The Feline Entity and I are, once again, ready to sit in the dark for a couple of days and keep an eye out, or five, for those juicy GenCon details!

Much like last year I will be linking any videos that pop up during GenCon or afterwards in this top bit for easy access as the body of this post did get kinda messy as I will just keep editing it over the next couple of days.

Oh, and spoiler warning for just about anything and everything, I guess.

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Videos:
Most of these will likely be from Bra Mithra again, as his vids are KD:M centric.

Live Community Garden with Adam Poots
Lore Interview with Adam Poots

Wise One Campaign Preview (very little info – very tongue-in-cheek)
Dead Armor Preview
First Hero Showdown

Dark Architect Interview (KD Sim)

White Box – Legendary Character Hollow (post-GenCon review)
White Boxes – Belevedere & Astri (post-GenCon review)
White Box – Survivors of Death 3 (post-GenCon review)

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And, again, just as last year, another quick disclaimer: as a European it sadly isn’t exactly easy (or cheap) to attend the convention in Indianapolis and sadly I won’t be able to attend GenCon myself. Thus I am unable to provide my own pictures for the event and as I don’t feel it appropriate to just steal them from the web this post will likely be text only.
Should you however be attending the convention (or, by the time you have read this, have attended in 2026) and are willing to share a picture with me feel free to send me a message over here.

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Day 0:
Whilst the convention opens to the general public on Thursday, historically we have seen a list of all the new releases Team Death has brought along to GenCon, including their prices, a little earlier.
And this year, it would appear, is no exception!

KD:M Core Game – $400
Gambler’s Chest – $370
Core+GCE Bundle – $666
Frogdog – $135
Black Knight – $135
Screaming God – $175
Slenderman – $90
Dung Beetle Knight – $90

New releases:
Survivors of Death 3 – $77
Legendary Character Hollow – $77
Astri the Promised – $34
Butcher Lvl2 Prototype – $67
Sci-Fi Dwelling Keeper (Painter’s Scale) – $67
Questing Aya – $34
Honeycomb Weaver T-shirt – $30
Parasite Queen Dice – $20
Sunstalker Dice – $120
Phobia: the Hunt comic Vol. 2 – $13

Various Art prints – $25

Edited for Day 1: Whilst there are no new indoms this time around, SoD3 has been added to the list of purchasable items!
After spotting it the display case yesterday evening, the 4 girls from the Screaming God Vignette will be available as well! I wouldn’t be surprised if its a fairly limited item for the con though. Production turn-around for that one was really quick!
All 4 minis have been added to a display case by the end of day 1 and they are exactly the same poses as they have in the art cards.

Butcher Lvl2 is a stanced up new sculpt of the beloved/feared nemesis monster in resin. If its not just an alt sculpt for collectors we might be looking at a KD:M 2.0 sculpt here.
Edit: Apparently Adam has mentioned that this is indeed an updated Butcher sculpt for KD:M 2.0 – which according to his own words will not happen anytime soon though.
Speaking of resins – Questing Aya seems to be a direct homage to Dragon Quest 3.

The price on the Sunstalker dice set is also not a typo – $120 dollars! Adam did post pictures on the Lantern’s Reign discord a while back – around Black Friday – of some beautiful yellow/purple translucent dice, which turned out to be the Sunstalker dice!
It would appear these dice are made out of tempered glass!
And they sold out in just over an hour.

Oh, and also, Parasite Queen dice? What color are those going to be? Flesh and blood? – Yup, looks like flesh and dried blood I’d say.

But the actual big thing from this list however is not only the chance to pick up the Screaming God expansion for $175 but also Slenderman and DBK have returned!
Both boxes have seen a price increase of $10 compared to the shop (from $80 to $90) and do also now come in new fancy boxes akin to the newer releases from Black Knight onwards.
First pics of the rulebooks had quickly been spotted and confirmed that these are indeed updated versions of the old expansions. The age of the reprints has begun!
Whilst mostly adding the information on the node system and fixing old verbage/typos, events and things like crafting costs as well as stats have also been adjusted.
The most important thing being clearly that we now have an updated campaign set-up for Slendy (Lvl1 in LY 09; Lvl2 in LY 18; Lvl3 in LY27).

For instance for Slenderman the required crafting levels of Dark Water Research (I) have been shuffled around – the Gloom Katana and its sheath are now both available at Lvl2, whereas the Gloom Hammer and Gloom Cream have been bumped up to Lvl3.
Crafting costs have also been adjusted to no longer require monster specific items like a Lion Tail etc. so the expansion can be used more easily with the larger variety of options we now have.

With Gencon over we have now a better understanding what these 2 reprints incorporate. Whilst they will not be strictly necessary to get if you already own the 1.6 expansions as you should get “a full gameplay experience” (the words of Team Death) if you purchase CoD and an appropriate card pack later down the line, for now DBK and Slenderman are considered “on par” with newer releases and there were quite a few inclusions/fixes – like knowledges or scout discoveries, or a meal gear.

I’ve seen a full change log over on the Lantern’s Reign discord earlier.

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New releases:
Doors to the con have opened and the first few pictures of the new releases have quickly made their way onto the internet.

Astri the Promised:
Astri was the first new release to get partially shown. The box features 2 seed patterns for both a Seeker Lantern and a Cleaner Bird Cloak.
The Seeker Lantern (Era 1) is, you might have already guessed it, a lantern with the other keyword, 2 red half-affinities (left & right) that gains you 2 bleeding tokens at the end of your act if you are not adjacent to the monster. And if you manage to connect 1 puzzle piece red affinity you also gain +3MOV during your act.
The Cleaner Bird Cloak (Era 2) on the other hand is an accessory for the chest that grants 2 armor with flammable, stinky and feather. It also grants +1EVA and the Cleaner Dive special rule: if you have not spent any mov for the round, you may use both mov and act to move in a straight line and attack with a sword with +1LCK for each space moved!
Both items seem really powerful, and the crafting requirements aren’t that bad either. The lantern requires you to lose gear due to a settlement event, which is probably the most notable requirement, alongside having a survivor with Hyperactive (D) for the cloak.

Legendary Survivor Hollow:
This new legendary survivor offers a different take on a survivor that levels up and gains items/abilities, not unlike Glow, but this time the focus seems to be on cursed gear (based mostly around a chain of head accessory) instead of age milestones.
The Legendary Character card The Hollow will gain you the pattern for the Aspirant Headband and the ability that if you die whilst wearing the Sacrificial Headband you will be resurrected with the Stoic Mask rare gear (the same she had in the Killennium Butcher Vignette, which also grants the same status card – Empty Vessel).
The Aspirant Headband also adds +1LCK and gives you not only another pattern (for Hollow’s signature weapon) but also if the wearer deals the killing blow to a monster, the headband will turn into the Anointed Headband.
In much the same way, this new headband adds +1LCK and +1ACC, you gain the pattern for a chest armor (with the lantern keyword, what?) that is really powerful as long as you stay uninjured, and this headband will again level up to the Sacrificial Headband upon dealing a killing blow.
This final headband adds +2LCK and +1ACC, but when somebody dies in the settlement it has to be the wearer of this item!
Each of these headbands has the irreplaceable keyword and thus will be lost forever if you die prematurely, ending the chain of gear cards for this run.
Each of the pattern gear can be crafted quite early in a PotStars settlement as they only require the Throne, but there are alternative settlement locations to use for non-Tyrant settlements.

Survivors of Death 3:
Whilst I am happy to see the 4 girls from the Screaming God Vignette making their way into our collections so soon, it is a little as I had feared, the team probably had a little trouble coming up with additions to the figures for this box set.
But I won’t be complaining any more than this, I am honestly quite happy that they released with any new game content at all!
As per usual we get 2 abilities and 2 impairments in this box, with a strong emphasis on music innovations and instruments all in all.
Besides the character cards it does get a little lopsided though. This box adds 1 Pillar card, 1 knowledge and a strain – so only 3 things this time instead of the 1 per character. Each single addition is a little more meaty than what we have seen from these boxes in the past though.
Maybe I’m just a little salty about the lack of indoms this year. I really like those additions to my end-game monsters!
The Pillar card – Troubadour Troupe – adds the Band innovation to your deck. This is a Forbidden Dance consequence that not only further buffs Synch Strike (SFA) – allowing you to spend a survival to reroll a failed wound attempt but also adds Concert Tour as an endeavor (2 endeavors if 2+ survivors have instruments in their gear grids all hearing gain a +1MOV-token on departure) and its 2 consequences – Concerto and Symphony.
And you will have to chose which one you want as the other is removed from the deck once you picked one of them! Both add +1 survival limit. Symphony lets you gain +1 survival (once per round) upon attacking with Synch Strike, whilst Concerto can stack up to 3 +1LCK-tokens on a single survivor by using Synch Strike with different partners as long as nobody else as any +1LCK-tokens..
The knowledge (23CC) lets you add ambient music to your settlement that effectively “blocks” a spot in your Forum for a lingering effect added to your settlement for the lantern year – like the option to spend 4 endeavors to give 2 survivors 2 +1STR each, or that all departing survivors gain a +1LCK token.
Finally the strain reintroduces us to the Blind Rocker vermin card which was previously a beta resources a couple of years ago (with the resin Cockroach Queen around Christmas, I believe). If a group of musicians dies on the hunt, this bone vermin will get added to your vermin deck. And whilst you have one of these in your settlement any survivor using a music innovation gets +1survival! But they also have to roll a dice and on a 1 the Blind Rocker gets eaten by a much worse vermin: the Discord Cricket. This does give you a pattern card for what is effectively a noise cancelling headset (Heart Flute & 4 Black Lichen, the cricket and other things!), but also prevents all music endeavors until you get rid of this new type-less resource – which gives you an opportunity to do so by losing 1D5 population!
Yikes!

And that’s the round-up for the 3 new gameplay releases.

This year’s grab bag mini seems to be Talisman(? Ban?) the hooded guy from the croc demo.
One other notable change got spotted: Gryphon got re-sculpted! It is no longer standing upright as tall as can be, but it is bent towards the ground, almost on all 4s. The more rugged wings look especially impressive and I personally would say that the new sculpt is a massive improvement!

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From this point onwards I will be grouping the different previews together without doing too much editing for each day, but having them thematically grouped makes more sense now that Gencon is over.

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The Wise One settlement:

Day 1:
It has made it to settlement creation and we got a look at the new language innovation: Fissile Tongue – which gives Survival Limit +2, the standard encourage survival action but also reduces Fighting Art and/or Knowledge slots by 1!
That is certainly one way of having players engage more with disorders!
The legless Spidicules also seems to be able to keep higher level monsters away by frantically cursing.

A couple of the specific items for the Wise One campaign have been seen – Lingering Wish (-1MOV,-1EVA,-1SPD – you can archive it and trade it for a disorder “Unfulfilled“), Enriching Wish (ignore FA, K and abilities, trade for the disorder “Unfulfilled”) and Sensational Wish (you are guardless, ignore positive EVA, can be traded for “Unfulfilled” as well).
And why would you want a new disorder?
Well.., Brain Wraps (head, 1 armor, accessory) gives an idea with its +1ACC and add the number of disorders you have to your brain trauma rolls. The item also doubles all brain damage, unfortunately.
In general this campaign seems to get abilities and items that gain bonuses for the amount of disorders you currently have.

The Wise One settlement also seems to have its own bunch of specific innovations – like Meditation (which is mentioned on a piece of a settlement location that is poking out on a picture).

We also got 1 more glimpse at a couple of new disorders: and they seem like something positive-ish. Like, for instance, the ability to roll a dice when you gain the monster controller tile and on a 4+ you gain the priority target token.

Day 2:
Pictures of more items and innovations have turned up and the gameplay loop has emerged alongside them:
1: spend an endeavor and 1 resource to craft a random Wishing Stone gear with a negative effect (such as -3 to severes, be guardless and ignore positive EVA or at the start of your act roll a dice on a 1-3 end your act immediately)
2: go on a hunt and survive
3: gain +1 Wise One Teachings upon returning to the settlement
4: spend the Wise One Teaching for various effects
And some of those effects are juicy! The most powerful one I’ve seen did cost 4 Wise One Teachings but it let you pick a disorder that 1 of your survivors currently had, remove it from ALL survivors and THE CAMPAIGN as a whole! And it’s only limited to once per settlement phase! Not per campaign! Per phase!
See you later Aichmophobia (D)! Vestiphobia (D)! Eproctophilia (D)!

Another glimpse at gameplay content revealed the story event Hive Force which lets a survivor gain access to alternate monster controller tiles. We have seen one of these in a Black Friday update before but now we know how to get them.
You “simply” need to somehow trigger this story event and have a pair of 2 disorders. And just looking at the names here.. none of them is a core game disorder.
There are 6 different disorder pairings each giving the survivor in question a different selection of bonus stats and/or abilities in addition to making one of the several new monster controller tiles depending on which pairing they got.

Day 3:
Whilst we have heard little from the Dead Armor settlement since they built that first piece of the armor set, Spidicules is definitely making the best of its time with its batch of foolish survivors.
They are carving wishes, spending Teachings and triggering all kinds of story events.
Today we got a peak at 2 more story events, one probably very early in the campaign (maybe around Hands of Heat timing), granting Pictograph (I) and the ability to gain wishes, whilst the other is looking like a mid-game story event (perhaps around Royal Visit?) that gives us a visualization of the effect the relentless vitriol of the Spidicules has on the settlement.
Those timings are purely my own speculation based on what I have read.
The Wise Mehndi is a fun gear you can gain from the latter story event, adding not only adding a bunch of armor to your survivor if they are stacking wishes (2 armor per wish) but also giving their attacks devastating 1 if they are carrying 3+ wish gear. Whilst you do have to stack at least 3 negative effects for the full-power mehndi, depending on what the wishes in your settlement actually end up being this will probably still be a very powerful item!

Day 4:
Pictures of 5 of the 6 alternate monster controller tiles have shown up a little earlier, missing only the Choleric Monster Controller Tile – which we got to see in last year’s Black Friday update.
The effects on these tiles are really varied and interesting and far beyond the regular gain +1 insanity. I have read a handful of opinions on the way you make them available and some people felt like these were too hard to acquire as you do have to trigger a story event (I have no idea on how you do that – if it is on the timeline or if you have to actively trigger it) and have a survivor with a specific combination of 2 disorders at the same time as well.
I think it is still a little too early say at this point how reliable you’ll be able to do this and will largely depend on if and/or how you can tutor disorders.

Also the effects gained beyond just the access to a specific monster controller tile might also be well worth it – there is Red Fist (SFA) in there for instance, or +2EVA, +1LCK or reset a characters impairments, permanent injuries and hunt xp! There is a lot going on in that event!
As far as the actual tiles go, between having a survivor gain both a +1LCK-token & a -1EVA-token, over a Hit Location scouting ability all the way to suffering a -1MOV-token but also gaining 2 armor in every spot, the abilities should give access to a few new strategies!

The Wise One settlement unfortunately did not make it to the story event “Thus spoke the Wise One” which is surely going to be the endgame trigger for this campaign.
The survivors fell just short by dying to a Screaming God.

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Dead Armor:
Day 1:
The first piece has been built – the Dead Cranium!
At 4 points of armor this head armor looks surprisingly weak. Of course, armor values aren’t everything – not by a long shot – and we have no idea what the rest of the gear actually does, but it would appear that the set works with an additional “token” like mov or act – which the head can turn into a reroll token if you have 5 green and 1 blue affinity (including 3 puzzle pieces). This head piece also triggers a yet unknown story event during the aftermath.
Overall, Team Death weren’t kidding about the bone based prices! 112 regular bones for the full armor set and another 37 for the scythe, or 22 for each the axe or shield. And that’s just the unspecified bones! It also wants loads of Skulls and Perfect Bones, as well as new Sovereign resources!
Sovereign traits can be added to your Lvl3+ monsters via a new Secret Fighting Art called Bone Artisan, which you do need to level up. By the
looks of it, this does turn the survivor into a bone witch! And the helmet appears to be the only piece of gear you can craft without a sovereign something resource.
There is also the option to special innovate something called Reliquary for another 3 Skulls and 6 bones.
I’d imagine this innovation to help out with the enormous amount of required bones as well (the SFA already does just gain you +1 monster bone during the aftermath in addition to its other effects) considering the math won’t math otherwise.

Comments made by Adam during the day seem to have implied that CoD might actually be one of the expansions to release next, together with First Hero.
Whilst these estimations should always be treated with an adequate amount of salt, Honeycomb Weaver does seem to be stuck somewhere deep in the development pipeline!
Before you start panicking or gushing with joy, keep in mind that something fairly similar happened last year as well when he spoke of CoD printing starting in August 25.
As of right now, I would estimate that we definitely won’t see the bee monsters this year, but Dead Armor might be unaffected by these delays yet.

Day 3:
After a really quiet day 2, I saw that the Dead Armor settlement had managed to get a little more progress done on the armor set, a glimpse at one of the Osseus traits and the Reliquary innovation mentioned on the settlement location – which poses more new questions than it answers.

Osseus traits are the main way to gain the sovereign resources needed to build any Dead Armor gear pieces beyond the helmet. They can only be applied to Lvl3 monsters and seem to increase monster level, add additional stats and life points as well as appropriate ability.
The Adamant Ribs for example collect a token for every wound the monster suffers and after 3+ tokens the monster cannot suffer anymore wounds until the end of its next turn. This will draw out the fight considerably and I’d hate to draw this against a Phoenix!

And yes, these traits do get applied randomly most of the time! Which will likely also be one of the major hurdles to completing the set, I’d imagine.
(Or you can hunt a random quarry with an appropriately learned Bone Artisan SFA to choose your osseous trait instead.)

As for the items the settlement managed to build: there’s now also the shoes, shield and axe out there!
Whilst the armor seems to have 4 armor points as its baseline – which, again, feels relatively weak – the abilities on the items are pretty nice! So far each piece of gear comes with some decent abilities just from the get-go and if you manage to connect some demanding sets of affinities (2 to 3 puzzle pieces, 4 to 6 affinities in total) another way for you to spend your bone-token given to you by the helmet gets unlocked.
The shoes for instance let you ignore intimidate and after damage effects just for existing (wow!) and once you have managed to connect all the affinities for it you can spend a bone-token to up your perfect hit range by 3!
The shield is 1/9+/15, adds 2 armor and all survivors gain +3 on brain trauma rolls!
And the axe is a 3/7+/10 weapon with perfection 2 and barbed 10 – isn’t that cute? It’s trying to be a Greatest Gaxe!

As for armor values, I’m fairly sure the set-bonus will add a lot, possibly rounding out the 10 armor to be in line with Green Knight Armor, or you might just get another bone-token to spend per round to have an incredibly flexible armor set in what it can do each and every round. Or it could be 13 armor in total (15 with the shield) and also give you more bone tokens to use per round!

Now the Reliquary innovation is an odd one. It gives you the option to archive up to 3 pieces of Ossuary gear and record them to the “City of Bone”.
Without a peek at the event/location that is the “City of Bone” the only reasonable assumption right now would be that you get a chance to build this incredibly expensive armor set over the course of multiple campaigns!

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And finally the day 2 – 4 recap .. including the July sale, a shopify hack and water leaking into GenCon.

Day 2:
With the second day of the convention under way we have seen most of the new releases at this point and any more “reveals” today will more or less depend on what the settlements manage to achieve.
So, whilst this post should not get that much longer today, I am keeping an eye out for any new findings.

Something I did NOT see coming for Day 2 of GenCon was a store update for the end of July!
Screaming God is officially available both physically ($175) and digitally ($17.50)!
The overall line up of new stuff is understandably short this month, only featuring 1 more item – the Indomitable Survivor – Ballistic Brayonet Belvedere. She is looking stunning though as she adds another indomitable resource to the Frogdog! And its copper as well! It’s like this box was made for me personally! Or well, I guess it would be an axe in that case. This sounds more like a thrown weapon, possibly a dagger. I’m being dumb – it’s built from a Vertebrayonet with the indom, a copper and a Gaseous Bladder! It sure has to be a dagger!
So.., onslaught throwing dagger?

It would also appear that a bunch of older 1.6 expansions have seen a reduction in price (about 30% I believe – for example Lion God, Flower Knight and Lion Knight are all down to $50), which I believe might be the attempt to sell out remaining inventory before any reprints hit.
Should you end up considering picking up one of these older expansions, just be aware that they are very likely just the 1.6 version and NOT the updated reprints just yet.

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Day 3:
Today started off with some noticeable shop-issues online.
It would appear shopify had been hacked/otherwise compromised. Whilst some folks have mentioned that the issues have apparently been fixed on shopify’s end, I would still advise to exert caution for a while.

The settlements at the con seem to be trucking along for what its worth and several groups have managed to best both the First Hero as well as the Screaming God in their demos.
Similarly there have been King’s Coins awarded for killing blows and special feats, like staring down and defeating a First Hero wielding a Perfect Slayer. Of course King’s Coin can be redeemed for a handful of special items this year as well – One Eye still being the big ticket item priced at 3 coins.

And just as I was ready to call it a night GenCon got rained on – literally. The halls are/were leaking in places! KD:M seems to luckily have been unaffected but overall, what a terrible turn of events for any booths that got affected!
I do hope this didn’t cause too much damage overall!

I also saw something about broken pipes and a tornado warning! Though, from what little I have seen, it seems things turned out mostly all right considering the circumstances.

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Day 4:
It’s the final day of GenCon and it has started to wind down a little.
Whilst I would expect for a couple more new things to still pop up here or there, most will depend on how the 2 play-in settlements finish up their respective campaigns.

Curiously I have heard and seen very little mentioning any form of super secret special showdowns. The absence of a hard-plastic Honeycomb Weaver model had me thinking it could be sign for a special showdown but I guess it’s more a sign of the weaver not being nearly as done as people had been hoping for it to be(e).
There was apparently a Parasite Queen table at one point fighting against 6 players – the poor lost souls.

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I think I went a bit too in depth on the gameplay content, but it is what it is. This post is about double the length of last year’s and maybe we just got more reveals in form of the settlements they had set up, or I might have gotten carried away.
Personally I found most of the new content coming our way with Dead Armor, the Wise One settlement and even “just” the august line-up of releases very promising all-around and I cannot wait for some of the stuff to be up opened up for purchase at the end of the August.

As a quick reminder if you ended up down here, I will be posting video links I see over the next couple of days/one or two weeks up top for easy access. Bra Mithra has mentioned something about 8 recordings he did, so there will be a couple to look forward to.

As for myself, I will be crawling into a corner for a good long nap now. The Feline Entity is way ahead of me on that.
The next thing for the site will be the epilogue for season 3, probably around the end of the week.

If you have made it this far, thank you very much for your time, and thank you again for bearing with me!
Amathul