Creative Work: Kortar

by Lucas Thompson, Ambassador

3rd December 2018

I suspect that I usually help contribute to the nightmares of the Creative Team. After all, I regularly contribute to cards like Arresting Display - dilemmas with strange requirements and abstract effects that the Creative Team is then saddled with the task of finding a story that somehow merges all those elements into one cohesive story. It's hard, and I don't make it easy!

Usually anyways. For some reason, Kortar's an exception. I've been watching with alarm as deck sizes in Second Edition, even in solvers, have ballooned. I remember fondly the days of 35-40 card solvers duking it out and, while I'm happy that bigger decks are viable now, I've wished for an environment where I don't feel like my 40 card solver would just be better off adding 10 more personnel to deal with the losses it is sure to sustain.

When we were going through currently effective Klingon archetypes, I voiced this concern to Charlie, and he came back to me with the ability text on Kortar. I loved it! Keeping the text on a personnel rather than an event or interrupt increasing the density of effects in a tight deck, and the text feels Klingon. The Klingons don't have the kind of discard pile access that the Bajorans do, but they revere the past (represented mechanically in-game as the discard pile) and do have windows of access.

Because I was happy with the ability text, and also because it was so abstract, I was particularly motivated to find it a home on a personnel. Fortunately, there's this Voyager episode (one of the two Ronald D. Moore worked on before leaving Voyager) called Barge of the Dead. In this episode (which isn't generally a fan favorite, but I really liked it), Torres meets Kortar, Slayer of Gods, who pilots the barge of the dead, bringing Klingons to Gre'thor.

Who better to literally bring Klingons back from the afterlife than the rare mythological character that our heroes met on the show, one whose specific task was related to the afterlife? As a side benefit, since the episode leaves it murky as to whether or not he was real, he gets that shiny Alternate Universe icon in an expansion that focuses on mirror universe Klingons (among other affiliations). I hope you guys are as happy with this card as I am.

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