The Grognardies: Kingdom Monster Death
The Grognardies is a series where we highlight the nerdiest and most intense games of imagination and thought; ones that take so much effort to master and play that to call them a hobby is an understatement. Titles that portray Imagination, Design, and Commitment to the hobby in top form. Such tabletop games are worthy of an award of it’s own class: A Grognardy.
Imagination is the titles ability to not only transport the players to a different place but a place that makes so little sense it makes a sense all of it’s own. Good Design principles weave this imaginative fabric into an experience worth celebrating. A title that rewards not only the physical Commitment put into assembling and playing it, but demonstrates the hobby as a whole as it is played.
Kingdom Death: Monster is an indie project that was kickstarted back in 2012 by Adam Poots resulting in over two million dollars worth of funding, far surpassing his $35k goal. Part of this is due to the $400 MSRP of the core game buying you seven different monsters (varying from beginner to expert level hobby kit complexity), around thirty two survivors worth of parts, as well as all of the gameplay materials. Thankfully the pieces you need are on a sprue marked Prologue and should be what you assemble first, giving you four naked people and an evil lion beast. Everything else can be assembled later, this is already far more generous than comparative games. From there you need to grab one to three other people and then gather around the table with the promises of pizza and lion killing.
From the very start of the game session the players are steeped in Imagination as a player reads out the plight of the first four survivors, plunging the party into a tutorial battle. The prologue chapter then walks the players through the first session with the full intent of them reading the book together right after setup, filled with colorful art and diagrams to help them confront the giant lion threatening to eat them. The Prologue acts as a fantastic grounding place in the setting, immediately guiding players into how to go about fighting what will be the only easy fight of the campaign. This is an opportunity to teach people that loudly complain about not knowing how to play tabletop games how to do so.
The setting forces you to fill in many of the blanks by showing you images and describing cultural norms of the setting alongside putting you through their fight for survival. This is a setting that grabs hold of you and changes you forever. Kind of like the first time you watch Animal House or date a girl that likes pegging. You very quickly start scanning the rules for loopholes and ways to make your life easier, but this game has been rigorously play-tested to be as Nintendo hard as possible.
A play session after the Prologue consists of a Hunting Phase where the survivors track down a monster and fight it in the Showdown Phase; where they can hopefully slay it and bring it back to town for resources to use in the Settlement Phase. Once the settlement has allocated it’s labor and prepared the next hunting party a lantern is removed to mark the end of a Lantern Year and the days session. Each Lantern Year takes two to four hours to complete, after which you are encouraged to put the game away and breath. Many tabletop games take three hours minimum to complete and only get longer, since the game has no internal mechanism to pace the players.
The risk and reward in fighting monsters is immense. Not only do you have a growing list of monsters your settlement may hunt but you may fight any enemy in game at a power level from one to three, with the third level monsters having the toughest mixtures of AI cards and a bunch of passive cards that they just start with. The cool thing is because the monsters AI deck is dismantled through wounding it; the monster gets a little more predictable as you fight it. Even if you hunt the same monster a few times to complete a set, you can fight drastically differently versions of them for different levels of reward(including a fourth Legendary version that’s EVEN HARDER). Wimping out and only fighting weaker monsters will just lead to the end boss waking up on the twenty-fifth Lantern Year and decimating you; assuming your bare bones playstyle has not gotten you killed by then.
The brilliance in KD:M’s Design is it all follows a central survival horror theme, gives players a base of operations and most importantly guides the players through the first session to explicitly avoid players becoming too confused. The Prologue chapter does it’s job of introducing the combat and settlement system, being kind of easy but make no mistake: The gloves come off the very next Lantern Year. The rules are written with the purest intention of introducing and killing off characters from week to week, so in what must be an act of divine pity the majority of equipment is salvaged off dead survivors; the players represent the will of the settlement to live more than anything else.
What tends to hurt the replayability of other games is that you start off the same way every time and do the same thing the same way every time. The core of KD:M‘s campaign can be approached in many ways, several of the choices made in the first few sessions effect events far down the line. Expansions in the form of new monsters not only add onto the core campaign but like the Dragon King and Sunstalker add whole new campaign starts that tweak the rules of the core campaign but plays in the regular Lantern Year format; and later expansions promise to lengthen the core campaign with more final bosses. As a reminder, you can fight every monster at levels 1-3, progressively becoming even harder to kill and ontop of all that: a more difficult 5-6 hunting party variant exists for those that hate life and want it to stop.
Everything about KD:M bleeds not just the Commitment that Mr. Poots put into organizing the release but into improving the hobby as a whole. While the art direction of several monsters and characters is questionable at least, but it kind of has this “Frank Frazetta, Mark Bode, and Pablo Picasso collaborating on an artbook taking LSD” appeal to it that starts to grow on you. These influences blend together so nicely you just fall right into the world and accept it.
Something I do need to bring up is the controversy surrounding the influences above. Pretty much any style of super high fantasy/horror inevitably works in human sexuality somewhere; KD:M cranks this up to 11. The rulebook has art pieces on every other page loaded with high octane fetish fuel not for the faint of heart, the writing instills a tone of certain doom, and the internal magic of this realm seems to inflate every woman’s chest to triple-E proportions both off and on the table. The worst examples are expansion and promotional boxes while the core games armor sets and monsters are still pretty damn questionable but nowhere near as bad. If you even vaguely think the art and models are too much for you then I assure you they are. And if you don’t like the idea of monsters with human mouths on them eating people whole then just… walk away.
The sexualized pinup line is usually what catches fire from critics. They are single miniatures that are allegedly non-canon and depict females in bikini’s made of various materials. And then there legitimate expansions like Fade, whose titular character is matronly proportioned and a strong breeze can rob her of modesty. The game itself is quite respectful of the subject and is far more interested in detailing body horror than body proportions. In fact sometimes you wish they would talk dirty to distract you from the horrible things going on.
If I ever had to make a game that enshrines everything that embodies fantasy horror and weds it with modern gaming theory, it would probably end up looking pretty close to Kingdom Death: Monster. Everything a long time nerd wants is in there: Base building, monster hunting, crafting, immersion, and a game that fights back. At it’s mechanical core this is a really, really messed up tabletop campaign that is influenced a little bit by everything doused in nightmare fuel. It’s best marketed as a cooperative hobby tabletop experience, something everybody can chip in on and enjoy.
At this point you may be thinking that this is all well and good but how would you get your own copy? An issue with the quality of the core set is that it has to be printed in limited runs right now and it’s totally sold out. I would guesstimate only 7000~ copies exist. But the good news a reprinting campaign is rumored to start by the end of the year.
