The Silent Mother a Review of the Newest Official Legendary Monster

Recently Team Death (The name for the team working at Adam Poots Games) released a little piece of community engagement with a new legendary fight that a settlement can depart for. During the event the “Dark Tastemaster” issued the following challenge on the Lantern's Reign Discord.

Members of the community ready to send departing survivors out on a Hunt Phase and are confident in their settlement's power a new monster has been added to your quarry list.

Be forewarned that this will be a legendary ordeal.

Silent Mother

Level 4- Custom Deck List

MOV: 12 TGH: 17 SPD: +2 DMG: +3

Traits: S- Life (20), S- Spawn, S- Twitching Leg Pile, S- Spiderling Action, S- Hivemind, S- Silent Hymn (King's Man), S- Heart of the Woods (Flower Knight)

In addition, the monster starts with the following Moods in play:

Jumping Spiders, Feeding Time, Frantic Spinning.

Tokens: +6 Luck, +2 Evasion

Custom Deck List: 1x Hypergenesis 1x Arachnophobia 1x Animate 1x Fling 1x Echoing Screech 1x Descend

Type: Spidicules Hunt: Use Level 3 Spidicules Hunt Terrain &

Deployment: Use Spidicules setup

Special: The monster's moods cannot be archived or discarded for any reason.

This monster requires owning the Spidicules and Flower Knight expansions as well as the core game. Also this teaser of a strain milestone was shared:

Upon completion of this showdown fight the full milestone card was unlocked and a preview of a new Spidicules based Pattern Gear card was released. I'll share those images and write about the whole thing further down, because first I'm going to review the design of the showdown.

In order to do that, let us set all of the relevant information into a monster card so it's easier to see and review:

For those of you who want to print this, I've attached this image and a bleed version to the bottom of the post. The back side of it would be the generic Spidicules basic attack card.

The Showdown Sumary

The Silent Mother is at its heart a L3 Spidicules fight with higher numbers, there is an additional few spins, but the first step to understanding the fight is to be familiar with how Spidicules operates and specifically how she operates. That gives us the base for how this monster works, and we can build from there.

Spidicules is a highly mobile monster that deploys Spiderling minions (sometimes known as adds, a term from MMOs for these kind of additional enemies added to fight alongside the main threat) and it delivers most of its damage through those minions. The minions themselves are powered up via moods, and a normal Spidicules will cycle through different moods, changing the way that the minions operate every once in a while. The Silent Mother has a fixed set of moods, which cannot be discarded, so her Spiderlings act in a predictable manner – which normally would be a boon, but as we can see above, the Silent Mother breaks the usual pattern of cycling through moods and has three of them out from the start of the fight.

This means that her Spiderlings have “After Damage: Grab + Full Move away from Spidicules” (Feeding Time), Survivors cannot spend [Knight] when one or more Spiderlings are adjacent to them (Frantic Spinning) and +4 Movement (Jumping Spiders).

That means that in addition to attacking the survivors, the Spiderlings will 'pin' a survivor in place and then drag them away from the monster, which will lead them towards the edges of the board. That's where the Flower Knight's trait Heart of the Woods comes into play.

This trait card represents the sucking black hole at the centre of the Abyssal Woods and how it continuously pulls survivors towards it. In the Flower Knight showdown you can stand inside the Fairy Ring and avoid this, there is no such ring in this fight. That means in addition to the Spiderlings pulling the survivors towards the edge of the board there is certain death waiting for any survivor who starts the turn adjacent to the edges will be extremely dead, and every turn you'll also get pulled.

This means that the showdown fight revolves around the ability to keep moving, killing any Spiderlings and staying around the centre. That's further compounded by the Spidicules herself often moving large distances away from survivors and therefore ending up near the edge of the board.

However, that's not all this fight is doing, in addition to all of these clever mechanics making the fight challenging we also have one more added to the mix; it's that perennial favourite, the worst (or second worst) designed trait card in the game 'Adventures in Accounting' also known as Silent Hymn.

Yes, that's right. On top of all the Spiderling action, the Movement of Spidicules and the Heart of the Woods we also have a gradually increasing amount of -Movement tokens which bog the survivors down and make it hard to avoid the pull from the Heart of the Woods.

Now for my own playthrough I used the team I had from Dragon King fights (as the instruction was to use one's current settlement), this meant that I took three survivors with Altered Destiny into the showdown. For reference here's what it does:

This Secret Fighting Art is renowned for utterly dumpstering on Silent Hymn by turning those negatives into an increasing amount of positive tokens that cause your survivors to turn into miniature versions of the Flash. This didn't completely stop the impact of the showdown, one survivor still had to deal with the constant pulling and tugging towards the edge of the board and that was enough to make it clear to me that this is absolutely not a showdown I particularly enjoy – it's like everyone's jammed inside a pool filled with thick molasses and some annoying undercurrents are trying to pull you towards the whirlpool in the middle.

It's no secret that I don't much rate the King's Man as a monster because there's a few things unengaged with its design, however, if you were going to ask me for just two things to change it would be the King's Curse and Silent Hymn (Trap card would be the third option) – So yeah I did not much enjoy Silent Hymn's appearance here. I get what they're going for and as a one off challenge it was something, but I can't see any value to this showdown fight outside of this event. You bring survivors with surge, dash, spears and ranged weapons and try to burst the Spidicules down as fast as possible while sticking near to the middle of the board and killing any Spiderlings that come close. It's action intensive, it's an interesting challenge and it's an innovative use of existing mechanics to create something new – but this fight has no longevity because now we're past the event there is no carrot outside of maybe playing the fight to prove that you can win.

The rest of The Silent Mother's AI deck revolves around this concept tightly; Animate will remove a survivor from the board entirely when it hits - reducing the number of survivors to three (This Legendary Monster does guarantee getting a Silk Surgeon if you want one! It's a very good Secret Fighting Art). Arachnophobia, Descend, Echoing Screech & Hypergenesis spawns more Spiderlings while Fling not just spawns one, it also places the Spiderling next to a survivor for an immediate attack/pull. It's a very focused sub-section of what Spidicules is famous for and you'll find yourself probably running out of Spiderling miniatures due to only getting 6 in the box (or none in my case because Forged By Geeks owe me a Spidicules expansion and have never sent it or paid me for the one I sent to them). 

It's absolutely a world of wading through knee deep in spiders while battling against a torrent that wants to push you to certain death. 

Once the showdown was completed by a member of the community what we got to see is the full version of the strain card:

So, before we get into the weapon itself it's worth noting that this is a Pattern card (as per the icon in the top right corner) and it appears to be a Spidicules based weapon/instrument designed for the mid to late game. We can't fully judge how good this card is without knowing the requirements for crafting it (outside of the Pattern) – but we can at least assess how relevant it will be when in a hunt party.

Say hello to another punny name, this time focused around a portamento of Discord and Accordian:

So the first issue is the same one that dominates instrument keyword gear cards, it's noisy so without the promotional Grim Muffler pattern gear this weapon is going to delete its owner from existence at a 1% odds for every basic event rolled. The Harvester really does do so much to remove value from gear and the Grim Muffler is the only answer we've seen so far outside of 'just don't use this gear card except in nemesis showdowns and hunts without basic hunt events'.

That written we can now move on under the assumption that there is something which has allowed this weapon to be viable – because otherwise the review would end with 'and you keep it in the game's box' which isn't something we want anything to be... except for Musk Bomb. Musk Bomb you stay in the game box and think about what you could have been.

The Discordian is a sword with a (2/6+/3) baseline stats, that's reasonable when you consider Sharp (effectively making it strength 4 to 13 with an average of 8.5). However, there is another couple of elements to consider here – the first is the Unwieldy ability; this is a negative ability that causes any attack rolls of a 1 to cause the survivor to hit themselves in a random location for 1 damage. It's not great, but it's also not a dealbreaker if the weapon is a good one to attack with – or if it has uses without attacking.

The Discordian is such a gear card with its final ability the 'Ballad of Swordpolka [5]' Which allows the wielder to spend an [Activation] and archive 5 cards from the wound stack in order to give all swords (including the Discordian) finesse and Deflect 1 (or increase Deflect by +1). That is something which could have a lot of relevance in campaigns that are sword focused (such as ones that hunt the Flower Knight, Gorm or Sunstalker – monsters who all have excellent swords). As this weapon doesn't need to be used as the attacking one it might become something that is carried in a slot for the purpose of buffing all survivors once every 5 wounds. Archiving wound cards also stops monsters from healing, which becomes less and less desirable the higher the level of the monster becomes.

While the finesse keyword is still currently a marginal one that interacts with only the Polishing Lantern that is a space which could be expanded on a great deal in the upcoming expansions. The big noise however is that scaling of Deflect, the way that Deflect is a 'set and forget' version of block is huge, and having Deflect higher than 1 is something that should not be sniffed at. Tempering that however is the fact that the more times you are able to scale Deflect the nearer the monster is to death. Most monsters in our current game die at between 20 and 25 wounds (and this Ballad does nothing against Life: X trait monsters).

What all of that means is, in our current world the Discordian looks pretty bad, it attempts to combine some form of instrument with a weapon, but ends up being an instrument that you might occasionally attack with, during showdowns where the Harvester wasn't a factor on the way in. An Infernal Rhythm strain survivor could also use this for their fighting art, but the fact is that any instrument is effective for that purpose; the Gorn doesn't have noisy and the Whisker Harp discards moods from play. They're both better for such a survivor.

Final Conclusion

The Silent Mother is a great step in the right way for Team Death, it was a brief event that gave players a new showdown fight against a challenging monster and a fresh new reveal. However, this event was run through a community discord rather than any of Team Death's official channels like the Kickstarter, the website or the newsletter. Its a step in the right direction for sure, but the initial sharing should have been done on a wider basis and given more people a chance to play the showdown, send in their successes and reveal the Discordian with some build up. By the time many of us learnt about the event it was already over, which was a disappointment.

I do hope that Team Death continues to provide events like this; things that give players some kind of challenge and teaser reward are an excellent idea. The execution of this particular one might have been a little wonky and the reward at the end might be a little lacklustre but that's not to say this was a failure – more of these events need to happen and it's also possible that the future game environments will be more conducive to a gear card like the Discordian. The gear card is a fresh idea that's not too overly complicated and it being a bit on the weak side at least means that we're not yet in a world where power creep has made old gear obsolete.

As for the Silent Mother herself? It's an interesting fight to run once, but as the rewards are now just the same as a L3 Spidicules, I can't see myself returning to this showdown in a future campaign, it's not a showdown play style I personally find fun.