RGB - The Victims of the Ethereal Dreamer (Patreon)

In People of the Lantern (and sometimes, rarely, in other places), a certain class of survivor; one that was originally built for use in KD: Labyrinth; appears. When there is shelter, a roof over the head of the parents, and in the presence of a slumbering Watcher (or Watcher corpse). They can be born. Fueled by either the Black Lichen spread by the Sky Whale (Ethereal Dreamer's avatar) or by the twisted Drifting Dreaming Fruit created by ancient Lonely Trees - these individuals spend a lifetime in another realm before returning.

They are the closest that Lantern survivors get to seeing magic, able to trigger bizarre and unusual abilities at the cost of their own years. They are the settings stand users and today we are going to have a look at them, how you get them and how you use them.

How to Become a Savior

There are three ways that Saviors are generated in the game right now, the most common form is via the Intimacy table in combination with Hovel & A Watcher (Black Lichen). They can also be transformed by eating the fruit from the L4 Lonely Tree or by the Fighting Art Ethereal Pact (first unlocked by consuming Black Lichen, hence the known connection).

Of these three routes, the one that you have the most control over is the birth method. Your birth principle determines the % likely hood that any child will become a savior (unless you already have one) and in Lantern this will dominate the strategies behind how you use your saviors, either they are a relatively common resource which can be exploited and discarded. Or they are a rare resource that should be mined to almost depletion and then put to use protecting others. We'll look at both cases, and remember the unspoken assumption here is that you have already unlocked Hovel, without it, you're not getting saviors through births.

Protect the Young

When you have Protect the Young, your birthing table gives you the option to generate a savior whenever you roll a 10 and you do not already have one. That means on 2d10 you have a total of 20 combinations that result in at least one 10 (out of 100). So baseline a Protect the Young settlement has a 20% chance of getting the option to make a savior whenever they birth survivors.

As an aside, with Otherworldly Luck in the equation, you gain access to 9s giving saviors also, which increases the cases by 17 for a total of a 37% chance of gaining a savior. OWL almost doubles the odds you'll get a savior.

As such, saviors are dirt cheap for a settlement like this, so you should be seeking to use them as often as possible and leverage their abilities to generate resources, slay monsters and help protect the other survivors before burning out at the end of the hunt and being replaced.

Survival of the Fittest

In contrast, the only way that a SotF settlement generates a savior through birth is by rolling 10 + 10 on the two dice*. That's 1% of each birth, which means if you birth 2 survivors every year in a settlement, on average you'll see one savior after 50 lantern years. 

*With Otherworldly luck this becomes a 9+, which means a 4% chance rather than 1%.  So OWL quadruples the odds here.

This means saviors are like precious gold dust, you're probably only going to have one if you do not have the Strain Fighting art unlocked and therefore you should use them differently. 

What makes up a Savior?

Saviors come in three colours, matching each of the affinities in the game (because Adam hates yellow). And like all things in this game, not all colours are created equal. To roughly tier them; the strongest is Blue, then Green and finally Red.

Each savior has a core set of abilities and drawbacks which are almost identical. They get +1 hunt XP during the aftermath, they cannot wear other gear. They cease to exist when they retire or when they trigger the White Secret story event and they cannot gain any benefits from ageless. I've attached their ability cards and secret fighting art reminder cards to this post so you can see exactly what each one gets. 

As a quick note, currently the Lion Knight secret fighting art Ageless Apprentice still works with Saviors by stopping them aging, this seems unintentional and it has been reported to the APG design team for them to review in Campaigns of Death. But as it stands right now, Ageless Apprentice Saviors are b-b-b-busted (and hard to get because they have to gain the mask + SFA and then afterwards gain the savior ability).

The variation comes in their specific stat gains, a single matching natural affinity, abilities and the SFA they unlock at Age 2. Each stat bonus is tied to the 'realm' the affinity colour represents, blue is +1 luck, green is +1 evasion and red is +1 strength.  Needless to say, the strength gain that red gets is not on par with either green or blue's bonuses.

However, these stat and affinity gains are not the only part of the picture. We have to consider the abilities and the gained fighting art. So we'll drill into each savior individually and have a look at what we can do with them.

Blue Savior

+1 Luck, +1 Blue Affinity, Lucrena Ability, Lucrenae's Lantern Secret Fighting Art (Age 2).

With a name that is the latin for 'light'. Blue Saviors are entirely about scoring critical wounds. In addition to having a natural +1 Luck, they can activate a Lucky Charm with the addition of just a single extra half blue affinity. They are also a solid loading platform for the use of either the Blue Charm or Spears (or both). 

Lucerna gives a single wounding attempt +X luck (Where X is the amount of hunt XP gained up to a maximum of the number of blue affinities you have). It allows you to rapidly score a vital critical wound and get to Age 2 quickly. 

At Age 2 you gain Lucernae's lantern. This ability requires concentrate to use (see the Glossary, it's basically standing still and doing nothing much). When it is activated on the following turn you get to reveal X locations (where X is Blue Affinities/2 rounded down) and critically wound every single location that has a critical wound. The Trap if drawn is ignored entirely and then the deck is reset.

You are only going to get to lantern once per Lifespan due to the extreme expense of it (6 hunt XP) so you want to set up your Blue Savior to gain Age 2 at the end of their first showdown, and then fling the skull for massive gains during their second showdown. It costs them 6 hunt XP to get to Age 2, then after the Lantern thrown showdown they're just shy of retirement (they will also have a chance to get multiple fighting arts, which is very powerful if you have Romantic + Sculpture and you are seeking a specific fighting art for builds like - Backstabber, Timeless Eye, Abyssal Sadist and similar).

The play pattern is: 

• First Showdown: Lucrena 2 (x2) or if you have the gear Lucrena 4 = 4 + 2 Hunt XP for aging (Total 6)
• Age 2: Gain 
• Second Showdown: Lucernae's Lantern = 6 + 2  = + 8 Hunt XP (Total: 14)
• At this point you decide if you want them to "retire" at the end of the showdown (sit around in the settlement at near max hunt C(XP) or cease to exist so you can get a new one. If you are SotY, it is generally better to "retire" if you are PtY you should cease them unless you want to try and get a specific fighting art to sculpture. If you want them to cease, you should use Lucrena 1 to get them to 15, or go crazy if you are near the end of the showdown and go for another Lucernae's Lantern. 

Yes, that is correct, you can thrown a second Lucernae's Lantern because the hunt XP gain is NOT a requirement or cost, it is something that happens after everything else is resolved. As always in this game, timing matters in the fine details. So enjoy a double Lucernae's Lantern and all the resources it brings. With enough Blue Affinities (Cycloid Scale Armor works really well here) you can deal massive damage to any quarry monster and only lose your savior.

This play pattern is almost identical for all three affinity types, do not sit on saviors, get them high up in hunt XP as soon as possible so they can either protect the rest of your settlement as "murder bait" (Highest XP survivor is the one who gets murdered, an almost retired Savior is the least cost paid in the game) or you can cycle them away and get a new one into rotation as soon as possible.

Green Savior 

+1 Evasion, +1 Green Affinity, Dormenatus Ability, Grace of Dormenatus Secret Fighting Art (Age 2).

Dormentaus is a combination of the latin word Dominatus and Dorment. It couls be loosely translated to sleeping king or dormant power. The ability that Green Saviors have, Dormenatus is nowhere near as strong as Lucernae. It is a huge boost to your own tanking ability however, and that is exactly the role Green saviors should be employed in. They can spend a bit of their hunt XP each showdown/hunt to become significantly more durable. Even just Dormenatus 2 is +10 armor points across all locations.

However, it is Grace of Dormenatus which cements itself a place as the strongest nemesis ability. Giving a boost to all survivors armor equal to your green affinities and then also allowing them to remove any tokens they have (up to your green affinities). This can clear a whole bunch of troublesome things, including bleed tokens, Infectious Lunacy (Butcher) and stat decrease tokens from say Silent Hymn (King's Man). You also gain the Priority Target token (if you have not erased yourself from existence with this one), which means that everyone has a breathing space because the monster is pointed back at the tankiest tank in all of tanktown.

 Red Savior 

 +1 Strength, +1 Red Affinity, Caratosis ability, Beast of Caratosis Secret Fighting Art (Age 2).

Caratosis is the word I had the most trouble finding the root of, the closest I could find was
Keratosis Pilaris which is a condition  looks like small goose bumps, which are actually dead skin cells that build up around the hair follicle. This does not seem correct, and the latin root of Cara is cārus which means darling, beloved, dear, loved one. In Greek Kara means head. 

"-tosis" is a bit easier, as that suffix is used in a lot of medical terminology, and it is:

 ..a process, condition, or state, usually abnormal or diseased; production or increase, physiologic or pathologic; an invasion or infestation 

I believe that the reference here is that the red saviors link to the infestation that is harming the land. That means we have one savior tied to light/lanterns, the second one to a sleeping power/dormant king and the third tied to infestation. All of these things loop back to the Watchers, which is not surprising as it is a somewhat known quantity that saviors are created in the presence of Watchers and that the Ethereal Dreamer is closely linked to them. Perhaps the infection is an infection of hope? Who knows, I think an interesting question to put to Adam in an interview would be to ask about the meaning of Caratosis. We'll see, maybe next time he graces someone with an interview, you guys can get the interviewer to ask about that.

The Caratosis ability is automatic hits, now automatic wounds are VERY strong, but automatic hits are not, because they can be cancelled out due to reactions and the trap card. This is quite a problem, because unlike the other two abilities which have a very high payoff (Green is never countered, Blue is countered only by the trap), Red saviors are the most likely to get low returns on their ability. 

Beast of Caratosis is likewise a lot weaker than the green and blue variants. It gives you an attack with speed = red affinities that automatically hits and has a bonus strength equal to double your red affinities. This is the kind of thing that works well with a heavy Red affinity investment vs. Nemesis monsters. But it is not really as good as just running the Red Charm + a High speed Weapon.  

So the truth is, I avoid the Red Saviors because the Green and Blue ones are so much stronger. A Red Savior can be very useful vs. the Gold Smoke Knight, but Blue and Green are still stronger here. So my advice is, just avoid making Red Saviors, but if you really want to, you should try and have a weapon with very strong wounding bonuses (Deadly for example).

Just remember, the price for using saviors is a 25% reduction in weapon proficiency gains for that hunt party. But you will gain a lot more resources (blue), or slay nemesis monsters more effectively (red/green) if you take this route. If you do not plan to rotate saviors, you should "murder bait" a single one and use them to protect your weapon masters in training.

And there we have it, much maligned, often disappointing (especially compared to twins), one hopes that this article will help you make more efficient use of your saviors, whether you exploit and rotate them over and over, or just use them once and then keep the old woman around to attract potential murderers who are jealous of her wrinkles!