Novice Beta and Elgnirk Content Reviews (Patreon)

As both of these two Holiday releases are relatively light on content I will review them together here. Normally I would consider splitting them up, but given the nature of these two I'll just keep them on one page.

Elgnirk

Elgurk is unusual in that this content is designed to be used exclusively around the Holiday Season (As KDM is a heavily Christianic board game in its theming). Now I'm not sure what you do if you are not of a denomination that observes that particular Christian based time; but it is your game so include this in whatever way you deem appropriate.

The main reason I mention this is because while we have had plenty of Father Christmas coloured content (Bring back Green or Tan Santa!) in the past; this is the first one with meta content that requires playing it during a certain time of year. We've seen time locked “content” like this before with the following Valentines Day electronic “promotional” Valentine's Day:

Which is from 2016 and due to its release method and lack of a physical printing is probably forgotten by most players at this point. However; it's valid this week, so if you're playing give yourself +1 population right now.

Elgnirk has you take out your festive Deathmark card and when on the hunt you place the Elgnirk miniature on the last space. Each doubles moves her miniature one closer to your hunt party and should the twain ever meet then you open the card and the event revealer rolls on the table (Included here; with thanks to Timberwolfl for providing images of the pieces ahead of them arriving in my postbox).

As you can see; this table is a pretty punishing pile of randomised nonsense to be inflicted on players. You get either a 6 disorder 0 fighting art survivor (40%), your proficiency being randomised (keeping the levels you already have) (30%); having your attributes swapped with a different random survivor (20%) or Gaining the Joyous Secret Fighting Art (10%).

Oh boy, this one's a bit of a head scratcher. The important things here are to note that certain monsters kill survivors for too much survival and that there are things that can remove your insanity other than Brain Damage. Also you can get rid of this by gaining a fourth fighting art when you are getting close to too much insanity.

One of the most obvious combinations this SFA has is with the Holiday Promotional Gear card Xmaxe, which becomes stronger as you gain more and more insanity. This seems like a planned synergy forced by the designers.

But the Gloom Katana from the Slender Man also works in a similar fashion and there are silly things you can do with Butcher's Blood to boot.

The Immortal disorder is worth a special note here because of how it works with Joyous  You are effectively immune from damage related deaths and if you have a reliable method that can pull your insanity back down then you have a really durable tank. For example:

Bone Witch Mehndi – Lion God

Spending Insanity is not the same as suffering Brain Damage.

Clarity of Darkness – Slender Man

Setting your Insanity to 0 is not suffering Brain Damage.

So this Secret Fighting Art provides an interesting ability; however; strictly speaking you can only gain this during the Holiday season and even then you need to roll a 10+; which means it is at best a 20% chance (Assuming you have Otherworldly Luck aka OWL) and the rest of the results are pretty terrible, because having your attributes, weapon proficiency or all of your Fighting Arts replaced with Disorders forever are absolutely terrible results. Survivor builds can fall apart very quickly if you lose attributes, weapons or Fighting Arts during a hunt/showdown and there's nothing you can do if this happens.

Ultimately this piece of content is a huge meme; it has some strong thematic ties with older Holiday content; but there is very little value in this one for gamers. The best interactions are with other Promotional Content or Expansion content and even then it is hard to get anywhere close to the best results. As such I think you can skip on this one whenever it is available to purchase because of how little time it will spend on your table and how heavily slated towards “LOL RANDOM” and negatives this content is directed at. 

I'd rather see more design attention aimed at things like our second offering which is...

Novice Beta

One of KDM's cutest members (second only behind Lucy) gets her first official in universe game content with this beta release. In addition to the adorable sculpt this content comes with a single gear card and a glossary card for the new Ability – Novice.

Novice is in essence a label for a survivor with 0-1 Hunt XP and it allows for more powerful gear to be available to them while limiting access for more experienced hunters. Before we get into the weeds with that, let us look at the payoff.

Crafting Requirements: 1x Endeavor, 1x Perfect Bone. No other requirements or restrictions.

The Novice Dagger has a couple of key things that make this weapon more interesting and relevant than normal daggers. The first up is the Deadly Ability, which allows the user to bypass the weapon's awful strength and get straight into critical wounds (which is the trope for knives/daggers and where they should sit in the game's mechanical balance). The second is that little blue affinity pointing to the left, that means it can slot right in next to a Lucky Charm and cover half of its activation requirements. The Red Affinity on the other hand is pretty useless in generic terms, it would have meant more if the two affinities were swapped in orientation. One should never scoff at an affinity; but left red is the one that this weapon would have loved to see because of the Monster Tooth Necklace.

This weapon also has a super low level of crafting requirements; there are no gates beyond drawing that perfect bone. This means that this is a weapon that could be crafted in the very first lantern year and that's really good. High variance, but really really good and something that daggers need (Whips and Thrown Weapons need love too Adam, urgently).

In the hands of a Novice this weapon is really powerful because it will be combined with Rawhide Armor and a Lucky Charm early on and result in a build that's more powerful than the Lion Beast Katar version (thanks to that +1 wound and a deflect token on the first critical wound in an attack).

However; if you are playing with the Slender Man you can use this weapon all campaign (if you desire) by simply utilising Gloom Cream effectively:

This will let you keep your survivor down in Hunt XP very efficiently and it is an exceptionally strong combination with Ageless in particular. However, you do not really need to lock a survivor down to low hunt XP in order to make good use of this weapon; it's just a strong weapon for any new survivor to wield until they get to 2 Hunt XP and I like this expansion of design space, especially when it is tagged on a weapon type that is not a common choice.

It's interesting to think that this weapon is basically a superior bone dagger, but the changes here are significant and meaningful. I think this weapon shows a growth and maturity in design when compared to what we've seen in the core game and it's absolutely something that I think is a staple of any campaign where Perfect Bones can be gained early on.

Great content, can recommend it.