15th Anniversary Survivors White Box Review | Kingdom Death: Monster

In celebration of 15 years since the release of the first Kingdom Death figure, we revisit the starting survivors of Monster, Allister, Zachary, Lucy, and Erza. Fifteen lantern years into their existence the pursuit of survival is replaced with a quest for perfection. Life and death still remain balanced on the edge of dice roll but the grizzled survivors have endured beyond expectation.

The 15th Anniversary Survivor figures are accompanied by an expanding armory of weapons wrought with purpose to take advantage of fortune and tenacity. A Blacksmith settlement location extension and a host of new tools and resources allows settlements to craft the wrought weapons of the 15th anniversary survivors.

The 15th lantern year of this journey has hardened our resolve. Kingdom Death has taken darkness of the past lantern years and crafted a path forward. Our journey continues to draw random events, impossible showdowns, and the rich rewards of bringing new stories to the world of Kingdom Death. Let's forge ahead together into 15 more lantern years of darkness! – KDM Shop Blurb

For myself it feels like a lifetime ago that the 10th Anniversary Survivors were released into the wild, that was a collection that contained our four prologue survivors decked out in leather armor and their pattern gear cards, those cards were a mixture ranging from powerful and interesting all the way down to one of the worst gear cards I've had the misfortune of having to craft. With hindsight however, the most interesting portion of this set was not so much the gear itself, but the way that it signalled Team Death's hard pivot into Seed Patterns. The main question for the 15th Anniversary Survivors' box set outside of 'is it good value' is one that we can't answer at this stage, but it is worth bearing in mind, does the design of this set herald another hard pivot in future content?

I'll mull over that a little in the end portion of this review, but before then we shall take a look at the miniatures and the in game content, including a dive into how this gear is unlocked, any little tricks that can be undertaken to assist in speeding that up/make it more consistent and a review of all of the items of gear with comparisons to the generic line options where possible.

The Miniatures

It is impossible to overlook just how much Kingdom Death's style for depicting its survivors has changed over the years since the game's release, but it has never been more obvious than it is with this set. All of these four miniatures are significantly larger than even the 10th Anniversary iterations, comparisons to the original prologue miniatures look comedic. However, these miniature do even more than that, because when placed next to the 1st generation of monsters, they make the monsters look small and weak. Truly these characters have received not just a glow up, but a blow up. It's almost like KDM is trying to catch up to Oathsworn's scale.

The massively increased scale is not the only element which has changed, the level of detail on these miniatures is staggering, even when compared to the newer elements of the Gambler's Chest. These models take advantage of the larger scale, combined with increased skill in 3D sculpting and improved tooling techniques; the result of which is the most detailed miniatures we have seen in years. Though not all these details are strictly an improvement. For myself, Zachary's Beard and hair does not look great, especially when compared to the rest of the quad. It reads as fur rather than hair, likewise Allister's pants look a little silly, and Lucy's boobplate is really pushed a bit too far into the pin-up area when compared to the other three who have relatively practical combat designs, but these quibbles boil down to personal taste, and to balance out those criticisms, I really like the way that the “Scribe, S” designs are utilised around Zachary's neck, everything about Erza's design is pure fire and Lucy's spears look incredible.

Overall there is no question for me, these are top of the line miniatures that can be held up next to some of the best options from any other range and often come out on top.

The Gameplay

The heart of this entire design is the Wrought Ironworks, a Settlement Location Extension in the same vein as the Gigacatarium from the White Gigalion expansion. Overall this location extension system isn't something I'm super keen on, we get small portions of crafting locations that are intended to be added onto the bottom of the original location, but the truth is they don't tend to interact with the original settlement location at all, so they could simply be their own location. While conceptually, the wrought ironworks is following the philosophy of using sponge iron (more on that later) instead of pig iron, so they are connected through iron, these new pieces of gear are basically stand alone and the entire affair has more in common with the Flower Knight or Leather crafting rather than the Blacksmith.

It is a functional system, but it is not an elegant one as it takes up more table space and more head space for the players. KDM is fast reaching a critical mass where there is simply too much going on, even as someone who plays the game multiple times a week it is getting really difficult to experience everything the game has to offer, let alone the various potential combos and synergies/conflicts that come into being when you put different elements together.

Still, let us start our journey into how we get the Ironworks in the first place, it is unlocked via terrain, this is one of the current 'hotness' systems that Team Death seem to be fixated on; terrain that generates resources and said resources provide an unlock of some kind. Here we have the new generic (always present) terrain card called the Perfect Lantern.

The Perfect Lantern has a number of unique quirks surrounding it, first of all it has to be deployed nearer the middle part of the board, secondly it gives a Perfect hit range bonus of +1 for survivors who are adjacent to this. However, it is also destructible, meaning that fighting around near this obstacle provides a risk to loosing it, that's a serious consideration because ultimately we need to successfully interact with this terrain tile in order to gain the resource we need to start our journey towards wrought iron.

So all of this means if we want to increase the chances of seeing the Perfect Lantern in the first place we want showdowns with as many random additional terrain cards as possible. Some monsters, like the Sunstalker or Frogdog, have no extra random terrain by default, so we'll need to bare that in mind when building our campaign. The Faceism philosophy is another element we can use to help increase our odds of seeing this terrain, this is due to its base Knowledge giving extra terrain cards. Faceism, while being a knowledge that makes me terrified of typos, is also one of those knowledges that keeps on giving and to be honest I wish we had a Fighting Art version of this for players who do not want to use Arc Survivors.

Once we've generated the terrain, that's the point where players need to decide if they are going to risk it and wait till later in the showdown before interacting with this, or if they're going to go for it as soon as possible. I'm of the opinion that getting the first resource drop from this terrain is exceedingly important, so it should be interacted with as a fast as possible before the monster crashes into it and obliterates it from the showdown board. After that first all important resource is secured, the remaining versions of this terrain become a useful tactical tool for Perfect Hit builds and also a source of iron.

Also as a quick aside, the name Pyrolytic refers to Pyrolysis, this is the process of burning things in an inert atmosphere (no oxygen), one of those ways that KDM is so excellent at conveying a huge amount of information with as little expositional text as possible.

We have a few ways to improve our odds of getting the Pyrolytic Light resource as well, the terrain has an inbuilt +2 bonus for Hoarder survivors, and also any armor using the Screaming Bracers (such as Screaming Armor, Beast Hunter Armor or Dancer Armor) can offer +2 to the roll result also.

So there are additional ways to increase the odds of seeing the terrain, and increased odds of getting the resource, but no guarantees. Sometimes you are just never going to see this terrain card; and even if you do get it early on, an accident or nemesis monster might cause the loss of this resource before you reach lantern year 15, which is where we can archive the light in order to gain the Bloomery innovation.

This innovation has two functions, first of all we need it to unlock the Wrought Ironworks for the cost of two endeavours as long as we already have the Blacksmith unlocked, then after that we'll need to come back to this innovation any time we want to craft wrought iron gear. That is because the Bloomery represents the process through which sponge iron is manufactured, it's a very interesting part of a topic I have always loved thanks to my uncle Charlie who was a farrier and blacksmith. To provide a crude overview, sponge iron (also known by the name of Direct Reduced Iron) is created through a process that requires the use of a reducing gas; the earliest places where this process was undertaken (that we know about) are known as a bloomery, hence the innovation name. The iron ore (or slag from earlier blooms) is prepared together by breaking the ore up and then roasting it in order to help remove some impurities. The bloomery is heated by wood at first, then onto charcoal which has a very high level of carbon purity in it. Inside the bloom, the charcoal doesn't burn the way it does in open spaces, instead it produces a large amount of carbon monoxide. This is the reducing gas that then helps to both purify the ore (removing carbon) and also lowering the melting point of iron. This process may need to be repeated multiple times, each time producing a lower amount of total slag, but with a higher purity level on each iteration. This is wrought iron.

In game this process is represented by the expenditure of not just an endeavours, but also some iron ore, given how the normal blacksmith weapons are impacted by the Early Iron ability (and the Dragon Slayer being Frail), that is how the game's mechanics are representing their cruder crafting. Here we're expending some extra iron that is lost through the process because we have reduced it down to a purer form. That's also why they have decided to make this process not generate a fixed resource, you've got to restart the process from the beginning each time. There's also probably some additional pseudo-scientific “not-magic” influences from the source of the heat, which in most settlements is the lanterns. It's a good compromise between realism and the limitations of the game engine, you can't expect a game to have 1 to 1 translations of such a process, so abstracting it to the cost of work and reduction in total iron produced feels right.

For we players what this means is we are rewarded for stockpiling and spending/crafting as much as possible in a single year. This is similar to how it is with leather, where any number of hide can be turned into leather with a single endeavour, but it is even more focused because we have to spend a physical resource rather than the replenish-able 'work resource' that is generated by survivors every lantern year. To put it into euro-game terms, it takes deploying a worker and a resource to initiate the exchange rather than just a worker.

Given all of that, we want to bare in mind that the crafting cost of each piece of gear is higher the less pieces of gear we craft at the same time. It's hard to put an exact number on it, because that is an incredibly situational moment. I'll look at just the printed costs when comparing it to the Blacksmith options where possible, but bare that in mind, everything from the wrought ironworks is more expensive than the base value.

Before we do get into it, I want to quickly just put the text for Perfection X here into this review, because it is a core part of the design for the weapons, they don't just have perfect hit triggers, they also make perfect hits more likely.

Perfection X
A gear special rule. Increase the range of your Perfect hits by X while attacking with this gear.

This is different to other Perfect hit range increases because it is tied to attacking with the specific gear card, so it's not as strong as Dark/Timeless Eye because they can synergise with other excellent Perfect hit triggers. Instead we have a more self-contained ability here.

Wrought Lantern Mantle

Crafting cost: 1x iron, 3x leather, 2x hide

There's no direct comparison for this first piece of gear because while it is a body slot, it's an accessory, not an outfit card. So this was designed to be worn in addition to a normal armor set, something which we can clearly see from the affinities. This accessory is intended to sit in a lantern armor gear grid in slot 4 next to the lantern cuirass in the middle (slot 5). That gives us an easy puzzle affinity activation, but we can also run this in other heavy blue/green armor sets like the Earl armor set from the Black Knight.

Benefits of this accessory are threefold, first of all there is +3 armor points to the body, second up is a minor combo boost in that we can put fur or metal keywords into a gear grid that might not normally have them in their worn gear (without gaining the heavy keyword), thirdly when the affinity ability is activated we can spend 2 survival before making an attack to increase our Perfect hit range of that attack by 1. We're allowed to do this once per round and it is limited to the specific attack we are launching at that moment. No surge to get a second benefit, we can't combo this with Blood Paint. It's 2 survival for +1 Perfect hit, for 1 attack.

On the face of it that is honestly not good value; so this is going to very much depend on how many different Perfect hit abilities you have stacked into the particular survivor and how much speed they are able to deploy for the specific attack they have boosted. The Wrought Ironworks gives us a few perfect hit synergy options, so that's the main place we'll consider this gear, but also having other perfect hit triggers via knowledges or fighting arts is also very desirable. We're paying a lot of survival to get this +10% chance of a Perfect hit trigger per die; so we want to squeeze out as much as possible from it. People of the Sun seems like a campaign where this mantle is most likely to find a home.

Overall this is one that hasn't impressed on the first few looks, but it does have value as a combo piece with the right gear/survivor build and it is worth bearing in mind when we look at each of the following gear cards. A solid workhorse, but being so expensive to activate limits the playstyles and settlements that can utilise this best.

Wrought Longbow

Crafting Cost: 1x iron, 5x bone, 2x organ, 2x scrap

This is immediately a very exciting gear card because it represents a generic resource bow, something that previously has required leaning into specific monsters to gain access to. As such there's no direct comparison in the Blacksmith and most Node 3 monster bows are crafted much earlier than the 15th Lantern Year. This weapon has the finesse keyword, range 7, an increased perfect hit range of 1, a great stat-line of (2/7+/9), a down blue affinity and a puzzle affinity of blue, red, red; which when connected gives us an extra move at the start of our next act if we perfect hit (LOPR).

That extra movement (Knight) is really useful, not only can we combine it with Surge to get a cheap double attack, but we can also use it for positional based 'scoot and shoot' tactics, meaning we can really take advantage of the long range this bow features.

I think that this longbow is one of the more significant additions to the game, because it is giving us something we've not had before, semi-reliable access to bows in every campaign when we're in the late game portion of the campaign. That means monsters like the Dragon King, which provides an arrow and a quiver, but now bow, now have more combinations where their gear can be utilised, we can construct a campaign with arrows and quivers, but no bows in the monster settlement locations.

All of that makes this an exciting piece of gear that I am thrilled to be able to add to my campaigns, really the game needs a solid baseline progression path for every common weapon type in the game, that isn't this, but it does help.

Wrought Greatshield

Crafting cost: 2x iron, 4x leather, 1x perfect organ

This is the kind of gear I was referencing when writing about the Mantle, the Wrought Greatshield is an alternative to the Beacon Shield, having a similar level of protection via +2 armor points to all locations. The main place this differs is instead of having an activated Block 2; it instead passively generates Deflect 1 when a Perfect hit is triggered.

The Beacon Shield costs 2x iron, 3x leather and 4x bone. So it is numerically more expensive, but the quality of the Wrought Greatshield's resources are a bit higher with that perfect organ and initial Sponge Iron entry. However, I think these are quite comparable in cost, though in application the two shields do greatly differ. The Beacon Shield is typically employed as an activated tank weapon, leveraging the Block 2 in combination with evasion and armor point soak to neuter the monster's attacks.

In contrast the Greatshield is better utilised by offensively orientated survivors who will benefit more from gaining Deflect via attacks. This means off-tanks (not Blood Paint Brusiers) and damage dealers; with the closer your general attacking range is to the monster, the more benefit you will get. You ideally want to be able to tank 1 hit each round with this deflect if you want maximum benefit, but because this shield is giving +2 armor points to all hit locations on departure, that's not necessary to generate value from this gear card.

Overall, this is an excellent shield that is better for most non-tanking survivors, there is some tension in campaigns where you can upgrade the Beacon Shield (such as People of the Lantern), so it's not always a clear cut “take this if you're not a tank” shield, but it is hard to argue against this one for survivors who are close range damage dealers looking for a bit more passive protection. As always in games, it is really a delight to get alternatives that are not strictly better and instead are situationally better, that makes for more decisions and texture in your game experience. I really love the design of this shield.

Wrought Sledge

Crafting Cost: 2x iron, 3x leather, 4x bone, 1x perfect leather

Whenever one is looking around the campaign period where the Blacksmith location is open, one has to pay close attention to anything with the keyword club due to that armor set's synergy with that class of weapon. This means that the Wrought Sledge has an immediate leg up in comparison to all the remaining weapons we'll look at because it effectively has Sharp as an extra ability.

The base weapon here is also very impressive, it is two-handed, finesse weapon with a (1/4+/10) statline, a left and right red affinity (so synergy with Lantern Greaves), Perfection 2 and a puzzle ability that is red puzzle, red and blue (just needs one additional red left or right from a piece of gear to activate with lantern armor, easily achieved with a Monster-Tooth Necklace if nothing else is available). The puzzle ability is giving the first wound attempt in this attack Devastating 2; that's 3 wounds in a single perfect hit and we already have a base 30% chance of getting that perfect hit before adding any additional synergies in. I'm not sure if I would run the Mantle with lantern armor plus this Sledge as standard, but it is a solid option if one is running an off-tank Lantern Armor survivor rather than a main tank one. In fact I think probably Lantern Armor + Sledge + Greatshield +Mantle is a straight up pre-baked end game build for anyone who is running dual off-tanks or a main tank + off-tank as their front line strategies.

The sole negative we have here is that Slow ability and when you're scoring 3 wounds on an 8+ that means with 4+ accuracy 4 in 7 hits will be dealing 3 wounds, so you don't really care much about the Slow keyword here because that single first hit is the main thing you care about.

On top of all that, this weapon is much like the Longbow in that there isn't really a generic competitor for it, until now the main generic resource club strategy was running either a Skullcap Hammer/Whistling Mace and/or Bone Club and that was honestly good enough for many monsters one would encounter. Now we've got a Blacksmith club and even with all those extra steps we have in crafting, this is absolutely worth the effort. This is one of the standout pieces of gear in the box and like the bow it is a reason to get really excited.

Wrought Tachi

Crafting cost: 2x iron, 1x black lichen, 3x hide, 4x organ

Katanas are one of the worst weapon types in the entire game, one cannot get Katana specialisation without either playing People of the Sun or defeating a level 3 Sunstalker. In addition, when you do that, you end up with another weapon that has a “death” clock ticking on it, you will lose that survivor when they master the Katana in the same way that happens with the Twilight Sword. Even worse though, you have to own the Sunstalker expansion to get that card; meaning there's extra expense involved in fully utilising this weapon.

You're going to want that, because Katana specialisation has synergy with perfect hits; fortunately the Sunstalker is probably the best single 1st Generation expansion released (only the Gorm comes close imo), so there is a lot of value in picking it up. For those of you who are not familiar with Katana Specialisation, here it is:

Note: you get eye patches with the Katana Story Event, so you can always take advantage of being blind.

With that opening note and additional information we can now look at the Wrought Tachi and determine if it is worthy of its crafting cost. This is a two-handed finesse weapon with Perfection 1 and Sharp, bolstering its strength from 4 to an average of 9.5. The stat profile overall isn't that impressive, it's a reserved (2/6+/4) with an up red and left blue affinity, decent blue affinity, but no deadly on this weapon makes it hard to get super excited about it when you compare it to the Rainbow Katana.

The affinity ability unlocks with a red and blue affinity anywhere in your gear grid and it gives the monster -2 accuracy tokens for its next turn once per round. There's a cute trick where you can hit the monster during the survivor's turn and then a second time with a flow step surge to give the monster a total of -4 accuracy tokens, but doing that does mean you cannot repeat the process during your following act due to the Limit Once Per Round (LOPR).

Katana design is always a bit off because you can't utilise the scabbards with any Katana you like, they're always designed to work with a single option, this Tachi doesn't have a scabbard, it's “in-built” into the gear card according to the artwork. So it contributes further to this overall messy, unfocused weapon category.

Ultimately this weapon is probably the biggest miss in the selection, a lot of that is due to the rather weak overall design Katana's get, they have no real mechanical thread connecting them together and the proficiency is not only a ticking clock, but it's also locked away in a single expansion box. This is the only gear card in this box that requires an expansion in order to utilise it properly and as such I'm left cold and uninterested in this one.

With a better base profile, or leaning into Deadly there would be an interesting weapon here for sure, but as it stands, unless Campaigns of Death really revamps the weapon type, this one is a miss for me. Interesting ability that could save lives, but I really want Deadly 1 on this weapon to justify its existence.

Wrought Twinspear

Crafting cost: 1x iron, 2x leather, 2x bone, 1x perfect bone

Note: This one should be crafted in pairs, a single Twinspear isn't giving you enough oomph to justify the cost and slot.

Initially I wasn't too excited by these spears, which is unusual because I'm the Spear person, every spear has me excited to use them. But these spears are in a rough spot, the Blacksmith already has the incredible Lantern Glaive, which not only is a spear, but it's also an Axe. While it has Early Iron, this can be overcome with a Polishing Lantern and that item even has lantern synergies and also gives us the ability to boost the strength of the Glaive, not to mention also having Reach 2. That makes the Twinspear have to take a direct comparison against one of the Blacksmith darlings and when you are considering just pure stats it's not getting there.

However, there's quite a little sting in the tail of these spears; they have Precision 1, which is an ability not commonly seen and is very powerful.

Precision X

A gear special rule. On a Perfect hit, inflict an automatic critical wound to the first X hit locations you resolve.

Automatic critical wounds are amazing, especially when combined with Spear's natural resistance to the trap card. As such, when used paired and with other Perfect hit range boosting options, we've got a great little damage dealing weapon that can justify its existence. I do think the weapon typing of these twinspears should have been spear and katar, that's the black mark I hold against this, we didn't need another spear for generic crafting, we needed some of the gaps in weapon progression filled, Katar is a notable spot that needs filling.

But this is not a weak weapon by any measure and we haven't even really considered how good the spear is in the many hands of a Verminism survivor. There's builds that are crying out for weapons like this and because of that I can firmly give these weapons a thumbs up, yes it's a lot of resources and gear slots to get that +1 speed and +1 perfect hit range, but it's worth it before we go anywhere near survivors who can also leverage the paired.

I imagine I'll end up coming back to this one with nothing but even more positive thoughts and opinions as time passes, they remind me of the Calcified Digging Claws in some ways, but that weapon has pick axe, katar keywords and better accuracy so it carved a niche out for itself as a reliable safe tank attacking weapon for Katar spec/masters. Perhaps these short range stabbing spears will manage to carve out their own space in a similar way as time passes?

They certainly have a LOT of potential and they're absolutely something I need more time with to properly assess their impact.

Final Thoughts and Summary

There's no doubt about it, this one is pretty much a 'yes' in response to the question 'Should I buy this?' because it's augmenting a core game generic location AND providing unique pieces of gear that fill holes in the game's core progression it is almost impossible for me to give this anything other than a full bloom of a recommendation if it is in your budget. This location is going a long way towards smoothing out weapon progression for a bunch of options, and that matters a lot.

I do think that the 'location extension' system is very clunky and awkward, likewise there's a lack of real smoothing for weapon progression, but this does help where clubs and bows are concerned. The Greatshield also justifies its existence nicely and even the Katana, the weapon I'm least excited about, is doing something new and unique.

From superb models to a selection of gear cards that can have an impact on every campaign; this is very much a easy recommendation from me.