The Bloody Shallows .. where do I start with this one?

Well, for one, the name was incredibly accurate. It was a bloody affair all around with over 50 actual deaths, a handful of “ceases to exist”-s and an exile or 2.
As for being “shallow”? Despite us winning most of our nemesis encounters surprisingly decisively, the growth of this community was severely stunted by the overall lack of weapon proficiencies besides the not-very-utility-minded club spec we got gifted by the Outsider event.

And yet we made it all the way to the Finale – which does mean that I do still consider the campaign as a whole mostly a success. Especially as it was the newly released Parasite Queen we were up against.
So even without weapon specs, stats, finished armor sets and a clear vision – because I do have to be honest, at some point I got lost in the sauce a little – we somehow managed to crawl all the way into Lantern Year 30. And that is precisely the type of persistence the game wants to see! Even if it doesn’t always get rewarded.

Throughout these more or less successful 30 Lantern Years we hunted 7 Frogdogs, 4 Screaming Antelopes, 2 Nukealopes, 4 Dragon Kings and 3 Screaming Gods.
We also successfully drove off the Pariah and conducted the glorious rite of divine combat with the Black Knight to quell its aggression.
However, whilst the Red Witches did not manage to reveal the taint left behind by the Pariah’s gifts, Seer judged us wanting anyhow.
As a People of the Lantern we naturally fought the thing below the Lantern Hoard and ultimately followed the royal beckoning – making our way to the Parasite Queen, where the 8 remaining survivors at the time have come to .. rest .. as seedbeds for the creation of more gifts to the masses.

The Bloody Shallows only ever managed to gain 1 weapon mastery: club, which was due to the diligent stone work performed by Goldenglow in the time of her exile.
During this time she also witnessed a group of unknown survivors get lost to the Stampede – i.e. the Screaming God Vignette.

And, it already feels like an age has passed since then – Candy & Cola had made their way to the Bloody Shallows as well, greatly helping us through the early and mid game. Sadly, she died fighting against the Lvl2 Pariah before she could make this place her forever-home.

Our line-up of settlement events this time:
Open Maw: 1
Dark Dentist: 1
The Plant and the Stone: 3
Gathering Emissions: 1
Lights in the Sky: 4
It rang!: 2
Cracks in the Ground: 1
Elder Council: 1
Glossolalia: 2
Startling Barks: 3
Stranger in the Dark: 2
Murder: 1
Jousting: 1
Dark Trader: 1
Plague: 1
Smoke Break: 1
Hunt Reenactment: 2
Nickname: 1

All in all a fairly positive line-up of settlement events, I would say.
We didn’t manage to fully escape random Murders and Plagues, but 1 of each was a decent enough spread for them to not be too oppressive even with several scheduled Murder events thanks to our own introspections and the Dragon King.
We also saw quite a few Sunstalkers streaking across the sky, which are always a sight to behold! And Skrelle was as persistent as ever. 3 settlements played and in each of them she tried to have us nurture the sapling 3 times.
i actually like taking Pictograph (I), I swear!

Now, where are those elephants hiding this time?

Well, the first elephant got lost in the sauce.., err, swamp.
Whether or not its the biggest one, it is the one I keep thinking about the most as I do get the feeling I got lost along the way somehow. And, I guess, that is partially because of the missing Dung Beetle Knights .. again .. as well as the overall time it took to get this playthrough done. So, at least for myself, I associate “waiting on stuff” with the Bloody Shallows to a degree.
Pivoting mid-way to the, at the time, freshly released Screaming God expansion didn’t help that either. Especially as it took a lot longer to ship to non-backer-kit pre-orders than initially expected. This was also decidedly another step away from the inverted-mountain-theme I started out with.
I will say, I do want to try and be less tempted by mid-campaign additions in the future, and at least for right now with the bee monsters being pushed back and CoD still not nearly close enough to be in consideration, I should be safe for Season 4 in that regard.
Hopefully Dead Armor releases either super quickly or in a year at the earliest.
Is that a curse I should put on people? Probably not.

The 2nd elephant: principles.
This campaign was definitely quite far removed from my comfort zone when it comes to settlement principles and I’ve got a few things on my mind now that the campaign is over. Whilst I do generally believe that all the principles offer an interesting choice for the player to consider, I would also say that they have not all been made equally appealing.
Principle Death (i.e. Cannibalize vs Graves) and Principle Society (i.e. Collective Toil vs Accept Darkness) both feel the most rounded to me and the most like an actual choice with each of the different options you are presented with giving you a very particular type of boost to certain aspects of your gameplay, whilst potentially leaving you wanting in other places. Personally I have come to enjoy Collective Toil a lot more over the last couple of campaigns that I have played and with the Screaming God’s Trophy Wall event added via Taxidermy (I), I am eager to keep on experimenting with it for a while longer as well.
As for the other 2 principles: I would say most people have a rather one-sided relationship with them. And whilst I do somewhat understand the ever-on-going debate for Principle Life (Survival of the Fittest vs Protect the Young) in regards to there being a distinct lack of choice, I find myself questioning the hype around the Romanticism side of Principle Conviction (Romantic vs Barbaric) just about any time I play with it.
As for Principle Life, whilst I do prefer the +1STR/EVA (soon-ish to likely be only +1STR – which would still be unga-bunga!), I have come to believe that both options are closer to one-another than people tend to make you think. You just need to actually make use of your surplus population .. and of course the saviors you are going to have! Those especially are silver bullets meant to be used up quickly – at least that is my read on them. Sure, non-blue saviors could be more powerful, I’d agree to that, but there is definitely something interesting to be played around with here. On a slightly different note – with SotF looking at getting nerfed at some point soon-ish, I was wondering how well a +1 departing survival bonus (instead of the usual increase in survival limit) would work on PtY to give it just a very slight nudge.
But yeah, Barbaric vs Romantic.., what’s up with that?
I do keep coming back to this again and again, despite having talked about how stacked this event feels towards Romantic in S2 LY11 myself! Maybe it’s the way how resource gathering works for Screaming God that’s pushing you really hard towards Barbaric now – as you get to use Ultimate Weapon during the Lantern Years leading up to the Watcher fight allowing you to hand-pick any 1 resource from a monster’s resource deck – potentially taking out the antlers ever single time! Maybe that’s why I felt the sting of it missing out on Barbaric even more this time around?
Not to mention the stat(s)!
I do honestly just want my +1/3/2 (+2/3/1) base stat line for my survivors though and am willing to put up with the feasts for that. I’m simple like that.
Unga-bunga protects, y’all!

As for the mistakes-elephant, I don’t think I did anything as egregiously wrong as in S1 when I misread the Frogdog’s chest armor piece.
I will give some special acknowledgement to the -1 population from the Collective Toil event being an “exile” and thus would not have triggered Principle: Death for us. Aside to that, whilst I don’t believe I played absolutely everything correctly, I am happy with how it felt in regards to overall “correctness”.

The misplays-elephant on the other hand – there are a few things that come to mind.
There were several ways of how I could have prevented the “only 4 dudes left” scare of LY27, even if that resolved itself ridiculously quickly.
Bringing Goldenglow with full understanding to the Seer fight was equally ambitious and dumb, but I think I laid out my reasoning for that one well enough during the set-up for that fight.
As for the earlier parts of the game: we had a nicely juiced up early game getting to build Leather Armor fairly early .. and I just kinda threw it away in the pursuit of the full Frogdog Armor set, which I have not been able to complete in any campaign before LY8 yet.
In a somewhat similar fashion, I really should have taken the time to get the 2nd Black and Red Armor built. There is a lot of potential in that set, and whilst our lack of high-powered weaponry would have put a cap on it in a way, having access to a fresh, 5th survivor entering the fight is a boon by itself.
I also think I should have upgraded the Hyperelastic Sword to the Screaming God sword. In hindsight.. that would probably have been a good call.
The final mention in regards to misplays I feel like I need to make would be our innovation deck – it got real thick real quick! And whilst I don’t think I could have necessarily prevented that – besides.., I did force it as well – I probably could and should have picked up innovations a little more mindfully .

And that should be all the elephants I wanted to address this time. There are a few more things that I would like to mention, but I wouldn’t consider them stuff that could have necessarily been prevented by better decision making.

Which, of course, brings us neatly to the community’s favorite hunt event: #10. Nothing (besides picking Barbaric, of course) could have prepared us for LY12 .. 4 survivors with Prey (D) rolling a *REDACTED*, which ultimately led to 2 survivors dying to the event as they were too sane to spend survival, and then the other 2 faltered against the Nukealope.., which also took out our remaining endeavors for the following Lantern Year.
This line of events not only got rid of most of the immediate power-bonus we had gotten from picking Romantic but it stunted our mid-game progression as well, as we were left without any resources or endeavors for the next settlement phase leading into our first Black Knight encounter.
And whilst the following Dragon King fights were kind enough to go our way, the settlement never fully recovered from this.
And if we had had Ultimate Weapon (also from picking Barbaric), we could have at least taken the most important bits from the Screaming God later down the line to maybe finish the armor set. And it’s not like I got desperately unlucky whilst hunting that quarry either. We got trampled twice and still took all the bits back with us! That is highly unlikely!
Anyways, losing to that first Nukealope compounded into almost all the following Lantern Years with the strange exception of most nemesis fights. My willingness to throw out anything and everything we had against Pariah and co apparently made a big enough difference with the exception of the final bout against the Red Witches.

Similarly we seemed to lose most of our powerful survivors whenever they were just about to establish themselves, either to a severe injury taking most of their power away or them flat-out dying.
This is what also routinely snuffed out any progress I had managed to make in terms of weapon proficiencies time and time again.

But it can’t all be negatives either!
The 2 things that kept me going during the mid-game were:
1: the Piercing Claws – an actual MVP-type weapon! And they were katars as well for reaction cancelling! That’s pure gold against the Screaming God!

And 2: our Sculpture (I) of Agility Fighter (FA)!
Adding +3STR on average to swords and daggers helped out our meager arsenal quite a bit over the Lantern Years.

In the late-game the Cult Speaker Knife then took over for a bit after we got it during the Braal + Nico fight in LY19, together with the Vandal Sledge and Vandal Broadaxe a few Lantern Years later built from Screaming God bits.
These 3 weapons provided us with enough power to kill both the Lvl3 Dragon King and Nukealope!

Finally, the Parasite Queen is indeed a menace – especially for non-arc survivors, but if you can throw enough people at her she can be felled .. as I have experienced outside of my activities here.
So, with renewed vigor I do want to give her another attempt next time!

And with that we are set to move on from the Bloody Shallows and look ahead into the limitless darkness towards a .. bright(?) future!
So, yes, there will be a Season 4.

Fullmetal Gormchymist!

And whilst I am not completely sure about each and every node that I want to pick just yet, there are a few things that are more or less set in stone at this point:

QN1: Gorm
QN4: Screaming God
NN1: Butcher & KillyB
NN3: The Hand
C: Watcher
F: Parasite Queen

Wanderer: Aeneas

That is what I am thinking right now, in addition to all the pillars I currently have available – this will include SoD3 once it gets here at some point in September.
Both node 2 and 3 are a little more difficult to decide. That is mainly because I would like to use Sunstalker, but that combos horribly with Spidicules. So its likely either going to be Flower Knight + Sunstalker (no lope – which also means no C&D and not a lot of indoms) or Spidicules + Phoenix.
All those Lights in the Sky do make for a compelling case to pick Sunstalker though! The presence of Screaming God does push it towards the additional indoms of spooder+birb though.
The Nemesis Node 2 proves equally as difficult but I have the Lion Knight arriving hopefully soon. This’ll be a “how bad could it possibly be?” type of deal, I think.

And that’s that.
I’m pretty sure that I must have missed something about the Bloody Shallows but I’ll see to that via editing eventually.
For now, I will take a break for a couple of days, do some painting as I try to survive the summer’s heat, before I will return and hopefully be able to finally give an opinion on the last Wanderer I haven’t covered yet: Preacher.
And after that it its time to start with Season 4!

If you have made it this far, as always, I thank you very much for your time! I am still a little surprised that the people of the Bloody Shallows made it all the way to the Parasite Queen.
Amathul