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[Radiance] Item - Dawn's Eye Lantern
🕑 Added 2024-03-04 15:00:05 +0000 UTCClerics of the divine Dawnstar guild once wielded these lanterns in their crusade against the forces of darkness. Intricate holy symbols inscribed into their metal frames permit channeling of divine spells without a free hand.
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DAWN'S EYE LANTERN
Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement)
While wielding this lantern (as if it were a weapon or shield), you can use an action to light it. While lit, the lantern illuminates its space with bright light, and its lens emits bright light in a 20-foot-cone and dim light in the larger cone beyond for an additional 20 feet. You can reorient this cone of light at the start of each of your turns (no action required). The light is nonmagical. It lasts until you use an action to extinguish it, or until you no longer wield the lantern.
Radiant Ward. You have advantage on saving throws against effects caused by Aberrations, Fey, Fiends, and Undead in the lantern's area of bright light.
Lantern's Wake. This lantern has 4 charges and regains 1d4 expended charges daily at dawn. While you wield the lantern, you can use a bonus action to modify the light in one of the following ways:
Focused Beam. You expend 1 charge to focus the light on a creature within 20 feet of you. The creature must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or be blinded until the start of your next turn. Aberrations, Fey, Fiends, Undead, and creatures with the Sunlight Sensitivity trait have disadvantage on this saving throw.
Repel Dark Presence. You expend 1 charge to infuse the light with divine magic. Until the start of your next turn, the lantern's light becomes bright light that fills a 15-foot-cone or a 30-foot-line originating from the lantern (your choice) aimed at a point or target of your choice. For the duration, this area of light is sunlight and suppresses the effects of magical darkness.
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Uncommon Variant. The uncommon version of the lantern has these changes. The Lantern's Wake property requires an action instead of a bonus action to use. The DC of the Focused Beam option is 13 and the light created by Repel Dark Presence is not sunlight.
Very Rare Variant. The very rare version of the lantern has these changes. It has 6 charges and regains 1d4+2 expended charges daily at dawn. The DC of the Focused Beam option is 16. When you succeed on a saving throw caused by an Aberration, Fey, Fiend, or Undead in the lantern's area of bright light, the creature takes 2d10 radiant damage.
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DESIGN COMMENTARY
This lantern is one of two dedicated to the first lumenguild, the Dawnstar. They're a sun-based cleric guild and essentially founded Ellumara. Their sun magic guided the city through its dark times until it emerged to become what it is today. They are abjurers and ward extraplanar threats with magical light.
Thematically, this lantern draws from the Alan Wake games, which deals a lot with light and stripping the shadows. The Radiant Ward feature grants boons to the wielder for about ~15% of battles overall (combined percentage of combats that involve Aberrations, Fey, Fiends, or Undead. This feature is strong if always active, but is adjusted weaker to account for the simple strategy enemies can employ to avoid it (just walk out of the light's cone).
It also has 4 uses of the two options. Both requires a bonus action, so its activation cost is minimal. Focused Beam basically grants you advantage on your attacks if you succeed or allow you to escape; the Repel Dark Presence option is a situational benefit designed to temporarily negate enemies that use magical darkness or just vampires. Both are short-duration enough or situational enough (and the blinding is single-target) that it only accounts for about 1/3 of the item's total combat power.
Visually, the lantern is designed as a bulls-eye lantern, a sort of focused light source used during Victorian times. I'm not the happiest with how it turned out because the design doesn't quite look self-explanatory or cohesive, but that's the challenge with the more mundane-looking objects that need to look somewhat functional. The "supports' do help make it look like a sun's rays at least. I'm not sure what went wrong with the glowing lens but it doesn't quite look right either. Unfortunately, most of the references I used had unlit lenses so ... tough luck.
![[Radiance] Item - Dawn's Eye Lantern](https://img10.patrefans.com/storage/5/jy/ub/563145-019e84be-824a-797f-a7f4-a2c94c66c939.jpg)
![[Radiance] Item - Dawn's Eye Lantern](https://img5.patrefans.com/storage/12/hw/nl/563145-019e84be-824b-7a9f-8aa1-3286b49f815c.jpg)
![[Radiance] Item - Dawn's Eye Lantern](https://img10.patrefans.com/storage/10/cg/wh/563145-019e84be-8254-726f-aa07-f56c66e62da3.jpg)
