A detailed account of my various commission/hobby projects.
Kingdom Death – Creepy giant spiders will scare most people. Giant creepy spiders in Kingdom Death are on a whole other level. Spidecules is one of the expansions that adds a new monster as well as armor kits for your settlement.
Read MoreKingdom Death – Remember Sharktapuss? That’s what the Sunstalker reminds me of, at least the silhouette feels very similar to that tentacle monster. I really don’t have words for this guy, it’s just so weird I’m sure that it’s a difficult beast to take down with your hunting party.
Read MoreKingdom Death – The Green Knight is a special expansion for Kingdom Death: Monster. It requires you to craft a ridiculous amount of gear from several expansions in order to create the “ulitmate” armor.
Read MoreIf you can see the Lonely Tree for what it really is, it's probably too late. This carnivorous organism hypnotizes anything that comes near, luring prey with hallucinations of their innermost desires. Once they draw near, the hallucinations turn to ceaseless dreams, while the roots consume the victim in their sleep.
Read MoreKingdom Death – The expansions for this game seem to be never ending. Which I suppose is a good thing for me. My latest foray into the Kingdom brings the Dragon King and Manhunter expansions across my table.
Read MoreKingdom Death – Slowly but surely i’m working my way through all of my clients expansion packs for Kingdom Death. Once you’ve played through the core game there are a ton of expansions that add new monsters and encounters, most of them slot into a particular Lantern Year and replace one of the core monsters. If you manage to defeat the monster and harvest the right materials it gives your settlement access to some new tools and gear you can craft. It’s a pretty elegant system for incorporating new material.
I haven’t personally played with this monster yet but based on the model and accessories that come with it It appears the Flower Knight may have some type of musical theme. As with the other knights there is also several weapons included on the sprue to deck out survivors with new gear.
Kingdom Death – The Gold Smoke Knight is the newest Monster to grace my painting table. I believe this guy slots into a Kingdom Death Campaign as a replacement (or after-boss boss) for the Watcher. I could be wrong as it’s been quite some time since I was able to convince my group to play something other than Warhammer 40k.
The survivors are painted in the same manner as the others I’ve done. Pretty straightforward with some minor glow effects. I really like the variety of survivors you have once all the kits have been assembled. Being able to represent any item card in the game on your model is also a cool concept that’s harder to pull off.
Kingdom Death – With these kits I believe I’ve finally finished up my clients core set of Kingdom Death: Monster. The armor kits are one of the most difficult things to build, not because the kit is hard to follow but more so because until you’ve played the campaign you don’t know how to best arm them or what you might make during the course of the game. So to take best advantage of the versatility of the kits you’d build a new model after each session. WHICH IS INSANE!
The more reasonable thing to do is build the complete kits and arm them to look cool. Then they can represent the model without having to BE the exact model. This is especially true when having the models painted by a commission artist and preparing to have everything done before starting the game.
The first kit in this batch is the Rawhide kit. Your settlement should be able to start crafting these items fairly early in the game. I stuck with a simple khaki and bone color scheme for these to reflect the White Lion which is the monster that will provide most of the raw materials to make the stuff the survivors are decked out in.
After you’ve built some structures tanning leather helps move your rawhide into a more durable good.
If you can take out the screaming antelope making this set will help your settlement succeed and thrive.
Eventually you’ll face the Phoenix and if you are able to get the right parts making a nifty birdman suit keeps you going in the right direction.
After fighting the big bad watcher you can craft a sweet set of armor.
Kingdom Death – Slowly but surely I'm wrapping up all the models in the Kingdom Death: Monster core box as well as the expansions. Of course these aren't my own models but it's nice to put some paint to them finally, when I get to finish my own it should be quick with all the practice I'm getting.
Read MoreKingdom Death – My own Kingdom Death campaign seemed to have faltered after the Screaming Antelope murdered most of my party, and since that day most of my play group has been interested in other things so I haven't had a chance to go back into the boutique nightmare horror realm that is Kingdom Death.
Read MoreKingdom Death – The Lion God and Slenderman are painted. I think the photos speak for themselves.
Read MoreKingdom Death Monster – Yes I still haven't had time to paint my own set from this amazing game, however I do have a client who is slowly feeding me her complete set to paint up.
Read MoreKingdom Death – Slowly I've been getting a few models at a time to paint for the Kingdom Death Monster game. The game is really good, if not unforgiving, and should get better when the 1.5 book comes out.
Read MoreKingdom Death – If you want to play a challenging game that has character development and civilization building Kingdom Death can scratch that itch. If your party manages to survive the various encounters with the nightmarish monsters that inhabit the world, they can scavenge the parts left over from the encounter to create gear, weapons and more to help them survive the next encounter. The cool thing about this boutique game is the core set includes miniatures for all the things you can make so you can actually build your characters as they are armed.
Read MoreMy painting table is going to be a bit of a mis-mash of things for a little while. I've had several clients drop off big jobs that hit many different parts of the gaming spectrum. In the weeks to come I'll be working on:
Read MoreKingdom Death – The next model in the core set is the King's Man. This particular creature is incredibly annoying to fight based on my groups experience. Of course the same could be said for any of the monsters in this game. After fighting this beast we decided it might make sense to start over and focus on building weapons instead of building every settlement extra right off the bat.
Read MoreKingdom Death – I've made some more progress on the starting survivors and monsters for my Kingdom Death client which just so happens to coincide with the new kickstarter campaign. Totally worth checking out as it broke all the records for the first campaign within hours of the launch.
Read MoreKingdom Death – I haven't finished my own Kingdom Death set yet and really would like to get all of the models put together and painted. One day I'll get to it. In the meantime a client dropped off the prologue survivors, white lion and butcher for me to paint up.
Read MoreKingdom Death – When last we left our survivors they just killed a Screaming Antelope and limped back to the settlement legless, armless and bleeding profusely.
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Kingdom Death – After assembling all the core game monsters and basic survivors I was able to get a basic paint job on the models needed for the First Story. My play group has been anxiously waiting to play this game since I backed it on Kickstarter several years ago. So it wasn't hard to get three more players to join me on the first adventure into the nightmare realm of Kingdom Death.
The rulebook throws you right into the game it functions very similarly to a modern video game which walks you through the basic actions and teaches you through experiencing the game with minimal reading of the game rules. Essentially follow the walk through and you learn the basics of the game, this is brilliant because it makes teaching the game really easy. (Not to mention I didn't have to remember a bunch of rules right off the bat.)
After naming our characters we followed the instructions and set up the Lion AI deck and began the showdown. (Note: we didn't catch the adjustments needed to fight the various levels of creatures until we were deep into the battle. Fighting a 25 wound lion is way harder than fighting a 10 wound lion.)
Right off the bat my character got mauled and I thought it was going to be the end for me. Luckily my compatriots were able to roll multiple critical hits to bring the Lion down to a more managable number of wounds. I recovered and got back into the fight. Miraculously we survived out first encounter and looted the corpse for useful materials.
The next stage of the game is the settlement phase. This is where you go back to your camp and spend resources to build things or innovate cultural events. The innovations allow you to move the story forward and grant access to new gear and abilities. We rolled up our settlement and have a total of 12 people. (It seemed like overkill at the time, but you do need every body you can get) Once of our survivors had to stay at the camp staring as the lanterns to gain insight. Which meant that player made a new survivor from the pool we have to go on the next hunt. We built a skinnery and bone smith with our initial endeavors as well as crafting a vest from the body parts we had.
Each settlement phase you fill in a timeline box and at various stages trigger a story event. Which you do immediately. The core rule book has a ton of these events and it feels like a choose your own adventure book when you have to flip through the pages to find your event.
After the settlement phase is the ideal time to end your gaming session. You fill in what you have and make notes for the next time you get together.
Since it was still early and everyone was enjoying the game we moved on to the Hunt phase. During this phase you pick a monster to hunt and set up the hunt board per the description on that monsters showdown phase. The survivors move along the track revealing cards at each stage. The cards are events that can help or hurt the survivors as well as actions the beast may take while you stalk it. Once the monster and survivors meet in the same space you move to the showdown phase.
Each showdown gives you a layout to set up the monster and terrain cards. The terrain are heavy cardboard chits with a card that describes what it does. You then deploy your survivors according to that map and begin the showdown. The monster goes first and flips a card to see what it does. After it takes it's action the survivors take theirs. You can move up to your movement and then take an action. We pretty much just took turns swinging at the lion attempting to kill it. Each time you hit you flip a card from the hit location deck it lists the effects of your strike. These include critical hit events as well as what happens if you fail to wound. (Hint the lion doesn't like being poked in the ass). Each time you wound you remove a card from the AI deck when the deck is gone you've killed the monster.
This beast went down fairly easily and we salvaged some useful bit that we took back to our settlement. During the settlement phase we experienced an earthquake that gained us another founding stone. We took our body parts to the Bonesmith and made an axe and sword. We also made vests out of the useful hides we gathered. (Note the nifty paper towel vests one of my buddies created, a subtle reminder i still have a metric ton of minis to assemble and paint)
Some of our survivors aged and began gaining weapon proficiencies. Which seem like they'll help us in the long run. We also triggered the Screaming Antelope story event which gave us a new monster to hunt.
Eager to see what this beast will be like our brave survivors start the hunt for the Screaming Antelope. This hunt is much different and causes our survivors to spend all their survival during the hunt phase chasing down the Antelope. Eventually we catch it and begin the showdown.
The beast swallows one of our survivors in it's maw and dismembers her. It rams me and smashes my jaw three times and leaves me bleeding out on the ground near death. Our other survivors wound it, but as it eats the other arm of the survivor it swallowed it heals back up. Things are looking grim as we slowly reduce it's health and it vomits up our armless companion. It's next charge swallows our axe wielder and dismembers one of his legs. We fail to hurt the beast and it took his other leg. Outraged we began throwing our stones (not the best idea) and crit the thing to death. It vomits out our friend who will have to retire when we drag him back to the camp, but survived so we get the endeavor point to spend.
As it's now very late we decide to call it quits and make our notes for the settlement phase where we'll begin the next session.
Overall my group loved the game. It's really fun and the mechanics are very clever. The co-op aspect of the game really shines with the comradely and I can't remember the last time we laughed so much during a game. The stuff that happens is just insane. I like the fact that you play a settlement rather than a character. It opens up the opportunity for new people to sit in as well as making it easy to keep up if someone gets hurt or removed from the game early. I'm pretty sure it would be a good idea to rotate around the survivors to keep all of them around the same level but right now we're just going to wing it.
