Kingdom Death: Monster Review – Lantern Aya White Box

Legendary characters are born with a story to tell. Included character cards foretell a journey on a grand scale. Use only one legendary character card per campaign. This character's story unfolds throughout their lifetime.

The mounting evidence of close scrapes and inexplicable escapes invites sideward glances wherever she stops long enough to be known. In her hands, anything can be the ultimate tool for survival.

• 1 x Lantern Armor Aya Legendary Character plastic miniature

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

• Large Matte Art Print

• Character Art Card

• Install guide

• Legendary Character card

• Refined Lantern Armor hybrid armor set bonus card

• Veteran Lantern Cuirass Pattern card

• Veteran Lantern Cuirass Pattern gear card

• Soldier Lantern Cuirass seed pattern card

• Soldier Lantern Cuirass seed pattern gear card

• Refined Lantern Axe seed pattern card

• Refined Lantern Axe seed pattern gear card
  

The Miniature

I'm not going to beat around the bush here, Lantern Aya is to my eye one of the most unbeautiful and inelegant mainline miniatures we've had since the start of the Kingdom Death line; I don't write that lightly either because Aya is one of my favourite survivors alongside Lucy. I had the resin version of this miniature and while painting it I was so unhappy that I stopped and disposed of the miniature. I've seen some wonderful painters do a fantastic job with this model, but I'm not going to be one of those. This is absolutely not my jam.

On top of that, this is one of the Painter's Scale + Normal Scale releases with game content; a model that APG has promised to stop releasing. That's a good thing, I have absolutely nothing against Painter's Scale or Busts being released, in fact I was one of the people who asked Adam for these things. So I am happy that Painter's Scale/Busts are in the shop, but I am even happier that people who are players, not hobbyists do not have to purchase these more expensive boxes in the future. Not everyone can find a painter who wants just the larger model.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and I don't see beauty here. So yeah; I do not like anything about the miniature side of this release, but that is just like my opinion man. You can have a different one and that's also fine.

The Character Card

The Red Survivor is a legendary ability card and if you've read the recent reviews you'll know I've already made reference to this being one of the best legendary abilities in the game. When I first saw it, I wasn't sure if I was going to rate it ahead of the Gambler's Chest legendary ability of Weapon Master (x2 weapon proficiency ranks gained at the end of a showdown; depart the settlement when you reach mastery). Weapon Master lets you rush out important busy work that is a staple chore of a settlement (Fist & Tooth, Shield, Spear) and handle the fun goofy weapon types with the normal survivors; it also allows for very quick deployment of high Weapon Proficiency children through Family. In short, it's very strong at all stages of the campaign and helps reduce friction between hunt XP/Survivor attrition and Weapon Proficiency a lot.

The Red Survivor instead turns all weapons in the survivor's gear grid into all weapon type keywords. This is absolutely massive because it means you can train up F&T or Shield with whatever weapons you want. You don't get the speed of Weapon Master, but instead you get more flexibility and consistent progression. One doesn't need to hunt a specific weapon if you want to train up a particular type, anything will do and that helps a lot. Also your Masters don't leave the settlement, meaning you can benefit from their children all campaign instead of having to get them sorted just before they leave.

In addition to that, once you have a Mastery in the settlement any weapon gains access to the Specialisation in the hands of a Red Survivor. That's an absolutely insane thing to comprehend, we've all seen how good the multi-weapon types have been with the Lantern Glaive and King weapons. But now we have some truly crazy elements we can combine together and that is so unbelievably sweet.

Here's a list of all the specialisations:

• Axe - When attacking with an axe, if your wound attempt fails, you may ignore it and attempt to wound the selected hit location again.

• Bow - When attacking with a bow, you may reroll any misses once. Limit, once per attack.

• Cleaver - You can use Cleaver Proficiency while Frenzied. When attacking while with a cleaver, ignore one wound reaction during that attack.

• Club - When attacking with a club, on a Perfect hit, double your wound attempt total on the first selected hit location. Limit, once per attack.

• Dagger - When attacking with a Dagger, if a wound attempt fails, after performing any reactions, you may discard another drawn hit location card to attempt to wound the failed hit location again. Limit, once per attack.

• At the start of your act, you may lose all deflect tokens. At the end of your act, if you are standing and have a fan in your gear grid, you may Deflect 1 for free.

• Grand - When attacking with a grand weapon, gain +1 accuracy. When attacking with a grand weapon during your act, if you critically wound, the monster is knocked down.

• Katar - When attacking with a katar, cancel reactions on the first selected hit locations.

• Novel Sword - After resolving a monster's action, if you ignored a hit with Block or deflect, you may activate a sword and attack. Limit, once per round.

• Scythe - When you critically wound with a scythe, roll 1d10. On a 6+, shuffle the hit location deck (do not shuffle unresolved hit locations). Limit, once per round.

• Shield - While a shield is in your gear grid, you are no longer knocked down after Collision with a monster. While a shield is in your gear grid, add 1to all hit locations.

• Sword – When attacking with a sword, after drawing hit locations, make a wound attempt and then select a hit location to resolve with that result. Limit, once per attack.

• Spear - When attacking with a spear, if you draw a trap, roll 1d10. On a 7+, cancel the trap. Discard it, then reshuffle the hit location discard into the hit location deck and draw a new card. Limit, once per round.

• Whip - When you wound with a whip, instead of moving the top card of the AI deck into the wound stack, you may move the top card of the AI discard pile. Limit, once per attack.

I've left some off because either they're always on for all survivors (F&T) or they need specifically ranks in the proficiency to work (Katana, Twilight Sword)

So when you have the Red Survivor in your settlement you can work towards specific Specialisation combos (and even synergies with one specific mastery) while also getting the generic 'good stuff' specialisations that provide passive bonuses. Also you get to combine any weapon with whatever specialisation(s) you want.

This is an absolutely massive range of possible combinations; too many to cover even at this moment and that's without getting into all the future Weapon Proficiencies and weapons that are going to come out. For example; Whip Specialisation is ABSURD and has been held in check by Whips being very weak (or hard to get the good ones until late game). Now we can have good mid game whips (that are not patterns) and really get to curating monster AI for the second deck lap.

Or we can slam arrows into any Red Survivor gear grid and then ask Team Death if we can arrow stab monsters who are adjacent because we technically have a bow in our gear grid. (I believe the answer is no, because Arrows need Range X to operate, even the Sunshark Bow has Range 1 to let it work with arrows. If they say yes though, oh boy it's Hollowpoint time). Joking aside with enough Red Survivors we can also have all Bow parties to take advantage of how busted Range X is in the game, but train up/use other proficiencies.

Even if you don't own the Gambler's Chest at this stage you get this character card on your first born survivor and while that means you have only a single Red Survivor (thereby vulnerable to unit elimination) it is still a net gain, especially if you get Ageless onto them.

In short; I do believe that The Red Survivor is the single strongest Character card in the entire game and it's only going to get stronger over time. It is also ridiculously fun; no longer do we have to wait for Team Death to fix the imbalances in weapon progression chains, we can fix it ourselves by playing with the Character system and this card. All of that makes this pretty much an essential, automatic pick for the single legendary ability in your character deck and it is really hard to justify anything else. Weapon Master was so strong that I didn't think anything would be a better choice, but The Red Survivor is exactly that and it muscles everything else to the side with ease.

The Gear

If that character card wasn't enough for you; we're also getting two new seed patterns, one of which leads into a second pattern and also provides access to a 4 slot hybrid armor set. Also there's a weapon which is an upgrade for one of the best Blacksmith weapons. Let us take a look; starting with the weapon because it's a bit less complicated.

Refined Lantern Axe

Cost: 1x Lantern Halberd, 1x Perfect Bone, 3x Bone, 2x Organ

Requirements: Axe Specialist, Blacksmith, Heat

Usual frustration with another Perfect resource Seed Pattern gear; I won't retread the ground here except to highlight that it's over used and as such is feeling tired and unwelcome. Same problem with the the other gear card in this set.

I really like gear cards that use older gear cards as a part of their crafting costs; it sells the narrative of “upgrading” older equipment while also allowing players to have less useless junk cluttering the settlement storage. That is really sweet, especially when the new gear card feels like a better, faster, stronger version of its predecessor.

The Refined Lantern Axe is absolutely no joke; this weapon is a (2/6+/11) powerhouse with both Refined (reroll a failed wound attempt, LOPA) and a puzzle ability for red + red that gives Cleave. Turning the weapon into a two-handed (1/6+/15) weapon (LOPR). In short this is a really solid weapon for the blacksmith portion of the campaign and you can run it to the end of the campaign if you don't have access to Node 4 weapons (The King).

Also because this weapon's restrictive gates are all things you can rush getting, you can have a Refined Lantern Axe online by the early teen lantern years if you want. (Rushing Blacksmith for Beacon Shield is a skill you develop when learning to make Green Armor). So this isn't even a dead draw if you get it early, instead it represents a potential development path and goal to strive towards.

A fun, powerful weapon which can benefit any campaign.

Soldier Lantern Cuirass

Cost: 1x endeavor, 1x lantern cuirass, 1x iron, 1x perfect hide

Requirement: Survivor with 3+ Hunt Milestones

This second seed pattern gear card is another upgrade; in this case it takes the Lantern Curiass and improves it by reducing the movement penalty from -2 to -1 and also removing the requirement for the puzzle affinities to be connected in order to gain the +3 armor points to all metal locations (and it buffs that +3 to a +4). This is in itself a wonderful step up in power without feeling too ridiculous thanks to its being limited to one per settlement (under pattern rules).

However, it also has two extra features a neat new Hybrid Armor set bonus instead of the normal Lantern Armor bonus which we'll look at a bit further down and it also has a new ability, this one requires 2 green and 2 blue affinities in the gear grid (they don't have to be puzzle affinities, but quite often they will be because it's convenient) and if you have them active and end a showdown with 0 armor points on your body location you gain the Veteran Lantern Cuirass crafting pattern.

Veteran Lantern Cuirass

Cost: 1x soldier lantern cuirass, 3x black lichen

“Yo frogdawg, I heard you like upgrades for gear cards, so I put an upgrade in your upgrade so you can upgrade while you upgrade.” – Xzribbit

The veteran lantern cuirass increases the armor point bonus from +4 to +5 while also adding a new 2 green, 2 blue affinity bonus that increases the perfect hit range of clubs by 1. It also unlocks a second ability on the Hybrid Refined Lantern Armor set, which we'll discuss below. Otherwise, this is simply doing more of what you want lantern armor to do, more club synergies, more armor points. It's a pretty great little upgrade.

There's also a second hidden bonus, you've used up the Soldier Lantern Armor gear card during the crafting, which means you're back to 0 of them in the settlement and the crafting limit for that card is 1. So we can have both a Veteran Refined Lantern Armor set and a Soldier Lantern Armor set in the same settlement. That might be overkill, but it's also something to not overlook if we want two Lantern Armor survivors because 4 slot armor sets are have 20% more slot efficiency than normal armor sets (something that lets Gorment Armor function as a support/bow armor set despite it not being designed for that purpose).

In short a really fun pattern card with a sweet unlock that does a huge amount to increase the power of lantern armor (and metal mixed) sets.

Refined Lantern Armor – Hybrid Armor Set

I've already highlighted the major strengths of this armor set somewhat above, it is a 4 slot armor set that because of the hybrid armor rules gives you 5 armor points to the head if you do not even run a helmet (more if you have a metal helmet because of the cuirass bonus). That is very strong and flexible in a way that few armor sets manage, it also still gives all clubs in the gear grid sharp (Red Survivor synergy!) and with the Veteran Lantern Cuirass you get Persistence 1 in addition to the Sharp bonus meaning you can replenish survival on perfect hits (which you get more often due to the cuirass).

A gear special rule. On a Perfect hit, gain +X survival. - Persistence X

This is one of the all time great armor set bonuses and it does a heck of a lot to keep Lantern Armor competitive even when moving into King Armor territory.

Final Words

I don't like the miniature in this release, but that is a personal and objective opinion (and who knows, I might change my mind in the future). What I do like is the Character Card and Gear included in this box and I think they are pretty much essential purchases for any veteran deathstyle gamers. It's unfortunate that the box is so expensive because of the plastic in it, but I think this is something that everyone should bite the bullet on and purchase when they can budget for it.

It is a net improvement to every campaign now and in the future which means it is a solid investment if you're going to be playing KDM for the rest of your Great Days.

Recommended purchase and I almost consider it an essential purchase for improving the core game.

You can pick it up from the store here: https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/products/lantern-armor-aya