The Kirin began its existence nearly as soon as I saw the incredibly majestic sculpt set to release in a couple of months. After a brainstorming session on the Discord channel, we had a radically game-altering version that I posted shortly after the first batch of Yokai in this thread. The main goal was to emulate the actual Kirin legends, which often specified that the creature was the pure embodiment of peace and an omen of luck and longevity. This feels perfect as a representation of Jandar, the default "good guy" of HeroScape, in the same way that the previous Yokai have really embodied distinct aspects of their generals.
That's a large part of why the Kirin has the ability to boost defense dice--much of Jandar's theme is around defense, from his blue color scheme to a castle set bearing his flag to Raelin and the Sentinels of Jandar, it feels natural for his Yokai to also play around with defending the other Yokai somehow. However, since the Kirin prefers to promote peace above all else, it will only protect the Yokai who aren't actively fighting--it's impossible for Masha to activate his terror and be protected by the Kirin, for example. This adds another interesting wrinkle to Abe no Seimei's ability to move revealed Order Markers, making the choice of where to put them even more interesting and difficult.
As the rest of the faction developed though, a pressing issue quickly became apparent: the Yokai couldn't actually kill anything. Ibaraki-doji was more or less created exactly to address this, giving the Yokai their own Krug to go out and clean up house, but given that his sculpt isn't as cheap and plentiful as the other Yokai, it makes sense to create an alternative main attacker. Nure Onna was originally this, but she's been redesigned partly in conjunction with the creation of the
Kirin's Judgment Special Attack, which
@
Captain Stupendous
had the great idea for. Since the Kirin is known for punishing the wicked, a two-space nuke that
only affects figures with revealed Order Markers on their card makes perfect sense thematically, and it's also a very potent multi-targeting ability when paired with Seimei's Shapeshift and Kincho's trickery.
This more or less poses the Kirin as a great counter to bread and butter squads--generally anything that has the basic principle of "put all of your OMs on me" is going to fear the Kirin to a large degree, since they get none of the protections and all of its fury. Sorry, 4th Mass, but you kind of had this one coming.
Interestingly, when paired with Masha, this can make the Yokai pretty good counters against squads, but with a notable weakness against heroes. That's a bit backwards for a hero-based army, but then again, a lot of the Yokai are backwards (their sense of bluffing often comes from placement rather than OMs).
Overall, the early tests have been showing that the Kirin is a very promising addition to the faction, and I'm looking forward to tweaking its stats and mechanics even further to keep polishing it.
