A Primer for People of the Lantern (Patreon)

It's been quite a long time coming, but in preparation for deep diving into The Watcher and The Gold Smoke Knight we're going to first drill in detail into the “original” campaign's 1.6 revision. Now the truth of the matter is I've put off diving into this because while this campaign is most players first experience of Kingdom Death, it's notorious for not showing the game in the best light. The campaign is somewhat mean spirited, disjointed and lacks a pleasing narrative when compared to its two competitors. The honest truth is that these days, when I am introducing the game to new players, I will take People of the Stars over People of the Lantern because of the combination of a stronger narrative, more powerful survivors that players can latch onto and overall a more complete experience with a more ambiguous and enticing ending that helps build mystery and keep players talking about the game long after they've finished playing it.

While going through this campaign I am going to refer to the concepts used in the previous articles on Tempo and Value, you can reach those through the 'Strategy' tag at the bottom of this post if you want to read about them and how they apply to Kingdom Death. Of particular note is the understanding of how Kingdom Death's campaign structure ratchets up the tempo in order to compensate for the sandbox freedom that the rest of the game gives players. Options, when offered to players, give opportunity for immensely powerful growth, so the nemesis encounters exist to turn the screws onto the players and force certain gear selections.

Before we start, I'm going to write out one particularly harsh point, I feel a little mean in writing this, but it is important that this is highlighted. Outside of not knowing the game because you're new to the experience, or having incredibly bad luck on the birth tables, you should never lose a campaign of People of the Lantern before you get to The Watcher. If you are losing them, well you're not paying attention to the big old warning the settlement sheet gives you. It tells you right on it that running out of population means a game over, that makes it very clear that you should be paying attention to that. If you're not holding your population at 15+ (I prefer to aim for 20+) and you are hoping to get by on less than that, well, you need to go touch grass because you're being foolish. You can ONLY lose the campaign before The Watcher because you've run out of population, you will only run out of population through poor settlement choices. You can, of course, suffer a game over by losing to The Watcher, that's a different matter, but again, if you have enough population, you should be able to handle that showdown and get to the real portion of the campaign.

Pay attention to the Settlement Hierarchy of needs to survive:

(Permission to share this image outside of the patreon is given)

Gear is useless without survivors to wear it, Survival actions rapidly become useless without enough Survival to use them, but they are also completely useless without population to activate said survival actions. Dodge and Encourage are more than enough tactical options to overwhelm the early game monsters, you absolutely do not need Dash or Surge until you're moving onto the Level 2 White Lion or Level 1 Phoenix.

Part One: Beating the Butcher

Goals:

• Rawhide Armor
• Deadly Weapons
• Knuckle Shield (If playing with gorm)
• Monster Grease
• Lucky Charm
• Cat Eye Circlet/Wisdom Potion
• Whisker Harp (For nemesis fights only, it's too dangerous to take out on a hunt).

In this first section the goals are to construct the tools to beat the Butcher, fortunately these tools are ones which are generically useful for the rest of the campaign. It's just one of the many places where the Butcher demonstrates design above the norm for Kingdom Death's monster design. It's very close to being a perfect nemesis, beaten only by the sheer excellence of the Tyrant's many layered combat and the brutality of the Slender Man.

You will, during this portion of the game, be seeking to build defences against inaccurate attacks and bleed – this is achieved through evasion, rawhide, bandages and if you have access to it – the Knuckle Shield. You will combine this with decent weaponry and that is pretty much all you need to achieve victory, extra survival actions are not important at this stage of the game, gear is the largest gain in power and you need a lot of it. So you will not be innovating until you have at least one or two full sets of Rawhide, good weapons and synergistic support gear.

Lantern Year 1  - Returning Survivors

A lot of the strategy formed here depends on your population numbers, losing a survivor during the prologue showdown is not a major drawback because with Graves you will get a 50% shot at gaining Lucky on a survivor. If you do get this, you should keep this survivor safe until you're able to leverage their potential with the addition of a Deadly Weapon (Lion Beast Katar/Rib Blade/Greater Gaxe) plus Rawhide & Lucky Charm.

If you end up with 14 population, your primary goal should be to push towards getting 15 population and triggering an early Society principle. The pick out of the two options here should be Collective Toil, it provides far, far too many benefits over its alternative – endeavours are amazing resources, gaining them passively through population is incredible. Also most of the time, the settlement event will give extra population and resources which more than makes up for the Bone Witch (you can do great things with a Bone Witch).

As for the Birth principle, there is no correct answer here. If you are newer to the game, or you are struggling to get to the Watcher because you can't manage your population, Protect the Young is completely fine because of how it gives you an easier time rolling twins pre-hovel and getting saviors post hovel. Survival of the Fittest has a higher skill floor when compared to Protect the Young – it is more powerful in the Hunt and Showdown phases, but it's weaker in the Settlement phase. You have more opportunities to screw up and fail to make it to the Watcher if you play with Survival of the Fittest. Yes the extra strength and evasion and lifetime rolls are amazing, but you absolutely have to be able to understand how to grow your population under its constraints. Protect the Young will help you learn to walk, then you can run with Survival of the Fittest in later campaigns.

When it comes to picking a survivor to start the settlement process, remember that they will skip the next hunt, so choose accordingly.

Expansion Lantern Year 1  - Gorm - The Approaching Storm

Expansion option – adds Gorm alongside the White Lion

This optional event introduces the Gorm and its wonderful downside, Gorm Climate. When a Gorm is a part of your campaign, you are going to be seeking to innovate Song of the Brave earlier than usual because that will allow you to banish the Gorm Climate. Before that happens you have to be very pro-active in spending your resources. Consider all resources you put into settlement storage to be lost, Gorm Climate might do that. If you are more experienced in playing the game, you can control Gorm Climate with wise usage of lifetime rerolls from disposable settlement members (plebs).

The main downside to The Approaching Storm is that it can give you Hovel far earlier than you want it. While Hovel does have some good innovations linked to it (Family in particular is great, but an Early Clan of Death can also be solid) – it adds a lot to the deck and reduces the odds you'll draw Symposium or Drums. In short, you'll probably delay innovating even more if you get Hovel, because it becomes a less useful option due to the odds being diluted so much.

Lantern Year 2 – Endless Screams

The Screaming Antelope introduction event has a survivor roll on a particularly punishing table. Avoid the temptation to have a good survivor roll on this table, it's more likely to punish you than help. So choose a useless survivor to roll on this table, they can deal with all random events that might end up harming them and they can eventually be recycled into an endeavour through Graves (always pick Graves over Cannibalize). Outside of that there's not much to say here, you shouldn't rush off to hunt the Screaming Antelope yet, the White Lion or Gorm still have plenty of useful things to offer you, but you will want to get the Stone Circle open once you have the Forbidden Dance innovation because the Harvest Ritual settlement location action is frankly amazing at turning excess monster bones/resources into chances at getting basic hide or Perfect resources.

Expansion Lantern Year 2 –  Spidicules –  Young Rivals

Replaces Endless Screams, meaning Spidicules replaces the Screaming Antelope.

So, the main goal if you have Young Rivals is to avoid using more than a single male survivor on hunts until you have had this event triggered. This is because if you have two or more male survivors with hunt XP then this event will kill one of them, yay. Now this can be good if you have a large-ish population, you've already gained Collective Toil and you want to create a dedicated attacking survivor (they care about strength over evasion). But just be aware that you're going to experience that loss.

As a quick aside, it's worth mentioning that male survivors make for worse hunters than female ones, it's not a huge difference between the two, but female survivors get access to great fist and tooth options when you have the Spidicules innovations and also they're immune to the Manstealer event. Male survivors on the other hand can lose their ability to reproduce because of that above hunt event, which is really problematic when you're seeking to pass on their weapon proficiency to the next generation of hunters. The fighting art Unconscious Fighter protects against this, so I tend to only use male hunters with Unconscious Fighter or ones who have the Harvestman fighting art and are wearing Phoenix Armor (that's a powerful combination worth the risk).

Lantern Year 4 – The Butcher

Nemesis Showdown

Here is the first time that the campaign performs a quality check on you, it's asking you if you have enough evasion, bleed protection, mood control and good enough weapons to survive this showdown. If you're correctly prepared on the gear front then you should be able to get through this showdown without much in the way of losses. I still will use a secondary team for this showdown rather than my quarry hunting team, because The Butcher can, and sometimes does, blast its way through your survivors with extremely unfortunate AI card combos.

For the most part however, if you've built appropriately, this should be an exhilarating, but winnable match up. There are a few very dangerous moods that can turn up, but if you managed to get a Whisker Harp from the White Lion, then you should be able to handle them.

Once you are past the Butcher it's time to prepare for the next tempo gate the game has to offer...

Part Two: Killing of the King's Man

Goals

• Leather Shields
• Leather Armor
• Zanbato
• Counterweighted Axe
• Whisker Harp if you do not already have one
• Rare powerful weapons
• A focus on Innovating every year

So, there is an alternative to the King's Man in the Slender Man, for the sake of brevity I am going to ignore that, but if you want to read more about Slender Man, you can search the tags in this patreon and you'll find a lot of articles about the original Internet creepy pasta. The short version here is that the Slender Man is a better mechanical fit for People of the Lantern due to it still being as challenging as the King's Man, but having high synergy with the three core game quarry monsters and not having a trap card that you can completely ignore with the right build. It is however, far weaker thematically, because it has nothing to do with the Regal subplot in Lantern.

The main things you need to do to prepare for the King's Man revolve around having disposable survivors plus shields. So you will concentrate in this section on getting to leather armor, leather shields, better weapons (Zanbato, Counterweighted Axe, Riot Mace, Rib Blade etc) and increasing population.

Lantern Year 5 – Hands of Heat

I tend to take a fresh Plebian survivor for this event, because it's great if they get the amazing Red Fist Secret Fighting Art then they are an automatic inclusion for quarry hunt parties, but if they mess it up and turn  themselves into a bone witch it's not so much of a loss. (Note: The survivor is exiled, not dead). You hopefully have not been unwise enough to innovate Lantern Oven before this point, you should never innovate something you can get for free elsewhere (apart from Ammonia, while you can get that for free from some White Lions/Gorms, you might be unlucky).

This is also the moment where you gain access to the Lantern Oven innovation and you can start rushing towards the Blacksmith location if you want to get Beacon Shields online as early as possible.

Expansion Lantern Year 5 – Flower Knight – A Crone's Tale

This used to be a big power spike for settlements because they would get access to the Vespertine Bow and prepare for gaining Acanthus Doctor survivors. This has changed with 1.6 because of how hard the bow has been nerfed and the entire Flower Knight expansion is now in a bit of a sorry state. It's a beautiful model, but it is not a challenging showdown at lower levels and you basically can use it in combination with the Harvest Ritual (Stone Circle) to generate lots of basic resources (in addition to gaining Fighting Arts like Otherworldly Luck through crafting).

If you do include the Flower Knight, maybe because you're making green armor, what you want to do is bring as much luck and deadly as you can to the showdown and make it rain petals. Campaigns of Death and/or the Abyssal Woods have a LOT of work to do to get the Flower Knight into a workable shape. Shame.

Expansion Lantern Year 5 – Manhunter – The Hanged Man

This special showdown is the Manhunter's introduction, it is an excellent showdown, but it will make the campaign easier for experienced players. You do not need to prepare for this showdown with new gear because the gear you got for fighting The Butcher is sufficient for this one. There are some showdown specific tactics that matter a lot while fighting this one, you can find them under the Manhunter tag.

Lantern Year 6 – Armored Strangers

So, if you've been really unlucky with your population and you have a small number, armored strangers will give you some help... most of the time. However, they are going to keep coming back over and over until you have grown the population enough to trigger the destructive action. So the sooner you pull this band-aid off the better.

You should always resist the destructive action except when it is the 10+ result (or your highest courage survivor is rubbish that you can afford to lose). But you should send into the showdown four disposable survivors, fighting the King's Man at Lantern Year 6 is a really tough ask for a normal settlement – you need to be able to handle a monster that's Lantern Year 9+ in power level. So go into this one expecting to lose all four survivors and even at best case you'll end up with a cursed survivor who is going to have their gear grid fill up with armor pieces that have no affinities before they leave the settlement for good (unless you get them Crystal Skin before that happens).

Most of the time I aim for this timeline event to generate 8 endeavours (the outcome from all four survivors dying) and I will turn those endeavours back into attempts to gain population. This does not mean I will throw the fight against the King's Man here (sometimes I will); but it does mean I go in without worrying about winning or not. I just avoid innovating Pottery before this lantern year (and I usually avoid Pottery before Lantern Year 10).

Expansion Lantern  Year 6 – An Uninvited Guest

This will kick off the Lion Knight arc, it is a mostly self contained series of special showdowns which I am going to ignore in this article simply because it's not great content. If you do play with it, the settlement based content, especially the Hybrid armors, is excellent. The showdown is best populated with survivors you don't care about losing, at some point we'll deep dive into the Lion Knight, who is one of the best thematic and narrative characters in the game, but one of the weakest mechanical additions.

Lantern Year 7 – Phoenix Feather

This is another event where a disposable 'Janitor' or 'Pleb' survivor rolls on the 'Break the Silence' table. While they gain +1 courage from rolling on this, there's a chance that they will get banished (10%) or gain the hoarder disorder (50%) which REALLY sucks. The best results are the 2-5 or 4-5 (with Survival of the Fittest), but that's only 40% of the table, which is why I use a spare survivor, if somehow they get the best result then I'm going to start using them for hunts, otherwise they're no big loss.

The Phoenix itself is not something you need to rush into hunting, you typically want access to Dash, Bandages and a good survival pool before you go after it, but Ageless survivors are also a major benefit because they can ignore the ridiculous hunt XP gains that hunting this monster causes. There are now a fair amount of benefits to be gained from hunting the Phoenix, but there is no need to rush after it if you don't have a good amount of leather gear already.

The L1 Phoenix is slightly tougher than the L2 White Lion/Screaming Antelope, so bare that in mind before you go after it and also it is fine to over prepare for attacking this particular monster, it's contains a lot more bullshit than the three expansion monsters that turn up in Lantern Year 8.

Expansion Lantern Year 8 – Glowing Crater (Dragon King), Rumbling in the Dark (Dung Beetle Knight), Promise Under the Sun (Sunstalker)

Which ones of these you'll have in the campaign is very much up to you and your collection. I think it's worth highlighting that there's no downside to including quarry monsters in every campaign – because you don't have to go hunt them if you don't want to. Outside of Spidicules replacing the Screaming Antelope there's almost no cost to including them.

Of particular note are the benefits to including the Dragon King, who will give a survivor Acid Palms at the cost of having a slot filled by the Husk of Destiny cursed item. This is perfect for training Fist & Tooth and the cursed item is not a huge price if you mentally consider it to be the 'weapon' in your build.

The Dung Beetle Knight will give the settlement the Round Stone Training innovation for free, this innovation allows you to spend endeavours to get something good 90% of the time. You'll gain Tumble a lot of the time, but 20% of it you'll get either Carapace of Will or Propulsion Drive (your choice). These two fighting arts are incredible for tank and damage dealing survivors respectively. There's a sweet build you can do with Harvestman (Choreia) + Propulsion Drive (Round Stone Training) + Phoenix Armor plus whatever weapon your heart desires.

Lantern Year 9 – L1 King's Man

So this is the second time that the L1 King's Man can make an appearance (yes it remains L1, even if you resist). You should have been moving towards stronger weapons, armor and most of all shields in preparation for this fight. Shields completely negate the King's Man's trap and without that nasty trick, most of the work here is just learning how the King's Man operates. Don't leave a survivor on the floor before it has its turn is a major tip I'll give at this point, but mainly this fight is a methodical, if somewhat humdrum one.

Have a disposable survivor or two in the party so they can deal the final blow and eat the King's Curse, there's no benefit to having a good survivor get cursed. If that does happen, pick axes can give you Crystal Skin, which will remove the Cursed Armor at the cost of not being able to wear any armor gear forever. It's worth the trade off, Crystal Skin survivors are solid.

It's also worth noting that this is a point where you can save 1 hide, 1 bone and 1 organ this year and then innovate in Lantern Year 10 to get a 'bonus' innovation. This will make up for skipping a lantern year earlier on and it's why it doesn't matter if you do.

Part Three: Waiting for The Watcher

Goals

• Blacksmith weapons
• Beacon Shields
• Lantern Armor
• Phoenix/Sunstalker/Dragon/Rolling Armor
• Monster based high power end game weapons
• Innovating every year 

So from Lantern Year 10 to Lantern Year 20, while there are a few nemesis fights along the way, including the sole fight against The Hand, your goal at this point is to prepare for the Watcher. This is the longest stretch in the game and it's one where you'll build Node 3 (Lantern Year 7 + 8) monster gear, complete any leather stuff you still need and then push hard to get the Blacksmith location open.

In respect to the monsters, this is where you'll aim at getting to L3 early game monsters, and L2+ Phoenix/Sunstalker/Dragon King/Dung Beetle Knights. You should also have encountered the Hooded Knight by this point – the main way to handle that event is to send out four survivors without weapon proficiency the year before you get your fifth innovation, that way you don't have to get the Twilight Sword on a survivor who was already working on a different weapon.

The Twilight Sword itself is a great tool to use against The Watcher, and very helpful for newer players, so you want to train it up (attacking in the blind spot helps), but ensure that the survivor doesn't depart. If you have no interest in the Twilight Sword because you've played with it before, you can safely ignore it as long as you have disposable survivors for the Hooded Stranger to beat up each time they return. It's worth noting that the Allison White Box content significantly improves the Hooded Stranger experience.

Lantern Year 11 – Regal Visit

A lot of what happens here depends on your Principle choices. But a lot of the time you should just challenge The Hand because it's not a tough fight if you have the tools to simply play defensively and do exactly what The Hand demands from you during the showdown fight. I'll write a bit more about this in Lantern Year 13.

Lantern Year 12 – Principle: Conviction

So ensure that you spend all the resources you can in lantern year 11, leaving just 1 hide, 1 bone and 1 organ in the settlement storage if you want to gamble on getting to innovate. This is because this story event can eat up all the resources you have if you roll badly on the table.

When it comes to which Conviction to choose, I don't think there's much contest, Romantic's 'choose one from three fighting arts' and bonus Bone Witch blows out everything that Barbarianism could ever have to offer. It is only Conviction and Death principles where I think there are 'correct' choices rather than situational ones.

Note: If you are VERY resource rich, leaving 10 resources in the settlement storage allows you to convert them into +1 Luck (and the Prey disorder) on each departing survivor with the right roll. That's really good.

Lantern Year 13 –  The Hand

This Hand fight is not very difficult, clever use of shields and other defensive capabilities, along with patiently waiting for the Hand's AI deck to run out is the correct option here. It's not challenging, a lot of people find it to be unengaging, but I do like the theatrics of this showdown and I consider it to be more of a little set piece vignette over and actual showdown fight.

You should always bring your Fist & Tooth survivor into this fight for the extra F&T XP unless your defensive gear is very weak and you're concerned that the survivor will die. In truth, you don't need to bring weapons apart from shields, and you should pack Dried Acanthus for extra defence. Though you might want to have a Cat Eye Circlet + one weapon on the off chance that you can score a quick win through the “cheap shot”.

Expansion Lantern Year 13 – The Silver City

The Lion God is a quarry monster that I wouldn't add in automatically because the introductory event isn't super great. It makes a survivor 'always insane' through a disorder and while that's not a major problem (in fact it's great if you rely on sentient weapons), it's also not a benefit most of the time.

The Lion God is a monster that you will typically not hunt unless you're very powerful, and even then the existence of the Earthquake card is a major negative. That card will automatically kill at least one survivor and there is very little counter play to it outside of some exceptionally fortunate and skillful Dash positioning or removing it from the AI deck in advance via wounds. Earthquake should never have been printed in its current form – no-one wants to have their survivor deleted on the first turn of the showdown and then have to sit the showdown out.

Lantern Year 16 – The Level 2 Butcher

The Butcher's back, it's faster, it's more dangerous, but you should be stronger than before. The same strategies that worked previously work now, and if you're confident in winning you can save the resources to innovate in Lantern Year 17.

Lantern Year 19 – The Level 2 King's Man

Oh boy, this fight is just an awful experience because of the 'Adventures in Bookkeeping' that Silent Hymn represents. Thematically the card is a bullseye, but mechanically it's a huge pile of dragon dung. I often just send four injured/retired/useless survivors into this fight and skip it, letting them die (or I fight the L2 Slender Man, which is a good fight).

There is one fun wrinkle you can get to make this showdown less painful, and that's having access to the Secret Fighting Art – Altered Destiny, which is punched into you by the Dragon King. With that, all of the negative tokens become positive ones, so Silent Hymn just makes you faster and faster and faster. Combine that with Momentum (Propulsion Drive) and/or Phoenix Armor and you'll get to play as The Flash for one joyful showdown – just make sure you either have Crystal Skin or a disposable survivor to deal the final blow.

Lantern Year 20 – Watched

This is the point where you can jump on The Watcher. Now, you should attack the Watcher as soon as is comfortable for you. Be aware that post Watcher you'll lose access to making new innovations (because your source of innovation inspiration is dead), and you'll be locked into fighting L3+ monsters only, but the more you delay, the harder The Watcher showdown will become.

We'll discuss the showdown itself, tactics and gearing, later on in this People of the Lantern exploration, but for now, if you've been working towards Node 3 monster gear and/or Blacksmith gear, you should be fine.

Fighting Gold: The Post Watcher Years

Goals

• Oxidization of Blacksmith gear
• Construction of useful Lanterns
• Preparing your chosen survivors for the end of the campaign showdown
• Any other fun challenges such as hunting Legendary monsters

So once you've beaten The Watcher you get to play in the very powerful end game. If you're not super confident, you can cut your teeth by fighting L3 White Lion/Gorm/Spidicules/Screaming Antelope/Flower Knights, but the real experience and fun lays in tackling the L3 Phoenix/Sunstalker/Dragon King/Dung Beetle Knight and to be honest, many experienced players may be ready for the L3s before the Watcher even wakes up.

The nemesis monsters are returning visits from the L3 Butcher and King's Man. Both of these are pretty tough fights. The Butcher in particular gets a 'hard save' where it can ignore your attacks at times. This makes the fight very variable in difficulty, if it keeps saving against your attacks you're going to want to throw the dice across the room. The King's Man on the other hand just gets bigger numbers and moves – but it remains as disengaging as the L2 monster is. There's not really much alteration to the strategies against these guys.

The main focus at this point will be around constructing Oxidized Lantern Gear, this process has been discussed in the past (see the People of the Lantern tag at the bottom of this post) and grabbing a few L3 specific pieces of gear like the Ink Sword or Crest Crown. You should be very powerful at this point, because the monster threat level climbs immensely and you're seeking to burst them down rather than drag out the fights with farming techniques.

Oxidization is a very expensive process, but at this stage in a settlement lifecycle you should have more than enough spare resources to build it and you will want to. Because the final boss is the only boss we've had designed since the community started demonstrating how powerful the builds they could put together are. This means that it is no slouch, but also you have all the tools you need to beat it right there inside that dead jellyfish-cloak-monster's corpse.

So that's the run through of the play goals during People of the Lantern, next time I'm going to dive back into the thematics of this campaign, exploring what it means for the world it is set in, where the story beats were lost because of the change in direction from the designers (Cancellation of the Lantern Festival expansion) and where they shifted with the 1.6 update.