Seed Patterns – An Overview and Review

As is tradition, I want to start this dive into a section of the GCE with a top down look at what Seed Patterns are, how the system works and dig into the various positives and potential negatives that such a system features. I find writing out in this method provides a solid foundation for my understanding and analysis of the individual card elements. It helps me a great deal to get a firm grip on the system's intent and design before I start to tease things apart.

Now seed patterns are of course, gear cards, so part of the assessment of them is the same as normal gear cards, which we did last time over here (goodness, now I'm doing prep for my prep work). But the delivery system is divorced away from settlement locations and instead involves a direct link to survivors and endeavours; here they are used to pull from a random selection of potential crafting patterns that were seeded at the start of the campaign.

Some seed patterns are generic, they will always be present in your games, some have a negative pattern number, indicating that they are “non-thematic” and might want to be excluded for players who want a more realistic, immersive experience and some are linked to a specific monster being a part of the campaign's potential quarry or nemesis list. This selection is put together at the beginning of your campaign and generally doesn't change (unless perhaps a new quarry monster is introduced, or new cards are acquired from Adam Poots Games aka APG).

If we choose say the White Lion, Screaming Antelope, Dung Beetle Knight, Slender Man, Phoenix and Sunstalker for our quarries along with the Butcher, King's Man and Black Knight for our Nemesis monsters in our People of the Lantern campaign then the seed patterns that would be added would be the generic – seed – ones along with the – seed, (monster name) – ones. This set up is linked to how we form the campaign much like the Character deck; this is all part of Team Death's goal to give players all the tools they need in order to build their own sandbox to play in.

However, unlike the Character Deck, we have had a smooth, simple system for bringing these patterns into the campaign without need for the specific innovation (which we'll get to later). This is triggered by a survivor reaching 3 Understanding and gaining “Insight”. After that event and all relevant story triggers have resolved we'll draw a Pattern from the Seed Pattern deck and place it in our selection of possible crafts. While the Character Cards do have a system for covering this lack of the Innovation situation, it's really cumbersome and awkward in contrast because all character cards in the innovation free campaigns are ruled to be given to the first survivor born. Meaning that the newborn gets one character card and then it's up to you to figure out if the rest can be given out to later births.

The downside of this system is that well, Graves + Saga = newborns with 3 understanding, and when you don't have access to the Gambler's Chest (GCE) there's no reason to not take Graves every single time. So the pattern deck gets drained completely very quickly, resulting in the only meaningful thing being the order in which the patterns are drawn.

It is different once you have the GCE so for the rest of this that's what we'll assume is happening, starting with a breakdown of how that works and then moving into a look at the pattern cards themselves in detail.

Gaining the Drafting Table

This optional component is added to the campaign at the start and has a trigger of when the first survivor who reaches 3+ understanding happens and you get to the “check milestones” step. The event is Designs and Dandelions, with the dandelion being of significant thematic importance. This represents the Cyclops Knight, who is as close to “the god of crafting” as we get in this world. It is implied that the way the Cyclops Knight interfaces with survivors is by scattering out ideas across the ether like a dandelion spreading its seeds. Dandelions are a very significant symbol in many cultures, they are said to grant wishes and have become a signal of hope and the power of manifesting desires. The plant is also an exceptionally tenacious one, capable of thriving in the hardest of environments, something we are shown through the experience of playing a settlement in Kingdom Death. They're also a symbol of transformation, as their flowers have a really dramatic set of changes through their life span, from a bud to a bright yellow flower to a wispy ball of fluff that will drift through the air on invisible currents. All of this and more has made these flowers a source of great inspiration for artists and writers.

Also, the name Dandelions comes from the French term dents-de-lion, or Lion's Tooth/Teeth of a Lion. So once again we circle back to the importance of the White Lions and how they get everywhere in the lore of this game when you start looking for them. So there's another idea here that the Cyclops Knight is preserving some of the White Lion's lost civilisation by seeding that lost creativity back into the nascent civilisations of the human survivors.

The event has a survivor find a seedling that either signals or grows the Drafting Table, they clean this off and either (30%) lose 1 courage plus suffer the intracranial haemorrhage severe head injury (which can be removed by the Barber Surgeon), or (50%) they gain a seed pattern as later survivors will automatically or (20%) they gain 2 seed patterns and the Mark of the Cyclops Knight, which has them grow in strength (+1) and experience (+1 Hunt XP) each time a seed pattern is crafted. However once you reach 10+ Hunt XP this survivor will depart. We don't have much choice in which survivor this happens to because they have triggered the event in the first place, unless you have access to something like Gloom Cream (which can remove Hunt XP) this is not something one can do much about. This is also the step where the Seed Pattern deck is constructed, based on the monsters that are present in your campaign's roster.

This gives us this innovation card, which has both the passive ability of gifting a Seed Pattern at 3 understanding, but also has an endeavour that can result in a gain of a new Seed Pattern 30% of the time (at the cost of skipping the next hunt, but that's fine because you can use survivors who are not going out on the next hunt here). The +1 understanding result is neat, but it's another box I've had to put on my survivor sheets to track when they've received it.

All of this makes for a relatively smooth and easy to use system, there's only one milestone to remember and otherwise you get these patterns from actively trying (usually spending whatever leftover innovations you have, which with Collective Toil in the GCE can really start to pile up).

The Seed Pattern Design

To look at the design of the seed patterns themselves, I'm going to use the anatomy reference image that is in the rulebook, this allows me to not spoil anything more in this particular article than what is already spoiled in the rulebook.

For the vast majority of elements I think that this design is excellent. We have a good mix of mechanical design elements that are easy to read and thematic ones that help world build in a way that the Indomitable Patterns really don't manage. I especially like the use of colour to help distinguish between pure flavour (grey), stuff that is a requirement (blue) and things which have a mechanical impact (purple). That's great.

In fact, the only element of these cards that I think isn't done well enough is the Era icon (6). It is first of all a little bit weird that they are called Eras but effectively Era is another name for Node. The two terms are basically interchangeable outside of the visual aspect of Eras + Roman Numerals vs. Nodes and regular numbers. It's adding an extra element of complexity where there isn't any benefit.

Also the Era numeral is far, far too small. There's a lot of space there and considering that it has a mechanical importance it should have been more prominent. The reason for the importance of this piece of the design is because of the crafting rules surrounding Seed Patterns. Wherever we have a common resource type (hide, bone, organ, scrap) rather than a specific resource being named such as Deathmetal, Perfect Bone or Broken Lantern this cannot be from the basic resource deck. It has to come from a monster that is in the matching node or higher. That means our Heartseeker example requires 2x hide that comes from a Node 4 monster resource deck such as the King or Dung Beetle Knight. In contrast an Era I resource cost could come from any Node 1 to 4 resource deck.

It's a fine system, was a little difficult to grok initially now but I have it internalised now, the main issue is having to squint at the pattern cards to see what Era they are from. So in order to solve that I've ended up hitting on the solution of keeping them in Era order in the settlement binder. This reduces possible confusion and saves on brain power, but it would have been nice to have the Era numeral more clearly presented on the card as there is space right therethere.

For the curious, here's an example pattern section of the settlement folder from the settlement I'm running at time of writing this article (I've just recently crafted the Beast Hunter pattern card, so that's now face down). Left page is Era 2, right page is Era 3:

The face down cards have already been crafted, it reduces noise for me to flip them around so I can concentrate on the possible future options. The sleeves are Dragon Shield Japanese Opaque, they're a smidgen too short for the job, but it's the only way I can reasonably conceal the different card backs at the moment (I'm one of those people stuck with an Orange/Black split). I do the same with my hunt event cards (but in silver, which I chose because gold was out of stock) as they're never going to match on the backs. Hopefully one day in the future the Seed deck is fixed and we get opaque backed American/Bridge card size sleeves in general release.

So What's Good About Seed Patterns?

Goals

Let us not beat around the bush here, the Pattern system is one of the best parts of the second generation of mechanics along with Arc Survivors. This system allows for players to set goals in advance and focus their progression in a more targeted fashion. You draw a pattern with the phoenix keyword? It's gently encouraging you to go hunt one or more phoenixes in order to craft this and for the most part these cards are worth crafting, especially items or pieces of armor that unlock new hybrid armor sets. I frankly prefer this way of getting hybrids over the original method for the Lion Knight hybrid sets and I hope that expansion gets updated when Campaigns of Death drops.

Evocative

Each pattern card itself is filled with rich descriptions and the symbology used on the card is both evocative and clear (excepting the Era issue), this adds a lot to the narrative experience and world building with only a few deft brushstrokes. I like reading these cards a great deal as they do so much storytelling with such efficiency. They're fun and informative, helping sell the brutal nature of this world alongside the crude nature of the survivor's culture.

Variety is the Spice of Life

We get a lot of variation in this system, one that grows with more and more seed patterns being released and this is very helpful in keeping each settlement fresh and exciting. This system is a great supplement to the "menu" system used on settlement locations, because it's adding new things without overcrowding the existing settlement location cards or requiring a new settlement "appendix" like the White Gigalion Catarium extension needs. Its great on that front as it gives us new reasons to hunt older monsters and that makes it a wonderful partner to the Indomitable Resource (IR) Pattern system that gives us good reasons to hunt a range of level 3 monsters, sometimes even getting us to hunt the same monster multiple times. I think the IR system is a great complement to the patterns and vice versa also applies.

What's Not So Good About Seed Patterns?

Random

One of the more frustrating elements of the pattern system is its randomised nature, while you will see most patterns in a campaign, the order they come out in is completely random and you can end up hitting multiple Era 3 or 4 patterns long before the given monster is even on the quarry list. That can result in a disappointing outcome from what should be an exciting box to open.

Also present is the inverse issue, where Era 1 pattern cards turn up really really late, to the point that they're looked at and stuffed in a pile of 'not interested'. Weapons are the largest victim of this, because the armor set patterns are really viable for a long time, and of course items never need to worry about this at all.

There are house rules that can get around this, and my recommendation here if you want to spice things up further is to gradually build up the Pattern deck. When it is first constructed only shuffle in the generic ones and the ones with the keyword monsters you have available on your quarry list at that time. Then when a new monster is added to the quarry/nemesis list, you shuffle in their specific new seeds into the deck.

This has the impact of increasing the odds you'll see the early stuff early while also ensuring that you don't draw a King Seed Pattern off Designs & Dandelions. It does of course power the Seed Pattern system up a bit more because it's reduced the randomness, but I don't mind that in exchange for a pattern system that feels a bit more refined and thematic.

Tracking “milestones”

There are a lot of new weird hidden milestones that need to be tracked in order to meet the blue requirements on some patterns and as the survivor sheets don't list them you may not know you need to keep track of them. Here's a few examples of what I mean from the GCE:

• Having your ear cut off while bloodletting

• Inexplicably survive while having 2+ accuracy

• Deal the killing blow to a Phoenix

• Wound a Labyrinth HL

• Get sucked into Kingdom Death

And every time we get a new blue requirement in future releases this list can expand. It's the kind of stuff that a computer would be able to track silently in the background, but players need to know in advance to track these things otherwise they'll have to achieve the triggers post drawing the pattern. This is an element of the pattern system I do not want to see expanded with more entries, if it does I'm going to have to create a checklist of various “milestones” that I can check against to record on survivor sheets.

Most Blue requirements avoid this as they involve looking up elements that are already recorded, such as innovations, timeline events or abilities like bold. They're easy to track, but these other things? One needs a series of checkboxes on your survivor sheet so you can tick them off when they happen so you meet the requirements.

Insight unlock

A minor one that has already been mentioned it can be all too easy to drain the Pattern deck entirely because of Graves and especially Saga. Not at all a deal breaker, but it is a negative due to how mundane and uniform it can make the seed pattern system. I'm not sure there is a fix here at all outside of more and more seed patterns being released. I'm also not sure it needs fixing in the first place.

Overwhelming options

You can see above how I've taken steps to try and reduce the volume of options by turning spent patterns face down in the folder. I've also sometimes turned patterns I don't care about crafting upside down or reordered them to the end of the list in order to help prioritise things. There's already a lot of bookkeeping in KDM, even more so with the Arc Survivors and patterns that you unlocked a while ago can simply get lost in the noise. This is again something without a fix that could be deployed at the top level, instead it's simply something to be aware of so players can figure out what they want to do about it. Also players who suffer from decision paralysis can also find this system too much. I don't struggle with this as I pick a direction and follow it to see if it works out or not.

Final Thoughts

I love the pattern system, players are for the most part rewarded when they follow patterns as goals and craft these gear cards. Resulting in unique and exciting gear cards to experiment with. As such this system does a lot to change the pathways that settlements may follow and this design is far more engaging than their pseudo-predecessor the Rare Gear cards. The system could do with a little refinement, and Team Death need to be cautious about creating pattern cards that have no use, or are far far too situational in their design. But one can always cut cards like that out of your personal seed pattern deck if they are not doing it for you, it's your sandbox.

A lot lands on the designs of the individual pattern cards and due to the randomised, uncontrolled manner in which these crafting recipes are delivered (along with some really 'stars must align' requirements for some of them which means unless you play a lot you'll likely never get to use them) this can be tough. We've seen an example of an absolute stinker of a pattern card in Lunar Aya (check the review collection for more on that mindboggling Era III Phoenix gear card); so the future of this system is very much positive, but could be soured if it gets too many highly situational or purely bad cards as a part of it.

Still, I think Patterns are a wonderful part of the game and I prefer them over their cousin; strains, an extraordinary amount. They introduce themselves into the campaign slowly, and if players remain disciplined and have good

Next time we're going to go through the Generic Era I Patterns from the GCE (there are 7 in total) and we'll work through everything else in the GCE with as few extra articles as I can manage over the week(s) after that.