Kingdom Death: Monster and Emergent Roleplay

If you have no idea what the hell Kingdom Death: Monster is beyond its awesome name, I don't blame you. The game itself, copies of which are essentially made on a case-by-case basis, is incredibly expensive. Like, $400 per core box expensive plus $80-150 per expansion box. Yes, fucking really. And the community around Kingdom Death is highly secretive, remaining close-lipped on the game's inner workings so as to not spoil it for new players. That's their rationale, at least--on paper, it's really just more RPG gatekeeping that's grown very tiring and needs to stop but oh shit I'm about to go off aren't I?

I found out about Kingdom Death: Monster a few years ago when a let's player I like began dropping a short playthrough of the game, using a Steam Workshop mod for Tabletop Simulator rather than shelling out the money for the physical game. I was immediately taken with the game's overall aesthetic. One look at the immaculate miniatures and art will show you that the game is well-worth its high price point; the titular monsters are all suitably nightmarish and very, very cool to look at, so much so that I've just got a folder on my phone of images of every single one for inspiration.

Last month, I finally caved and bought a 4-pack of Tabletop Sim on Steam for my friends and I and dove in. We've played through about a third of the base game campaign (with a single expansion, the Gorm, added for variety) by this point and it's absolutely met or exceeded my expectations at every turn. The actual gameplay is just as fantastic as I'd hoped, but that turned out to just be the tip of the iceberg on what the game does really well. I'm gonna use this post to describe the actual game to the best of my ability and that special hidden ingredient that makes it so engrossing.

The base game. Originally posted on Ars Technica.

The Gameplay

Take the Souls games, Monster Hunter, and Darkest Dungeon, put them in a blender, and then turn the resultant mush into a board game and you've got something close to KDM. It's a cards-and-miniatures game in which the players--the game supports 1-6--act as the unlucky accountants for a settlement of Survivors in a nightmarish, foggy world where the ground is made of stone faces and awful monsters prowl in the darkness. The monsters are incredibly grotesque--a huge lion with human hands and shark teeth is the tamest the game gets--but they're also just part of the ecosystem here and are thus the only reliable sources of food and resources, so it's up to the Survivors to hunt them down and kill them.

The Gorm, one of the many expansion monsters. This fucking thing is a level 1 encounter, btw.

The players each pick one Survivor at a time and guide them through three cyclical phases of gameplay: Hunt, Showdown, and Settlement. In the Hunt phase, the players move their party across a track towards their selected monster target and deal with random events, generated via cards and D100 rolls, as they come; these events can provide nifty bonuses but more often than not just incur penalties that must be managed in the upcoming fight.

The Showdown phase is where you're liable to spend most of your sessions. It's the big boss fights against your quarries. The Survivors move about a big board, utilizing their gear, wits, randomly-generated terrain pieces, and luck to fight and kill the beasts. How do the monsters themselves interact with the players? Well, the monsters are the players: all monsters come equipped with shuffled AI Decks that are drawn to determine their moves each round, and the players trade off on who draws the card and controls the monster. The monster usually goes first in every round, followed by the players making moves popcorn-style. The players win when they kill the monster, accomplished by making successful hits to permanently lower the number of cards in the AI Deck until there are none; the monster wins when it beats the players to death.

The true difficulty of the game comes from the game being unfairly skewed in the monster's favor. 

That's not a criticism: it was intentional on the part of the designers to make the game feel more rewarding when things actually go well for the survivors. Beyond the bevvy of bad things that can just happen to your survivors at any given time, the monster is generally much less reliant on RNG in combat. Every monster attack is accomplished with a simple, single roll with a predetermined target number, a number that is, unless the target survivor has some points in the Evasion stat, very low. The players, meanwhile, need to make at least two rolls for any given attack: one to hit the monster, with a target number unique to each weapon and aided by an Accuracy stat, and one to wound, with a target number equal to the monster's Toughness (usually really fucking high) and aided by a Strength stat. Furthermore, every successful wound attempt has a corresponding random hit location card which usually allows the monster extra actions based on whether or not the attempt fails or succeeds (some activate either way) that can only be mitigated by a crit or "Lantern 10" to wound. Hell, some hit locations are immune to damage or are Trap Cards that incur the monster's wrath before being shuffled back into the deck! All that in addition to the monster just having more health: the lowest-level monsters have AI Decks of 10+ cards, while an unarmored survivor can take two hits to a single location before being knocked down (or losing a turn) and three hits before rolling on the Severe Injury Tables and probably dying.

A look at our settlement board (yes, we know we broke the rules and innovated too much).

And once the Hunt and Showdown are done, the survivors come home for the Settlement phase. This is the phase dedicated to managing your likely-dwindling people and resources. It always starts with the drawing of a random settlement event card, the likes of which range from a fucked up and unethical dentist coming into town and trading resources for super-teeth surgery to your survivors deciding to hold a contest which, if a single survivor gets last place in every round of, results in banishment. After that, it's time to do any timeline events corresponding to the Lantern Year you're currently on, predetermined events that progress the main story. Some years force you to partake in Special Showdowns, fights that interrupt the Settlement phase in which your team dukes it out with more humanoid, but still deeply monstrous and incredibly strong, foes called Nemeses. Once those are resolved, the players all spend a currency called Endeavors to innovate--create a new big thing like language, education, or cooking to grant permanent boosts--or gain small temporary bonuses. Then there's crafting, in which you cash in the raw animal resources you gained from the hunt and showdown to build weapons, armor, and accessories. Oh yeah, and you can make your people fuck. It's surprisingly important.

The Other Gameplay

I've just given you a rundown of how Kingdom Death works on a mechanical level. It's deep, open-ended, and really fun. I've lost count of the number of times I've lost my shit at one of our survivors critting at the best possible time or at getting a really cool rare weapon from a lucky roll. But that's just half of the equation: the other half is the story you and your friends tell.

Kingdom Death campaigns do have stories, but they're very bare bones, just there to throw the survivors constant curveballs. The true storytelling comes from you and your fellow players responding to the constant deluge of random events and shaping a cohesive continuity from them. Over the course of the game, whether you originally wanted to or not, you'll find yourself actually roleplaying.

How do my survivor's previous experiences influence how they feel about this one? Why did seeing some bugs fly out of a dude's mouth make my survivor irrationally honorable? Why did the mysterious knight choose my survivor to wield a kickass sword that does double damage against the final boss? The game's randomness provides you with pieces, and the picture you form when you, you and not the game itself, connect them together is incredibly rewarding. 

I'll provide a couple of more personal examples:

• My first character was deafened (it's a possible severe injury roll) during a White Lion fight, which caused her to permanently lose 1 Evasion (in other words, giving all monsters +1 to hit her). In the next couple of Settlement phases, I rolled extremely lucky and managed to gain so much Evasion that she became the most nimble survivor in the camp. I crafted a small narrative about her lamenting the untimely death of a survivor during that same fight and training herself to compensate for her lost hearing so such an event would never happen again; she gained the title of One-Eared Swordswoman.
• During our first Hunt, we rolled a random hunt event in which we came across a decrepit statue of a fallen king and were each told to roll 1d10. The lowest roll among us, one of the other players, was forced to watch as their character was turned to stone as the king's statue came to life and took their place in the party. The fallen king given a second chance at defending his homeland has since become one of the seminal characters in our campaign, especially because he was bestowed the incredibly powerful Twilight Sword (yes, the sword I mentioned a minute ago is a real thing you can get in-game).

It's not all sex and death.

Those are just the two examples that immediately jumped to mind. There's plenty more. As a reminder, these are stories and character arcs we created ourselves--all the game gave us was a mechanical template to build off of. The end result has thus far been one of the best emergent narratives I've seen in any tabletop game I've ever played, one which leaves me excited to play again at the end of every single session. And all this from just a third of the base game campaign--there's currently two more full-length campaigns, a few short campaigns, and a dozen expansions full of new monsters and story events, with double that on the way in the 1.5 expansions. The 1.5 expansions are gonna add so much: a new monster classification system, at least four new campaigns, and whole new mechanics like a scouting system, mini-monster fights, and mechanics for giving your survivors life philosophies (I'm especially excited for the Inverted Mountain expansion, which combines 8 expansions together into one campaign). 

Dragon Goblin aka The Hottest Shit, one of the many 1.5 expansion additions.

I seriously urge anyone who enjoys difficult but fun games to try out KDM. Watch some LP videos, look at/drool over the art and designs, and shell out the money for a copy of Tabletop Simulator--if I recall correctly, the creator even mentioned an official KDM DLC, so you might not even have to rely on the Steam Workshop to play it soon. Or, if you're exceptionally well-moneyed, pool your money with your friends to buy the newest edition of the base game as a communal copy. Don't get too attached to your favorite survivors.

Next week, I'll be resuming Spire Sessions with a new villain entry. Tune in then.