Male Fighter Beta | Kingdom Death Monster Review

The male Fighter is a host to parasitic worms that regenerate his body. His buckler acts as a feeding mechanism, his reckless fighting style producing nutrition and protecting his life to feed his passengers.

Contents

• 1 x Male Fighter miniature

• 1 x Hard plastic Kingdom Death 30mm round base and insert

• Beta Starting Gear card

• Large Matte Art Print

• Character Art Card

We have an extended version of the Fighter text that came with the original female release. I'm going to include this here for the sake of comparison.

The Fighter is a host to parasitic worms that regenerate her body. They make her near-immortal, pale, and her eyes yellow. The worms feed off the water and salt in her body and thus she must consume copious amounts of both to stay alive but the resulting diet keeps her body swollen, obscuring her muscular frame. Her fighting style is sloppy and aggressive, unhindered by fear of harm.

This is the third iteration of the Fighter Generic Hero, with the previous ones being the resin Female and the plastic Monster Kingdom Death universe one (I'll call her the Echoes Fighter). This male fighter, due to its release being part of the Beta line should most likely be considered as another Monster universe. However, I do think that the change in how this version of the Fighter has the same source of gigantism (parasitic worms) as the first Resin release does muddy the issue quite a bit. This is because the Echoes fighter gets her gigantism from a form of marrowism impacting on their pituitary gland function, which is part of the process that causes the Bone Eaters and Marrowism survivors to grow so large. As such, it's hard to say what the intent with the Male Fighter text is, it's been greatly shortened from the female version and is referring to the parasitic worms instead of marrowism, and the other lore link we have is that the gear card is Ethereal. Ethereal is a mechanic which ties gear to saviors, usually indicating that the gear has come from somewhere else, an adjacent reality. We've had this before with the Generic Swashbuckler white box release and its Corsair Coat, and we'll get a bit more into that during the game mechanics section.

The Miniature

No doubt in my mind that this is a beautiful miniature that I'm never going to use on the game board. My plastic Echoes Fighter has enough trouble with her hair ribbons breaking when playing, so a photoresin version of this character with even more thin break points isn't something I'd want to use as a play piece. However, putting aside the usability of this as a player pawn, the model itself is gorgeous. We have all of the elements that are a part of the original generic female fighter, but with higher fidelity, more details and in a larger scale. Here's the original Female Fighter for comparison

For its time this older sculpt is good, but you can see how far the sculpting team has come since Jacques Alexandre Gillois (JAG) crafted his rendition of the character. I like the original Female Fighter, but I absolutely adore this new version which has come along almost a decade later.

To return to the Beta Male, we can see how the axe, buckler and the salty water jug have all been brought across to the new sculpt, while I'm not sure what use the jug has now because the lore blurb updated the feeding of the parasites to be via the buckler rather than copious amounts of water and salt I do like seeing it here because it is a fun design.

Speaking of fun design, I love to see the base depicts the same weird grub creature that the original did, and I wish the opportunity had been taken to explain a little more about what they are because these two sculpts are the only places I have seen them. I guess we will have to speculate longer, are they just some of the vermin that scurry about the place? Are they a larval form of the Bee Titan? Maybe one day we'll find out.

The Game Content

Crafting Cost: 3x Endeavors, 1x hide, 1x perfect bone

Requires: Savior with Dormenatus in the Settlement

Additionally, a month ago Team Death updated Ethereal's rules to this:

Ethereal: A gear special ability. This gear is inextricably linked to saviors. When the settlement has no savior, archive this gear.

In contrast, the original wording of Ethereal as printed on the back of the Swashbuckler's Corsair Coat is:

A survivor must be Insane and depart with a savior to wear it. When the settlement has no savior, archive it.

This update is huge, as under the original Ethereal Rules this type of gear was pretty close to useless due to it lasting only as long as your single savior could keep on hunting. That is why the Corsair Coat and Durendal (from Oktoberfest Aya) are not discussed very much, the previous Ethereal rule made them incredibly disposable and the Durendal wasn't even worth crafting (at least the coat is 'free' to gain).

The new Ethereal now allows us to bench our savior in the settlement and keep using the gear on hunts. There is still risk involved, if the savior dies/departs/ceases to exist for any reason then the gear is lost and because normally a settlement can only have one savior (this can be higher with mechanics like the Collectivism philosophy or Drifting Dream Fruit from the lonely tree) and if that savior is gone then the gear is also gone.

For me this is a massive deal, with the original Ethereal Rules I would be easily giving this box a failing grade because it would be too temporary to justify the high cost, especially that Perfect Bone, which is something that so many gear cards now demand (The Tachyon Nodachi wants 3 of them for example!). Crafting a temporary piece of gear that archives quickly due to your savior aging out from hunting isn't worth it. But now we can park the Savior, it's a different matter.

The stats on Pain Eater are very solid for a shield, we get a (2/5+/1/Block 1/Surpass 10/Sentient/Ethereal) shield. That 5+ accuracy in particular is huge as most shields are nowhere near that accurate. The low strength would be a concern, except if you have the puzzle green, puzzle green, green, red affinity ability active then each time the shield blocks a hit the weapon gains a temporary +X strength until the end of the showdown where X is the damage the monster would have dealt.

(Note: See comments, I originally wrote +1 which is not correct and also was not how I played it. This is what happens when I try to get a large backlog of articles to cover friends visiting. My bad everyone, I should have written this with the card sat in front of me. It still doesn't change my end evaluation.)

So this can be used in a purely defensive manner until it is strong enough to score wounds with, making this an excellent weapon to level up with. The triple, left, up, right green affinities also tie really well into Leather Armor's affinity loadout, which is a portion of the game where Block 1 is a great tool for a front line tank.

I also really like the Surpass 10 design on this shield, though due to it having Block 1 we'll need beefcake survivors to get that online in a reasonable timeline, but if you are turtling a showdown in order to crit-farm then this provides a quick pivot when it is time to finish the monster.

Ultimately I think this gear card is pretty cheap for what you get, it's a superior round leather shield for savior settlements that costs -1 leather, +2 endeavors and an upgrade from bone to Perfect bone and the main showdown cost is you need to be insane to activate it (blocking or attacking). So it needs insanity gain support.

Final Thoughts

All of that makes the Pain Eater a nice luxury gear card to be able to craft, but like any luxury, it's not essential, in fact being tied to saviors means it'll be hard; but not impossible, to get your hands on it outside of People of the Lantern (Collectivism is the most reliable route we have at the moment). Which I think is pretty much the entire boxed set as a whole, a luxury, nice to have if you play the game a lot and have the disposable income, but if you couldn't afford to get this one I wouldn't worry about it. It might come back in plastic white box form and if that theoretical box came with pattern cards for the axe, horns and jug then it would be a great purchase. If it doesn't come back with a white box release, I don't think you're missing out too much here unless the miniature is something you really need to paint.