Rules light.
Action heavy.
No compromises.

 Lanterns

HI THERE, WE’RE THE DEV TEAM BEHIND THE TTRPG “LANTERNS”

Remember dreaming of an RPG with the freedom of Apocalypse World and the tactical depth of D&D?

Us too.

Mechanics Matter, and that’s where we aim to shine.

what’s Lanterns about?

Your character is a Shrine Warden. They’re knights errant chosen from every walk of life to follow the light of their magic lanterns towards adventure. Through cosmopolitan cities, forgotten forests, and sleepy villages besieged by folktale terrors, they find and tend the stone shrines that powerful creatures become when they die, and make sure they stay dead. For the uneasy truce between mundane and magical folk to endure, someone has to put down the monsters on both sides. That someone is you, Warden.

TOGETHER, WE CAN DO THE IMPOSSIBLE

Lanterns is in open beta. Open Beta link coming soon!

how does Lanterns work?

FICTIONAL POSITIONING IS MY PASSION

Tags are notable adjectives (like your character being +strong but a little -simple, a house being -on fire or a +brutal axe) which Lanterns uses to increase or decrease the odds of success during (d6) rolls. Think of tags as little, crystalized morsels of The Fiction.

Play looks like this: The GM describes an obstacle to your objectives and gives it a "Peril", starting from 5, and getting higher for each -tag the situation (or enemy, or obstacle) has.

Then you'll describe how you go about overcoming the situation based on the Backgrounds you wrote when you made your character, picking a relevant +tag to apply. A "Fallen Noble" might give themselves tags like +authoritative, +educated, or +horsemanship; while an "Undercity Urchin" might spin up ones like +nimble, +quiet, or +shrewd. You can claim literally any +tag if it fits your backgrounds' fiction and would help you achieve your objective. Get clever! Be creative! Roleplay!

To find out how the situation resolves, roll a d6 and add 1 for each +tag you're leveraging. If your roll's total is above the peril you get to add tags (-hp, +prone, +distracted, +convinced, +hidden) to yourself or the obstacle; roll under and there'll be complications!

Here’s the core rule:

your +tags (or “effect”) +d6

vs

their -tags (or “peril”)

ok, but how do you play Lanterns?

Say you need to sneak past some guards, and say they're -watchful. You’ll first try to generate a tag like +stealthy through one of your backgrounds. Are you the Neighborhood Thief? Grew up a Puckish Urchin? Pressganged as a Military Scout? No problem, roll d6 (+1 for +stealthy) and see how it goes.

No stealth backgrounds, but still need to sneak? The GM will give you a choice: either Tell Us A Story by spending a resource to give one of your backgrounds a fiction-expanding story (”I know I grew up in a wizard’s tower, but my wizard’s tower was haunted, so we actually had to be very sneaky when we explored at night”), or, Try Something Else.

"Try something else" isn’t a punishment, it’s an opportunity! Look outside of your Backgrounds (or use them in a novel way) and see if there's a clever work around: maybe you hitch an +incognito ride on one of the merchant wagons heading into the capital, or perhaps the right +disguise might fool those guards?

When we say your character can “do anything they can do" we really mean it: describe what you want them to accomplish in plain words; Lanterns’ rules will automatically convert your desire into mechanics.

ok, now talk nerdy to me

Our key innovation is the “gate”. Gates are short, descriptive phrases used to mechanically and fictionally describe characters, items, and pretty much everything else in Lanterns - when the GM narrates an obstacle, it'll take the form of a gate.

Characters in Lanterns are made of stacked gates, and defeating them means reducing their last gate to 0hp. That last gate is protected by the gates above it, and you'll often (but not always, depending on the fiction of your attack) have to whittle those down first.

(also the art is incredible)

I’m a game designer, talk even nerdier please

Our goal is to create an RPG which fulfils “The Promise” we all fell in love with when we first started playing: a game about clever, creative solutions to exciting problems, with intuitive rules that feel more like a game than a job.

We don’t want it to cost hundreds of dollars to keep up with, but we want new content regularly.

Lastly, and most daring of all, we reject notion that games have to be either “crunchy” and tactical, or “fluffy” and abstract. We don’t think a game needs to have a higher word count than The Great Gatsby to have depth. We won’t settle for a compromise any more, and neither should you.
Lanterns accomplishes its goals through a design that’s radically player-centric (we think GMs are players too)! Above all, we designed Lanterns to be fun to play, not just fun to win.

We understand that what the system rewards is what the game is about. We believe it’s the system’s job to a) work, and b) be fun and usable out of the box, not after you watch 30 hours of GM tips. We think it should be more rewarding to come up with something cool, than to “get it to work” (seemingly against the system’s will).

Lastly, we believe Lanterns’ design speaks for itself. How many RPG pitches have you read that promise you fast gameplay, infinite options, and a great setting? Dozens? Hundreds? Not ours - the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
We’re creeping into open beta now, and plan to crowdfund Lanterns once it’s even more polished. We need folks to run the game (who aren’t us devs who’ve been working on it for years 🙃)! We need feedback! We need you!