Welcome, Agent. Uncanny entities are loose in the world. Your instruments pick up specimens hiding near your position.
The Society keeps a watch, not a score. Not every question about the Veil has an answer yet, and that is the pleasure of it.
📡 Radar: sweeps the area around you. Each blip is an entity, placed by real bearing and distance. The display is heading-up: the top of the radar is wherever your phone is pointed. Tap a blip to lock it.
📷 Capture Lens: raise your phone like a camera and physically turn toward the creature. Watching costs nothing: study it, circle it, let it be. To capture it, center it in the ring, walk close, and hold the brass mark until the reticle closes. Nothing is caged: what you keep is an impression of light, and the creature goes on as it was. The glass never decides; you do.
🕯️ Lantern Oil: the radar and the lens burn the Veilglass's oil. A wider sweep sees farther but burns faster. The lamp refills as you rest, and walking the watch feeds it. An approved Field Report earns a ration of Oil.
🗄️ Bestiary: your personal collection, with each specimen's scarcity, when it first came home, and how many you have captured. (The full Menagerie, which contains everyone's captures, hangs in the Hall; call in from a desk.)
📜 Standing Orders: if you want a task, these name one. Your supervisor sets duties for your rank; discharge them and you will be recommended for the next Standing. Find them under Orders on the menu.
And wherever you read, touch a word of the Society's — writ, rete, the Burden — and its meaning will be given. No mark betrays them; the touch is enough.
A concept from 2012, finally on its feet.
The words of the watch, as the Society keeps them.
The World
The Veil: the thin place between our world and somewhere else. Most never feel it; on old ground and at odd hours it wears through, and things come across.
An Entity: what comes across the Veil. Not always a monster: some are lost, some merely present, but each is wrong in a way the eye refuses to hold.
The Lantern Society: the old order that keeps the watch. Founded in the gaslight era to find the entities, catalogue them, and hold the line so the unknowing world may sleep.
The Hall: the Society's headquarters, kept by those who tend the lanterns and the records while the rest of us walk the dark.
The Work
The Veilglass: the instrument every Agent carries, a phone in this age, a brass nocturnal in older ones. A nocturnal is a sailor's instrument: a disc of turning dials with a hole through the middle, raised to the eye to sight the pole star and read the hour. The Society's has a glass where the hole should be, and what resolves in it is not the hour. It is what walks. None now living quite agree how the first was made, nor why only it can see across the Veil.
The Radar: the Veilglass's sweep. It marks each entity by true bearing and distance, heading-up, so where you point, the watch points.
The Signal: the Veilglass finding its bearings. Until the glass knows where it stands, the Veil shows only echoes; acquire your Signal, and the watch begins in earnest.
The Capture Lens: raise the Veilglass like a camera and hold it steady on an entity; the Lens takes its likeness, gently and wholly, into the record.
Capture: to take an entity's likeness into the record, with its rarity, and where and when it was found. What the Lens takes is an impression of light; the creature keeps the Veil and goes on as it was. Nothing is caged, and nothing is destroyed. An Agent captures; the archive contains. What the Society contains is the impression, never the creature.
Lantern Oil: the common, finite charge the standard Veilglass burns. Wider, deeper sweeps cost more; spend it like the last light in the lamp, and replenish it before the dark.
Aether: the rarer, stranger energy of the Veil itself, which no workshop has ever learned to make or counterfeit. Only the finest instruments are wrought to hold it, and it is stored and dispensed under the hand of the Maker, Agent Wright. It is a Lamplighter's charge to channel, never a junior's to carry.
The Watch: your patrol, and the work itself. To keep the watch is to walk, read the Veilglass, and capture what should not be there.
The Bestiary: your own archive. It contains every entity you have personally captured, carried with you.
The Menagerie: the Society's whole archive. It contains every Agent's captures joined into one great record of all that has crossed the Veil.
The Instrument
The Alidade: the sighting ring. An arm sights one bearing; the Society's makers closed it into a circle, to sight every quarter at once.
The Rete: the pierced ring that carries the almost-seen. Latin for "net": a net that never catches, only points.
Empyreal: the finer grade of Veilglass, wrought to hold Aether where the standard glass holds only oil.
A Fitting: a part earned in service and set into the glass, to widen its sweep or steady its eye.
The Proofwisp: the figure etched on every reference plate: the first impression ever taken, of a creature never seen since.
Your Standing
Standing: your place in the order, earned on the watch: Initiate, Agent, Senior Agent, and Lamplighter at its cap. The appointed seats beyond it are granted, never climbed. It rises slowly and on purpose; the high reaches are the work of a long, faithful watch, never a single night.
Initiate: the first Standing, where every Agent begins.
Senior Agent: the third Standing, above Agent and below Lamplighter.
Marks: the measure of a watch well kept. Earned by capturing the uncommon and the unseen, by walking your rounds, by discharging your orders, and spent toward your next Standing.
Standing Orders: the duties your supervisor sets. Discharge them, and you will be recommended for the next Standing.
A Writ: the list of conditions that must all stand met before you rise to the next Standing. Yours is kept in your Footlocker; when every line of it stands met, you are ready to be raised.
The Burden: a charge taken up by choice, not earned. Offered by invitation; set down without shame.
The Vigil: keeping the watch from one place, instead of walking it. Hold one post with the lamp lit, and the dark will come to you.
Hall Work: a piece of the Hall's own work, done at a bench rather than on the street. A lit lamp on the Hall's map means help is needed.
Lamplighter: a seasoned Agent who keeps a territory of the watch and guides those coming up behind. The rank most aspire to; the public face of the order.
The Imp of the Hall: a small brass figure of Agent Wright's making, about the height of a hand, which hides itself somewhere in the Common Room each day. It is not an entity. There is no Veil in it. It is brass, a spring, and a habit of hiding it was taught on purpose, so no lamp is needed to see it and no Lens will take it. It is not the Brass Imp of the streets, only modelled on one, and it did not stay on the bench.
The Hall's People
The Porter: keeps the Hall's door and carries word between the desk and the Hall.
The Beadle: the Hall's officer of order: doors, keys, and who is where.
The Clerk of the Hall: keeps the Hall's records and its correspondence. Agent Wright's office.
The Under-Librarian: keeps the Stacks in order under the Librarian. Runs the shelving, and suffers no careless hands.
The Hall's Rooms
The Stacks: the Society's library. Some shelves open as you rise.
The Common Room: where Agents gather when they call in from a desk.
The Lamp Room: where glasses are brought to true.
The Footlocker: your own kit: fittings, standing, what you carry.
The Damp Store: where the spoiled volumes go. Nobody volunteers for it.
The Stacks' Own Words
Chronicles, Reveries, Terrors: the three bindings: green, blue, red. Every volume in the Stacks wears one.
The Wire: where Agents' field reports are read and marked helpful.
A Field Report: an account an Agent files of what they met on the watch.