December 2025 IotM Review: Dry Bones

Christmas is past and it’s the last day before the year closes, which means that if I want to write a review of this month’s Item of the Month in Kingdom of Loathing before the trees are on the curb and the lights back in the attic—and I do—I’d best get to it.

All month, I’ve been stewing on my feelings about the Skeleton of Crimbo Past. It arrived with a splash—more on that in a sec—and seems to promise something great, but in practice, it just feels dry and hollow in a way that has stuck in my craw. I can’t get past it. It’s haunting me, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just a crumb of cheese or a fragment of an underdone potato.

It’s just not fun. But how can that be, given all the treasures it offers?

The Particulars of the Shade

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The Skeleton of Crimbo Past is a familiar. It’s a Fairy-type familiar, which means that it increases your item drops as its weight increases; a 10-pound Skeleton provides an additional 30.5% item drop bonus, whereas a 20-pounder gives just over 50%. It also drops knucklebones.

The Skeleton will give out up to 100 knucklebones a day, primarily after combat. The likelihood of finding a knucklebone depends on the monster you’re fighting; different types of monsters have different drop rates, with skeletons being the most reliable sources. These knucklebones can be spent by “chatting” with the familiar: every day, you can buy one epic booze, epic food, and one powerful spleen item, each for 5 knucks. The Skeleton also offers one last item: every day, an item is selected seemingly randomly from a curated list of previously-retired Crimbo content, with prices ranging from (at time of writing) 34 to 2927 knucks.

This is the familiar’s main draw. Not by accident, I’m sure, the very first offering was a tiny plastic sword. The tiny plastic sword has long been a bit of a collector’s item. It was one of three possible options from a gift given to all players in 2004, and in a game where crafting and drinking booze is a key mechanic, a reusable cocktail garnish that improves your drinks was destined for popularity. Until the beginning of this month, we had no reason to believe it would ever return to the game. The Skeleton offering the TPS at nearly 3000 knucklebones was an advertisement of value: this is what you can expect.

And let me stress that this is damn near revolutionary in terms of design philosophy. The designers of Kingdom of Loathing (affectionately referred to as The Powers That Be, or TPTB) have historically been unapologetic about retiring old limited-time content. There’s no overlap; if you weren’t here for Crimbo 2024, or 2014, or 2004 you just missed it. This year, the Crimbo world event has seen players fighting demonic skeletons and collecting charred bones. Last year, they were hopping between different holiday-themed islands and gathering holiday spirits. This has been the philosophy, with very few exceptions, for over 20 years: when it’s gone, it’s gone. KoL is not a game for completionists, we’re warned.

The Skeleton of Crimbo Past upends that stance. Given enough time, either between direct access through the Skeleton or the market responding to increased supply, players of today and tomorrow will be able to enjoy the gifts of Crimbos past.

Humbuggery!

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That’s the vision. And as an abstract design goal, I find it noble. With a game as long-lived as KoL, it’s a shame that the list of unobtainable content only ever seems to grow. Introducing old retired content in a limited way makes sense.

But, to use a therapist’s trick: that’s head language. It makes sense. I deem it noble. That’s what I think about the Skeleton. How it feels, though, in play?

The Skeleton is an unfun familiar that I switch to out of a sense of obligation, and which delivers far more moments of exhaustion and disappointment than actual enjoyment.

Its main selling point is the old Crimbo content. The name of the familiar alludes to it, and the sheer scope of potential offerings indicates that a significant degree of effort was put into curating an interesting and exciting list. But even when all the possible items are discovered, viewing that full list of possibilities will provide a deceptive impression of the Skeleton’s emotional feel.

You can read a list in a minute or two and let your mind reel at the possibilities. Oooh, I could finally learn Sweet Synthesis! I’ve always wanted to play with a Fuzzby! It’s brief and dazzling, like watching the pine needles shrivel and burn when you toss a bough on the fire.

But you don’t experience these offerings as a comprehensive list, you experience them day after drudging day, and this is where the Skeleton’s brittleness starts to show.

Slog 1: Rolling the Bones

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First, at time of writing, we still don’t know what all is available, or how each day’s item is selected. Does the daily offering cycle deterministically, or is it random? Extrapolating from the age of past items that we’ve already seen, as well as groups of items who have yet only seen one or two members offered by the Skeleton (such Volume 3 and Volume 4 of the Journal of Mime Science skillbook series), it seems this list could be quite deep. Until we see a repeat, there’s no way to know when the item you want will next appear—or if that is even knowable. For now, the best you can do is log in, chat with the Skeleton, and more often than not, likely feel disappointment because the item you want isn’t back on offer. Better luck next time.

The best case scenario is that the list does cycle, like a model train around a predictable track. If you miss the tiny plastic sword on Day 1 of the cycle, you only have to wait some guaranteed number of days and it will return again, right on cue. Since we’re at the end of December now with no repeated items, a deterministic cycle would mean at least 31 days between repeats. On the one hand, this is an opportunity, because it ensures players will have enough time to farm up the necessary knucklebones before their desired item returns. On the other hand, a month is already a long time to wait. If the list is 60 items long? 90? That starts to become egregious.

I say that this is the best case scenario, because other options only add disappointment and unpredictability. If the list is truly random? Players could be farming diligently for weeks, only to watch their target appear a few days before they’re able to afford it. Or players might sit helplessly with sufficient knucks for months on end, waiting for the random number generator to work in their favor and deliver the one item they want.

In either case here, the scope of this generous gesture from TPTB, combined with its miniscule and highly restricted output mechanism, actually works against the enjoyment. The more items of Crimbos past slated for renewal via the Skeleton, either the longer the wait before a chosen item predictably returns, or the lower the chances of its random selection.

Knowing what is on offer is also a massive boon to players who use the Wiki. Now, I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of players who donate to the game are regular Wiki users. As I found when I returned to the game this year after several years away, it is damn near impossible to effectively use all of one’s Items of the Month without at least one Wiki tab open. But the Skeleton strikes me as a particularly egregious example. A player who doesn’t use the Wiki doesn’t know the breadth of available items. They won’t know whether the offering cycles or is random, so unless they’re very dedicated to observing and deducing, it will appear functionally random. Even if the offerings are determined predictably in the code, the benefits of that design disappear for a player who is not aware of the rails.

Perhaps this is an intentional design decision, an example of something close to what Magic: The Gathering designer Mark Rosewater terms “lenticular design”. A lenticular design appears uncomplicated to inexperienced players, but reveals new options for strategy and interaction to players with deeper understanding. Perhaps the Skeleton is supposed to offer, as far as no-Wiki players can tell, a delightful random item of yore each day. But if that’s the case, that whimsical delight is undercut by the range of unpredictability. As of writing, only 7 of the last 31 days’ offerings have had a cost of 100 or fewer knucklebones—that is, the most you could produce in one day. Including items with a cost of 101-200 knucks—so what you might accrue in two dedicated days—only brings that total to 9 of 31.

200 knucks is, I’ll admit, an arbitrary number, and it might seem low. Why wouldn’t we assume that players would have a higher average number of knucklebones kicking around?

My answer to that is: because it’s just not fun to use the Skeleton.

Slog 2: Grinding for Bones

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Especially if the item selection is purely random or appears to be, you are incentivized to efficiently build to 3000 knucks as fast as possible, so the next time your goal item appears, you’re ready. This means ensuring you get your full 100 knucks a day. In fact, since the knucklebone counter resets upon ascension, the faster you can complete an ascension (while also obtaining 100 knucks a day), the more often you can get double days, earning 100 knucklebones at the end of one run and 100 more at the beginning of the next. This means you not only want to spend a significant number of your turns each day with the Skeleton, you also want to route through zones with a high percentage of knucklebone-dropping monsters while you have the Skeleton out.

In practice, I wager you’re not going to both ascend efficiently and hit 100 knucks per day. You can only guarantee knuck drops from skeletons, and there just aren’t that many 100% skeleton zones in the game. Your next best targets are orcs and pirates, but even those are rare within an ascension. You will likely have to decide between highly efficient knucklebone farming and efficiently ascending.

That in itself is fine; the Skeleton is far from the first IotM to introduce long-term goals that are likely to be completed in aftercore. But few ask so much and with such an unknowable goalpost. It’ll have taken me 30 Platinum deliveries, each probably around 10 turns long, to max out the MP regeneration on my Guzzlr tablet, and far more to finally max out the Booze Drops and HP regeneration bonuses—but that’s knowable. Earning my Manual of Transcendent Olfaction took me 200 days at 40 turns a day, but again, I knew when I’d be done and could literally see the object I was working toward. PirateRealm takes 40-60 turns or so each day; the Spacegate is only open for 20 adventures between rollovers. The Skeleton stands out for both how much it asks you to give it to efficiently progress toward a meaningful goal, and how little agency you have over your reward.

The Skeleton has stuck with me all month because these demands and restrictions end up feeling so damn puritanical. Take heart in your daily toil, even though the work is long, for one day, ye shall receive your ultimate reward¹. When will it come? ‘Tis not for man to know.

And if that weren’t enough, the Skellie suffers on a third point: it’s a Fairy.

Slog 3: Danse Macabre

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I think Fairies are probably the least fun base familiar type in the game².

This is a little ironic and deserves unpacking. Fairies, which increase your item drop chances, have historically been regarded as some of the most useful familiars, because increasing item drops is almost universally beneficial. Obviously, too, waiting for the game’s RNG to grant you the item you want is a deeply disempowering experience. It’s fun to get more stuff, to see more content, to have agency over the random forces that churn beneath KoL’s surface.

I believe all of that, and yet, I still think Fairies aren’t intrinsically fun to play with. More than any other base familiar type, Fairies suffer because their effect is stochastic. When your Starfish damages the enemy and grants you MP, you can immediately see that effect. When your Levitating Potato blocks an attack, you know. When your Blood-Faced Volleyball grants you some extra stats after combat, the game highlights it, and even the meat bonuses from Leprechauns can be fairly easily observed.

Fairies, though, have an effect experienced in aggregate. Until you start boosting your item chances such that you can guarantee drops—which you’ll rarely manage with a Fairy alone—you can’t tell from a single turn if your Fairy’s dance did anything. True, over 20 turns with a Fairy, you’ll accumulate more items than if you’d been adventuring with a Barrrnacle, but again, look at how we’re experiencing that. That’s experienced rationally. It’s an intellectual identification of a benefit. Fun? Fun is an emotion.

Fairies lack juice. And the Skeleton of Crimbo Past, by being a simple Fairy, inherits that issue.

Naturally, we’re in the realm of the subjective here, but broadly speaking, I think fun familiars are those that (a) offer interesting decisions, (b) allow you to do beneficial things you otherwise couldn’t, and/or (c) give you tangible, immediate benefits. And here at the end of 2025, we have plenty of examples of fun familiars. The Pair of Stomping Boots, also a Fairy, lets you stomp enemies into consumables that give certain bonuses based on their phylum, and grants free runaways to boot as well. The Space Jellyfish grants unique adventures in certain locations and can produce spleen items in combat with interesting effects based on the elemental alignment of the monster you’re fighting. The Cookbookbat greatly increases food drops, grants 5 free cooking actions a day, and produces unique cooking ingredients as well as recipes to use them in. Even the Jill-of-All-Trades is fun, for the sheer scope of its effects, being an amalgamation of literally every basic familiar—and then, on top of that, it produces items that allow free fights each day. Compared to all of these, the Skeleton, a basic Fairy, is just utterly lackluster.

I’ll admit there’s some irony here. Because, yeah, if you’re going to use a familiar for a hundred turns a day or more, a Fairy is a very preferable option. The Skeleton is a farming familiar, so giving you bonus item drops means that your knucklebone-hunting will also reward you with extra loot. Or on the flip side, you can drag it along with you in places where you’d otherwise use a Fairy, and get some knucks alongside. But this rational option does not change the fact that during those hundred turns, you’re just passive. You’re passively collecting extra items and knucklebones, which you will, in turn, passively wait for the opportunity to spend on your dream item. There’s no tangible immediate benefit, no interesting decisions to be made while the Skeleton is out. Pull out the familiar, count to 100, put it away.

All of this—the randomness, the high costs, the wide item pool, the unknown unknowns, the stochastic benefit of the Fairy—work together to create interlocking restrictions that just feel bad to me. Overwhelmingly, the emotions I get when using the Skeleton are neutral to unpleasant. Log in and see a cool item on offer? If you can’t afford it, ow. If you can afford it, but you’re still biding your time for your dream item? Ow. If you buy it, you’re faced with the uncertainty of what tomorrow will bring; will you have enough time to rebuild your knucklebone stockpile before your dream item returns? It’s an unanswerable question, so you just cross your fingers and hope you’re not going to regret your choice. Ow. Buying any of the consumables might give your run a nice boost, but they also set your knucks-per-day back, adding uncertainty to your collecting goal.

It’s joyless. Oddly befitting its monstrous shape, the Skeleton is hard, dry, and empty. It offers so much but at such a steep cost that it feels like it was crafted as an object lesson.

Fleshing It Out

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I don’t think the Skeleton had to be like this. Without altering its core conceit, I think there could have been ways to introduce more player agency and make the familiar actually fun to use while still grinding for the ultimate rewards of Crimbos past.

First, the Skeleton could allow players to “pin” one offering, so that it was always available, like saving a die between rolls in Yahtzee. If you log in and see that your Skellie has your dream item, but you won’t be able to afford it for another week or so, you could hold it in reserve. With only one reserve slot, you’d have to be selective about what you pinned, and you still would have to see it arise organically once in order to pin it, but this would eliminate the agonizing uncertainty of wondering when that tiny plastic sword would come back, or fearing you’d miss it by failing to log in on the critical day.

Another way to solve the issue of the wide pool is by expanding the offerings each day. Offerings already appear to be roughly organized into tiers: consumable items and potions cost a couple dozen knucks; familiars, reusable items, and skillbooks are in the 1500+ range; and equippable gear is somewhere between there, usually in the hundreds. The Skeleton could acknowledge these tiers by, each day, offering one item from each, instead of only one item total. Assuming there’s a roughly equal number of items in each tier, this would allow the pool to be churned through three times as quickly, making it more likely players would see their desired targets in a reasonable timeframe.

As for making it an enjoyable familiar, the Skeleton desperately wants to be something more than a 1× Fairy. The cheap answer is to make it something like a Ghoul Whelp as well, granting HP and MP after combat³. That’s nothing amazing, but it would mean that you actually had an immediate, tangible benefit during the turns you were running it.

But it’s 2025, and we get weird with our familiars now (don’t quote me on that). What if knucklebones could be spent on special ascension-relevant combat skills granted by the Skeleton? Now there’s an interesting tension, and there’s an actual in-run benefit to strategically deploying the Skellie. I know this feels ironic, given how I decried the consumables above, but I think this is actually a case where the problem is one of emphasis. The items of Crimbo past are so obviously the gravitational center of the Skellie as it currently exists that the consumables feel like afterthoughts. Diversifying the non-antique ways to spend knucklebones would legitimize doing so as a valid choice.

Tomorrow, we’re going to be entering a new Standard season without either the cursed monkey’s paw or the book of facts, which means we’ll be without any source of wishing. What if you could spend 20 knucks on a wish?

Or, heck, what if alongside knucks, the Skeleton occasionally served up some fun A Christmas Carol-themed items that could be used on other players, time’s arrow-style? Crimbo, after all, ought to be a time of companionship and good cheer, but right now, the Skeleton asks us to ignore our neighbors (and, for those of us with access, forsake the gift-giving generosity of the Crimbo Shrub) and focus solely on our own enrichment. Unlike its namesake, it asks us to become more Scroogely. Some lighthearted gift items could steer the Skellie back in the giving direction.

Finally, the knucklebone grind could be diversified, again to offer more options for player choice. This year’s Crimbo world event was all about Hot-aligned skeletons; what if the Skeleton, in addition to granting knucklebones, also had a chance to drop some different deluxe bones based on the monster’s elemental alignment? Maybe you get 100 knucklebones worth of bones each day, but overkilling monsters with damage that matched the element of the day would yield deluxe bones worth 5 knucks, allowing you to speed up your acquisition if you’re intentional.⁴

I don’t expect that these are the only solutions, or that any of them would be perfect. I merely mean to offer them as examples of changes—some small, some larger—that could transform the current grind into something more rewarding and fun.

To Honor Crimbo in Our Hearts

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There is, of course, an easy out to my criticism. Nobody is forcing me to donate for, or play with, the Skeleton of Crimbo Past. If it’s not fun for me, then why not simply shelve the damn thing?

And the sad fact is that I probably will. Although I like the notion of one day having a tiny plastic sword of my own or learning some of the previous Crimbo skills I missed, thinking about grinding for months or years with the Skellie, then playing the waiting game on top of that makes me actively repulsed. I am free to make my own choices, and I will, by choosing to let this familiar gather dust.

I criticize because I don’t think the Skeleton had to be this way. I’ve played Kingdom of Loathing for twenty freaking years; I have a lot of experience that shows me TPTB know how to make engaging, interesting, and fun game pieces. They didn’t here, and I know they can.

And more broadly, I criticize because it’s a way I know how to engage with the media I love. I think about all of this because I believe it’s worthy of thinking about. We all joke about KoL being a stick-figure RPG, as if that makes it a triviality, but it’s lasted longer than the high school binder pages I first doodled Pastamancers on. You only have to spend a few minutes wandering through the KoL Wiki to sense the fathomless depths of this game’s content. KoL is something special, and it deserves attention and thought.

The Skeleton of Crimbo Past has promise, and it reflects a generous philosophical approach to the availability of old Crimbo content. I just wish it had a little more meat on its bones.⁵