Timeline Events: People of the Lantern (Patreon)

Timeline Events are at their core identical to settlement event cards, the only real differences between them are you know that they are coming in advance and they serve to progress the "set" story rather than propel "emergent" storytelling.

In Lantern, the story line is notoriously broken at the moment, it has several large disconnects, sudden appearances and a large amount of hanging threads. It represents the least complete and satisfying of the three campaigns and while that may be something that appeals to hopeful theorists, the truth is that APG LLC themselves have admitted that there are some gaps, problems and failures in the storyline. We'll talk briefly about these as we work our way up through each event (or examine the lack of one).

The First Story/The First Day/Returning Survivors 

One of the more interesting aspects of this multi-part event series that sets up your campaign is how it is constructed from a showdown, a settlement event card and a book specific timeline event. To date we have only seen changes to the timeline section - but the future has already promised a change to the showdown and with the First Day being printed on a settlement card there is potential to see changes there as well. 

At the moment you will start your settlement with between 7 (worst case) and 14 survivors.  If you are at either of those extremes then your priority is to increase your population, 7 survivors is too low to have a sustainable experience as you are close to annihilation on just one failed showdown; so you need to get that population buffer up. 14 survivors is a single survivor short of triggering your Society Principle (Accept Darkness/Collective Toil) and regardless of which one you pick, that is a huge benefit for your settlement (it's essentially the only conviction that has no 'right answer').

Outside of that; we have previously discussed in detail the various important strategies that revolve around this first group of events because they set the stage and momentum for your campaign. You get it right here and you will be set for a strong push forward, but missteps can result in huge problems a lot further down the line. So we'll just bullet point the key actions:

• Build all of the tier 1 crafting locations (Skinnery etc) that you have resources for.
• Concentrate on efficient gear (Bone Darts, Bone Sword, Bone Club - if you are very bone rich, Rawhide, Monster Grease)
• Grow your population so you can absorb missteps/disasters.
• Pick one of your returning survivors (aka Hunters) to gain +1 understanding and skip the next hunt at the lantern horde (so you spread out your early xp and weapon proficiency gains). Yes, that is the optimal choice, the second option is to start creating an augury survivor by getting a Pleb to 3 understanding, but it is hard to do that purely in settlement at this stage.
• Do not innovate for a couple of years. Those endeavors are better spent on population and the resources on gear.

That's pretty much it! There's not a lot of good options available early on, so bone weapons, evasion, rawhide and population take priority - just keep avoiding the newbie trap of innovating!

The Butcher

A Timeline Event without any "event" the Butcher's sudden, unannounced and unexpected arrival feels hollow and empty on the surface. But as the only Nemesis monster without any form of foreshadowing or introduction; this is actually the story in itself. You are supposed to feel shocked, surprised and confused by the lack of details in this one's appearance.

The Butcher is modeled after classic 'silent' slasher killers; the ones that turn up and start killing a bunch of obnoxious teenagers for no discernible reason other than this is what they do. Instead of being the viewer of this; you are put in the place of the victims, attacked for reasons that seem beyond your understanding or ken.

As for how to handle it, this is a showdown that we've discussed in the past several times and until I do 'A Visual Guide to the Butcher' later this month we can leave a pin in it with a few bullet points.

• Evasion good
• Bandages good
• Deathblow really good
• Luck bad
• AI control bad
• HL Control very good
• Fecal Salve breaks AI in a beneficial manner

Hands of Heat - Lantern Year 5

This event is partially skipped if you have not innovated the Lantern Oven already. As a rule, never innovate the Lantern Oven, always get it for free here.

The nominated survivor should be a Pleb, there is a trick you can do here if you have a Pleb with decent courage, you can build them up further to try and make them the Courage leader ready for Armor Strangers next year (so you can sacrifice them if the situation requires the bravest survivor to be executed). However, the main reason for picking a Pleb is the 'Experiment with Lanterns' table has both awful results and very powerful ones. You don't want to risk losing a Hunter to the 1-3 result and speaking of which, we're going to take an aside so we can look at why the wording on this is... awful.

So, the clear intent of this result is to have the injured survivor exiled for being badly burned and they become the Bone Witch (Bone Witch is a decent event these days, I don't mind it coming up). However when you break down the steps to this, it actually tells you to lose two population.

"...the survivor is exiled from the settlement..." That is not just a piece of flavor text (well it is, but it's poorly written). When survivors are exiled from the settlement, that survivor is already, mechanically, removed from your pool of survivors. So you then suffer an additional -1 population. So two people are lost!

But that's not the only misinterpretation! Even if you ignore the  "...the survivor is exiled from the settlement..."  text as just flavor, you are now left with a generic -1 population, which means technically you can keep your horribly burned survivor and exile someone else instead.

It might not seem like a lot, but wording like this REALLY matters, especially for players who do not have English as their first language or are predisposed with an affinity for tight rules that are clear and precise.

Given that there are two alternative understandings for this text, and neither one matches the intent - this text needed some severe clean up.

As for the rest of this, you do not have much control over what is going to happen to you, either you get the Lantern Oven and Red Fist (+1 Strength) on a Pleb (who is now automatically promoted to Hunter), or you get Red Fist & Lantern Oven and have to roll on the Lantern Branding table. Which is often a worse result because it costs half of your TOTAL resources (including the ones you brought back) and you can end up with +1 permanent strength (same as the previous roll, but at a price) a repeat of Hands of Heat 1d10 Lantern Years later (and more loss of resources because you now have a Lantern Oven). 

The good results are the +1 Permanent Speed (Give them a Spear, Spears with lots of Speed are great) or +1 Permanent Luck at the cost of being Blinded. The usual trick here is, if you know there is going to be Lantern Branding, you have a returning survivor with Dried Acanthus do this one. So they can spend the Dried Acanthus to avoid the Blind.  Otherwise you can eventually get your hands on an Eye Patch via the Sunstalker (L3 event) and enjoy the bonus there.

Armored Strangers - Lantern Year 6

Unlike the Butcher above; the King's Man does not turn up and start indiscriminately attacking the survivors, they are not here to test the edibility of the settlement for the Kings... this time... The first visit of the King's Man is to assess the suitability of the settlement for the future harvest and cultivate/prune it as appropriate. They count each survivor with the rhythmic tapping of their Lantern Halberds and decide on action based on the number. Too many survivors and the settlement may threaten their masters; too few and it may get wiped out before mealtime. 

If your settlement has had some bad luck and is at 7 or fewer survivors then they will provide a supportive action. This is a pretty bad situation for the settlement because they will return in 4 years time and check again, over and over and over. However they do leave the Guidepost, which can be turned into a Lantern Halberd. I don't think enough people highlight how the Armored Stranger event becomes repeating until your population is sufficient for them to be destructive towards the people. The other part of the supportive action either harms a survivor with a disorder or results in some basic resources, very straightforward to use; spend those resources wisely.

The destructive action should be considered to be a 'tax' of four population; you are almost always going to resist their actions because the price is higher than four plebs (who might even manage to kill the King's Man). However, that is not always the case, so we'll look at each instance individually.

1-4 is -5 population, so it is a given that you should resist here because 4 is lower than 5. In addition, you will gain more endeavors from the 4 deaths in the special showdown than the 5 deaths from this table. Always Resist.

5-7 This one greatly depends on the survivor with the most courage. Sometimes that survivor is a Retiree (due to injury) and you can let them go without much worry. Most of the time though they are an active Hunter and you are going to have to decide if they are worth more than 4 Plebs (the answer is normally, yes).

8-9 Losing 4 population is better than losing an innovation, you have a finite number of times you can innovate (btw it's worth saving innovation resources for Nemesis monster years so you can keep your innovation numbers up) and because innovating in the first 2-3 years is SO BAD for your settlement progress, losing later innovations can hurt a great deal. 

10 is just a good result, you now have to decide if you are going to pull out the Guidepost or not. (If you want to, wait until after the Regal Visit).

The other sticky situation is where you started at a low population amount and you have been unable to get above 10 population. Worst case of losing 4 population at a count of 8, 9 or 10 can be very concerning, especially if you have not picked Graves (WHY DID YOU DO THIS?) But even if you have picked graves, you're gambling on those endeavors to replace population numbers because Augury is not certain, even if you stack it somewhat in your favor.

Ultimately, you're likely to resist here, maybe beat the King's Man, maybe not.

And one final note. If you do resist, the LY9 King's Man remains L1. Their level is SET on the timeline as a fixed value, some custom timelines fail to include that it is ALWAYS a level 1 and confusion occurs. Don't worry about resisting increasing the level of the King's Man, that doesn't happen anymore.

Hooded Stranger - On gain of 5th Innovation

Remember Language counts as your first Innovation!

This is honestly the most obnoxious and awful of all the Lantern specific timeline events and the one that has the highest level of metagaming surrounding it. I hoped it would have been revised in 1.5 to fix the metagame nonsense, but it was not and as such it's still a garbage fire.

Regal Visit - Lantern Year 11

Oh, it's everyone's favourite fashion victim, The Hand!

First of all, because of how The Hand is structured, there is no reason to not challenge it whenever the results of its inspection are unfavorable. The Hand fight is notorious for being beneficial for survivors and this is an opportunity to gain extra weapon proficiency, fist & tooth points and even stat gains. You absolutely should be able to withstand The Hand and reach his Applause result by Lantern Year 11. 

The other things to note here are how The Hand rewards a very particular set of Principles, if you have Accept Darkness, the Guidepost or Survival of the fittest. You are given additional benefits for conforming to the "recipe" that makes for the tastiest settlement instead of being punished. Given that the Guidepost is (mostly) a positive and that Survival of the Fittest is now so strong that  you are almost always going to pick it. The only question is if you have Accept Darkness or Collective Toil (I take the second one). 

Generally if you are not getting anything beneficial I believe that you should be challenging The Hand. Every single result is worse than the costs & benefits of resisting.

This is also one of the places where Slenderman hurts you a bit, because you cannot get the Guidepost, so the 4-7 result almost always has to be challenged.

Watched!

Finally the vague foreshadowing from the very start of the campaign comes to fruition (you remember that foreshadowing right?) It's time to decide when you want to face the Watcher.  

The gain of the two different final "conviction innovations" depends on what Society you formed. Romantic is the more powerful of the two options and that holds up when you get to these two different innovations.

Tutoring a resource of your choice when beating a monster is a rather nice benefit, but you are fighting L3 monsters once you pop the Watcher, so I consider this to be less useful than the ability to specifically prune dangerous AI cards away from the monster via Final Fighting Art. In essence, at this stage you should have enough specific resources, you would only drag out fighting pre-Watcher here if you needed L2 and L3 victory strange resources.  Also, Romantic is so much stronger than Barbaric that the benefit of Ultimate Weapon isn't enough to make up for the difference.  Romantic + Final Fighting Art >>>>> Barbaric + Ultimate Weapon.  Fortunately, in People of the Stars we have a different way of getting these Principles unlocked, so we can explore them without their tethers to your conviction choices in the future.

Now, the fact is, you may not have very long with these endeavors anyway, because you'll lose it right after you kill the Watcher. So that's part of what you have to consider when deciding when to trigger the Watcher fight. I am a large proponent of 'kill it asap' but you might not be ready for L3 fights, so you have to weigh up the cost of the Watcher becoming harder and harder to kill alongside the issues with being forced to face only L3 monsters.  There are certain L2 monsters with very desirable resources that you want to get before they are cut off forever (Sunstalker, Dragon King in particular).

As for the results, there is some weirdness in the 1-5 result on the Romantic table, a survivor runs off without -1 population (surprised Pikachu face at that omission) but the 6-10 result is incredible (way better than the Barbaric version).

Blackout

We've discussed Blackout and Oxidizing in the past, you can find the details here.

For the most part, you should be prepared by this stage and your options are greatly limited, you cannot innovate any more, instead you "innovate" via the Lantern Research and the game experience is more focused on surviving showdowns, upgrading specific builds/gear and considering who to sacrifice to the L3 King's Man.

I think it might be the least interesting part of the campaign by a long margin, it's pretty much a case of just running the distance and trying to avoid disasters. It gets more fun if you still have other crafting objectives such as finishing Green Armor in time.

Gold Smoke Knight - Final Nemesis

There is some, older information on the Gold Smoke Knight here, it includes paraphrased text from Adam himself (one is requested to not ever quote Adam directly on things such as this because he does not want to be locked down). 

Ultimately, the Gold Smoke Knight just does not fit well into the current People of the Lantern campaign, without much in the way of consistent foreshadowing (it turns up in two hunt events which might not be encountered) and no timeline event the same way as The Butcher - the Gold Smoke Knight just seems to be 'this thing turns up, smash it' - lacking the sense of tension and drama that The Watcher fight has.  

Honestly there isn't much to really say in respect of this one that has not been covered in the Oxidizing link above. The end part of the Lantern campaign is highly forced, you have a singular objective, reach enough offense to breach the GSK's toughness and enough defense to withstand its attacks. Oxidization is a large part of that, but other options, such as Perfect Hit auto wound builds and Red Charm builds also come into it. 

And that is the Timeline Events of Lantern, to be honest, they hold a lot less strategy and depth than Sun and Stars, who we will look at in the coming weeks. But there are still plans to follow and decisions to make, so it is not a rote experience by a long shot. There's just less initial focus followed by a laser focus once the Watcher is gone.

*If you are curious where Endless Screams is; we're doing a section on monster introduction and because Young Rivals officially replaces it, this event is not always on the timeline. Likewise for the sake of consistency I have moved Phoenix Feather away also.