THE LENS
A role-playing game of fantasy, horror, and fantastic horror
THE LENS TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME
| by CHRIS FINCH | version 0.5 | 2023-09-12 |
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THE LENS is a role-playing game about quantum immortals who learn about their nature while inadvertently, unavoidably, and repeatedly murdering themselves across the multiple epochs and timelines of a dark fantasy world.
The GAME RULES describe a versatile and mid-crunch system which leverages consistent mechanics, player-facing rolls, and degrees of success, combined with a flexible ability-based, classless system.
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New PLAYERS can build their Character from archetypal templates, while advanced players can customize Characters using highly differentiated options for Species, Culture, Faith, Factional Alignment, Social Class, Abilities, and Equipment.
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REFEREES will learn the fundamentals that underly all game systems, from small-unit SKIRMISHES and INVESTIGATION to DIPLOMACY and large-scale WARFARE, and have access to the toolsets that make content generation simple, easy, and fun.
The GAME SETTING is a new, unique IP, providing both a ‘canon’ gameworld where the published adventures of The Lens take place, as well as rules and procedures to generate countless other worlds that effectively support and complement the rules while providing worldbuilders with the flexibility to create their own histories and tell their own stories.
This REFERENCE DOCUMENT is intended to both give players a quick way to get characters rolled up, and to give GMs as much detail as they want in order to understand, set up, and run a game in the multiverse of The Lens.
BOOKS OF THE LENS
| BOOK | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| QUICK | Skip the details and get playing as fast as possible |
| PLAY | Learn how to create and develop your Characters, and resolve Challenges |
| REFEREE | Learn how to run a Session, design an Adventure, and build a World |
| EXPLORE | Learn about the game world’s Factions, its Faiths, its Histories, and its ultimate Doom |
| KNOW | Find a specific rule or table without thumbing through the details |
VERSIONS OF THE LENS
| DATE | VERSION | NOTES |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-10-18 | 0.2.5 | Ability rework in progress; Skilled-Anima complete. |
| 2023-09-12 | 0.2 | Species rework complete. |
| 2022-05-13 | 0.1 | Initial rough version. |
THE LETTER
On a strange day, you wake, and a leather-bound book, wrapped in this letter, is on your pillow. The letter is weather-bound and worn, but the script is strong and the ink clear.
If you ask, no one recognizes the handwriting, knows of its author, or has any recollection of when or how it appeared.
You are about to read a very special book.
What follows is a collection of critical observations across the infinite incarnations of our benighted world. The briefest glance of our shared multiverse: of its uncanny commonalities, of its wild variances and, perhaps most importantly, of the Shadow that has improbably arrayed itself against all existence.
I have been called a prophet, an Archmage, and a heretic; power-hungry, a fool, and even an agent of the powers I’ve opposed in my quest - but the truth is that I am just a simple woman who once chanced upon a curious item: a LENS that let me peer into every world that is, that could yet be, and that once might have been.
Through the LENS, I found light and dark, madness and truth, everything and nothing. All these things are known to me now, but they are not enough.
There is neither time nor space (a delicious irony) to relate all that I have perceived. Death comes for me; I have seen her many faces often through the LENS. Before she overtakes me, as my final task, my knowledge must escape my possession – indeed, my entire world — so that one day, you can at last stumble upon it.
You who will, in the end, have little choice but to follow in my footsteps.
I have left you what I could. By the time you read this, all but this single volume — and the LENS, of course — will be gone. Perhaps with more luck and opportunity than I had, the wisdom you unearth will teach you how to escape the clawing tendrils of our mutual doom. To confront the Shadow and to end its dark tyranny.
Perhaps it will only give you enough time to do as I did: to package what you have learned and launch it blindly into the dark, daring to hope it finds its way into hands and minds more capable than yours were before your end.
It does not matter anymore. You are now the heir to my legacy. Cross the Deeps and find my tomb to claim what is now rightfully yours. Recover my LENS. Join me in my madness, and save us all from the deathless Shadow.
Remember me when you do, in hatred or in fondness. Either suffices.
*Until then, I remain:,
JEHANNA ASHMORROW
SAGE OF THE LENS