dboeren

Yes, they are both beasts (see my Marcus thread for a full list of new beasts). I hadn't thought of doing that one yet but it's legal and may help you get your "no ranged attacks" trigger off.

Kirai used to work at the Qi and Gong. It seems to be a fairly well known location.

Lord Chompy's Parade of Nightmares (and Daydreams) Daydream 2ss. Can turn into a Nightmare, also his Totem. Alp 3ss. Makes stuff Slow and has other annoyance effects. Coppelius 9ss. Eats your eyeballs and scares people. His killer takes 4 wounds. Insidious Madness 4ss. Weird looking, does Wp duel stuff. He's a Woe, and Pandora's new best friend. Lelu 7ss. Male Nephalim, decent fighter but needs his girlfriend. Lilitu 7xx. Female Nephalim, more controlly, needs Lelu. They're an S&M pair. Stitched Together 5ss. It's Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Chrismas. He's tough, buries models, summons fog, and likes to gamble.

I'm less familiar with the others, but I'll see what I can do. One thing you should understand about Kirai is her interactions with Seishin: 1. If a spirit dies near her, you get a free Seishin 2. If a Seishin is b2b with her, you can redirect an attack to it 3. Seisin usually get sacrificed, but Seishin Beacon can override this, meaning that if they die they get replaced for free You'll want to have a few, and keep them around her I think. After waffling over it for a couple days, I ended up with the box, pack of Gakis, pack of Seishin, pack of Onryo. That gives me 2 Gakis, 3 Seishin, and 4 Onryo. I may add another pack of Gakis and Seishin later but I think Onryo will be good combat models for 5ss. Once the models are available I'll get Shikome and a Night Terror I'm sure, maybe others. I need to make a complete list of Spirits like I did Beasts for Marcus.

This is all theoretical since I haven't gotten to play with any of them yet: Guild Hounds are useful if you like to play alpha strike Marcus where you Companion a ton of stuff. If you're currently packing several Silurids, consider these. Not only can they packtivate together, they have Companion (Master) as well. Night Terrors sound like something you'll want one of, but maybe not more. He protects from shooting in a fair radius and I'm thinking one will generally do the job fine. It's only temporary until you get into melee anyway... Raptors can put Beast on a model, and of course Marcus likes that. I figure a pack of these to be a no brainer for Marcus fans. I don't like the idea of the Lawyer or Undead, they don't seem to make sense to me thematically. But, the Rogue Necromancy is a tough customer, sort of a pumped up Cerberus. He's got a solid ranged attack and seems like a good option to me. I just would rather get some greenstuff and patch over his undead looks to fit better with the theme is all. I play Marcus and I just picked up Kirai. So, I *will* be getting some Shikome. Might as well use them, right? Fortunately, she's also a natural choice with Marcus. She's got a zero action Hunting Partner that allows a nearby friendly beast to share her declared Prey. They can't attack anything else, but they gain Fast and a positive flip to both attack and damage. As a ZERO action. Yeah, she'll be popular with him no doubt about it.

Boy, kind of light on the spoilers in here. You've seen Kirai's card, so I don't need to cover that. Ikiryo is Kirai's own spirit. It's HER, just her spirit has manifested separately from her body. Can't buy it in your list, only summon it with the Summon Ikiryo spell. She's pretty nasty in melee but short on wounds. It also heals Kirai which is handy since she hurts herself a lot. Lost Love is Kirai's totem, it's her dead boyfriend. He can heal Spirits and potentially grant Spirit to a non-Master model. Datsue-Ba looks pretty unpleasant, and can mess with your opponent in a variety of ways as well as potentially summon more Spirits. Gakis are cheap melee spirits, they can eat models like Hoarcats do and aren't too bad to summon. They also heal when they kill a model or eat a corpse. Onryo are your main beatsticks I think. Good fighters, decent wounds, and a ranged attack too. Seishin are cheap and drop easily but you will generate more so no big deal. They can buff other spirits but don't fight themselves. Shikome are nasty geisha-harpies that run something down and kill it, think of the Prey ability in Warmachine. I would advise a starting Kirai player to pick up the box, a blister of Gakis, and a blister of Seishin. Optionally, you may also want another blister of Gakis, Seishin, or Onryo. Datsue-Ba and Ikiryo are both unique so don't get extras of them. Best thing would be to play some sample games and see how many of each thing you need. I have not gotten to play her yet, I'm mainly passing on the advice I got from the Henchman I spoke with at their booth.

Here are some tidbits on all the new Beasts in the new book... Guild Hound 3ss. Melee beast, works best in packs. Interested in tokens. Lawyer, Secretary's Aide 7ss. Odd that he's a beast, but he's mainly a disruption model. Night Terror 3ss. Vampire bat spirit, helps shut down shooting. Shikome 8ss. Geisha-harpy. Aggressive hunter beast, looks nasty. Rogue Necromancy 10ss. Undead chimera. Malifaux Raptor 2ss. Grant the Beast characteristic to stuff and change w/out LoS. That's it I think. All Pigs continue to be non-Beasts. There's also a non-Beast "Malifaux Rat" in there.

Yeah, I'll be picking up the book at Gencon so I'll see her then. Just didn't know if they were planning on posting any more spoilers before the con or not.

So, two new Masters have had their stat cards posted so far. I'm not sure if you're waiting on us for anything, but on behalf of the community it's OK if you want to go ahead and post Kirai now. Just saying...

"Kirai found herself with little to live for after a tragic event, and no way to exact revenge...until she found in herself the ability to summon forth her Ikiryo, her living spirit, able to track down any enemy. With her powers developed with the help of Nicodem, she has discovered her profound connection and powers over the spirits that exist in Malifaux. She can give her life energy to call them to her, but in turn they also protect her and she can bend them to her will." It sounds like the Ikiryo may be her totem? Really looking forward to picking her up at Gencon.

It's always worth going, but at this late date you may have trouble getting into a lot of the events as they may be sold out.

Thanks for the recommendations. I need to go check out the different Hanged sculpts I guess It may be possible to snip the body off one of them and replace it with a more Japanese looking one. Edit: I just had a thought... what is her totem going to look like?!?! Prediction: Frigging Awesome

Thanks to you and Angus Khan, that helps a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing what other Japanese themed models might be available in the future. I also need to recheck my book and see which current models are classified as Spirits. It's precisely because I *DO* think that samurai fit her theme that I really want to be able to field them with her. But, the blister has one samurai and two punks. It's a mixed bag thematically and I can't justify the price for one model if I won't use the other two. A biker with a mohawk is not really a samurai by theme, even if he is holding two katanas. I will likely go ahead with my plan to contact other local Res players and offer to buy spare samurai figs or split a pack with players who want to pick some up. At least your posts confirm that they probably don't work well enough that you'd want a lot of them, so picking up 1-2 as separates ought to be plenty for any list I might field. This one minor glitch aside, I'm very happy with her box and looking forward to starting my new force.

Awesome news! Sounds like she's going to be a lot of fun to use and suitably mind-bending to make her challenging to play. Can one of you guys tell me whether, in your opinion of course, you would want to run samurai punk zombies with her? Or does she have better options with her own stuff like maybe the Gakis? I'm currently having trouble with the fact that only one of the zombies actually looks anything like a samurai and if she wouldn't want to use them anyway then I can stop worrying about it. For instance, maybe she grants bonuses only to Spirit models - that would probably do it.

I'll be there. Most of my time will be spent running Learn to Play events for Spartan Games but I'm planning to stop by the booth and pick up the new stuff. I *might* even be able to make one of the Malifaux events but I'm not sure yet...