Kingdom Death Monster: Getting ready for The Butcher

Continuing the Kingdom Death Monster story... which is timely because I just got notice that Kingdom Death... The Expansions of Death... has shipped!

After a couple of hunts... including a disastrous attempt on a Level 2 White Lion... it's Cunning Mood allows the Monster to kite the party unless they have long, or ranged, weapons... the Lantern year is indicating our first Nemesis Encounter... The Butcher!

Under D'lenn's leadership we've spent our resources as best we could trying to strike a balance between research, gear, and growing the settlement... although there were a couple of glaring inefficiencies that were really the result of our inexperience... which actually is very RPG-esque!  Like... we let the White Lion cub we found during a hunt live... missed out on a pile of resources and ended up getting ambushed by the White Lion anyway... plus the little monster is soon to be a BIG monster and certainly won't extend us the same courtesy!

Dlenn's wardrobe has evolved a bit and she's picked up some bits of Rawhide armor, a drum, and a bone dagger.










My main complaint with the game is the lack of handy reference charts which results in a lot of page flipping through, the admittedly beautiful, rule-book... which does't have much in the way of an index.  But the game is otherwise proving to be highly engaging and has triggered a lot of creativity so, on the whole, it gets an A+.

Rost the Elder... now sometimes known as Rost the Barking Mad due to his insanity level of 26... far, far higher than most of the group which tends fluctuate between 0 and 3, and Dlenn have become a couple and have two children whose eyes are free of ink.








One of the best things this game has done is refresh my pool of ideas for painting.  Because of the way the Survivors grow their technology and gear over the course of the campaign there are a lot of opportunities to represent the growth of the settlement on the models.  For example the endeavor: Pictographs got me to writing some on the various cloth items in the party and the ink that encrusts the eyes of the survivors seems to be a recurring thing even after the first rub of the eyes.  Natives, people born in the settlement. are free of the ink... so there is room for both types of eye treatment.




Insanity is a big deal, and mostly a positive thing no less, so I've taken to making the ink color around the eyes red for the more insane of the group... and am beginning to have the survivors adjust their ink in artistic ways... kind of like variable tattoos around the eyes and elsewhere on the face.

As we are still in the early lantern years the clothing and equipment of the survivors is very limited, and they haven't developed paint yet, so they are recycling the grave shrouds they arrived in and modifying them without getting into dying them yet.  Bone based weapons and rawhide armor are scattered throughout the group.  They've actually got some White Lion based Gear but that will show up on the next batch of minis.










The Butcher is the first nemesis encounter and seems to be some psycho that collects faces, wraps them round the victim's lantern and hangs them on his gear as he travels round from settlement to settlement collecting his grisly toll.  But... since this guy comes back from time to time even if you kill him... he is either some kind of immortal or there is a Butcher tribe out there somewhere.

 The Butcher isn't my favorite Kingdom Death model, and is a bit fussy to assemble, but it does have some very interesting details that might illuminate some of the mysteries of the setting.

 For example... the lanterns he carries are of several different designs while the survivors only seem to have one design... this implies that the lantern design is either unique to to a settlement region or that the Butchers are hunting things other than the Survivors we know about that also carry lanterns and have humanoid faces... The butcher also has a much higher tech level than the survivors and is sporting some sort of metallic armor and weapons.  I've treated this as blued steel (to my mind meteoric iron).  I'm curious to see what this guy's loot deck looks like... assuming that we beat the monster!

 This batch of Survivors is mounted on the stone face inserts.  The stone faces are interesting because they seem to be renewed from time to time and the Survivors have caught glimpses of some kind of creature that seems to be doing that.

Fam is an example of a full unarmored kit build.

 The bases were painted with Secret Weapon washes (Sewer Water, Algae, and Green Black) over Dirty Bone (Reaper) and then brushed up with Graveyard Bone (Reaper).  Some mild OSL was done based around a mix of Pale Saffron and Splintered Bone.

Mara is an example of the full Rawhide kit... sans the shoulder cover which does not accommodate some of the hair styles.  Dlenn  is wearing the Rawhide body with the shoulder and an unarmored leg.

 The kits mix and match fairly well.  Titus is a mix of Unarmored and Rawhide... as well as the optional Bone Helm.  The bone weapons and gear are part of the Rawhide Kit.