The Hundred Kingdoms can make some pretty solid characters; I talk a bit about kitting out the Noble Lord as a combat character in this article, and building Chapter Mage’s or Theist Priests as magical murder machines is always a good time… but I would say they don’t hold a candle to the brutality of a fully upgraded Nord character.
While there is more than one character to kit out this way, today I want to talk about the Konungyr. While the Blooded captures a lot of hearts with his strong and monstrous warband options in addition to his ability to murder, the Konungyr stuck out to me personally and we’re going to explore a potential build with this brutal combatant.
The Konungyr’s base profile already goes a long way, though has some clear weaknesses we can easily address.
The Konungyr is a medium infantry character for 100 base points. The main things of note on his profile are his good Clash stat at 4, his great Resolve of 4, his middling defensive stats, and of course
that huge Attacks stat of 6. This combined with Throwing Weapons means on the charge he’ll put out an enormous number of attacks… which we’re going to bump up a little bit. The main, glaring thing missing from his stat block is any Cleave… thankfully we’ve got options for that too. Shoring up his defensive stats will also go a long way.
His Supremacy Ability, Living Legend, is a lot of fun to work with, giving him the option to purchase an additional Trove-Find, as well as giving your army Terrifying 1 during turns in which they charge. This is just a flat increase in output in most cases, though useless against armies like Old Dominion.
I’m kitting my Konungyr out to be both a brutal blender of death and an effective duelist that will hopefully survive at least one duel in any given game.
Firstly, we take him straight to a Tier 3 combat retinue. This is 50 points total, and will give him +1 wound, +1 Attack, +1 Clash, and Cleave 1. We’re now up to a perfectly respectable 5 wounds, a brutal 7 attacks, Clash 5, and have added a Cleave which is a nice bump to output.
The next choice is the 20 point Dragon Aspect, which increases his Clash by 1. Bear Aspect is also a cheaper option that would give +1 Attack, but… we’re building with a purpose here that we’ll get to in a second.
As my Warlord, the Konungyr can take two Trove-Finds. Firstly I’m going to pick an Armor for him called Ty Jokull, the Rimeheart. This is the first part of fixing his poor defense, giving him +2 defense while he has no wounded markers on him at all. Bumping up to D4 is a great jump, but isn’t the end of that. This upgrade is only 10 points.
The real work horse of this build, coming in at a whopping 40 points, is the weapon: Vinda, the Dancer.
Vinda is going to artificially crank up the number of attacks by letting him roll an additional attack for every 2 hits he successfully makes when Clashing or Dueling.
What we have now is a Clash 6 character with 7 base attacks. Adding the Fury 1 draw event from Blood of the Einherjar, there’s a solid chance he’s coming in attacking 8 times. Clash 6 means he is hitting on 5’s, re-rolling 6s, and has Relentless Blows, causing every 1 to cause 2 hits instead of 1. Out of 8 attacks, rerolling 6’s, there’s a decent chance you end up with two 1’s in your roll and no misses, meaning he’ll generally hit about 9-10 times. Rounding up with Vinda, this means he’ll typically get to roll an additional five hits, and with a 1 being reasonably likely in there, you’re on pretty decent odds to end up with about 15-16 hits from this guy, all at Cleave 1, with Terrifying 1 if his regiment charged that turn.
For fun, I also threw the Headhunter mastery on him so that 1s cause THREE hits instead of 1 during duels, because… let’s be real, I just had to.
The Regiment I’ve put him on here is the Huskarls, which have a Thegn upgrade. This gives characters in the regiment +1 defense during Duels, getting him to a very respectable Defense 5 during a duel as long as he has no wounds on him yet. This means he’s on pretty good odds to survive against all but the killiest characters, and will absolutely murder most any character he is put into.
All of this makes an incredibly high-output character at an admittedly quite expensive 240 points. He’ll be a hell of a target, and turns his regiment of Huskarls into a real target for an enemy army, but if you can deliver him he’ll absolutely rip through anything he reaches. There are a lot of ways to build out this character, and I’ll talk more about his warbands in a future article, but this is a fun showcase of the kind of nonsense you can see out of a Nords character with some investment.
If you’d like to pitch up a Konungyr and start doing some serious blending, or pick up any other Conquest goodies, make sure to hit up their webstore using the linked image below and use the code LOS10 at checkout to get 10% off your order! Thanks for reading, see you next time!
