KDM Beta Content Review – Mist (Raikin Armor) (Patreon)

Mist disappears into the the thin, toxic air that descends as gazes of Raikins generate violent storms near her settlement. Streaking past the massive balls of frizzed fur, she conditions her lungs to fight in the ozone rich atmosphere. Repeated exposure to the highly charged environment has left Mist's hair crackling with energy and embarrassingly unruly. No one knows what strange coiffure has driven her to hide her head.

Lore & Flavour Review

As has now become a staple for these beta content releases we will start with a overview/review of the real world influences/references; pop culture nods, in game lore and/or the overall design for Mist. For a start we'll have to go and wave our hands over whatever it is that's happened to Mist's hair; it's got to be some form of magic because hair isn't damaged by static electricity. It can't even be a perm, cause that's done by chemicals – however that is one possibility, that Mist mistakenly thinks it is the static that's done this when it was in fact the chemicals transmitted with the electricity instead – if that is the case, and the Raikin transmit pheromones or other chemicals via electric charge, we've got a very interesting monster there. However I suspect it's more likely to be “Electric Mammal goes brrr” if/when we get to see this thing.

Either way; we don't have to think about it too hard at this point, her hair is permanently ruined in some form and its caused Mist to turn into Kingdom Death's version of a furry. If that makes her happy, good for her. Though this does bring me to her variant and something I think was missed out on.

Mist was released with a pin up variant that depicted her before the incident that ruined her hair and if this had been a “normal” variant of the character wearing some other armor/clothing rather than the usual bikini straps cheesecake I would be giving huge props to the concept. Unfortunately that's not the case; the variant is another boring barely wrapped up set of buns, melons and chicken thighs. I would have liked instead of red hot bikini summer an alternative head with Mist wearing a heavy set of wraps covering her hair while wearing some kind of casual in settlement garb. With that kind of change there's even room for a fun little diorama with someone trying to remove her head towel/headscarf as she fends them off. Oh well, what could have been, enjoy the mini as it comes, it's not the worst one we've had in recent times even if it is a bit of a jarring experience to see this new character immediately roll off the 3D printer with two versions that are so thematically different that they seem to have no link at all apart from the name and Lokhman's artwork.

The armor that Mist wears comes from parts the Raikin and there's a fair bit of world building about this monster even if we do not get to see art of the creature. The first part of their name “Rai” comes from Raijin; the Japanese god of lightning (it's also where Raiden from the Mortal Kombat series gets his name). Kin on the other hand is a term that one cannot ignore the links to animalism as it calls the terminology of Otherkin (a term used to talk about people who think/say they are not completely human and instead are some form of other being/species). For example one somewhat could call the Ringtail survivors Foxkin and you wouldn't be completely wrong (The Ringtail Vixen is definitely not born with that tail or ears, she's absolutely a Foxkin, just one of many areas where Adam references furry culture).

In more scientific areas Kin means those with genetic links; so it suggests that the Raikin are a pack-like creature and we can see some indicators of that in the armor design (KDM borrows the Monster Hunter concept of having armor sets heavily reference the armors the are constructed from). We can see that the Raikin have pronounced canine appearance in their aesthetic; the armor has a dog-like stechhelm (Frog-mouth helm – more on that in a bit); clawed, furry arms, a long bushy tail and a the wearer is put into a lupine stance via those high heels (I hope the heels are kept on both versions of the armor).

Note: There is also a perfectly valid alternative take that this is a more raccoon/panda-like creature and armor set. However I think the coloured art doesn't really suggest those kind of animals outside of maybe a weasel/stoat/mink or red panda.

Also while we're in an aside; here's a fun little goof that's in the art they put on the webstore, the layer where Mist's unarmored head was left in the above picture, you can see the purple and we know Lokman drew her with her helm both on and off in the same digital art as the small card shows her before “the frizzening”. I guess the thing that really happened to her hair is it became an eldritch being that can't be contained by metal and the laws of physics.

The Petrichor armor design as a whole is just excellent; we've had some wonderful designs come out in this Beta series and standard Mist is one of the best. The overall shape of the armor looks practical with good articulation on the limbs with heavy furs (standard note of disapproval for boob plate) and I have only applause for the way they've depicted Mist's face inside the stechhelm.

No notes.

The Petrichor armor name is a neat little term, it is the scent of earth when rain falls on it – the word itself is constructed from Petra (Rock) and (Ichor) fluid. So you can look on it as being rockfluid or the blood of the land. It's actually a relatively modern word, coming from the previous century; but the experience itself is something humanity has had for as long as we've had the ability to smell the aerosols that include geosmin being released from the ground (we're very sensitive to geosmin scent – it's what makes freshwater fish taste “muddy”).

Mist's lore, art and physical design is a lot of fun world building with a light touch of humour and some great non-verbal world building. On this front I think that this one of the best pieces of Beta content we've had thematically.

The Gameplay Content

Like Vitanvox and Wall Aya before her; Mist comes with a partial armor set that suggests a full release will come in the future; at the moment we cannot fully assess how good the gear is; but we can look at what it's like at the moment and if you'd use it in current (haha) campaigns. We'll start with the new Abilities; Currentand Charged.

Current X

Current is a future monster ability, we can surmise that it's going to appear on the Raikin and likely also on the Storm Knight. There's little more we can draw from this here at this time because it's something that has no place in our campaigns right now. It's a teaser, it might spend years without being relevant (Ivory Crafter anyone?) Though if APG would get ahead of their Kickstarter they could easily release two new monster expansions every year. I do hope that when the latest KS is done they do not go back to the crowdfunding well and instead concentrate on becoming an online store with regular new releases – we know that's not going to happen, Mr. Poots is addicted to the crowdfunding model and really wants to surpass Cephalofair's Frosthaven - something which he might be technically able to manage now that Gloom/Frosthaven have moved to a less terrible crowdfunded platform. Let's be serious for a moment though, Gloomhaven's aesthetics and mechanics are far more appealing to a broader audience; KDM vs GH is like a middleweight vs. the heavyweight champion of the world.

Charged

Charged on the other hand is a survivor/gear ability so we get to see what that is doing. The simple version is, your survivors are rubbing their feet across a rug to deliver a static shock to the monster. If you have a charged token (rub rub rub) and you hit the monster with a metal keyword weapon; you get to “shock” the monster and deal an automatic wound. All Charged tokens are archived at the end of the round.

That's a pretty clean and straightforward design; in addition it is showing some learning in respect to automatic wounds. Players have a limited number of ways they can deal these automatic wounds – at the moment that would require activating the ability and then attacking the monster. So outside of tricksy timing moves it is hard to deliver multiple shocks a round with one survivor. Hard, but not impossible – unfortunately Charged doesn't interact with Dagger Mastery because you don't “Hit” with that triggered effect; you “re-draw”. On the other hand, blood paint and one-handed metal weapons is a thing.

That means in my assessment this is a pretty balanced ability as it stands; it is powerful for sure, but it's not capable off reducing monsters to becoming a joke the way that other auto-wound abilities have done in the past (we're still waiting for a fix for the Red Ring abuse).

Onto the two gear cards.

Petrichor Stechhelm

Crafting Cost: 2x Iron

The first thing to note here is that this is a 5 armor point helmet that connects to the Leather Shield and/or a Lucky Charm for just two iron. That's actually a really good return on investment and something you won't be upset to have; though because its ability does absolutely nothing at all that's all you're getting here.

Is 5 armor on the head plus a good blue & decent green affinities worth losing an armor set bonus? Not really, however there are some settlements where you might have a glut of early game iron sitting about doing nothing and not yet have four full sets of armor. In that situation I could see using this gear as a stopgap but it's really situational and most of the time this is just going to sit in the box and not do anything. Shame it didn't have Outfit in its beta form, however I think even with outfit we wouldn't be replacing the helms with matching keywords because they tend to be better than this.

Petrichor Sleeves

Crafting Cost: 1x Iron, 2x Perfect Hide

This is the place where one can get Charged at the moment; so the entire value of this box's game content rotates around these sleeves. In order to activate the Static Wash ability one needs not only a red and two affinities to be supplied by all the other items on the gear grid (as the Sleeves themselves are no help and the Stechhelm isn't worth it). That means our first question is what armor gear cards mixed up can utilise this this card?

Choose your boots!

This is one of the best loadouts I found; there's an option on the boots to play either of the two pictured (swap in whichever one you want for the campaign, you've always got access to leather plus the stinky chicken of time) and you can run any up blue in the bottom right corner and it's got the Silk Boots which are some of the best “splash” footwear in the game along with the Phoenix Plackart & Helm (aka the only parts of Phoenix Armor worth anything outside of the set bonus) so it's an OK loadout that has 5/5/6/5/4 for armor protection without a shield and it also has the Plackart + Silk Boots combo if you're playing Phoenix + Spidicules. Unfortunately when you don't have the Dragon Belt, matching up affinities becomes a bit more of a chore.

So that loadout is just good enough that losing the set bonus in exchange for automatic wounds and Silk/Plackart tanking abilities. But it really is the only one that felt good to use while also leaving room for Blood Paint (swap out the Scarab Circlet for an up blue one handed metal weapon – which currently is the Scrap Sword). That build worked quite well and was fun for generating two automatic wounds a turn, however it is survival intensive.

Final Summary

Great Model, weak gear (at the moment) but there is some fun to be had if you are willing to be a bit “suboptimal” and play about with it; however as the helm is doing nothing at all outside of a pair of affinities and armor points there's not a lot here and most of the time this is going to just be forgotten about in the gear piles until we see either the Current X keyword get activated or the remaining 3 parts of the Petrichor Armor set turn up. I do think that the full Petrichor armor set is going to be very interesting when/if we get to see it, but it's probably a decade or more away.

That all makes this one a better flavour piece than Vitanvox was previously, but the gear is so deliberately hard to use that there is little to no value here at all unless the miniature is something you're going to be using (Unlike Vitanvox's gear which is good in a vacuum).

I don't understand why we do not get some Beta Hybrid Armor Set card with these releases so we can at least do something fun with them. It's kind of shocking that someone decided this stuff was good enough to release attached to an expensive miniature, so I think you can safely leave this one on the store and wait for the armor to get an official release.