Arc Philosophy & Knowledge: Part 5 Faceism (Patreon)

Spoilers for:

• Sculptor Lore
• The Character Innovation
• Dragon King Campaign
• General KDM Lore
• Marrowism

Next up after our look into the core philosophy of Survivalism it is time for our dive into the Tier 1 philosophies as they are the next most commonly applied group of Philosophies across all campaigns. I'm going to start with Faceism because it is my favourite of the Tier 1 philosophies thanks to the beautiful artwork from Melissa Natalie Cochran. (Go show them some love on Instagram).

Core Themes

The Core themes of Faceism takes its inspiration from the psychology concept of Face-ism, which is in our world the idea of facial prominence when comparing the proportion of face and body of a person. It's a complicated subject that goes into a wide range of difficult areas, this is because it comes from how the media portrays people. Some of the core issues here include [in media] how men are considered by their faces in comparison to how women are considered by their bodies, something I think you are very capable of understanding why that's not great. There are also some racial connotations in the entire mess, so I hope you'll forgive me for not diving too deeply into the subject; I have some academic education in related subjects, but not this one.

The translation into Kingdom Death's mechanics on the other hand is closer to pareidolia, where people see faces in all things, except here in the plain of stone faces, well the name speaks for itself. There's faces underfoot, faces on the monsters, faces everywhere. More than even the hands. There's an in universe reason for that and this is what we'll explore here. (Note: A lot of this is based on reasoning/speculation from evidence, where it is directly from APG/Team Death I'll put it in italics otherwise it's just my reasoning from the evidence I present).

When one opens the KDM rulebook and looks at the first two pages, you will find artwork depicting a humanoid figure with a rock-like head that has an inverted human face on the front. This is the Sculptor.

This Sculptor (I'm going to use the singular noun, but as we'll see shortly there may be multiples of these creatures) are still somewhat enigmatic within the world of Kingdom Death because we have not had a full exploration of them. I'll go through what we do know in a moment, because they are core to this philosophy. But before then I would like to highlight how important the placement of this opening sketch is. Before you get to the rules, before you get to the contents, before you get to any text at all, before you get to the designer credits – here is a Sculptor. Why is that?

Well it's because the Sculptor is the start point for survivors; their faces are carved into the ground by the Sculptors and later on the Scribe may write in its book to bring some of the faces to life. There's always been some evidence to support this “pre-scribe” state, most notable in the Dragon King expansion, but now that we have the Gambler's Chest this positioning of the Sculptor before anything else, before the designer, before the first story, tells us strongly that this is the start point, not the First Story, which is. Well just the first story, there's things before that tale and this is the very beginning for all tales in KDM.

Lets quickly run through some other evidence, I'll put them in order of when they were released:

1. The Miniature line & repetition of faces/names.

The starting survivor miniatures are named characters who turn up time and time again. We've seen Lucy, Arc Lucy, People of the Sun Lucy, 10 Year Lucy and many more besides (and that's just Lucy, we even have a gender bent version/analogue of Allister in Allison) and the same thing has happened with Aya, Erza, Zachary, Inti, Macy and others, including the Satan Survivors (generally any survivor with natural white hair could be a satan survivor; Allison/Twilight Knight/Allister, Nico, Twilight Witch, and so forth. Though we need more information to narrow it down further). This is apparent throughout the game's content.

2.“A concerned, inverted face with powerful jaws stares down at you, its forked eyebrows masterfully braided and trailing along the curve of its face. The face's gaze shifts, directing you to a discovery.

You find your likeness amidst the stone faces and skillfully extract it. +1 population. Make a copy of your record sheet for the new survivor. They gain the Unbreakable fighting art and lose their Surname and Scar. When your work is complete gain the following ability.

Limb-Maker: Once per settlement phase, spend 2 [Endeavours] to carve a prosthetic limb. Remove a survivor's dismembered injury and add 1 bone to the settlement's storage.” – Sculptor Constellation.

Not only does the Sculptor survivor carve an entire second survivor out of the ground and they are an almost exact duplicate of themselves; they also can carve stone into replacement limbs for survivor, which work exactly like the real thing.

3. Our Starting Survivor Allister, reimagined as a Stone Sword wielding barbarian! Those mad enough to hunt the Sculptors like quarry often drink its stone blood and wear pure confidence like layers of armor.– Barbarian Allister (who I believe is turning up in Campaigns of Death with the others).

We can see here that the Sculptor is making the miniatures, while the Scribe is writing them. This even ties into the rules where one player is suggested to take the role of the “Builder” and takes the job of assembling, repairing and organizing the miniatures. That's a really odd role to assign to someone in any game until you consider that the Sculptor below is taking the role of the builder, the other three are all clearly signalled in the art as the Storyteller (Hand), Historian (Scribe) and Banker (I'm not confident which Entity the one on the left is, but I'd speculate it's The Gambler from an odd viewing angle because of the nose, unusual jaw structure and the fact that it is holding cards). You have to build the miniatures before you start playing, before even the survivors and settlement is created those miniatures come first - just like the Sculptor's role in the game's world.

4. Marrowism & 5. Bone Eaters

I'll explore the reasons for these links when I get into those two topics. If you are familiar with them I think you should be able to make the connections.

6. The Character Innovation

I'll go into this one separately in the future. If if you have read the rules on it, you should know why its relevant here.

7. References in the Hunt Phase

A classic one is #68 – A Familiar Face. Which has a survivor encounter the face of a dead survivor, one who was once a friend. There are more besides these, you'll find them all over the place when you go looking for them.

So Faceism is tied to the plain of stone faces and the sculptors; which themselves tie to the landscape and the survivors own bodies. Because both the landscape and the mortal forms of the survivors have come from the same place. This is why Faceism's core tenant knowledge deals with terrain, while all the other three knowledges are focused around the survivors bodies. At first it seems jarring to have a terrain based tenant and then everything else is focused around taking less harm; once you know the connection, that the land and the survivors are all parts of the same whole, the theme comes together completely.

Faceism Neurosis & Hunt XP track

I'm going to go through the core tenant next week with the other Knowledges, while I did it differently for Survivalism, that was because that particular Philosophy is so full of knowledges that I wanted to split them apart. Also I want to write some stuff about Physiognomy, and putting it here will have a second diverted topic, so you'll have to wait until next time.

The Neurosis is very thematic and also helps mechanically support the extra knowledges outside of the core tenant. Fixated means that you can only attack the monster from its facing or when it is knocked down (monsters lose their facing when knocked down, so this is more a mechanical decision to not deprive the survivor of that bonus over a thematic one). This ties nicely into a bunch of knowledges that ensure the Faceism survivor is more durable, due to being located in the monster's facing increases the odds that you will be the one targeted and attacked.

Our level up points are at 4, 7 and 10 hunt XP. Leaving 6 Hunt Xp for a fully ranked up Faceism survivor to continue to perform on the showdown board. That's standard for Tier 1 Philosophies at the moment, with only Deadism being different. It's a fast progression path and gives you a good amount of higher level hunts that they can perform well in.

Rank 1

We start off our journey in the same fashion as most philosophies, +1 lumi and a roll on a table.

The 1 (10%) punishes us hard with [D] Seizures and +1d5 Insanity. Seizures knocks you down whenever you suffer damage to the head. That's not great for a survivor who might want to become a frontliner further down the line, so off to the Barber Surgeon with them if it happens.

Results 2 to 7(60%) Give the survivor [K] Stone Heart and at CC 11 (Collective Cognition) we get an additional +1 lumi and add Stone Heart to the forum. Stone Heart is a good all-round defensive knowledge that has some interesting specific builds, but it's also good at just keeping a survivor alive for longer.

Results 8 to 10(30%) give us +1 lumi and +1 Movement Token the next time we depart. The best use for this token is in the mid to late game where you combine it with [K] Digestion. More on the synergies between Faceism and Gourmandism when we get to that higher tier Philosophy. The CC 21 result just straight up gives you +1 permanent movement and the lumi/token. So there's an opportunity to get 7 movement on a survivor here.

Rank 2

At rank 2 we get +1 lumi and a roll on the table for a 1 to 2(20%) chance of gaining [D] Secretive plus spending an [Endeavour] to advance Physiognomy. Not great, you'll want to remove Secretive as soon as possible (Barber Surgeon/Trepanning) because Secretive is going to double the number of hunts it will take to advance through this philosophy. This is caused by the survivor coming to understand that they have a face of their own and they become obsessed with it.

The 3 to 8 (60%) results give the survivor [K] Unyielding. With the 5 to 8 results at collective cognition 28 resulting in the survivor crafting the Man Mask (which is useful for survivors that accumulate negative attribute tokens). Thematically gaining Unyielding here represents the survivor scarring their body with stone dust over and over, meaning that their skin is a mixture of scabs, scars and stone dust. Making them more durable due to increased resistance to damage in combination with feeling less pain in the first place. (We've already seen how crazy survivor regeneration/survival/healing abilities are. They can survive being disembowelled with no long term issues).

9 to 10 (20%) is a better version of the 1 to 2 result. It's +1 lumi and that free tenant observation. Simple without being too powerful.

Overall I want to get the 3 to 8 result here because it has the most immediate impact. Even if this particular survivor isn't going to tank all the hits, Unyielding is just a generically helpful knowledge that you want to complete as most survivors take hits at some point during the showdown. If I don't get Unyielding from the first Faceism survivor I will absolutely work on another new survivor to try and unlock that knowledge as soon as possible.

Rank 3

Another +1 lumi and a roll. The table offers [D] Weak Spot – Head for the 1 to 2 (20%) result, which isn't a huge deal, just wear a hat. (It is a problem for [D] Narcissistic survivors and [SFA] True Blade Sword Wielders – but Trepanning is always an option).

The 3 to 8 (60%) result gives a survivor the Stone Face Engraver ability, which means that whenever a survivor adopts a philosophy, they get to draw two and choose. What this usually means is you want to protect the first Stone Face Engraver survivor in order to save this ability for the rest of the campaign. Having card selection from a random deck is really powerful, just ask the [I] Symposium Innovation. With CC 18 the survivor also gains +1 accuracy and if they Endeavour at Face Painting they'll also get +1 Evasion (which you should do, 1 endeavour for +1 evasion is a ridiculous deal). These are great, because by the time you're at CC 18 you should be on additional Faceism survivors outside of the Engraver you've kept in the settlement.

9 to 10 (20%) gives us the new Sculpture Innovation (or an [Endeavour] to use at it). The new Sculpture isn't something I've written about yet, but it is basically a variant of the old Sculpture, but for a knowledge. That Knowledge will cost 1 less and be always available. It also puts the Sculpture consequences into the Innovation deck (Pottery).

At this rank one wants a Stone Face Engraver and I'm of the opinion that you should then park them in the settlement unless they need weapon mastery progression. If they still need to hunt for some reason, you want to get their goals completed as soon as possible so you can keep that amazing ability in a relatively safe place. As long as you have one Stone Face Engraver, you can risk the others on hunts if you desire. The reason for not pushing to rank 4 here is in our next entry.

Rank 4

I said we'd get to Sculptors, and at Rank 4 the thrust of thought behind this particular survivor philosophy comes to light. We get to see a first person perspective vision of the Sculptor copying an individual, and through the text we know this is a person who is genetically linked to the survivor. In short we find that the Sculptor originally copied a living person as a template for the stone face and through their ability (plus the Scribe's ink) this copied face became something that can be brought back to life. This is not just pseudoscience nonsense the way that Physiognomy is. Instead we have some scientific evidence of genetic memories that can be passed down to descendents; phobias are an example of this. There's a study where mice who suffered an electric shock when in the presence of Cherry Blossom scent passed the fear response onto their descendants for several generations.

With a 1 (10%) you find a shattered version of your own face and suffer +1 torment plus 1d5 Founding Stones. Additional Founding Stones are very useful in any campaign (especially People of the Dream Keeper), but this isn't a great outcome for the work involved in getting to Rank 4.

The 2 to 7 result (60%) gives the survivor [K] Sculptor's Apprentice and at CC 22 you also get to perform a pseudo-Sculptor moment all of your own, where the Faceism survivor finds an awoken survivor who has not yet emerged completely from the ground. This new survivor has 2 Hunt XP and a philosophy of your choice.

Finally at an 8 to 10 the survivor is changed across the generic memories by the Sculptor who remakes the survivors entire head. You end up with an almost completely new survivor. But you get to keep Understanding, Courage, (Secret) Fighting Arts and Weapon Proficiency because only your Name, Philosophy, Knowledges, Impairments, Abilities, Disorders, Lifetime Reroll and Severe Head Injuries are lost. Bye bye [A] Stone Face Engraver.

There's a lot of value involved in any 2+ result here, getting a reset on a survivor but keeping some of the most important positive aspects is huge. You also get to shift to a new philosophy and the only real negative here is if this happens to your sole Stone Face Engraver survivor – another reason why I advocate 'parking' your first Rank 3 Faceism survivor if you can afford it.

What Survivors Benefit from Faceism?

I am firmly of the opinion that the Faceism is the early game “tank” Philosophy, but this is just a generically useful tenant that benefits every member of the hunt party and the settlement as a whole. You generate extra terrain (and multiple Physiognomy survivors will give multiple pieces of extra terrain), terrain provides tactical benefits, resources and with Physiognomy eventually giving out extra card selection you can even dodge some of the more problematic terrain pieces a bit more often. I can think of a campaign specific terrain card that I would love to be able to dig for (The Bleeding Corpse Lily from the Sunlion Armor set). Getting more chances at Acanthus and Vermin resources is also good. Really the only reason Physiognomy is held back is due to knowledge slot limitations, but more on that next time.

This philosophy also gives extra population, a massively beneficial character “reset” and knowledges that have both defensive and offensive applications. There's also lot of gear synergies we'll explore in the Knowledge portion of this deep dive.

There's also a load of interesting synergies with not just Gourmandism, but also Marrowism, Gorm gear, the White Lion Cloak, Spidicules' Silk Body Suit and more besides. We'll get to a lot of those next time.

Finally, please put in the comments here which Tier 1 Philosophy you want me to look at after we've finished Faceism! Most popular one will take priority.