Mox the Healer | Kingdom Death Beta Review

A shriek startled Mox from her dreamless sleep. The sound of skittering claws disappeared into the gloom before she could make out their shape. Beside her, a form in fitful slumber lay bleeding. Rubbing the flaking ink from her eyes, she spied the spreading pool of blood wending its way among the cracked stone faces. Suddenly aware of the weighty staff clenched in her hand, she applied its pulsing light to her companion's injuries. As their wounds faded, she felt a sharp pain. Blood poured from her own hand, running along the curiously patterned grooves of the strange staff.

Contents

• 1 x Mox The Healer miniature

• Beta Pillar card

• Beta Starting Gear card

• Install guide

• Large Matte Art Print

• Character Art Card

Out of Stock at time of writing, yay Beta content.

Pillars are a system I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, at the moment they're a very simple system that essentially guides you around the structure of constructing a campaign. This addition to the pillar system is the pillar cards, which makes it a tease for the full system that will eventually reach our tables. While I do not like the beta content release system overall because it puts game content in only a limited select number of hands; I do think that teasing new systems is a good spot for shop content. We had that with Patterns which worked fairly well if we ignore the black backs instead of orange ones and with strains which have been a bit more mixed in quality or desirability.

The core concept here is that at the start of the campaign, you pick a maximum of 1 Apostil Pillar card for each starting survivor and follow the rules on it to alter your starting survivor in some manner. I've actually had a lot of experience with a similar system because I created a 'hero' survivor system which had survivors gain a specific heroic trait card upon their generation and it would alter the way you played with that particular survivor for as long as they were alive. Another official example of this would be playing the Twilight Knight in Training and White Speaker alternative rule sets that are in the back of the base game rulebook and the Gambler's Chest expansion book respectively. It's fun to tweak the way that the game is played if you run it a lot, and having official versions of this is great because it gives the community a base language to discuss modifications to the rules without asking anyone to learn some additional custom rules before getting into being able to discuss what the spin on the game is this time.

The Miniature

This is a miniature I'm honestly not wanting to use on the table under any circumstances, and that is because of the material it is cast in. Photoresin miniatures like this are gorgeous, but a board game table is a rough place, especially now we have a plastic board for miniatures to collide with rather than cardboard or a play mat. As a display piece, perhaps in a diorama, this is an excellent model, but the brittle nature of the resin in combination with those small parts limits my personal use for it. From a load-out perspective though, which is worth considering if Mox gets recast into plastic, this would be a fantastic game piece as she is wearing a full set of rawhide armor along with her signature staff and various sling bags and pouches.

As an aside, Mox appears to be a variant of the character we've come to know as Glow, which would make sense because Mox is another spin on the healer trope. I think it's really cool to see these characters crop up again and again with a twist on them because it brings into focus one of the really interesting aspects of the game; where the survivors appearances originate from. Nice subtle 'show don't tell' world building. If you want to see another variant example, check out Wriel, who is a variant of Lucy or the Twilight Knight Allison who is a gender bent Allister (There is also a Twilight Knight Allister and he's apparently a terrible dude, which makes sense given he's The Scribe's self insert survivor). This stuff is so much fun to experience, explore and think about.

It's a lovely piece and I do hope to see it return along with other specific Apostil characters in plastic because this is both beautifully designed and interesting in what Mox and her stave add to the setting.

The Mechanics

This is a clean piece of design, with a base of very simple set of mechanics that have a lot of complexity in their implications. At the start of a campaign each survivor can be assigned an Apostil Pillar card (we only have this one right now) and in the case we have here the Healer pillar card will give them a specific ability and a cursed item that replaces their founding stone. This is immediately a fascinating portion of the game to play with (as mentioned above I've had experience with designing an analogous system, but without the potent extra world building that Team Death brings to the table).

Our Apostil – Healer card gives the “Mox” survivor the following ability and gear card. This is the only way that these two elements can be gained and they can be used only as long as the survivor who has them exists (well, Crystal Skin can of course get the gear card to slide off the survivor).

Custodian – When you heal another survivor, gain +1 strength token. When you are knocked down, archive all of your strength tokens.

This ability is designed to directly interact with the Beating Heartstave, but due to it using the word Heal it also interacts with a bunch of other elements of the game such as using the Acanthus resource. We're able to generate Acanthus in every showdown either via the L3 Screaming Antelope victory conditions or the Screaming Antelope specific monster knowledge Arc Survivor card “Herb Grinder”, we can also carry Acanthus out to showdowns if we have the Flower Knight and craft the Satchel gear card. So there's more options and depth to this than just the simple survivor plus their cursed gear and this is the kind of design I appreciate. Integrating with existing mechanics is always a fun thing to play with because it can be backwards compatible in unexpected and interesting manners.

The pay off is a solid one to boot, +1 strength token isn't something to sneeze at because this is a game where getting just one or two extra strength points can tip the odds into making attacks productive for a survivor. This is especially the case when combined with an acanthus terrain generating ability like the two mentioned above. Without the Acanthus though, the Healer still has access to their Beating Heartstave, and we'll take a look at that now.

The little pink hand icon indicates that this gear can only be gained in a specific manner and isn't added to the game's cards in other circumstances.

The first thing to note is that this is in the same category as the Bone Pickaxe/Sickle in that it is not a weapon, instead it is an item/tool with an attack profile (I wonder when we'll get Arm gear with attack profiles to represent claws?) It is also other, metal and heavy; heavy is the only one of these three keywords that is interacted with by base game elements such as the hunt phase and settlement phase, where it trends towards being a negative trait. However, nothing here is a serious deal breaker and the tool keyword is even a boon if you are playing a campaign with tool related synergies potentially available (such as the Manhunter).

Still, the base attack profile on this item is to put it bluntly; complete ass by design. It is clear that you're not intended to be using this to hit monsters with once you're outside of the prologue, (1/8+/1) is among the worst attack profiles we've ever seen, so without the Manhunter's Tool belt this is not a beating stick. Well I guess strictly speaking it is literally a beating stick, it is in the name, but it's not good for the other kind of beating, the one we aim to deliver to monsters on a lantern yearly basis while trying to avoid getting one from the hunt phase. Even the Barbed 4 is not hugely relevant because Barbed gets weaker the lower your speed is due to how it needs a Perfect Hit to trigger and how additional Perfect hits can score additional triggers of Barbed.

Instead, the main draw here is the activated ability called Epimorphosis; this is a very evocative word, epimorphosis refers to when an organism can regenerate specific parts. We see this in reptiles that can regrow lost limbs, and in Doctor Who when the 10th Doctor regrew his hand when he lost it in a sword fight with the Sycorax leader during The Christmas Invasion episode (the one which also introduced Donna Noble). Also during the episode The Time of the Doctor, the hand also underwent epimorphosis and grew its own Meta-crisis Doctor. Mostly this tangent was because I wanted to reminisce a little about the 10th Doctor's run because it really was a great time with a lot of really good episodes (and a few stinkers).

If you want a great real world representation, salamanders and the American cockroach are two prominent ones, both of which are capable of regenerating lost limbs.

In game this Beating Heartstave mirrors this by allowing the carrying survivor to activate it and record a permanent injury of choice in order to heal 1 hit location of an adjacent survivor. An equivalent exchange, which I believe is something that happens in Full Metal Alchemist, but that is a series I have not watched. In addition, if the Healer has recorded a permanent injury during this process that matches one that the healed survivor has, then you get to remove that injury from the adjacent survivor. This somewhat provides a cap for how much healing the Healer can provide, they are gradually falling apart in order to maintain others. It's a really cool and thematic ability that tells a story of tragic giving of oneself for the greater good.

Except, if we're smart about it we have a way to shrug off these permanent injuries and keep healing for the remainder of their entire existence. That's because the Gorm offers this sweet little item.

At this point, it doesn't matter how many severe injuries the survivor suffers, as long as they do not bleed out or get killed directly they are going to bounce back from anything that happens during the showdown without any long term consequences (outside of the mental trauma they probably suffer from living such a tortured experience over and over, but let us not think about that too closely).

Without the Gorm as a part of the campaign we also have other methods of healing our Healer, for example the Intracranial Haemorrhage severe injury can be removed at the Barber Surgeon. Broken Arms, Hips, Ribs and the Ruptured Muscle severe injury can be removed with the Bed innovation and the Bloodletting innovation can remove a Warped Pelvis or Intestinal Prolapse. That means we have some "easy" severe injuries we can remove during the settlement phase, though at times our Healer may have to skip hunts while recovering.

Silk Surgery from the Spidicules expansion can even go as far as cutting limbs or other elements from plebeian survivors and transplanting them onto the Apostil, turning them into a Frankenstein's Monster rebuilt collectively from the entire community. Also the Butcher sometimes offers a chunk of meat that can be used to regrow dismembered limbs.

There are of course going to be other places where you'll notice that you can heal up the severe injuries that the Healer Apostil suffers, and that means that something which looked quite the major drawback can instead be navigated and mitigated through common elements that are available in every campaign. Write a down list of what severe injuries can be healed by your settlement and you're free to use those during the showdown with lesser consequences.

All of this is why I really like Mox's game design, it is on the surface a small addition to the game, but it interacts with a huge amount of differing interactions rather than simply being a depleting source of armor point heals. I've not even gotten into how interesting it is to suddenly have a “cleric” class arrive in the game, Kingdom Death's balanced around armor points being a finite and difficult resource to replenish once you are on the hunt, Mox changes that equation when her cards are included in the game and that is something which is interesting and engaging.

Final Thoughts

Mox is a great release, we get a teaser for what expansions to the Pillar system we're getting in Campaigns of Death and if they are as elegant and deep as Mox's ones here then we're in for an incredible time. This is something that has a significant impact on your game experience because it turns up in the prologue fight and then you're given an experience where you can discover new elements to the game's mechanics by having an entire aspect of the game enhanced. We lost the Screaming Ambulance healing support playstyle when 1.6's update removed generation of Acanthus with the Screaming Armbands, but we've had it returned here in a new, powerful and ultimately fragile form.