[Dis] The Order of the Lantern

The Order of the Lantern is an association of rangers tasked to protect the surface and the underground from each other.

The term “ranger” usually means someone who works in the wilderness: a guide, a game warden, an army scout, or a hunter. In Dis, the word is tightly linked with the Order of the Lantern and implies a deep and literally symbiotic relationship between a person and the wild environment.

Thanks to the peculiar “mana climate” of the peninsula, flora and fauna are entangled together on the mana field, with their action reverberating subtly off each other. Humans are not immune to this process, and after a millennium of life on this piece of Hell, they became acclimated and able to exploit the situation to their advantage.

This kind of ranger started similarly to druidism, with people becoming instinctively aware of the mana field and the possibilities within, but instead of taking elements from divine or arcane magic, they kept a physical and material approach. The more someone stays in the cave, the more “in tune” they become with the dungeons and their inhabitants, to the point of having an empathic connection with everything underground. Some practices can develop this connection to a true symbiosis, boosting the “tuning” so much it’s not clear where a ranger end and the dungeons start.

Let’s take, for example, the Chiropterers, also known as Bat Rangers or, by the folk, Batoners. A Bat Ranger will always have their trusted bat by their side, in a relationship much deeper than the one between a falconer and their bird, or a hunter and their hounds. Young rangers will spend most of their childhood in bats’ nesting grounds until age nine when they will keep a couple of bats just for themselves. These bats will “take care” of the kids and, in return, the kids will grow up caring for all of the bats’ future generations.

Through training, Chiropterers can mimic and improve the bats’ senses. Most species of Dis’ bats have both echolocation and a form of “echo mana location”: they emit sound pulse to receive feedback, but they also excite the mana field to get additional information. Dis’ bats have big eyes almost blind to light but attuned to specific mana colors. Chiropterers can not only replicate “mana echolocation” but also choose the color on which to focus: green helps find living things, red tells you the composition of the rocks, yellow can extract details to a microscopic degree, and so on. Bat rangers will often blindfold themselves to not have “normal sight” interfere with their special sense.

The other ranger traditions have even more intimate connection with their “partners”, their chosen aspect of the cave, animal or otherwise. These relationships look unsettling to foreigners, disturbing even, but for Dis’s citizens, they are just a little gross.

Scolpendrer, the Centipede Ranger or just “bug rangers”, can control various invertebrates, especially the large centipedes that populate the dungeons. These rangers will use their own body to host eggs during the mating season and have pseudo-colonies crawling on them. Scolpendrer may be connected with different species but the composition of their “residents” must be carefully chosen to keep them in a social equilibrium, mediated by the ranger, and avoid mutual eating. Centipedes are the preferred creature for many reasons, not only they predatory behavior is useful to many activities but also these insects can be pushed to even bigger sizes through specifically designed diets: some bug rangers will have dog-sized centipedes as companions.

Another advantage of this bond with scolopendras is their “vibration sense” that the ranger can “copy” and gain an all-around awareness.

Fungal Rangers (called also mushroom rangers) use their body as soil to grow different mushrooms. Their connection to the cave environment is even deeper instinctual than a bug or bat ranger, as their sense spread along the fungal ecosystem bestowing them with vague but constant impressions. They don’t have to focus, they just know, even if they can not articulate what they know: if they encounter an underground animal they will immediately get an idea if they are hostile or venomous, from how deep it came and other ineffable details.

Not all mushrooms are safe to “host” but rangers will know what’s best to keep and what to remove. With some precautions, like special diets and ointments, rangers can grow noxious species. Fungal rangers can have poisonous mushrooms or kinds with psychotropic effects. One of the most famous “tricks” up these ranger sleeves is to encode messages into hallucinogenic caps, to deliver pieces of information through lysergic visions.

Mushroom growths have a tenuous connection to the nervous system of the host: rangers will sense if a mushroom is touched, but they will feel little pain, like a pinch, if a fruiting body is removed. Some of the mushrooms are edible, but everybody who ate them says they taste awful (they are nonetheless used as emergency rations if in dire straits).

The rarest and weird of the ranger are the Ooze rangers, vulgarly called Slimer, Slimey, or similar variations. These rangers have patches of their bodies substituted by oozes, the amorphous creature that lives in the depth of the Tartarus Caves. Oozes mimic the body part they seamlessly replace, emulating the function of all the tissue involved: skin, muscle, tendons, and nerves. To create this intimate symbiosis some ooze is mixed in the blood flow, working as blood cells: the ooze rangers bleed green.

Ranger and oozes are one and the same to the point they can alter the flow of life energy between them: humans can lend their metabolic energy to make the ooze grow pseudopods and other structures or take it and boost their stamina. With enough training, they can also change some proprieties of the oozes they host, making them more liquid or harder, to the point of generating ooze daggers. The oozes part are sensible as skin but receive and process all kinds of stimuli making them work like eyes, ears, tongues, and noses as well: ooze rangers can extend small “tendrils” to probe into cracks or just to look around corners.

One needs a concrete predispostion to become an ooze ranger, the symbiotic bonding is not a guarantee as is in the other kind of Dis Ranger. Members of the ranger families go to a quite brutal “initiation” where oozes driblets are dropped on the “candidate” (young children) to see the reaction: the oozes are acid and will painfully burn the flesh but, if there is compatibility, the ooze will cover the wound and took the place of what was bunt away. Even if the symbiosis doesn’t occur, the kids are raised in the way of the “silmers”, being able to manage and interact with the amorphous creature as no other can.

Rangers developed naturally, with people attuned to the cave banding together, and eventually became family-run guilds (affinity for the caves “runs in the family” after all). Eventually, 24 of the most prominent ranger guilds became officially sanctioned by the nobility and become the Order of The Lantern. These groups are on retainer by their local lord and are tasked with patrolling the land, helping the population. One of the main tasks is to deal with creatures of the depth that emerged on the surface. The slow motions of the tunnel can create passage and confused or aggressive beasts can become a threat or a pest, and it’s up to the rangers to push them back down or exterminate them if needed.

The other main activity is to guide pilgrims, scholars, prospectors, and explorers in the Tartarus caves, ensuring their safety and the safety of the underground life as well. The dungeon ecosystem rest in a fragile and inscrutable equilibrium and the rangers are the only one that knows what can be disturbed and what not: killing a bat nest could cause a chain reaction that will lead to the frantic escape of an albino wurm. The Rangers can barely explain how and why, but time and time again they have been proven right.

The Order of the Lantern is the point of reference for nobles, commoners, and minor ranger groups and, during the centuries, there have been periods when they exercised considerable political power: time and time again their expertise has shaped lawmaking and directed taxes. Even if the Order is in a key political position it is an institution run by commoners. Aristocracy’s devilish blood seems to have a peculiar interaction with the Tartatrus’ caves: a noble will be either “cave deaf” and unable to synch with the underground mana or be too attuned, to the point of losing their mind.

The Stalagmite Whisperers are hermits that have forsaken people and material pleasure to live underground, spending their time in conversation with the rocks. It’s unclear if it’s madness or some extreme form of symbiosis or a mix of both. When a noble children show too much interest in the underground is quickly sent to some relative or institution far away, hoping to break the forming link. Sometimes it will work, other times the call of the depth will be too strong and the enthralled kid will do everything in their power to go back home and get lost in the dark.