Hellebore – A Frozen Survivor Beta Content Review (Patreon)

Hellebore’s ancestors descended the thin atmospheres of their settlement to launch their papery boats into the frozen seas. Shivering, they navigate the ice floes in search of the floating nests of the lantern flame gull. Each generation harvested a single silver down feather from the shaggy chicks slumbering in nests of hollowed bone. With the passing of countless lanterns, Hellebore’s lineage created the feather mantle she inherits, insulating against the piercing cold. Her hands confidently grasp the frozen dagger that would burn the hands of any unprepared survivor.

The Beta content will continue until moral improves !

Hellebore is the latest snapshot of the wider world of Kingdom Death; these tantalising glimpses into other places and times outside of the desolate Plain of Faces are interesting but tend to raise more questions than answers. One of my main questions is; given how much emphasis in the lore description, why does the feather mantle not get a gear card in this box?

This release is one of the stingiest to date in respect of game content; but quantity alone has no intrinsic merit unless inordinate propagation of stock is a virtue. When considering mechanics and value for the game, as we'll see when we deep dive into this, there's a lot of punch packed into this single gear card. So, lets get a look at it shall we?

Crafting Cost: 1x endeavor, 1x founding stone

Once again whips and thrown weapons are ignored and daggers get more love. This time we get an early game dagger that is available from the very first lantern year. This is the second early game dagger that has come out in recent times and I am honestly starting to feel the redundancy kick in. That means once we've analysed this Cold Face Dagger and its two new mechanics we'll need to compare it not just to the Bone Dagger, but also the Novice Dagger Beta content. So. Many. Daggers.

I don't tend to recommend badgering APG, but maybe it's time that we as a community remind them that tools, whips and thrown weapons all need love.

We'll start with the two new Abilities that this weapon introduces, the first one is Insulated:

Insulated: A survivor is insulated if they have 6 or more gear cards that grant them armor points.

This ability is a tall ask for some survivors because this means two thirds of your slots need to be dedicated to providing armor points, however tanks certainly reach this number. There's also a few questions in regards to gear cards that provide armor points under certain situations. The Gorn, Bird Bread, Green Ring and the Weaver are all examples of this type of gear card. They all grant armor points, but not in the same way that flat armor bonuses on shields, armor and DBK plating does.

What this means is Insulated is going to be something that varies immensely depending on what gear card it is placed upon and what bonus it gives when placed (as the bonus can vary). On a shield it is going to be easy to activate. On the Cold Face Dagger here it is a weak bonus because this dagger is an early game weapon and the bonus you gain is pretty middling to poor (+1 speed).

Melting X: A gear special rule. On Arrival, place X +1 strength tokens on this gear. At the end of your act, remove a +1 strength token from this gear.

Melting is a very interesting ability because it encourages rush down strategies, the weapon is strong at the start but becomes weaker in a very rapid fashion. Because monster toughness doesn't drop outside of certain hit location triggers this can turn a weapon from being very relevant into being a dead slot very quickly.

So clearly the intention with this weapon's design is that the player is intended to want 3 speed in order to burst the monster early and hard, and the 4 → 3 strength turns are certainly good enough to hold their own against early game monster toughness if you are aggressive, but you do need a plan for what you are going to do after the Dagger has melted down to the same effectiveness as a butter knife facing against that margarine your grandmother left in the back of the freezer for a month.

At this point; I've found a relatively optimal way to use this knife is as a cheap weapon for the off-tank in early game hunt parties. You have a main tank with a Bone Club + Rawhide Armor + Monster Grease and then an Off-tank with Rawhide + Cat Eye Circlet + this dagger while the other two survivors run Deadly weapons. In the first 3 turns this survivor runs  pure damage, stripping wounds off the monster while the Bone Club survivor takes the hits. Then on turn 4 you have the two survivors pivot their roles and now the Dagger survivor uses their actions to Headband Scout while the Bone Clubber smashes over and over. It makes the early game party more durable to have two tanks in rotation like this, but there is a loss of potential resources due to the old Deadly/Luck being missing.

In the future if we end up in a campaign where Deadly and Luck are appropriately hard to gain this may become a more common thing, but honestly if we see a campaign design where less resources are dropped by critical wounds (something I'd love to see); we'd need victory resources increased by around 50% to compensate.

So on that front at least there is a place in the game world for the Cold Face Dagger, it is cheap to produce and does provide more killing power for a desperate settlement who failed to generate enough bones from their prologue fight. It also compares very well to the Bone Dagger (apart from builds that want red affinities). It is naturally a lot worse than the Novice Dagger from the Novice Beta content (pictured below); but that weapon requires a harder to acquire resource in a Perfect Bone:

I'd posit that if you are in a situation where you can craft either the Novice Dagger, the Bone Dagger or the Cold Face Dagger you'll always pick the Novice Dagger because it is light years ahead of the other two options (and it doesn't cost a precious Founding Stone). However, for campaigns where you don't get a Perfect Bone in the first two showdown fights the Cold Face Dagger is a nice option that doesn't require any monster/basic resources to construct.

So to finish up I'd tier the early game daggers in the following rank order:

1. Novice Dagger
2. Acid-Tooth Dagger
3. Cold Face Dagger
4. Bone Dagger

Due to its very affordable crafting cost there's a place for this weapon in anyone's gaming collection and Hellebore’s miniature is also a wonderful piece to use on the table, so like the Novice before it I think I can give this Beta content a thumbs up purchase recommendation. If you can afford it in these trying times it won't disappoint you at the start of your next campaign. Now we just need to rattle the bars until Adam supplies us with more thrown and whip weapons.

Footnote: This is a lighter written piece because I am working on the first Aeon Trespass: Odyssey deep dive analysis on the Hekaton. Originally I wanted to release this alongside that as bonus content, but fighting, dissecting and interrogating an AI critter in a game which has a different combat system to KD:M takes a little extra time (and so many spreadsheets). I hope to put that out next week; but we'll see how it goes.

The ATO plan is to deep dive all four Primordials from Cycle 1 over the coming months and then review the entire first cycle (a third of the content in ATO's core game!) as a whole. I've released a review of Mythic Games' Darkest Dungeon earlier this week to compensate for that. Next month I'll also be putting up a review of either Aeon's End's 2nd Edition Core Box or Marvel Champion's Core Box – just like the Darkest Dungeon review, this will be an additional post, not a replacement for KDM content the way that ATO's content will be. While these two games are absolutely a boss battler just like KDM & ATO, reviews of games like these will be extra content rather than replacements for the moment. If you like them; please let me know, sometimes this job can feel a bit like writing into a void!

Finally thanks to timberwolfl for continuing to ensure that I get access to this content in a timely fashion so I can proxy and review it without having to wait 2-3 months.