Featured in the Allies and Adversaries pre-order bundle and the Inverted Mountain Campaign, the Pariah is not only a really, really tough Node 1 Nemesis with interesting mechanics but also probably one of the more vile monsters created for Kingdom Death: Monster so far.
Which is why I wanted to talk about it.

Obvious Spoiler Warning!

But before I start digging any deeper into the expansion, a simple question for you to think about first:
Do you use endeavors at the Sacrifice Innovation?

Just keep your answer in mind for later.

I have not done a proper “review” of any of the prior expansions released for the game (and considering I have not had a chance to play this fight for myself yet, I probably shouldn’t – I’ve seen the fight 8 times though) but the Pariah is a special case in many ways.

Meant to give you “an icky feeling” from start to finish, the Pariah will throw tantrums, lash out with obscenities before groveling in the dirt shedding thick crocodile’s tears, or it will be laughing heartily with a survivor before breaking their arm just because it could.
And they will just let it happen. It must have been a mistake, it would never hurt them? It wouldn’t! Yes! It must have been a mistake!

Watching the community reaction to this expansion as a whole has been somewhat a story of extremes. Whilst there has been a good amount of positive reactions and a certain fascination with the new lore and gameplay on the one side, alternatively, you might instead find yourself utterly repulsed and/or frustrated by the thing that crawled into your settlement in Lantern Year 3.

From replacing typically highly sought-after events, to jellifying survivors and turning them into breakable weapons, all the way to just miserable Settlement Events, the Fiend – as it is so aptly called in its introduction event – has a host of poisonous gifts for you to dabble with. Even further on top of that it features higher stats than the monster it equates to (the Butcher) and a whole bunch of mean AI cards (over 30 in total) as well.
The Pariah will live in your settlement influencing it for the whole of its stay and you get the privilege to dread every second of it.

Long story short: the Pariah expansion will, in most cases, make the game harder for you.

I also highly doubt that you would ever want to auto-include it into every non-PotStars campaign going forward. But if you are in the mood for a challenge and some round-about Protect the Young buffs, you might just have a good time if you don’t get attached to your survivors too much.

To give you, dear reader and /or potential buyer, a better understanding of what is going on with the Pariah, I am going to have a look at the monster on a gameplay level from a non-Arc-survivor viewpoint.

I am also having a look at the lore it brings along to the best of my understanding, though without the expansion already in your hands, my musing are not likely to help you as much.

Of course the rest of this article will be chock-full with spoilers, so consider yourselves warned a second time.

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Gameplay – Settlement Phase

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Even before you get the chance to worry about fighting the Pariah, it latches onto the survivors like a parasite, offering dubious gifts and questionable solutions to the problems it itself presented you with.
This is a central cornerstone of the design of this expansion: It wants your survivors to suffer as it feeds off of them.

In stark contrast to the Butcher, who just shows up ready to flay some face, the Pariah is introduced to the settlement in Lantern Year 3. It is found red-handed as it not only just killed a survivor in the middle of your community (-1 population) but it also gets to eat 2 resources as compensation because you – yes, YOU – made it feel bad for what it did.
In return you are presented with the 2 innovations included with the Pariah Expansion – Implanted Memories and Precious Fragments, the latter giving you a choice of which “fragment” you would like to take from this biting bowl of bloody candy.

As you probably know by now these correspond to the 3 Red Witches from the other recently released KD:M expansion (Red Witches), and give you a one-time bonus relating to the chosen gift and the witch it was taken from:
Seer’s Eye (+1LCK/blind), Braal’s Locks (+1STR/Rageholic D) or Nico’s Fletching Feather (+1SPD/broken leg).

It is one of these gifts that has caused a bit of a stir early on as it can flat-out end your campaign early. We know at this point from hints by a Team Death member that we are very likely to see further interactions with each of the gifts over the course of the Inverted Mountain campaign, but at this point, only Seer’s Eye is referred to if you are playing a campaign with the Red Witches.
This particular aforementioned interaction only applies to campaigns including both the Pariah and Red Witches as this combination adds a special event to the timeline in Lantern Year 20 only ever featured when both the Witches and their quarry are present. And if you are caught with the eyeball during the so festively named “Red Witch Trials” your campaign is just over.
There are several ways to mitigate this however – like beating the Lvl2 Pariah, losing the innovation Precious Fragments or finding another event that drastically short-cuts the interaction to something extremely positive (which, to be fair, is a lot of work and possibly very rare), to just name a few.

Of course, you could also just not get caught with the goods. Sounds easy enough? Right?

In any case Seer’s Eye represents a somewhat high-risk-high-reward option for now compared to the more straight forward options of either Braal’s or Nico’s keepsake.

You also get the scab weapon patterns to play around with.
These weapons all are some facsimile of known (dare I call them legendary?) weapons found in the game. They each cost 1 or 2 organs, depending on whether or not they can break, and between 1 and 3 population without gaining the benefits of your death principle, to make.
Depending on how detached you are from your survivors – these have the potential to either be incredible or unusable.

So, back to that question from the start: Do you make use of Sacrifice (I)?

The Pariah also has a tendency to leave survivors that have either successfully fought against it or became a victim of one of its settlement events behind somewhat .. broken. The scab weapons will help you deal with this growing population of fodder .. if you so desire.
Also, considering the Pariah itself has a mighty 10TGH at Lvl1 you probably want to at least build the Maul Scab before heading out to fight it. It is a fairly durable scab (3 perfect hits before it shatters) and has a decently high STR of 6.
Other notable mentions for me are: the Sword Scab, which always breaks as it wounds, but deals 3 wounds at a time.
The Knife Scab which does have the Fist and Tooth keyword!
And the Bow Scab which is noisy because it references the Shrieking Bow found in the Squire Campaign that comes with the Black Knight. The statline on the bow is also pretty good for the early game (2/7+/5) but it has a chance to shatter on a roll of 1 after every wound.
Why did I want to solely omit the Halberd Scab? I don’t know, it feels worse than the other ones to me, but it also can’t break, I guess.

Finally, you might have also noticed that the Pariah Innovations not only give a Departing +1 Understanding – but they also replace all White Speaker related events.
More shenanigans are afoot!

I am not one to just share everything, but the 2 important ones have made some waves so they are on the list to be mentioned.

First off: if you use Storytelling (I) you are basically feeding White Speakers to the Pariah. You are also told to record the number of dead White Speakers as it will be a bonus to the roll on the respective table for the event, amongst other things.
There are a couple of great high-end results that will need you to have fed the Pariah quite a few. One of the final results in particular is incredible.
Use at your own peril!

The other big change is the replacing of the White Secret story event for reaching 9 understanding. With the Pariah and its Implanted Memories (I) you instead learn a Dark Secret.
The hardest to get (and keep) is One-Two (see above).

Like most of the Pariah content these events come with some significant downsides and part of the puzzle will be making them work reliably in your favor.
And you might find yourself having to well and truly go off the deep end for that.

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Gameplay – The Showdown

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Besides being forced to live with a monster that poisons the well for its own amusement, the settlement also faces the problem that the Pariah is an exceptional fighter, and thus its violent mood swings are hard to stave off.
This also reflects in the large amount of different AI cards, ensuring no fight will be quite like the other. The monster has a total of 42 AI cards listed in the rulebook, of which we have 3L, 15A and 14B cards, with the remainder consisting of traits and the monster’s basic action cards. Of course this is also to facilitate one of its main fighting gimmicks – the trait Cyclopean Empathy. More on that in a moment.

First the cold, hard stats for each level:
Lvl1 AI: 7B/5A Stats: 7MOV 10TGH
Lvl2 AI: 8B/7A/1L Stats: 8MOV 13TGH +1DMG/SPD
Lvl3 AI: 6B/10A/2L Stats: 8MOW 17TGH +2DMG/SPD
+1EVA&+1LCK-Tokens

Whilst I wouldn’t say that +1TGH breaks the fight, or makes it unwinnable compared to the already tough as nails Butcher, it is a noticeable step up in difficulty and will either have you look at the monster and audibly say “Oh, no!” or you will start smushing up survivors into paste to make a scab weapon or two.
Or maybe you are a hardened veteran that routinely starts hunting Lvl2 monsters in Lantern Year 3+.
Your mileage may vary.

There is also the fact that most of the Pariah’s attacks have 2 base damage with a decent chance for more.
ALL its attacks have after damage triggers though.

There are also 2 Keen cards in there, which seem worse at first glance than they actually are. Keen attacks ignore positive EVA on your survivor – and whilst, yeah, that’s obviously not great – it will do a lot less at early levels compared to later down the line.

But the main danger of the fight lies with the continuous punishment coming in via the Cyclopean Empathy trait.
Every time you wound the monster, the card you just wounded off is revealed as it is put into the wound stack and the attacker will suffer the effect in the black box at the top of the card. Possible effects include, but aren’t limited to gaining a negative token in just about any stat, taking damage that ignores armor, suffering brain damage or getting the Joyless impairment.
Scouting AI does not prevent this reveal – on the contrary – you will instead effectively double up on the effect! Thankfully, at least drawing a card during the monster turn is not considered a “reveal”.

Beyond a myriad of ways to trigger Cyclopean Empathy on Hit Locations, the trap or other AI cards, you might come across Somatic Static tokens which offer you a temporary sort of reprieve from being pelted by these retaliatory effects.
The fairly rare Sundering story event instead poses a dangerous chance at a more permanent solution.

The Hit Location deck consists largely of Failure reactions (not quite half) and it changes slightly in the Lvl3 fight once the Pariah travels up the side of the Inverted Mountain and the survivors have to fight it whilst hanging from the ceiling (including its own – different – Scramble to Survive event going off anytime you are knocked down).

The monster will typically switch up its reactions between cavorting away from attackers and trying to give them glimpses of forbidden knowledge to further your understanding (+1), which in turn will not only make them more susceptible to the Pariah’s gifts and events, but also hits them with another draw for Cyclopean Empathy.

Should you nevertheless manage to beat the monster, congratulations, you have avoided one of the two settlement events coming into play.
You have also beat the system in a way, as especially in LY4 with the monster being so heavily stacked against you, I am pretty sure you are meant to lose this fight more often than not.

Wicked Game (SE) is also not that bad a punishment (compared to Sulking SE), if you are fine with either losing a survivor per year or getting more fodder for the scab-mill.

Again, just how detached are you from your survivors?

But you can always challenge the Pariah again to get rid of the Settlement Event.
Or you white knuckle it out until Lantern Year 15.
Good news: neither of the punishment events get actually added to the deck, so if you get rid of them once you are good!

Yujiro Hanma.., eh, I mean, the Pariah Lvl3 fight is a slightly different beast as its punishment for being defeated will take out a whole line of Innovations from the current campaign.
I love this design, but I am slightly horrified by the chance of it happening to me.

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The Lore

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This is the first time I mention lore in a capacity such as this as there typically is so frightfully few points that feel definite enough to warrant talking about them. In that sense – all of this (most of this?) will be speculative in nature and very much depending on my personal viewpoint and the interpretation I have arrived at myself, as well as you will have yours as a reader.
I do love KD:M’s lore and the myriad of story strands developing hidden behind the weird ways this world works and it scratches that same itch that Bloodborne and the rest of the Souls-franchise usually did for me.

This section is probably not that helpful for people without the texts for the events as I do not intend to copy them down word for word.
Still, if you are willing, please indulge me – or, well, just go ahead and scroll down to my final thoughts otherwise. I won’t tell.

Because of how White Speaker centric this part of the Inverted Mountain campaign is, I will start off by sharing my understanding of the Cult before anything else:

The White Speaker cult is one of the very few active “human”-based factions. They use stories stored in their blood to call upon supernatural seeming feats including altering their own bodies to their needs.
White Speakers make frequent use of a fundamental of the KD:M world: actualization. By knowing the story (and/or understanding it?) they can draw from its inherent power and alter reality to their needs.
Ultimately this is also why White Speakers all look reasonably similar (queue the nipple-debate) and why the Pariah can shift its body’s form going from its Lvl1&2 to Lvl3 so drastically.
White Speakers are also known to travel around and visit settlements, sharing their knowledge to a degree.

The Pariah and the Red Witches expansions both have opened doors to new stories (quite literally) and are thus filled with a lot of new lore bits. Whilst the Red Witches, who are deeply engrained in the White Speaker Cult’s activities offer a perhaps biased but more complete understanding on the stories they tell and use to power their abilities with – 3 in total in their expansion; the Pariah instead “spits” and “hisses” these stories at us in fragments, leaving much to be deciphered but offering a broader range with 6 overall.

We know from its pitch during the Kickstarter that the Pariah is “the last male White Speaker” and he is probably the reason or at the very least a reminder as to why White Speakers are not allowed to partake in Intimacy or bear children.
It “is driven mad by the secrets in its abomination blood” and thus likely an indicator as to why White Speakers cannot be male. Men can’t handle it for an unknown reason – I like the idea of the Y-chromosome just being too small compared to the much larger 2nd X-chromosome a woman has for storing genetic information – but that is just me.

We can also reasonably assume from both the Squire campaign and the White Speaker is Dead event, that the Pariah is gathering stories to further its enigmatic goals along the mountain.
It is a fair guess to assume that it might being trying to assemble a particularly powerful or dangerous story spread out as fragments across the whole of the Speaker Cult.

When it comes to the 6 stories explicitly mentioned across the Pariah expansion we are even deeper in speculation territory. And I also think it is important to keep in mind that the Stories shared with Survivors in Dark Secret (Felled Folly, One Wish and Heart’s Love) are complete, whilst for White Speaker is dead, the Survivors “invent the ending”.
So yeah,… things are even more obscure with those.

Story of the Internal Heat:
We are set to have more Witches coming up in the future – between the Witch of the East Star (Bunny/Pantsu Witch!), the Flower Witch (Abyssal Woods) and the Red Witches there are a few possibilities – though they should all still be alive.
The easiest common denominator could be the death of a Red Witch, prompting the ascent of another into the trio.

Story of the Bleeding Heart:
A “thousand fingered beast” does sound a little like the Parasite Queen from what little we know at this current stage. And it steals hearts as well? Still, I can’t really imagine this is about her as well.
Even without calling out a name drop, this story sounds like it references the patron Entity the White Speaker Cult worships/works for.
If they are a functioning “human” settlement, they likely have a Core monster so to speak. But whilst we don’t know whether the Red Haired Dragon the Red Witches’ cloaks are made from is a quarry or a patron/core, there is no telling.
The heavy imagery of fingers and hearts also points a little to the Dark Surgeon, though drawing a connection to the White Speaker Cult feels strenuous at best.

Story of the Tarnished Liver:
Sounds like it is talking about the Pariah, or a similar being at the very least. I could also just be the reason for why it looks the way that it does, or that the Survivors came to this conclusion because of the Pariah’s presence.

Story of the Felled Folly:
The word abomination invites you to draw parallels to the Pariah again, but ultimately I got nothing much for this one.
It might just be a hint that there were more than one “World Tree” at some point, and from interviews we know that according to Adam the Inverted Mountain campaign should give us more insights in how the “world cycle” works in Kingdom Death.

Story of the One Wish:
The Ocean of Rust is, duh, the Rust Ocean, one of the possible future biomes for the game. The multiplying of a single individual is something we saw first with Satan and the Ivory Dragon.
There is also a hint of the Doll (who was said to have been dumped at the Rust Ocean) in the way it is presented (“the final spark of its life”).

Story of the Heart’s Love:
A heart sinking so far it causes a gravitational singularity. And talk about roots? This does sound like the creation of the Abyssal Woods to me and it might clue us in on a theme of the big box expansion way down the line.

There is technically another, final story mentioned in my opinion and that is the Red Haired Dragon learning of a Sorrowful Secret, though aside from the mention of the Red Haired Dragon again – which was said to be the source of the Red Witches’ Red Cloaks way back during the Kickstarter when they were first pitched, there really isn’t much to work with here. I am aware that this lore might well have changed, but it is all we have to go on right now.
The empty throne invites more speculation about Death Crowns and who was supposed to be seated there.

Finally, before I get my final thoughts in I wanted to quickly touch on the biggest mystery of the whole Inverted Mountain campaign. The grand enigma at the top – the Mountain Man.
Whilst we do not have any real hint at what is going on with that particular monster, we know that it is going to be the Finale for the campaign and thus that it is likely going to be quite dangerous.

I am going to use this space to get my personal prediction out there:
that because of visual similarities – including to a hit location calling out Pariah’s similarly burnt out eyes, much like the Mountain Man’s; I think we could be looking at a One-Two split situation.
One-Two splits Insanity, EVA, SPD, understanding, your 2nd FA, 1st and 3rd disorders to one person – which does sound like the Pariah to me – and Survival, ACC, LCK, courage, 1st FA, 3rd FA and 2nd disorder to the other.
I might well be reading too much into it, or I am seeing only what I want to see, but just based on how the characteristics of the two monsters (the theatrics of the Pariah vs the relentless meditation of the Mountain Man) contrast each other works for me in that regard as well.

Another popular way to look at Pariah and Mountain Man would be father and son, though it is entirely unclear with one would have sired the other.
Either way, the hit location of the Pariah – when its blindfold sags if hit critically – suggests that the Pariah has been to the very top of the Inverted Mountain.
Naturally this poses more questions then it answers at this stage.

Grains of Salt and such for all of this.

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Final Thoughts

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The Pariah expansion is overall a bit of a weird one for me personally. This is mainly because I wasn’t interested in it at all for the longest of times, much like with the Frogdog. But now that I have them both, I feel like I’m getting Stockholm-syndrome in a way, as I enjoy the presented gameplay concepts in both of them immensely.

Whilst the gameplay of the fights is definitely an interesting addition to the game in any case, just how hard it can potentially be to get past him at early levels, or to even just get your regular year by year settlement activities in will likely make or break the expansion for you.
The morality of certain choices you are bound to make will only further add to this conundrum. The high-road is the more difficult approach to a lot of them, clearly, and I would say that is part of the point.

In that sense, if you endeavor readily at Sacrifice (I) the Pariah might also be more up your alley.

I don’t think having an expansion or monster that makes the game harder (like the King’s Man) is a negative, but it will definitely not gel with someone who prefers to gain actual rewards for winning the fights besides just getting rid of “bad things”.

But even without these points the Pariah will likely always be a bit of a hard sell as the first Butcher encounter is widely considered to be one of the very best, if not the best fight in the whole of KD:M so far, and thus the Pariah does have some unreasonably high expectations to live up to.

Still, the question stands: Should you buy the Pariah expansion?

And it remains a though question to answer, and will depend largely on your personal taste.
I would not add it to what I currently consider the “big 4” expansions – those being Dragon King, Sunstalker, Black Knight and Frogdog. So it definitely is not a “must buy” by any means.
The Red Witches have a much better chance to turn those 4 into a “big 5”, to be honest.

In the end, I would say if you don’t mind making tough decisions and the game being harder (or you are head-over-heels into the lore!) then the Pariah should be right for you.

This feels a bit like a conspiracy theory, which is why I am putting this at the very end – between the keen cards, the monster wanting you to turn your survivors into weapons and all the possible punishments on the Settlement Events – I think, if we get a guaranteed Intimacy trigger with the Oblivion Mosquito or in the Inverted Mountain campaign a la Sacred Water for PotSun, the Pariah might actually favor Protect the Young.

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For what its worth, this got a whole lot longer than I had anticipated and I hope sincerely that I could give you at least a little insight into the expansion and help you answer the question whether or not you should be bothering with it.

Pariah will be a part of my Season 3 on the site, which I will get going, hopefully by next week with the Feline Entity at my side.
Other than that I will be back on Friday with the Halloween update – need to buy me a lope.

If you made it this far thank you very much for your time!
And a second time – thank you very much for your time! If you let the Fiend in, its already too late! Just confess when the Red Witches come to hold their trial!
Amathul