Kingdom of Ashes - The Scorching Region

**THE FROST HAS THAWED. NOW THE DESERT BURNS.**

The Scorching Region is the blazing twin of the frozen north — fire to its ice, two halves of one shattered world. Where frost is about locking enemies down and shattering them, ember is about **building pressure and detonating it**. This is a faster, greedier, push-your-luck expansion where your own power can cook you alive — if you don't know when to vent.

Toggle it on from the title screen and the heat spreads everywhere: new cards, relics, and enemies mix straight into the base game's reward pools, and four scorched regions slot into the run map. Toggle it off and the game is exactly as it was. Your call, every run.

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### 🔥 SCORCH — the burn you detonate

Scorch is damage-over-time you control. Stack it on an enemy and it ticks down each turn like a slow burn — or spend **every stack at once** with a Detonate card for an explosive burst. The question is never *whether* to burn. It's *when to blow it up*. Load big, double a stack with Slow Burn, then crack it open with Everburn Sigil for the full cycle in a single card.

### 🌡️ HEAT — greed with a ceiling

Aggressive plays build Heat, and Heat is power: cards like Solar Surge and Heat Lance scale damage straight off it, and the Solar Crown relic rewards you for riding high. But end a turn over the cap and **Sunstroke** bites — you lose Mana next turn and take self-damage. The release valve is **Vent**: spend banked Heat to convert it into durable Protection that never decays. Bank for the nuke, vent before it burns you. A second economy running underneath every fight.

### 💠 GLASS — melt, crack, shatter

Armored enemies don't just block — under Scorch their armor *melts*, and once it's gone they turn to Glass. A Glassed enemy takes bonus damage from your next hit, so the play is to feather them into the brittle window and land the right-sized swing on the right beat. Over-commit and you waste it. The Magma Golem teaches the melt; the boss Vetra punishes a sloppy read.

### WHAT'S INSIDE

**36 new cards**

— multi-element, plurality fire but spread across all eight types so they feed

the base game's resonance system. 13 Common · 11 Rare · 8 Legendary · 4 Legendary+.

**6 relics**

— from the cap-raising Heat Sink to the **Sunstone**, a defining greed engine that

ticks Scorch twice at the cost of constant Heat gain.

**10 new enemies**

— 5 normal, 3 elite, and 2 bosses:

- **The Sunchained Tyrant** — the arena heats every turn. Out-race the solar ramp or bank Protection to survive the Solar Flare.

- **Vetra, the Glass Empress** — coats herself in Glass and reflects an over-sized hit. Win with hit-sizing discipline, shatter on the right beat.

**4 new Run Variant**

— a sequential descent of rising lethality:

- **The Dune Sea** — forgiving entry. Learn to stack Scorch and watch the Heat cap.

- **The Molten Causeway** — risk/reward routing. Molten nodes cost HP or Heat for upgraded loot.

- **The Glass Flats** — brittle one-shot decisions and Glass-heavy fights. No autopilot.

- **The Sunchained Citadel** — short, dense, lethal. A chained sun bakes the whole approach.

### BUILT TO FIT

- **On/off any time** from the title screen — never mid-run, so nothing orphans.

- **Mixed in everywhere** — DLC content drops in base regions too, not walled off.

- **Same progression** — DLC enemies grant ash and character mastery exactly like the base game.

No separate grind, no second meta track.

- **Save-compatible both ways** — turning the DLC on or off never rewrites a save.

The frost held its breath. The desert never learned how.