Arc Philosophy & Knowledge: Part 7 Lanternism (Patreon)

Spoilers for:

• People of the Lantern
• Nature of Survivors
• Sunstalker/People of the Sun Event – Edged Tonometry
• Various high level speculation about the world's lore

At the time I checked to start writing this, Lanternism was winning so I decided to go ahead with this philosophy next. Still, it would have been my choice anyway becayse one could consider Lanternism to be is the “other half” of Faceism. What do I mean here? Well, I wrote about in the Faceism article (Part 5 of this series, see the collection at the bottom of this post), that philosophy is focused around the physical forms of the survivors and their relationship with the very landscape they are birthed from. Lanternism represents the other part of their existence, the spark of life, their spirits. It's something I've wanted to write about for a while, because even before Lanternism came out there was a lot of indicators in the game that the lifeforce or spirits that bring the survivors to life come from lanterns, or at least the lanterns have the same source.

The first indicators for this concept came in the core game, with the card Inner Lantern being our largest signpost. This concept of an “Inner Lantern” is not unique to the world of Kingdom Death, it's a concept that's been a part of human history for a long time, especially in spiritual and religious matters. This is such a universal sentiment that, we have various forms of lantern festivals and metaphors for lantern/light linking to spirituality across the globe. 

For example; there is the Chinese Shangyuan Festival which takes place on the 15th day of the first month in the Chinese Calendar (Full Moon) and here the lanterns symbolise a form of rebirth through letting go of the past to start anew. But of particular interest to this topic are festivals like the Lantern Floating Festival in O'ahu, Hawai'i which is more directly linked to the concept of lanterns representing the spiritual nature of people. This is a Buddist festival where participants will honour and remember the departed with a floating lantern. It is one of the two iconic festivals involving lanterns, the second of which is Thailand's Yi Peng Festival, where rice paper lanterns (khom loi) are lit and then released. Images of them rising up into the sky is as iconic as the floating lanterns and this is something which has resulted in a number of popular imitation festivals elsewhere in the world.

We're not just limited to festivals for the link between lanterns and the human spirit however, lanterns have long been parts of everyday symbolism, with them representing the inner light that guides the soul through the darkness. An example of this would be in Egypt during the holy month of Ramadan, where streets are lit up with lanterns as part of how light guides the way.  

You can also see them employed in some forms of meditation, where lanterns are used as a part of the ritual.  Some texts also use the themes of blindness/darkness to describe being spiritually lost and a lantern will represent returning to faith. This is also interesting at just how strongly the lantern's power over people has continued even in our modern age, where a normal ceiling lamp doesn't hold anything near the mystique or ambience that a lantern can generate.

So given how much of KDM is influenced by a mixture of religion, pop culture and video games blended together; it is unsurprising that in a world filled with human-like analogues who dwell in a place where lanterns in various states are found scattered across the landscape, that light would be a core part of their faith. These people find themselves born alone into darkness, confusion and violence, but they awake with the light of lanterns that are there for their beginning. These vital sources of illumination are as close to them at the start as the stone faces that the survivors have been birthed from. Let us get into an examination of the lantern lore. (As usual, a lot of this is speculation based on elements of the game, if I'm quoting/paraphrasing directly I'll let you know, otherwise understand this is all just a hypothesis based on the evidence I've gathered to date).

At the start of the final arc in of People of the Lantern, the survivors discover that their god and source of knowledge - the towering lantern hoard - was a trojan horse. Hibernating inside this is a creature known as a Watcher. These jellyfish monsters are a mixture of vines, ropes, cloth and lanterns infused with a dream-like energy. When they need to feed they will cocoon themselves in a jelly-like shell threaded with copper that repels lanterns. This shell then gets encased by lanterns and forced upwards like a boil. (This is paraphrasing Adam's descriptions here). As time passes, these lanterns will gradually fade out one after another due to being drained while the Watcher draws nearer to its awakening. I speculate that the Watcher draws strength from the lanterns surrounding it, only awakening when it is at a sufficient level of energy because if you challenge it earlier it is far weaker and the longer it spends in the hoard the more powerful it becomes.

After the Watcher has been slain, inside the exhausted lantern hoard survivors find that their lanterns are infused with new abilities that enter them from the Watcher's “core” final lantern - given how many memories, dreams and elements of past survivors the Watcher's final lantern contains . They can also find Lantern Tubes. These tubes are a strange resource and described as being “A fleshy, muscle lined tube.” Based on various small clues, the resource ability (which is a 50% chance of having a broken lantern inside) and the artwork that has semi-formed lanterns in the art, I suspect that these tubes run through the ground and are a mechanism that through which lanterns are deployed across the landscape. I'd go further and speculate that the upcoming Parasite Queen is connected to this mechanism in some fashion also.

Note the vines running from underneath the Parasite Queen and into the ground. It'll be very interesting to see what this means when we get to the Screaming God expansion. 

Another hint of the nature lanterns which I'd like to quickly highlight is from the Story Event “Edged Tonometry”. During this event, a visiting katana master cuts through a bunch of lanterns (and survivor's eyes) and in the artwork we get to see the interior of the lanterns, which is a segmented length of biological material like a spine. This is why I sometimes reference the lanterns as being bio-luminescent when discussing them (like most other light sources in this world).

So, through all of this and directly through the Inner Lantern Innovation we see that lanterns are massively important to survivors. It's not surprising that people in a world of darkness would ascribe spiritual or religious significance to the very thing that lets them see. Our local star, the Sun is a common thread through most cultures on our planet. Sol, Atum, Helios, Ra, Dyeus are just some of the Sun Gods and there's many other relationships (often a chariot).

However, survivors with Lanternism go beyond this faith and suggest a far more significant relevance for lanterns than just sources of light. They go deeper than that and come to the conclusion that lanterns contain the souls of the survivors. While this is a setting with unreliable narrators and a still incomplete picture I'm inclined to believe that this holds as much water as the hypothesis that Faceism posits survivors are born from the stone of the ground. There's a lot of factors that just line up too well and as we'll see when we get into the tier 1 philosophies as a whole they build a picture that together creates the foundations of their existence. So that's the understanding I'm going to take from this, souls of beings are inside those lanterns and what comes from inside them provides the initial spark that brings the stone bodies of survivors to life once The Scribe has penned their name. It may not turn out to be the actual, official, truth, but it works well and it is certainly the perspective of Lanternism survivors, so exploring the world from their viewpoint is very interesting.

Lanternism's Core Mechanics

Lanternism's mechanics revolve around Death tokens, these are tokens which by themselves do not have any function, but the knowledges in the philosophy will generate them and/or give them function. The initial way these death tokens are collected is via the core tenet of [K] Death Collector (more on that next week), and they are not even automatically given, one needs to instead activate a fallen lantern terrain when another survivor dies. They are also generated by some of the higher rank knowledges automatically, which is an important portion of the philosophy's entire function. If Lanternism relied entirely on a survivor death in the showdown to start doing things it would be limited to being mostly a support philosophy for [P] Homicidalism.

The functions that the death tokens themselves can gain from other knowledges provide a range of different effects, but they can mostly be broken down to stat boosts, gaining frenzy or utility effects. Self triggering the Frenzy Trauma can be quite useful when combined with Deadism, and given the nature of Lanternism's connection to survivor “souls” and Deadism's obsession with being already dead, this is not a surprising synergy to discover.

Hunt XP Track & Neurosis

Our Lanternism Hunt Track is the standard one we've seen before, with 2,4,7 and 10 being the ranking up points. The neurosis is Phototaxis which removes your ability to spend survival as long as there is a Fallen Lantern terrain tile on the board. That's a soft neurosis, but honestly it should be soft, because the hunt party has already suffered punishment from the death of the survivor who generated the fallen lantern in the first place.

I'd like to briefly mention here that one wants to keep the death count low until you've unlocked one of the Rank 4 Knowledges. So don't go running after dead survivors quickly.

Rank 1

Rank 1 gives us the customary +1 lumi and a roll on the table, with 1-5 (50%) resulting in gaining [K]Light Whisperer; 7-10 (50%) gives us [K]Light Warrior and at CC 11+ the survivor gains +1 accuracy. Finally with all results, at CC 4+ if a survivor died in the lantern year, the lanternism survivor gets to depart with a death token. Which is useful for either of the two knowledges you gain here. I'm not going to bury the led, both knowledges gained here are good gets, with [K]Light Whisperer being the more desirable, but there's no result which is disappointing.

It's a good start, but you will find both knowledges feel underwhelming until you have additional sources of Death Token generation. It's helpful to understand that how they feel when you first get them does not compare to how they feel when they are built around.

Rank 2

After our +1 lumi, we roll and on a 1-2 (20%) we add [SE]Haunted to the following lantern year, not great settlement event because it has some unpleasant results if the settlement does not have [I]Memento Mori or [I]Song of the Brave. These are both higher tier Innovations to boot and only Song of the Brave is a priority. The advice here is just to make sure that you always have a novice (0XP) survivor in the settlement so if the worst happens and they become possessed you don't lose access to weapon specialization/mastery. (It's worth noting that a Possessed survivor can still gain ranks in a weapon proficiency though, so it's not a terrible thing to have. Gaining +2 strength and +1 accuracy as your “weapon mastery bonus” from the start can do a lot for certain weapon types. I am not disappointed to force out a Possessed Shield or Fist & Tooth Proficiency Trainer for example.

Between 3-8 (60%) the survivor gains [K]Light Eater and on a 4-8 with CC 13+ the survivor gains +1 lumi as well, in addition if you have Graves then the departing survivor gains insanity equal to the settlement's death count.  At 9-10 (20%) the survivor gains the courage and understanding of a dead survivor of your choice and also gains [K]Lantern's Souls. Finally if the settlement has CC 25+ then you will gain the [P]Graves principle in addition to having [P]Cannibalize. Also if you have picked Graves and the survivor who just ranked up has [K]Light Eater then the Graves Settlement will gain Cannibalize.

This is a reasonable tier with average tier 1 knowledges on it, the biggest hit is the CC 25+ result because the knowledges here are not overall as strong as the previous rank, though Lanterns' Souls can somewhat hold its own against the previous rank's offerings.

Rank 3

On a 1-2 (20%) here you die and in “compensation” the settlement gets to trigger the Hands of Heat – Lantern Branding story event with their choice of result. Not desirable, especially with your first lanternism survivor. So hold onto their lifetime reroll if you can. At 3-8 (60%) the survivor gains [K]Light Stealer and on a 9-10 (20%) they gain [SFA]Red Fist. Also just like Rank 1 at CC 4+ there might be a gain of a Death Token triggered.

This is probably the worst rank in the philosophy due to that death result and average power level knowledge, but Red Fist is a seriously powerful SFA so there are benefits here. However, this rank really does just feel like a speedbump on the way towards the next.

Rank 4

This final rank is a little bit unusual, it will check on your Death Count (DC) vs. the current Lantern Year (LY) number. If DC>LY then the settlement gains a few endeavours, which is nice, but it's not what we're interested in. If DC=LY then the lanternism survivor gains four permanent affinitys of their choice. Very powerful for certain build times such as ones utilising the Blue Charm and also on theme because Lanternism's secondary thematic element involves affinities (as a part of light, just like the Sunstalker and Survivor spirits. However the real prize is if you've kept your death count low and DC<LY. 

With the Death Count being lower than the Lantern Year you will unlock [K]Ghostzerker and we'll discuss this knowledge next time, but the important thing here is to highlight that this is the knowledge you should be aiming for. It is why you want to play safe and keep the death count as low as possible until you get your first Rank 4. After that you might want to relax a little because Ghostzerker is now in the settlement's knowledge deck, but before then this is the goal that a Lanternism settlement should be aiming for.

Summary so Far

Lanternism is an intersting and unique perspective that builds on existing world lore and gives us a potential insight into the nature of the lanterns in this world, or at least lets us explore one way that survivors interpret their existence. It is also an unusual philosophy in that it sets you a mechanic goal, that of keeping your death count low until you get Ghostzerker. This mechanical goal is a bit at odds with the core tenet in this philosophy, but once you have Ghostzerker unlocked you can relax a little and work on getting Death collector levelled up while also angling for that sweet DC=LY unlock at rank 4.

It's very interesting how you can also manipulate the circumstances in which you hit Rank 4 by holding the Lanternism survivor back in settlement if you need to climb the lantern year number a bit higher. One can even sandbag by going after weaker quarry monsters where deaths are highly unlikely and that's not a wrong decision.

As to why I'm putting all this empthasis on unlocking Ghostzerker, and we'll get as to why that is next time.