Remembrance Beast

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...

Recently (by which I mean, like, months ago), a game dev I follow on Twitter, Kai Tave (whose work you should absolutely go and check out and whose Patreon you should support if you're a Lancer fan) discussed the difficulties of putting quality boss fights into tabletop games. I had never really thought about it before, despite the fact that I insert bosses into my games all the damn time, so, after reading the brief thread they posted, I went back and looked at my own fights. My boss fights were, to put it lightly, fucking terrible. The vast majority of the bosses I had pitted my players against in my campaign were incredibly easy, missed most of their attacks, and often had some incredibly lame gimmicks in their movesets. The ones that did turn out fun were basically just extended setpieces, during which I had players primarily make non-combat rolls with some brief fighting sprinkled in. My boss battles sucked, and I'm upset at myself for making my players do them. N...