that speak of this settlement, drifting into the survivors memories and dreams just through being in the presence of greater entities.

Ghostlink Pumpkin

Requires: Graves Innovation, a sickle keyword gear card, 1x Black Lichen, 1x Muculent Droppings Phoenix resource, Phoenix as a Quarry.

The resulting gear card, of which 1 copy can be crafted, is:

This item in isolation provides when activated a once per showdown frenzy mental trauma and conversion of all attribute tokens (positive or negative) in exchange for becoming doomed until end of round (meaning that you cannot do anything at all until the end of the round, which happens at the end of the survivor's turn). This is actually a very low opportunity cost as the player can activate this after all other actions/movement in their turn and the only limitation really is that it costs an [Activation] and requires the ability to consume. There are plenty of slow weapons that can be improved with the aid of frenzy's +1 speed and there's a lot of weapons that can benefit from conversion of a great deal of tokens into strength tokens.

This item has a natural synergy with the five Halloween costumes because they create a token that half the time is beneficial and the other half it is a negative. The Ghostlink Pumpkin provides a safety valve against this by letting the equipped survivor cleanse those negative tokens. It also has a similar benefit against Silent Hymn, but due to it only working once against Silent Hymn's continuous pressure it's not a solution, more a temporary reprieve and strength boost.

Add onto this the item's excellent affinities (always a great way of making a single use gear card viable) and you have a solid item. This is however just part of the picture, because this item is also designed to work with the other items contained in this release.

Robes of Dedheim

Requirements: 1x Cloth, 1x Hide, Traumatized Disorder (Core game), Bone Witch Settlement Timeline Event

This item is a bit harder to craft than the Pumpkin due to it requiring a disorder and a Bone Witch to happen while you have the Pattern available. The resource requirements are not so hard to achieve; but there are a lot of things which require cloth these days and you only have one of these per starting survivor in the Prologue showdown. Are we beginning to reach the time where it becomes a meta choice to play with 6x survivors? Probably not, but it's an interesting idea.

The gear card itself is an alternative body piece for Rawhide Armor:

(Hair is not included!)

A couple of key things to note, these robes work with the Dancer Hybrid armor set, which means they have the ability to scale into the mid/late game thanks to how Hybrid armor sets provide replacement armor points. Secondly, we are now at the point where we need a clear clarification on what happens if you can potentially have more than one item with Outfit in an armor set.

The Promotional item Twilight Thong is a waist rawhide armor piece and these robes are a body rawhide piece, so that means we've got an armor set with two potential Outfit ability pieces – if someone wants to prod Team Death on the Lantern's Reign discord if you can have multiple outfits in an armor set (i.e. Rawhide Headband, Robes of Dedheim, Twilight Thong, Rawhide Gloves and Rawhide Boots) and still receive the set bonus. Then post their answer in the comments here that would be very enlightening and helpful thanks (You can also confirm that this will work with Dancer Armor while you're there).

Outside of that unusual situation what we have here is a body piece that is self contained and allows the Rawhide Armor set to work in a different manner to its usual form. The obvious and immediate synergy is with spears, spear survivors do not care about having high speed because their combination of reach and Spear Specialisation means that they can spam attacks while suffering less consequences. However, most spears cap out at 2 speed and gaining more speed on them is a challenge. This provides a simple and cost effective way of doing that, even if you hit the trap and don't cancel it you still gain +1 evasion.

It is notable that this armor lacks the up blue affinity that makes it so easy to activate the Rawhide Headband, but the increased emphasis on red affinities adds alternative synergies with items like the memey Red Charm (which always enjoys more speed) or the excellent Acid-Tooth Daggers from the Gorm expansion (I would rather get my +2 speed from body armor rather than having to run a second dagger for paired, plus this also has the option for 6 speed Acid-Tooth Daggers, stabbing goes brrr).

Without outfit this armor would not be a notable or impressive item, but with it we've got another variant that can open up new builds when you happen to draw this particular pattern card. Which is excellent news for players who replay the early/mid game over and over.

It also has one final piece of the puzzle and that is the doomed synergy; we've now seen two cards with doomed synergy, but outside of gaining and converting tokens we've not seen much in the way of pay off have we?

Scythe of Doom

Requirements: 1x Bone, 3x Iron, 1x Leather, Rolling Hunt Event 73 while the Pattern is out and the Possessed Ability (Gained from Settlement Event Haunted without Momento Mori innovated on a roll of 8+), Blacksmith Location open.

This is a rough ask to craft because Haunted is a random occurrence and then you need to roll an 8+; fortunately Momento Mori is not a common innovation due to low benefits so at least that isn't going to roadblock you from gaining possession. So; each year you have a 1/22 chance of drawing the card (core game SE only) and then 30% chance of getting the roll you wanted – that's a 1.5% chance each year. It's not terrible, but that's pretty close to the perfect situation – for those of us with expansion/promotional Settlement events the %s get worse.

So this is a very rare weapon that you will probably see at some point, but without repeated play it's not going to have much room for experimentation and if you really want to get it online you're going to have to work at getting the options above. This weapon does not play well without help.

The key aspect of this weapon is Doombound; now before we dive into the meat of this, it is very important to point out the horrible wording on Doombound. The use of 'This' here means that the literal reading of this weapon is.

Doombound: When you become doomed, place a doom token on [Doombound]. You must archive a doom token to activate [Doombound].

That's obviously NOT the intended use, but it's why you have to be really careul when using definitive articles, because there can be more than one definitive article in the sentence. Here “This” is intended to mean “Scythe of Doom” or “This Weapon”. However, by being lax the full reminder text here isn't automatically clear and it can cause problems for non-English speakers or individuals who parse written language in a non-standard form.

I bring this up simply because adding “weapon” after this each time would have completely avoided this issue and when you have a simple fix for a problem that can cause accessibility/clarity issues it is foolish to not take that option. There is even room on the card to write the word weapon or gear. Some may see it as a small point, but it has large repercussions for some people.

Onto the weapon mechanics itself. Scythe of Doom requires the Dragon King expansion to gain access to its mastery; so for people without that expansion there's a chunk of content locked away. That is a shame, but it is something that is always going to come up as long as a weapon type with a proficiency that appears in an expansion is used. Fortunately you can always use my small reference cards to cover that situation (or look up the specialization/mastery online)!

The weapon itself is an absolutely beastly weapon with massive strength, above average accuracy, deadly, a blue affinity that connects to the Lucky Charm and Sharp. It's one of the most powerful weapons we've had in the game to date (especially when you factor in Scythe proficiency) – but all that power comes with a price, without doom tokens on the Scythe you cannot activate this weapon and you can only get Doom Tokens by becoming doomed. Here's the main ways you can become doomed.

• Anyone activates the trap of: Phoenix, Slenderman, Spidicules, Lion God, Lion Knight, Manhunter, Flower Knight, Dragon King, Dung Beetle Knight, The Watcher
• Be the attacker when activating the trap of: White Lion, King's Man, Butcher, Screaming Antelope, Tyrant.
• Ghostlink Pumpkin (Which is a pattern gear, therefore not guaranteed to be available, but you do get it in this box).

Note: the following monsters do not doom with their trap: The Lonely Tree, Gorm, The Hand. And the updated Vermin Obsession/Villain Role Card do not doom survivors because of how they can break showdowns.

So; yeah. This weapon is VERY hard to activate, especially because that not only do you need to rely on hitting the trap for doom tokens, but in some cases it has to specifically be the Scythe Wielder who does that.

As such, you just can't rely on this as your only weapon, you're going to need a second one – something with a lot of speed so you can haste your way into the Trap and score more hits. It's an interesting playstyle, but with gear grids having so much pressure on those slots it is hard to justify this weapon even if it basically deals up to 6 wounds each time you attack with it.

As an aside, there are a fighting arts that have Doomed Synergy, it is Headliner (Lion Knight) and it does this:

Sadly it doesn't help doom you directly.

At the moment I can't foresee a build arising around this particular weapon at the moment; however it can easily be squeezed into a DPS gear grid in order to activate the Lucky Charm and then you get to swing it for big old exciting hits every once in a while. That's actually a fine place for a weapon like this to be, especially as the other two items have standalone applications. However; as more content is added to the game we will have to keep an eye out for more Doomed synergies being added; there may be a stage where we hit critical mass and some crazy build swarms out of the cracks. It happened with Doom in Arkham Horror thanks to The Scarlet Keys' Doom synergy cards; it can happen here – because any eternal format with customisable builds, which KDM is absolutely a member of*; has this gradually increasing level of power creep due to more and more options becoming available and while some cards are locked behind specific monsters being in the campaign; some like this Scythe do not appear to be so (unless we get some confirmation what the seed keyword is linked to).

*(it just turns out for your deck building you just build four x9 card tableaus and sometimes add Fighting Arts/Disorders to those builds).

Conclusion

Erza of Dedheim is another good addition to the range of pattern cards one can choose from. All three gear cards have good affinities, interesting applications and are not reliant on each other for value. You can get any one of these three in isolation and still have a good time – I really do want to stress how much of this is because of the smart decisions made with the affinities; the Ghostlink Pumpkin would be relegated to specific builds if it didn't have those green affinities on both sides, but with them it's a great piece of glue for builds and also has a sometimes excellent ability that may have other applications.

The Robe is the standout option as far as I'm concerned; it has very interesting applications and fits into two different armor sets (Possibly more when we get the Gambler's Chest) and that's a very exciting proposition. As such I think this is something that was worth picking up for the game content even if the miniatures themselves are a little behind the current standard.