Within Kingdom Death's core gameplay loop Nemesis monsters represent the pressure that the game puts on us to get stronger. Of course, in games it's a natural desire to improve and build upon your previous position because; well, in most games that's a big part of winning. KDM absolutely asks players to work on that power fantasy and become as strong as possible because of its Nemesis system, these foes arrive in the settlement with a pre-set level of power and threat. This is coupled with additional punishments for showdown failure, higher stats than the quarry level equivalents and other mechanics that exist to teach players and/or make the fight even harder.

The way I tend to describe Nemesis monsters as are gatekeepers, they're asking you to be strong enough to pass and while they'll let you through if you fail, unless the failure was due to a mistake or bad string of rolls you should now be aware that you've got a lot of growth to achieve before the next mini-boss rolls around.

Our three sets of “Gates” that lead up to the Core (and Final) Nemesis showdowns are Nemesis Node 1, Nemesis Node 2 and Nemesis Node 3. In the original base game release these are The Butcher, The King's Man and The Hand. It's pretty common knowledge at this point that only one of these designs really holds up. The King's Man is a frustrating fight that wastes player time through bookkeeping at level 2+ and The Hand is a glorified quick time event. Both of those monsters have an interesting place in the texture of the world, but the showdowns quickly become less engaging over time. The Butcher is the exception here, it's such a well designed monster across the board and it serves as the proper pace maker for the base People of the Lantern experience. You need to keep pace with this implacable foe because otherwise it is coming not just for your people, but your resources as well.

Nemesis Node 1 (NN1) is not just the exclusive domain of The Butcher either, The Manhunter which was released around the same time is another excellent take on a punishing pace maker in ways that are very different to its core counterpart. We add onto this the arrival of the “Best in Class” vignette expansion known as The Killenium Butcher and NN1 is very much the place where the cream of the Nemesis monsters hang out. While NN2 and NN3 have excellent and weak options, NN1 is full of nothing but hit after hit. This is the environment that The Pariah has to push its way in, its got to manage to fit on a podium that is already straining with solid platinum medal candidates. So let us see if it is up to the task.

What Is The Pariah and Where does it Fit?

The story lore surrounding The Pariah is that he is the last of the male White Speakers and the reason why there are no more male ones. There are hints within this expansion that provide some insight into what he did and why this happened (The Story of the Tarnished Liver for example) but given how malicious, duplicitous, manipulative and misogynistic that The Pariah is on top of the overall unreliable narrator fables that survivors concoct we can't be sure that any of this is the real story beyond the mechanics that The Pariah demonstrates in this box.

What we do know for sure is, The Pariah is an outcast from the White Speakers who has taken up home in The Inverted Mountain, from there he will travel out, seeking fledgling settlements to feast upon. If caught he uses his pheromone/blood magic control to beguile and enchant them, latching on to the settlement like a parasite.

Once the Pariah has wormed his way into the settlement's hearts he pulls them away from the world threads of the White Speaker stories and instead of gifting them with the White Secrets that most survivors are blessed with, he instead drives them forward towards a more twisted future ending in the Dark Secret. Which I believe is three stories that may all be based on parts of The Pariah's life, they certainly seem to be telling stories that relate to him.

I don't think it is unfair to write that The Pariah is one of the most openly despicable, malicious and vile parts of Kingdom Death's world and having such a parasite latched onto your settlement is going to end up being as toxic as having a data centre located there (I guess Watchers are Kingdom Death's data centres in a way).

The Pariah's whole shtick is similar to the empath or telepath without real ethics, except unlike most others who tend to have this kind of power in fiction and struggle with the morality of their actions, he's just straight up happy to use it in the pursuit of doing a very similar trick to The Watchers (hey, there they are again!) He's very much into eating the secrets out of people's heads via devouring their brains, especially White Speakers.

Of course, given that survivors are deliberately kept in the dark by the various forces that stop their settlements from being able to properly pass on knowledge down the ages, and The Pariah is pretty close to evil in physical form, they have no idea what he's doing. Accepting his gifts, which include perverted knowledge, the ability to convert living people into mockeries of weapons used by other factions and “The Poisoned Chalice” which is something he's stolen from The Red Witches.

Showdowns against the Pariah are a form of unknowing resistance, where succeeding feeds the wretch and demonstrating that there is at least some value still to be had, while losing invites the Pariah to toy with the settlement's people over and over until either it grows bored with its actions or they gather up and resist its cruelty. The second showdown has an additional twist in that victory this time drives the Pariah out, while failure results in the monster inflicting a childish series of punishments until it is dealt with and driven away for good.

Even driving the Pariah out will not completely not sever its connection at this point, despite The Pariah taking away his gifts one final battle will have to be undertaken in order to drive The Pariah away for once and all. This takes place on the ceiling of a gigantic cave, where the Pariah's intense grip strength allows him to move around almost freely whereas the survivors are forced to use pitons and survival to avoid a long fall and a sudden stop.

As you can see, the Pariah is a very much like a Manhunter in that it is preying upon the settlement and a weak settlement which cannot drive the monster away will end up being victimized until they stand up to their oppressor. However the amount in which the monster is interlaced into the settlement is far greater with the use of Innovations, Patterns and Story Events.

So with this overview done, let us take a look at how this unfolds in more detail, beginning with all of those various timeline and settlement elements.

The Settlement Phase Elements

The Pariah is introduced in Lantern Year 3 with the event The Fiend. This is a rough event because it kills one survivor, inflicts a second with a new disorder called Codependent (it's not a very bad disorder overall) and then scarfs down two resources.

In exchange the settlement gains access to five patterns based on a Red Witch bow, the Lantern Halberd, White Speaker Knife, Thunder Hammer and Twilight Sword. These weapons are made out of organs and the bodies of other survivors, costing population to craft and I'll be honest here, these weapons are all differing degrees of weird and sort of bad-good. Many of them do a thing and then archive themselves, often they inflict bleeding tokens (Which isn't always bad thanks to cosplaying as a Crocodile) and it's hard to recommend most of them. But they are organ based weapons so that is a positive; the Knife Scab is a legitimate Fist & Tooth weapon, the Sword Scab is a one shot three wounds in a single blow weapon and the Halberd Scab is kind of solid also. There's stuff to play with here and I appreciate the weird designs they have even if ultimately it's hard to find even edge case situations where I'd use them. The thematics of the weapons is the strong point for me, demonstrating the corrupt nature of The Pariah's magic and its mocking disdain for others creatures in this world.

The innovations are also mixed in their benefits, Implanted Memories accelerates the settlement's Understanding growth, making it easy to hit Tinkers but White Secrets for max understanding are replaced with the Dark Secret table instead. Also Storytelling no longer brings White Speaker stories, it instead inflicts a gruesome fate on the visiting speaker and offers dark and twisted tales that I believe are fables or analogues to The Pariah's own history.

The Poisoned Chalice is the other gift that is given to the settlement, each of these three gifts was stolen from one of the three Red Witches from the Red Witches expansion and they reflect those three individuals. One of the gifts ahas additional consequences if you're also playing with The Red Witches, but I'm not going to elaborate further on that one here.

I'll get into the showdown details in its own section, the timeline of these two is in lantern years 4 and 16, roughly the same as The Butcher. But the consequences of failure here are as mentioned above, more akin to what the Manhunter does. Both the Settlement Event cards generated by failure are crippling punishments that ask you to weather an unreasonable amount of nonsense or rise up and push the bully out of your lives. If you're not able to beat the Pariah then the settlement is going to really get worn down and torn up by this petulant tick that has attached itself to them. That's something that makes The Pariah more challenging. You lose to The Butcher or King's Man and there's a bit of temporary pain, but you can rebuild in relative peace. The Pariah isn't going to let you do that, so if you can't ramp up to handle it quickly, your settlement will slowly bleed out over the years.

The third showdown is going to be the end of the Pariah's involvement with the settlement regardless of success or failure, it happens in Lantern Year 22 and it has a lot of unique elements to it, some of which are clear future proofing for integration into The Inverted Mountain because we don't currently have “Climbing Gear” outside of one Fighting Art in this box. Also losing this one is quite a punch due to the loss condition removing key home innovations entirely from the campaign so the stakes are high.

I'll be honest here, I kind of expected The Pariah to integrate itself into the game as a kind of second "core" monster with a location similar to The Tyrant's throne in People of the Stars or a lot of alternative Innovations like The Preacher expansion. The Pariah's Understanding changes are absolutely something that is different and the acceleration of Understanding Gains that The Pariah gifts to a settlement does mix things up a lot as well. Still it doesn't feel like The Pariah is much a part of the settlement and is instead an occasional visiting predator in the same way that the Manhunters arrive.

The Showdowns

The Pariah fights with a mixture of physical and mental angles that are different to both the other NN1 releases so far. One of its big tricks is “Somatic Empathy” which punishes survivors for wounding the monster, revealing the AI card removed as a wound and delivering punishment for it. This empathy reveal extends it punishment as far as any form of AI Scouting as well, trying to look into the Pariah's mind and see or manipulate his future actions brings harm to the survivor doing it.

Be very careful about bringing gear like the Wisdom Potion or Frogdoggles!

The Pariah's reactions are also a difficult to internalise quickly, this is due to him employing reactions like the sweeping kicks that cover different areas depending on his facing and/or where he is attacked from. It is possible to understand how he reacts with time, but it's more complicated than other monsters due to the collateral damage not being as symmetrical as it is elsewhere in the game. The White Lion reaction collateral damage is in the two wide corridor ahead of the kitty, that is not the cast here.

There's also some interesting mechanics here surrounding attribute tokens, they are not only used here as temporary issues but they can even be converted into permanent de-buffs with some Somatic Empathy results. However that's fine, just remember when learning a new nemesis monster never send someone you're not willing to lose! When you get experienced, you absolutely can break this rule though.

Overall the first two showdowns are complicated to operate but not to the point where I feel exhausted playing. That's a good spot, but it again points towards this Nemesis monster being one for more experienced players who've already run through The Butcher, The Manhunter, The Killenium Butcher and are confident with handling more complex showdowns without forgetting things like I do at times.

The Inverted Showdown is if I am honest, less than I hoped it would be, but it does still have some neat extra elements to it. Survivors are fighting from Piton terrain cards in the ceiling and are effectively swinging around from these to get closer to the Pariah and it does a good job of replicating that. We don't have a full picture of what this showdown is intended to be as the aforementioned Inverted Mountain equipment like “Climbing Gear” is not present (we do have a fighting art that gives the keyword, but that's almost impossible for Arc survivors to get). As such I'm not sure what else to cover except that this is another “burst the monster down” showdown with some extra dangerous consequences to being knocked down. Maybe I expected too much here; it's very difficult to change how a monster behaves without swapping out one or both of its decks, still there is at least in inbuilt partial swap that happens in the HL deck design.

We also have the fun upside down miniatures for both the Survivors and the Inverted Pariah, which is a neat touch and much kudos to that one chap who's recorded playing the Inverted showdown actually inverted. You're crazy in the best way possible.

It's also cute how the Hit Location deck changes where the Inverted cards are concerned, but I don't know, it's not as impressive as I would have liked. The changes to the monster are not that large simply because there's less space on a card when half of it is upside down. I'm also disappointed that the card back for the HL deck doesn't reflect that it can be inverted, I hoped for a vertically mirrored design on either all of the cards or just the inverted ones. Kingdom Death falls behind other Boss Battlers where utilising the backs of its cards is concerned and while it can't change the base design at this point, there is an opportunity to do neat tricks with specific monsters and/or cards but it didn't happen here. Which means until Team Death move onto a new game we're probably never getting the “signal” portion of boss design.

Without spoiling much more about the showdowns; I think they are an excellent design with a fresh new way of dealing punishment out to survivors that feels both scary and fair. Hard games are great when they put difficult situations in front of you and says “Pick your poison” rather than throwing a sucker punch that comes out of nowhere when you read the card front for the first time. This is one of those showdowns which has surprises that I've not mentioned here and they feel fair. Scary, but fair.

The Miniatures

The Miniatures are a spot where The Pariah feels a little off, we get six total miniatures in this box, two versions of the Pariah (normal and inverted) and four inverted survivors for use during the Inverted Showdown. The new survivor miniatures are clearly using gear that mostly hasn't been released so far, they're all excellent sculpts, but it's difficult to assess them much more than that because many of the elements of these miniatures are unknowns.

For me it is the Pariah miniatures that are a little bit of mixed bag, the normal Pariah is very close to the original resin miniature, it looks like it has been re-scultped or at least scanned and touched up, but it doesn't have the flair and character that has become KDM's signature miniature style. I do think the normal Pariah is very suited for a deceptive shapeshifter to look this thin and small and it's lacking in a sculpted base. All of this came together to create something that I did not enjoy painting which is very rare for KDM miniatures.

In contrast The Inverted Pariah miniature has all the hallmarks of the modern KDM designs, there is so much more flair, detail and character on display here. This made it an incredibly fun miniature to paint. Not only is The Pariah's full power on display here, but the miniature also has more life to it. I really like all of the inverted miniatures in this box, they're gorgeous. It is only the normal Pariah that leaves me a bit cold.

Other Bits and Pieces

We get a few new disorders, fighting arts, secret fighting arts and a monster knowledge. As always the new fighting arts are really interesting and exciting, but they are going to be rarely seen. At this point I genuinely want to see a new Starting Philosophy that's focused around letting survivors use the Fighting Art system in some manner because there are so many interesting new cards that essentially do not exist if you're an Arc Survivor player. The new Pariah knowledge is fortunately interesting in its own right, but the frustrating part is it has synergy with one of the new fighting arts.

The Secret Fighting Arts are still available for all types of survivors, with Sacred Code from the Black Knight Squire campaign making an appearance and the new Secret Fighting Art of Quadradept being unique, powerful and exciting.

The new monster knowledge comes at CC 9 and it is a very interesting one that revolves around tokens, meaning that it has synergy with Philosophies that use tokens like Lanternism and Gourmandism or gear that utilises bleed tokens such as Crimson Armor.

Final Thoughts

For players who have exhausted the depths of both The Butcher/Killenium Butcher plus the Manhunter and are looking for a more complicated and modern nemesis monster there is a lot to like here. This monster's design is excellent across the board and the raw visceral distaste that you feel for Mr. Basement Dweller McGaslighter is an exceptional piece of showing not telling as like most expansions there is limited exposition writing and a heavy lean on mechanics to support the story and bring across the feel of this creature. The Pariah is one of the most despicable monsters we've had in the game to date, it's up there with The Manhunters and Spidicules in the club of things you love to hate and that's an impressive piece of design work. At no point does The Pariah feel like a retread of things that any Nemesis monster has done before, it's fresh and new.

The main point against The Pariah is simply that this is the most expensive option for the monster slot that has the most competition. Every single Nemesis Node 1 monster is an incredible design in their own right, you don't need to replace the Butcher any time soon, I've had 10 years with the slasher and I'm still not close to tired with the showdown. Same with the Manhunter, which is another one of the standout older designs and is a lot cheaper than this release. There are extra benefits for the Pariah, it has a monster knowledge and patterns, but a lot of the increased price here is because we have two miniatures for the same monster.

Beyond that we also have the currently incomplete picture of The Pariah being a part of “The Inverted Mountain” campaign, there's not a lot of hanging threads to connect it in outside of the climbing gear and connection to the Red Witches, but it's also possible that The Inverted Mountain will have more interlacing elements beyond what we just see here so as always with these releases I may have to revisit and re-review everything once that campaign has come out. We can see that The Pariah certainly doesn't help with the Frogdog copper issue, but as a nemesis monster it was very unlikely to be able to do unless it dropped copper like the Butcher drops scrap. That's not really thematic for the Pariah so it is not an issue.

Ultimately I think this is at the moment the second or third priority purchase for a Nemesis Node 1 monster. The Manhunter is excellent at a far lower price though it is not in stock at the time of writing this review and the Killenium Butcher comes with some of the best overall design in the entire game's history. On top of that, with how good the Butcher is I'd also recommend holding back on this one until after you've bought some of the other Nemesis Node monsters, the Nemesis Node 3 monster known as The Black Knight has pretty much become a staple in my games so that's the first port of call because he replaces The Hand. Likewise The Slender Man or the Red Witches do a lot to improve the Nemesis Node 2. So I'd put The Pariah at third place behind picking up The Black Knight and Red Witches at a minimum, or at least getting all three of those at the same time.

The price point is one the only real negative I can find about this one, if you like the design of the Pariah, if the upside down showdown calls to you or you want this one to use with The Red Witches then it's an easy recommendation. Especially with that last one, but I'll expand more on that when I review The Red Witches.

So yeah, good monster but all of the alternative options for this Node are also among the best designed monsters in the game and as such if I'm on a budget I'd focus on improving options for Nemesis Node 2 and 3 or more early game quarry monsters. If you have no budget limitations though, get him, you'll love to hate this chud gaslighter.

Recommended if you already have the other two options and want more.

The Pariah is available here: https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/products/pariah-expansion

Note: At time of writing this review the Manhunter seems to be out of stock, never buy KDM stuff from second parties at a markup, it is never worth supporting that behaviour. If you are choosing between The Killenium Butcher or The Pariah I would lean on picking up The Pariah first unless you intend to use the excellent Butcher Vignette to teach the game to others.