S1 – Bogstop – Epilogue – Exhausted Lantern Hoard

Ah, Bogstop, the place where the Bog don’t stop, home to Frogdogs and the like.
This is going to be mostly text.

Overall I would consider Bogstop a successful campaign, though there sure are few elephants left to address. 2 or 3, maybe 3 1/2? But just as a general sort of recap real quick:
The settlement made it all the way to Lantern Year 30, and over this time span we hunted a total of 9 Frogdogs (2 of which were Bullfrogdogs), 7 Screaming Antelope (1 of which was a legendary variant), 4 Dragon Kings and the required amount of Butchers, Slendermen and brawls with the Black Knight. As a People of the Lantern campaign we naturally faced off against a Watcher and got decimated in the end by the Gold Smoke Knight. This does amount to 31 fights in total, but the first encounter with Slendy was a special showdown.
Bogstop was a settlement of Club Masters, seeing 3 of them over its run-time, though none made it to the finale, sadly. The other weapon shaping this settlement’s combined history was a sword – Wrath.

We got a fairly wide spread of Settlement Events:
Rivalry: 1
Heatwave: 1
Jousting: 3
The Plant and the Stone: 3
Weird Dream: 1
Startling Barks: 2
Murder: 1
Clinging Mist: 2
Dark Trader: 2
Knighting: 1
Slender Blight: 3
It Rang: 1
Hunt Reenactment: 2
Nickname: 1
Dark Dentist: 1
Lights in the Sky: 2
Stranger in the Dark: 2

Nothing stood out quite as much for Settlement Events for Bogstop like the 7 Dark Trader visits did for my PotStars. Only 1 Murder and no Plague was quite nice. All in all, a decent timeline for the survivors I would say.

The first elephant: the lack of Dung Beetle Knights.
I did come to a fairly early conclusion that DBK would be a bit much considering what we had going on, and whilst we surely would have found the time to challenge this supreme insectoid foe in the later years of the campaign, only fighting it at Lvl3 seemed like a tall order as I had no fights against it under my belt at the time – I have fought the Lvl1 twice as of writing this now.
Between both the Frogdog, and its copper-fueled variant being fairly attention-craving and the other other dog taking up 2 extra Lantern Years as well, I found I would like to focus more on the beetle and the wonders of agriculture in its own settlement at a different point.
Thus, whilst the cards associated with the DBK remained in the respective decks, and one female survivor had +1STR for a while, I opted to not hunt any and effectively remove it from the campaign. With that out of the way, onwards to..:

The second elephant: Wrath.
Oh, my waterlogged froggy Lord, this one is powerful. It single-handedly made short work of a lot of the tougher monsters in the later years and was a constant boon for the settlement. Removing positive tokens from the monster (or negative ones) and inflicting additional wounds for each token removed on a crit.., for a weapon with deadly 3 – yeah.., it’s a beast of a weapon.
The price was a portcullis key, successful fight against a Black Knight and a 7+ roll (if you don’t have 3+ sword weapon proficiency you also take a Gaping Chest Wound severe body injury – which we did take). So it should be sufficiently rare for its power level.
Still, Wrath, remains a game-warping weapon, which we got our hands on the at the earliest possible point – LY13! All this is why I feel Bogstop can’t really stand to represent the typical KD:M experience. If nothing else, it helped us a lot in acquiring the Bullfrogdog gear, which is a (much more expensive) powerhouse in its own right. The frequency with which one gains copper for it is a debate left for another place and another time.
Concerning Wrath, it is safe to say no campaign without it will feel the same again. *dramatic sigh*

Half an elephant: misplays and mistakes.
Its a KD:M campaign, so in a way its bound to feature some sort of mistake or misplay. I am a little salty towards myself for the GSK fight as the Bullfrogdog set could have/should have tipped the scales in our favor, but that was my due comeuppance for Wrath in a sense.
And without trying to justify mistakes I made too much, KD:M is a vibes-sorta game inhabiting a strange space in the board game world with hundreds of bits and pieces of content and thousands of written words tying them all together.
Of course, I will try my best to be as consistent as I can and source rulings if I have to, but in the end, I am typically happy to go by vibes if I have to. I don’t see why there is a problem with the wording on Crush and Devour to a point where people don’t see the event because it wouldn’t activate (according to some?). But I also think the Butcher should give Axe Proficiency after a successful fight even without wounding – its a showcase for axe-fighting, isn’t it?
But at least the latter has recently been clarified by a Team Death member. You do have to wound a nemesis monster with the respective weapon to make use of that ruling. So if you want 2 spear proficiency from a Kingsman Lvl2, you best wound that monster with a spear during the fight. I will be playing the game this way going forward, naturally.
All in all, Bogstop was not without mistakes.

Edit: Well, no use beating around the bush, as somebody who has been telling people “I can’t read” for about 15-ish years now, slowly friends and family are starting to understand.
I read that Frogdog chest armor hell-a wrong. But nothing to be done about it now.

The third elephant: posts, pictures, readability and length.
Well, it’s a learning experience.
First off: I have since purchased colored rings and gear grids for 4 survivors and will be using those next campaign to make it more easily identifiable which survivor is which in the pictures.
Secondly, whilst the space I had to work with in a single post on Instagram was just too suffocating, I probably overcompensated for Bogstop considering the type of post I am writing. I believe I need to find a more digestible middle-ground, both for writing the posts and reading them. i do want to put out smaller session reports for a full attempt at the squire campaign for instance, focusing only on the truly important stuff .. like getting mauled by a Mountain Lion.
For pictures, I am still figuring out quality and lighting. This will probably be a year for a phone-upgrade, so that might also make a difference come summer.

And with that we can close the book on Bogstop for the time being. It was my first full campaign I started with Inverted Mountain expansions, and getting invited into the citadel was quite the thing to behold.
In a rare visit to the Lantern’s Reign discord, Adam mentioned the Red Witches should be ready to begin shipping out to people mid July according to their manufacturing partner. It will take a little longer for me to get my hands on them as I have not pre-ordered the sets and as a non-Kickstarter backer, but I am looking forward to our next trip up the mountain following in the footsteps of the Pariah.

On a more general note, I started making some headway with getting stuff painted and have added pages for my painted stuff to the site. Again, I’m still figuring stuff out in regards to lighting and taking the pics but I’m enjoying myself right now. The paint-jobs aren’t world-class, but I’m improving and I’m quite happy with most of them .. .. for now.
I also hope I can show off some of my generic set survivors because I can’t say enough how much I like them and whilst the often touted dynamic poses of the new sets are nice, the Frogdog minis had me a little underwhelmed with the options for each of them. And I do think you can make the classics work .. for the most part.

Rubi also got delivered on the last possible day before the Easter weekend. And I’ve said it before, its the first time I’m genuinely disappointed. I LOVE the artwork on the back of the box and its criminal we did not get an option to have the figure also wear the menpo!
The Tachyon Nodachi sounds really fun as well.., but its also real expensive… 3 perfect bones sounds like an oof.

So.., what’s up next?
Well, as I’ve mentioned I want to go for a Squire run or two first of all, expect that/those next week. Besides slapping on more paint to my models (currently working on my Tyrant) I’ll ask if I can post a few pics from settlements I play with my buddies. We might be starting up a new PotStars next month or so?
And for the site?

People of the Sun!

I’ve wanted to play a Vanilla+ campaign for a bit now and that is a great way to do it, I think. Base-game nemeses, core quarries + maybe Lion God or DBK. And a new campaign I have yet to experience on top.
Expect that to kick off next month as well.

Finally, and this should be mentioned: it seems we are looking at an increase in prices for KD:M, likely coming next month or with the update. It is currently unknown which products will be affected (though its likely all of them).
There is a bunch to unpack on that topic – most of which is difficult and a step too far for the send off of Bogstop though. The US tariffs don’t help either.
Do I like increasing prices? – No? Of course not!
Do I understand where they are coming from? – Yes. I’d say so.

The baseline reality is: KD:M has been historically and always will be an expensive product. Especially for a board game. Viewing it from that angle alone it is prohibitively expensive to get into. From a hobbyist-side though.., comparing it to WH40K or similar products,.. it could be A LOT worse. Not only on a model-by-model basis, but also if you want to play an actual proper game with your armies.
And whilst a lot of people have a lot of opinions – myself included – Adam has made it clear time and time again that for KD:M and him both these aspects – the minis and the “hobby” (and don’t forget about the art)- are intrinsically linked.