Indomitable Survivor – Roaring Harmonica Kale | Kingdom Death White Box Review

The shaggy beast opened its jaws, revealing row upon row of glistening teeth. It gripped the stone-faced ground with its exhausted hands, releasing a terrifying roar. The bowel-shaking rumble grew into a head-splitting assault. Kale shuddered, bathed in the roar of his doom. His body sprang into one final act of defiance, throwing himself headlong at the howling maw. A massive pale hand fell lifeless across Kale's heaving body. The beast slumped over his blade, frozen in a silent roar.

Available here: https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/collections/white-box/products/indomitable-survivor-roaring-harmonica-kale

Contents

• 1x Roaring Harmonica - Kale hard plastic miniature

• 1x Layered Maxilla White Lion indomitable resource card

• 1x Roaring Harmonica pattern card

• 1x Roaring Harmonica gear card

• 1x Large matte art print

Indomitable Resources and the associated Indomitable Survivor series are some of my favourite pieces of content, this is because they add more carrot for hunting the level 3 versions of monsters, while we do have the strange resource gear cards which was the original reward mechanic, those were fixed and usually one wouldn't want more than one copy of the gear card. That meant later showdowns against the same level monster lost a great deal of lustre due to the level 3 specific reward being reduced down to its keywords instead of the unique crafting option that was received the first time.

Because Indomitable Resources are drawn randomly from a pool, they overcome this issue, while you might get the same resource drop as the last time, you might not, and the anticipation of seeing that is for myself delightful. Even if the Indomitable Resource turns out to be a repeat, it is also still worth more than the strange equivalents because it will have the “perfect” keyword, meaning it can be used for other harder to craft options.

We've been gradually getting Indomitable Resources for some of the early game monsters over time, with the Frogdog, Gorm, Screaming Antelope, Smog Singers and the White Lion being the recipients of these in addition to the releases in the Gambler's Chest. This is the second one for the White Lion alongside Indomitable Survivor – Longclaw Lenore and that is exciting because it means we are on the road towards having a good selection of options for defeating a level 3 White Lion.

The Miniature

There's absolutely no doubt for me that Kale is one of the all time great sculpts. He is a mixture of multiple anime characters and the Admiral from Monster Hunter World. For reference here's the Admiral, but many characters in various Japanese franchises have this kind of spiked mane appearance and due to Kale's association with the White Lion it also echoes that monster's design.

Of course, the mimicry of the White Lion's appearance probably the main reason Kale looks like this, you can see it not just in his hair, but also his face and hands have taken on aspects that are similar to that quarry monster and it's a fun look. So yeah, really like this one, it's stylish, detailed and characterful. Top marks for both style and execution here.

The Gameplay

You know the drill by now, we're getting an indomitable resource, the associated indomitable pattern and a single piece of the gear, which is fine because we're limited to a maximum of one copy of this particular gear card. This is the Roaring Harmonica, the second harmonica we've had released so far.

Crafting Cost: 1x Layered Maxilla (IR), 2x Lion Claw, 1x Leather

I do really like it when you can directly see each resource used in the crafting turn up in the gear art. There's a sliding scale of how how close we get and the Roaring Harmonica is right up near the top end of a 1:1 match. The two claws are positioned at each end of the piece, the maxilla (upper jawbone) is used to make the harmonica blow reeds, draw reeds and comb and the leather is both the harmonica case and the strap to hang it around the neck.

Realism somewhat goes out of the window when we get to the idea of a harmonica that can knock a monster down, anything that loud would also cause damage to the user, but we're not in our reality when we consider Kingdom Death gear, so it's not a big deal and I only mention it here because I ended up going down a rabbit hole when researching harmonicas (I owned a harmonica as a child, but never learnt how to play it). But Harmonicas are considered to be amongst the quietest of instruments outside of those which can be played with sound being transmitted via headphones. Regardless, they're pretty neat and I especially enjoy their inclusion in the music of westerns.

In game the Roaring Harmonica follows the tradition of most instruments, in that survivors when they take them on the hunt can't resist playing them at every single opportunity. This means that the card is noisy so the standard quarry hunt harvester warning applies here. It is up to you how severe that issue is, but playing strictly to the rules means each basic hunt event drawn holds a 1% chance of automatically dying in the pursuit of music.

Before we get to the abilities, I want to highlight how frustrating the affinities on this gear card are. They are inverted 180 degrees from the directions you want if you were to combine this gear card with the armor set. White Lion armor wants up red and down blue affinities to connect to, not down red and up blue. It is a shame that this wasn't taken into account when designing the gear card, especially when you look at some of the other indomitable pattern gear cards and you can see how they are specifically designed to work with their monster's armor set. This is especially important when you have a gear card that only works situationally, which the Roaring Harmonica does. If you do not have any knocked down survivors (or abilities that let you encourage when standing) then you cannot use this gear card's ability, which means it really needs to be contributing good affinities to justify its place in the given survivor's nine available slots. In fact I've struggled to make this fit with any support style armor set that would want to use it because of this affinity orientation, which is a real shame.

The place where this has worked best for myself is when combined with the Smog Singer's Singing Armor set, this is because the body slot Singing Breastplate has the “Hit Song” monster movement ability, as you can see here this is a way to trigger Encourage without needing the other survivors to be knocked down in the first place.

It is however still awkward to fit onto this grid because there are no matching affinities that fit without being willing to give up the excellent Singing Cap hit cancellation ability. So I've always ended up having to find a weapon and/or support items to sit above and below the harmonica. The Thumping Timpani from Thumping Timpani Ledla slotted really nicely into this grid as it also has encourage synergies and that left just the down blue affinity to source (which technically could come from the hat if you are fine with breaking the hat's puzzle ability).

With affinity set up completed we have an item that gives +2 strength tokens until the end of the round (and this works even if you can't get the affinities sorted out) and with the puzzle affinities connected we also have a 10% chance of knocking the monster down. Now it is a bit strange that the Roaring Harmonica is not a weapon when the Hushing Harmonica is, even a (1/7+/0) profile would have been something, but that isn't a deal breaker, it's just an inconsistency in the mechanical and thematic design for harmonicas.

All of that set up resulted in a survivor who worked as the 'door kicker' each round, so they would act first, deliver their hit song charge and trigger both the Harmonica and Timpani (from Ledla), giving everyone else a large boost of strength and eventually other stat gains via the Timpani. These tokens being temporary wasn't even a big deal for the Gormundism survivors in the hunt party because they were happy to consume the temporary tokens in exchange for other benefits.

Final Thoughts

This is a great model with an awkward and situational piece of gear, for campaigns including both the White Lion and Smog Singer (especially ones where the Harvester has somehow fallen down behind the couch cushions or been eaten by the dog, what a good dog you are) there is something here. Likewise for settlements with other methods of being able to encourage survivors no matter if they are standing or not, this can be put to good use because +2 strength is a significant amount of strength to gain in this game even if it's only for one round.

I like this one, but I am unashamedly a massive lover of bard type characters in games and as such, despite the current ongoing issue surrounding noisy I do love to see this kind of thing expressed in game. The harmonica is almost certainly a skip on purchasing if you are not able to utilise Singing Armor or some other “Encourage standing survivors” ability alongside it despite it being a base game quarry monster gear, but if you have a more extensive collection it is difficult to argue against this one.

In the end I think this is a fun piece of design, but you're not going to be able to make efficient or powerful use of this one automatically, it needs the right support to properly sing out against the darkness. As such I wish this had been bundled in with other releases rather than being its own thing.