Death Knell

"Claim the dead and stack the caskets. Save these sots from the maggots."

Creaking corpse carts called death knells follow behind the cursed hordes of the grymkin. The impish coachman rings its somber bell as a warning to all who would dare disrespect the dead, and its toll can be felt as a chill down to the marrow. The bodies stacked high on the cart contain power of an old and dark sort. These corpses fuel the nightmares and horrors of the grymkin while bolstering their ability to shrug off wounds that would fell mortal folk. Template:TOCbox

Basic Info

Abilities

• Template:Cavalry
• Template:Construct
• Template:Pathfinder
• Template:Bring Out Your Dead!
• Template:Death Feast
• Template:Entropic Force
• Template:Finisher
• Template:Never Ending Pile
• Template:Special Delivery
• Template:Warmth of the Grave

Weapons

• Death Knell - 2" reach, P+S 10 melee weapon
  • Template:Magical Damage
• Mount - 0.5" reach, POW 10 mount attack
  • Template:Magical Damage

Theme Forces

• Template:Bump in the Night
• Template:Dark Menagerie. In this theme, this model gains +1 corpse token at the start of the game.

Thoughts on Death Knell

Death Knell in a nutshell

The Death Knell is a support battle engine that forms the backbone of any Grymkin brick list. It essentially has no offensive output, and you need to maximise its support abilities to get your "points worth".

It allows corpse tokens to move fluidly around the Grymkin army, from models that generate them (enemies, disposable allies) to models that need them (the grymkin beasts). It can be thought of as roughly analogous to the Krielstone Bearer & Stone Scribes.

Competitive Viability
As of August 2018, the Death Knell is considered extremely viable. Grymkin have good heavies, which become extremely good when you can control how they receive corpses. Patrick Dunford showed this off at Lock N Load 2018 to great effect, making sure that his defensive brick of heavies had corpses before his opponent was able to engage.

Oct '21 Update discussion

Some spicy cart changes! Cost reduction & increased CMD are really nice bonuses that make it much easier to play with the Death Knell. However the real meat is the addition of Never Ending Pile. Always having a corpse is a huge deal for the Death Knell, and by extension any of Grymkin's several models that care about having corpses. It means that +2 ARM aura is always present when you need it, and the cart can usually hand out a couple of corpses to Skin & Moans before the real engagement begins. Critically it also makes the DK no longer a dead model when playing into near pure Construct lists, such as Convergence or Exalted. Reliably having +2 ARM is going to have profound effects for Grymkin's tankier models, such as Piggybacks.

Theme Force thoughts

The Death Knell is available to both Grymkin theme forces, and on a cursory glance it may appear to be more useful in Bump where friendly corpses are more abundant. However the Death Knell is almost always useless in the Bump theme, due to:

1. Grymkin infantry are not resiliant. Buffing a terrible ARM stat to a mediocre ARM stat is not investing your points well.
   • Dread Rots go up to ARM 16, Hollowmen and Murder Crows to ARM 14.
   • There is one thing these numbers have in common - they are not critical "break points" in armor that dramatically change your survival rate.
2. The Death Knell prefers to support beasts, and there aren't that many in the infantry-centric Bump theme.
3. Three Grymkin infantry types have RFP effects that will deny corpses to the Death Knell, making offensive corpse collection surprisingly difficult.
4. The Knell does not begin the game with a corpse in Bump, this opens you up to all kinds of counterplay that a Death Knell in Dark Menagerie simply does not have to face.
   • Opponents can target models outside of corpse collection range first, and use clever use of RFP and non attacks such as Electro leap to deny corpses to the cart for as long as possible.

The Knell however does carve out a small niche for itself in one specific Bump build: Piggybacks. Some players have had good success with Knell + Piggybacks + The Heretic, but most players do not consider Piggybacks to be a very compelling option.

Combos & Synergies

• It synergises very strongly with the Cage Rager as it pushes their armor exceptionally high from the beginning of the match. They allow them to upkeep spells and threaten arcane vortex consistently. Make sure to be giving your cage ragers corpses in any match up where your opponent has key spells.
• The other strong synergy it has is the Skin & Moans. It allows it to have the best heavy beast statline in the game once fully loaded. Mat 7, P+S 19, DEF 13, ARM 21 is truly nuts. The Death Knell is the thing that makes this happen, shifting corpses to the Skin & Moans before they see combat. They thing support them by allowing them abuse Death Feast to heal a lot of damage. A Skin & Moans can activate, heal 3d3 (using all its corpses), then kill up to 6 models (7 with Child's Trump) and heal that many times, before the Knell refills its corpses back to 3. It turns a very efficient beast into a true monster.
• Grymkin has a few genuinely awful caster statlines - Notably three of the casters in faction are Arm 14, Heretic for his extra defensive buffs is only 15/15, and both Child and Old Witch have good armor but low defense. The Death Knell assists every single caster to become either respectable, or actually pretty good defensively.
• Almost every Grymkin beast has a generally good statline to stellar statline under the aura. Theres only a single beast that feels like its armor is only brought up "to where it should be" because of the existence of the aura which is the Frightmare.

Drawbacks & Downsides

• It has no offensive output. You may, on rare occasion make a decent impact attack or put some damage into something with its Finisher charge but it will never do much.
• 120mm bases are unwieldy and awkward at the best of times to position
• It fights for that "center of the board" position with Old Witch 3
• It can always be seen through clouds and over forests, as well as over your own models. This means its always going to be a charge target, always going to be a target for enemy guns. It's also got a big target on its back as its a key model.
• Without the Dark Menagerie theme list, it will be hard to have the ARM buff active for the initial engagement with the enemy.

Tricks & Tips

• Its mount is magic, don't forget about it against incorporeal solos who are trying to slow down scenario.
• Warmth of the Grave (the armor buff) is not a spell - blessed models cannot ignore it!
• Giving out corpses is "At any time during this models activation" meaning it can hand out corpses to a Grymkin heavy within 5" and then run into its new position
• Like the Skin & Moans it has Death Feast. If you are going to kill multiple enemy models in its collection range you can potentially just heal up to 5d3 and then collect those corpses to fill back up. Makes it hard to chip the Knell down as an opponent.
• Due to its large base, it has a surprisingly large aura when at max corpses. Leaving it full lets you spread out quite a lot.
• He has a decently sized bubble of anti-healing aura, which in addition to cancelling tough can foil things like Imperatus's revival, the ability of the Harbinger and Makeda to save warrior models, or Rapid Healing on everblight models. It also makes Self Sacrifice on Exemplar Errants unuseable because it just means two models die instead of one.

Other

Trivia

• Released with the Faction release (2017.06)
• The cart, along with the Bring out your dead! rule's name is a reference to Monty Python and The Holy Grail's famous scene.