The Inventor
Previewing How Kehli Has Changed in The Betrayer's War
Ousted from both the Smith’s Guild and the Alchemist’s League, Kehli Deepfire has been hard at work crafting her life’s masterpiece: her own heroic story. Setbacks aside, Kehli always knew that she was destined for greatness, and she’s not about to let a little thing like devastating war or “the Fourth Darkness” slow her down. With her hammer, crossbow, and endless ingenuity, Kehli is ready to defend both her homelands and build a better future for all.
In The Betrayer’s War, the second Act of Descent: Legends of the Dark, Kehli leaps into the fray with an expanded arsenal of tools and traps to support her allies and pressure her enemies. With new abilities that let her place mechanical contraptions around the map, Kehli can make her presence known anytime, anywhere.
Eternally optimistic and equally resourceful, Kehli steps into Act 2 with raised stats and a whole stack of new tricks. Her Autonomous Trap ability lets her nail an enemy with two statuses of her choice and hints at the greatest new feature in her kit: contraptions. Contraptions are special pieces of terrain that only Kehli can place on the map, and they provide various effects depending on what skills and abilities she uses. For example, the aforementioned Autonomous Trap ability on her character card allows her to inflict statuses on an enemy near her contraption instead of near a hero, and one of her surge abilities increases the number of successes she gets if she’s adjacent to her marvelous invention.
As for how Kehli gets her contraptions on the map, each of her new 2 XP and 3 XP skills have an ability on one side that gets her started. These skills are Nuts and Bolts , Spit and Baling Wire , and A Hope and a Prayer . You’ll notice that the abilities on these three skills all say to “stack” a contraption; this is because Kehli can only have one contraption fielded at a time. If she would place another, she instead stacks it on top of the one that’s already in play, giving that contraption some added sustainability, since flipping to these skills causes her to remove one of the contraptions from the stack.
As for what the contraptions actually do, the flip sides of Kehli’s new skills help with that. Nuts and Bolts flips to Shield Construct , which grants itself three prepare tokens and makes the contraption bolster nearby heroes’ defense. Meanwhile, Spit and Baling Wire flips to Fire-Thrower Sentry , which makes the contraption provide a similar boost to heroes’ attacks. Using prepare and focus tokens as “fuel” for the contraption provides Kehli with some excellent utility, especially when she combines it with her Strip it for Parts skill. If three tokens isn’t enough, Kehli can use Stroke of Genius to grant her contraption some additional uses from the get-go, or utilize the Experimentation ability on the flip side of her hero card to “refuel” one or more of her skills all at once.
Kehli’s contraptions already give her plenty to work with, but she wouldn’t be much of an inventor if those were the only new gear she brings to the table. Her new Kickback Crossbow gives her mobility a boost and allows her to manipulate the enemy’s positioning, while her powerful Thinking Hammer can allow her to prepare one of her contraption-stacking skills in a pinch. Her Ever-Eager legend increases her speed and upgrades any consumables she obtains during a quest, while its counterpart Ever-Keen lets her bring more consumables to the quest in the first place. You may have noticed that many of Kehli’s new skills have low fatigue values, but her Guild-Hammer and Guild-Anvil legends help mitigate that by either giving her more fatigue to work with or removing it from her cards quicker. Just remember: once you gain a legend, its other side is locked out for the rest of the campaign, so be sure to choose which form of Kehli’s wild ingenuity you want to cultivate the most!
Legends Only Grow
Kehli’s bombastic creations and clever use of weird contraptions has only expanded since Descent’s first Act, and she shows no signs of slowing down now. Look forward to seeing what this inventor cooks up when The Betrayer’s War arrives in August!
