Challenge Run / Kingdom of Loathing

Kingdom of Loathing offers various modes that impose special rules onto the player. All are optional, and make things harder, but offer special rewards (and extra content in the case of Bad Moon and many Challenge Paths) if you follow them through to the end.

Game modes actually present in-game:

• "Hardcore" is the game's own Hard mode. It has all the limitations of the Ronin phase,^note When you start a "normal" run, the game prevents you from interacting with other players in many ways (like receiving buffs or earning money from selling items at the Mall); this phase lasts for 30 days, until you've played 1,000 turns, or until you defeat the Naughty Sorceress. but extends them for the entire run. Additionally, it forbids you from using items, money, and skills from earlier ascensions; you can circumvent the last one by paying more karma to make those skill "Hardcore permanent". Being a "lifestyle" and not a "path", it can be activated in addition to all the modes described below.
• The dietary "paths" put restrictions to what items you can use. "Teetotaler" forbids alcohol, "Boozetafarian" forbids foods and non-alcoholic drinks, and "Oxygetarian" forbids all three.
• "Bad Moon" is a special "moon sign" that essentially acts as a special game mode - and it's the only one that requires an "unlock" method: you can access it only if you never used any ten-leaf clovers in your previous run, which must also be a Hardcore run. Not only it's automatically set on Hardcore, but it actively suppresses many effects that normally carry between runs, to create a "level playing field". Since it's a "moon sign", it replaces all the bonuses normally given from other signs; and it has the effect of randomly subjecting you to "unlucky" adventures, which give you small bonuses and big disadvantages.
  • On top of that, there's "Kittycore": a Bad Moon run only using the black cat familiar. During this run you are not allowed to use ANY familiar other than the black cat, which does such things as preventing you from picking up items after a battle, preventing you from using combat items or skills, and reducing the experience you gain from winning a fight. Beginning any fight without the black cat even ONCE before stepping through the gash at the end of the game and ascending will void the "Kittycore" run. Completing this run will permanently unlock Bad Moon, eliminating the requirement of a clover-less run.
• Special challenge paths were introduced in the summer of 2011, with new ones coming out every three months (although some of them are actually easier than regular). They are as follows—
  • Bees Hate You: The letter "b" is now your enemy. You take damage for every B in the names of your equipment, enemies become stronger for each B in their names, you can't use non-quest items with B in their names (and the quest ones hurt you), and bees randomly attack you.
  • Way of the Surprising Fist: You become a Bare-Fisted Monk. You can learn impressive skills, but you can't equip weapons or off-hand items at all, and you have a vow of poverty which slashes how much Meat you earn and cuts off non-combat Meat gains.
  • Trendy: Any limited-time content that's more than a year old is unusable. Every challenge path onward includes this as part of its restrictions while it's the newest challenge path.
  • Avatar of Boris: You become a special class with its own skill tree. Mighty Boris can feast all day long and is aided by the versatile Clancy, but he Can't Hold His Liquor and will not even contemplate using any weapon but his trusty axe, Trusty.
  • Bugbear Invasion: Bugbears invade the kingdom, radically shaking up the quest structure and completely changing the end-game.
  • Zombie Slayer: You become a special class with its own skill tree. The name's misleading, though - you are a zombie. All you can eat is brains, you can't consume as much booze as usual, and you can summon hordes of the undead to aid you (while at the same time being limited to "undead" familiars such as the Hovering Sombrero or the Spooky Pirate Skeleton).
  • Class Act: Skills that your class doesn't learn naturally are unusable.
  • Avatar of Jarlsberg: You become a special class with its own skill tree. Jarlsberg, the Great and Powerful, knows incredibly potent magic, but his rampant fear of germs prevents him from eating or drinking anything he doesn't make himself in his Cosmic Kitchen, and he won't contemplate attacking physically.
  • BIG!: You start the game at Level 15 (in a game where you're encouraged to fight the Final Boss at level 13). However, the enemies are tougher, too...
  • KOLHS: Your character is reincarnated as a teenager. They're forced to spend the first 40 adventures of the day in a specific zone, the Kingdom of Loathing High School, where all the monsters scale to your stats, and the school rules forbid hats and familiars over ten pounds. Fortunately, you can ingratiate yourself with one of three cliques depending on the skills you use. And after school, you can craft items from ingredients found while adventuring at the school, go on a photography side-quest for the Yearbook Club, or get some buffs.
  • Class Act 2: You start out with all and only skills from your chosen class, and are rewarded more for beating monsters and less for choice adventures.
  • Avatar of Sneaky Pete: You become a special class with its own skill tree. You are imbued with the legendary coolness of Sneaky Pete. Your sidekick is a talking motorcycle and you can drink booze like a fish. An audience is watching your every move and you need to manipulate the crowd to love or hate you to your advantage. As a downside, you are a very light eater.
  • Slow and Steady: Every day, you have exactly 100 Adventures to work with. No more, no less.
  • Heavy Rains: A massive flood makes monsters tougher to fight and sometimes washes away item drops based on the water level, wandering water-based monsters attack you periodically, and almost all bosses are also replaced by a water-based counterpart that are harder to defeat. However, at very deep waters you get the opportunity to learn new skills that let you harness the power of the storm.
  • Picky: You are limited to only 11 skills and 3 familiars. While it's actually not a challenge whatsoever to newer players as they may not even have 11 skills to pick from, it's crippling to seasoned players who've amassed hundreds of skills that they've come to take for granted. Imagine if you all of a sudden had to use a piece of charcoal and a rock slab to write your essay instead of a computer.
  • Actually Ed the Undying: You control Ed the Undying, the mummified ancient pharaoh final boss of the Level 11 MacGuffin Quest. He is armed with a slew of new spells, curses (one of which involves actual swearing), and assistants, but what makes him truly unique is his uncanny ability to indefinitely resurrect himself as many times as he wishes. Furious with the jackass adventurer who stole his MacGuffin (read: you, as in your player character), he sets out on a journey to reclaim his beloved artifact. He initially is quite weak for new players, as he understandably lacks a stomach or liver due to the mummifying process and instead relies on spleen to generate the majority of his adventures; however, Ed possesses a kind of Magikarp Power in that he becomes an unstoppable machine once the player manages to upgrade Ed's frail body.
  • One Random Crazy Summer: Monsters now get adjective(s) that modify their difficulty and drops.
  • Community Service: As a bit of a Take That! to players who wanted the game to take less real-life time, all the normal Council quests (including the Naughty Sorceress herself) are gone, replaced with eleven Community Service tasks, each of which takes one click (but up to 60 adventures) to finish.
  • Avatar of West of Loathing: An early self-plug for Asymmetric's game West of Loathing, which wouldn't actually be released for more than a year after this path was current. You play one of the three classes in West of Loathing (Cow Puncher, Beanslinger, or Snake Oiler) and play through the game using skills unique to each class. In addition, you fight three tiers of three types of monsters (cows, rodeo clowns, and snakes) that provide the most benefit to their respective class.
  • The Source: After taking the red pill (because the blue pill is just a jellybean), the player plays through the game as normal, except stat gains from edible items are gone and monsters provide less stat points on defeat, and on occasion, digital rain will appear, warning of the appearance of a Source Agent, a powerful enemy that can only be fought with path-exclusive skills taught by not giving the Oracle spoons you can find in various locations and using the phone in Spookyraven Manor. The final boss replaces the Naughty Sorceress with One Thousand Source Agents.
  • Nuclear Autumn: You've become a nuclear mutant incapable of using any consumable item greater than size one, your stomach and spleen are reduced to a maximum capacity of three, and your liver a maximum of two.^note For comparison, a normal run generally gives you a maximum stomach, spleen, and liver capacity between fifteen and twenty. In addition, several important NPCs are inaccessible and you will periodically get radiation sickness that will reduce your stats, forcing you to either rest or use a special item to cure it. On the flipside, you also have access to a special radiation shelter that provides a variety of useful benefits, and you can earn a currency called rads to trade for a variety of exclusive and powerful skills.
  • Gelatinous Noob: You're a gelatinous cube that's assumed the approximate shape of a human and aspires to become a real person. You're a unique Moxie-based class that can't eat food, drink booze, or consume spleen items, isn't affected by enchantments of equipped items, and can't access guilds. However, instead of normal consumption you can absorb any item that can be stolen in PvP to acquire powerful passive skills and/or extra adventures and stats, and can absorb equipment to gain their enchantments for the rest of the day. You also get three MP-expensive but extremely powerful combat skills.
  • License to Adventure: You're a secret agent for the LI-11 organization, tasked with saving the day from a variety of supervillains. You can't eat or use a familiar, your maximum drunkenness scales with your level, and you can't drink any booze that isn't served in a martini glass. In addition to the usual Council quests, you must periodically complete missions to clear out supervillain lairs or else be disavowed by your superiors, causing a crippling debuff to all stats until you continue your mission again. You also gain access to a special form of currency called "social capital" which can be used to purchase exclusive passive skills from LI-11 Headquarters.
  • Live. Ascend. Repeat.: The entire game is altered to eliminate randomness wherever possible. Banishing and tracking monsters doesn't do anything, food, booze, and spleen items always give average results, combat encounter rate can't be manipulated by skills and items, there are no wandering monsters, the RNG is seeded so that every player will have the same monsters and encounters on the same turn number in each zone, and item drop rolls are always exactly 50 out of 100.^note Effectively, this means any given item held by a monster will always drop if you have enough +item% modifiers, and will never drop if you don't.
  • Pocket Familiars: You cannot use familiars in the normal sense. Instead, you use a team of 3 familiars and pit them against other monsters instead of normal combat. Guilds are unavailable and you have no access to any permed skills from previous runs. The Cake-Shaped Arena is replaced by the Poképorium, where you can gain Pokédollars from leveling up familiars to spend on path-specific items and hats. Finally, almost all boss battles are replaced by PokéFam battles with Jerry Bradford.
  • G-Lover: The Spiritual Antithesis to Bees Hate You. You love the letter 'g'. Equipment without the letter G in it gives no bonuses, and you can't use non-quest items or familiars without the letter G in them (and quest ones hurt you).
  • Disguises Delimit: Everyone wears a mask (you included); each type of mask grants specific bonuses to the players or monsters that wear it. You can swap masks with your opponent by using a special "Swap Masks" skill.
  • Dark Gyffte: You become a special class with its own skill tree. You're an undead vampire, which has a limited pool of HP that can be recovered only through sucking blood, passive regeneration, or resting into your coffin. On top of that, you cannot use familiars, and you're constantly hunted by vampire hunters. Skills consume HP instead of MP, and cannot be bought; instead, you can equip or unequip them whenever you rest, lowering or raising your maximum HP in the process.
  • Two Random Crazy Summer: Items now get adjective(s) that grant them random bonuses. These bonuses replace the regular effects.
  • Kingdom of Exploathing: The planet has been destroyed by a Space Invader, destroying all areas that weren't quest-relevant, immediately unlocking all areas that are quest-relevant, and making the game harder in other minor ways.
  • Path of the Plumber: You become a special class with its own skills. You are now a humble plumber, attempting to save the princess. Your abilities depend on your equipment, your MP is replaced with a much lower amount of FP, you can only heal with mushrooms, and special enemies replace the normal bosses. One big homage to Super Mario RPG.
  • Low Key Summer: The path to the Naughty Sorceress's tower is clear from the beginning... but there are a lot more locks on the door than usual. You must search the kingdom for all the keys, each of which have their own effects when equipped.
  • Grey Goo: The kingdom is covered in grey goo, which takes myriad forms when confronted. How much can you destroy in three days?
  • You, Robot: You are a robot. Your class only determines which stat levels you up (you don't get to use any of your skills from any source), you can't eat or drink, you gain no stat points from combat, and you gain no adventures per day. Instead, you gain energy from combat, which you spend on adventures, stat points, and passive skills; you can also harvest scrap, which you can use to customize your limbs for various purposes (such as attack skills or the ability to use various equipment). The bosses in turn are replaced by robots.
  • Quantum Terrarium: Due to a dimensional accident, your terrarium has fused on a quantum level with every other terrarium in the Kingdom. Every eleven turns, you're switched to a random familiar owned by another player. Unlike most paths, this path doesn't apply Standard restrictions to which familiars you can get, allowing you to use a familiar from any point in KOL history.
  • Wildfire: Every zone in the kingdom has been set ablaze by The Naughty Sorceress's niece throwing a gender reveal party, forcing you to either spend extra turns putting out the fire, or take passive hot damage every round that scales with your maximum HP. Items dropped by monsters have a chance of burning up depending on the fire level, so putting out the fire will be necessary to obtain needed item drops for ascension.
  • Grey You: You are Grey Goo, a unique class that cannot use permed skills and benefits most from spending a short time in as many zones as possible. Instead of giving substats, defeating most monsters instantly increases your base stats, and levelling up is based on your total of all stats, instead of just one specific stat. However, you cannot earn Adventures from eating or drinking (food and booze instead increase your maximum HP and MP, respectively, but each item can only be used once per lifetime). Adventures are instead earned by defeating certain monsters and absorbing them, but also only once per life. Some monsters also grant new unique skills when absorbed for the first time, including many sources of extra rollover Adventures to partially make up for the inability to consume items.
  • Journeyman: Your skills were scattered hither and yon across the Kingdom. You begin the run with no skills at all, and must acquire them by traveling to seldom-explored areas of the Kingdom.
  • Fall Of The Dinosaurs: In this Whole-Plot Reference to Jurassic Park, all monsters in the Kingdom have been devoured by dinosaurs that escaped from the newly-opened Dino World theme park. These dinosaurs copy the stats of the monsters they ate, on top of adding their own abilities. Dino World is also added as a location in Seaside City, letting the player complete repeatable sidequests for currency that can be exchanged for special items.
  • Avatar of Shadows Over Loathing: Made to celebrate the release of the latest KOL spinoff, you play one of three classes with their own special skills: Pig Skinners (American football players who crush and batter their foes), Cheese Wizards (mages who specialize in spells of the dairy sort), or Jazz Agents (a musical take on The Men in Black). The bosses are replaced with shadowy doppelgangers of themselves, as well.
  • Legacy of Loathing: In honor of twenty years of Loathing, this path allows you to purchase and use Items of the Month from all across the Kingdom's history... or at least passable replicas. The bosses are also replaced with "younger" variants that use their original pre-Art Evolution designs. In exchange, though, newer Items of the Month are unavailable, as are any familiars that aren't replica IOTM familiars.
  • A Shrunken Adventurer Am I: Everyone except the monsters are shrunken down to the size of insects. Your stats are locked to a base of 1, and your maximum stomach and liver are reduced to 2 and 1 respectively (and you can only drink size 1 booze). To compensate though, you can adventure in new zones in your newly enlarged campground to fight bugs for scaling equipment and potions that give huge stat buffs, and food and booze have their stat gains multiplied by 50 and their adventures multiplied by 10. Also, you can equip items even if you don't have the required stat values.
  • WereProfessor: You play as the unique WereProfessor class. Every 50 adventures, you switch between being a meek professor and a savage beast. The professor has no personal combat ability and their stats are limited to 1, but they can research monsters in order to buy skills to improve their beast form and organ capacity and craft equipment from smashed science equipment collected from adventuring as a beast in seldom-explored areas. Meanwhile, the beast is much more combat ready, but cannot run from any fight, and NPC stores are too afraid to do business with you until you become a professor again. The normal bosses become were-beasts.

Special dungeon boss challenges:

• Some bosses in the multiplayer dungeons (Hodgman in Hobopolis, the Mother Slime in the Slime Tube, and Necbromancer in the Haunted Sorority House) reward speedrunners with special items. However, two bosses impose special challenges to speedrunners:
  • To reach Hodgman in less than 1100 Adventures (which is required to get his rarest item), you must avoid fighting his lieutenants. The problem is that every undefeated lieutenant will grant a different bonus to Hodgman, making him harder.^note Chester negates your damage resistances, Frosty massively increases Hodgman's defenses, Ol' Scratch dispels your buffs, Oscus inflicts damage each round, and Zombo unequips all your clothes.
  • Mother Slime's attack stat decreases the more time you spend in the Slime Tube. So, speedrunners will fight a harder-hitting boss.
• Mother Slime also has a second challenge: defeating her without triggering a form change. (Form changes are triggered when you cause more than 500 points of damage in one turn.)
• All the Dreadsylvania bosses have a "hard mode" version that is triggered when you confront them while either wearing certain items or being under certain effects.
  • Count Drunkula will start draining your Drunkedness every turn, instantly killing you if it drops too low.
  • Falls-From-Sky starts the fight with an attack that will instantly kill you on the first round unless you're blind.
  • Great Wolf of the Air gains a rocket launcher. He will fire it every two turns: it cannot be blocked, hits for at least your max health plus ignores Damage Absorption (but not Damage Reduction), and gets stronger every time it's used.
  • Mayor Ghost forbids you from using healing items. Also, his decrees force you to perform certain actions or use certain items (the normal version just bans a certain category of actions, like using combat items, failure to comply in either version means instant death).
  • The Unkillable Skeleton paralyzes you throughout the entire combat, forcing you to rely on indirect means (like familiars) to damage him.
  • The Zombie Homeowners' Association gains an absurd amount of health and an immunity to stuns.