People of the Dream Keeper: Prologue into Settlement Lantern Year 1 (Patreon)

Spoilers for:

• Crimson Crocodile – Prologue
• Starting Knowledges
• Crimson Crockery & Gear
• Collective Cognition Unlock 1

Prologue – Crimson Crocodile

I sit down with an assembled Croc and the starting survivor miniatures from the core game; this prologue feels similar, but different. With the opening narrative being presented from the perspective of the prologue monster rather than any of the survivors. It is well written, but I do find this change of perspective; while interesting, is not as gripping as the original version. That doesn't mean it is bad; it's not, it's really different and fascinating and already hints towards some kind of loop being a part of the Dream Keeper's story as the box the survivors are found in has to come from somewhere. I will be disappointed if this mystery box of a mystery box isn't at least partially answered during the progression of this campaign.

The Crocodile herself (my crocodile, called Cronk is a lass) is also here to make in impression, the first attack from the monster features a 21 damage attack called 21,000 Newton Bite. I'll get onto the design of this card, but the title it has is something I want to focus on for a moment because it really took me out of the game for a bit. As a youngling I was fascinated by dinosaurs, sharks and crocodiles (and space, and insects and of course horses, those stupid balls of fear powered by elastic bands). This fascination has left me with some rather useless pieces of information in respect to Bite Force, enough that I immediately noticed this rather large number and my mind slotted the crocodile in for comparison to real world animals (both living and extinct).

It should be no surprise to anyone that this number is huge, KDM is a hyper-exaggerated world with all sorts of nonsense that is to basically magic in everything but name. Human bite force is normally around 1,300 Newtons (~300 PSI), a wolf at near 1,800 (400 PSI). Which means that the Crimson Crocodile is up with the big boys and girls for its bite force, which one would think is very reasonable for a monster that is so large, the larger an animal, the more its bite force will scale up. It's length is around 7 survivors, which if the average survivor is 180cm tall (I used Bright Eyes for comparison and she is very tall), then these things are approximately 12 to 13m in length. About twice the size of a Saltwater Crocodile, which is the largest living crocodile (and also a really nasty predator that you want to stay away from).

Now that we have a size, lets quickly look at one dataset of the estimated bite forces of the top contenders (in reverse order). Be aware some of these can only be guessed at for various reasons and bite force can vary from one individual to another (humans can end up more than doubling their bite force if they suffer from sleep grinding for example).

• Lion – 4,500 Newtons
• Polar & Grizzly Bear – 5,300 Newtons
• Bull Shark – 5,900 Newtons
• Hippo – 8,100 Newtons (Hippos are also really dangerous for humans)
• American Alligator & Shortfin Mako Shark – 13,000 Newtons
• Saltwater Crocodile – 16,000 Newtons
• Great White Shark – 18,200 Newtons
• Nile Crocodile – 22,000 Newtons
• Tyrannosaurus Rex – 35,000 Newtons (rest in pieces Donald Gennaro)
• Orca (Killer Whale) – 84,000 Newtons (very estimated)
• Megalodon -110,000 Newtons to 180,000 Newtons

So we can see that the Crimson Crocodile is sitting around the Nile Crocodile in bite force, which sounds impressive, and there's no doubt that this thing bites harder than the White Lion can, but the Nile Crocodile rarely gets past 4.5m in length. Cronk is at least 12m in length and probably weighs anywhere up to 5,000kg. Cronk's near a T. Rex in size but has a really weedy bite. That's appropriate for a starting monster, but it's amusing that by the end of being distracted and going to double check facts as much as I can I ended up concluding that the card should read 35,000 Newton Bite instead if it wanted to impress me.

Sorry about this tangent, this is the kind of thing that runs through my head and interrupts a session of KDM, Cronk had to wait a long time to roll her attack dice, a very long time just to end up rolling a 1 and a 7 (also it's worth noting that Cronk's damage would have been 1, not 21, because the starting prologue survivors all get 1 insanity to begin with, which means they're not terrified and Cronk's damage was nerfed by her mechanics, don't worry we'll get to a big croc bite eventually).

After that initial admittedly impressive showing, let's briefly look at our starting survivors. They each came with one starting knowledge, each of which depicted one of our narrative cast; Zachary was on Hunger, Lucy on Fear, Erza on Darkness and Allister on Despair. As such, for my own ease, and because how can you not reference Funger (Fear& Hunger) when you get the opportunity? I decided to just name them all after their knowledges, I had a feeling that these starting knowledges would turn out to be weak compared to later ones so I decided to not invest too much emotionally into these guys. Especially as one of them starts with +1 Systemic Pressure (meaning taking more dangerous severe injuries) and another one has +1 Torment (more severe brain trauma).

The highlight of the prologue fight. Cronk monching on Despair.

I employed a mixture of normal founding stone attacks along with fist & tooth wherever possible and through this we got to see the first appearance of the coagulated hit locations along with a parry hit location and more than one super-dense hit location. So I already get a good idea of what the Crimson Crocodile is going to be like to fight, it's looking to attack insanity and reduce that to zero so survivors are terrified and become vulnerable to huge hits or automatic death moves. We did start to get to that point, and by the end of the fight I chose to close it out by throwing two founding stones because of the trap card (which is an impressive and excellent piece of design). Even then Despair lost an eye and an arm, ending his hunting potential before it even starts, sorry Allister, you continue to suck in my campaigns even when I call you something else.

The croc spat out a total of 12 resources thanks to some heavy fisting, but they created a rather large dilemma which you can see here:

This is literal first world problems as I am sure you're thinking “All Perfect Resources? Lucky”. Well the issue here is I don't need or want perfect resources at this time and I am now being asked to decide if I want to weaken my chances at winning the next hunt in exchange for saving towards some long term powerful gear crafting. These are the kind of moments I adore in KDM because there is not an actual right answer, but the decision you make will inform and impact heavily on everything down the line. A decision made even more challenging by the fact that the Crimson Crockery is opened after the prologue fight (a change I greatly approve of).

Before that though we had to deal with the settlement's timeline events; which gifted us our innovation deck, crushed the stats out of the settlement's chosen Scout of Death “Scout” (imaginative name eh?) and left me a little non-plussed because we were originally sold on the fact that the scout joining the showdown was optional, unless I missed something that was no longer the case. I also started the construction of the Philosophy & Knowledge decks a system which immediately felt overwhelming especially for smaller group sizes, so many triggers to remember and abilities to deal with. At this point I keep the philosophies we've randomly received as unknown, so all we know about is that first philosophy of Survivalist

Because I had rolled for maximum possible population on the starting SE card, I had a route that would make things potentially a bit easier, so my first decision was to go and try to score a birth which would give me Survival of the Fittest plus an early Society principle. If this messed up and augury forced the loss of an organ I was committed to letting that basic Monster Organ go, I'd even not open the Bone Smith if I had to spend more than one endeavor on this operation. All of these contingency plans turned out to not be needed, the settlement's people provided our first child and triggered both birth principle and society principle. I settled on Survival of the Fittest for the early boost to strength (lifetime rerolls and evasion are also no slouch) and Collective Toil for my principle. The parents also managed to get themselves some buffs, which meant they were coming out on the next hunt. Special note to the intimacy table not requiring a specific male + female pairing any more, hooray.

I decided to save the Blood Stool, Perfect Resources (4 total), then I opened the Skinnery and craft myself some Rawhide, because I want to test out new armor sets, I also made a start on the Crimson Crocodile body piece (which has another monster movement + attack ability, I'm kind of bored of them) and for my weapon I chose a Bloodglass Cleaver. This pair was selected because I had drawn the Crimson Fin + Thick Vein (can't recall its name, I'm not going upstairs just to check that). I did not want to bother with the Crocodileyes, while they seem like an interesting replacement for the Monster Tooth Necklace I ultimately decided that saving for the Crimson Pearls rather than making the Crocodileyes was more interesting and potentially powerful with its armor and F&T synergies. I do think that the Crocodileyes are a good fit for my playstyle, because I don't use much scouting of AI/HL decks these days anyway.  The cleaver in particular I could see being a big help if I didn't hit an early super-dense or parry hit location, more on that later. Ultimately however I needed Survival of the Fittest to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Bloodglass Cleaver

Crimson Dress

The remaining endeavors was spent opening the Bone Smith before Fear, Hunger, Darkness, Scout & Syr Vival the owner of our first philosophy turned towards the darkness and departed.

Their gear to protect them was:

• 4x Bloody Cloth (Worn on the head or body because those are the places I want to protect most of all, in addition naked survivors with nothing but cloth bags on their heads is an image I loved)
• 2x Founding Stones
• 1x Crimson Dress
• 1x Bloodglass Cleaver
• 1x Rawhide Headband
• 1x Rawhide Vest
• Fists, Feet, Teeth & Optimism!

Final Thoughts:

I think the prologue fight is very well done, it is an excellent replacement for the White Lion prologue showdown and having the Crockery open in lantern year 1 is a very interesting change that makes the start of a campaign less 'automatic', you're free to pursue monster specific stuff from the start and that widens your options a lot. It also makes the Lantern Year 1 fight a bit less of a threat because you have the potential to be going in with strength 3 weapons.

Knowledges and Philosophies look interesting, but I am already finding them to be a lot of cognitive overload and excess space. I think I am going to have to make small reference cards for all of them in the future because tracking all of these abilities, observations and other triggers on top of weapon mastery, fighting/secret fighting arts (which I can see are very limited for Arc survivors) and disorders is such a huge amount of cognitive load on players. They are more interesting than just fighting arts for sure, but the opportunities for missing things have become much larger and also it's more of an issue if you overlook things because you're losing progression. This style of survivor is going to require a lot of familiarity or many heads around the table.

It is an interesting start to the experience and at this point I am feeling very good about the design of the Crimson Crocodile, we'll see how that opinion evolves when I face the higher level versions of Cronk. Next time we'll look at the L1 Cronk fight which I did twice.