Lantern Log #14 — Beneath the Surface of the BADLVCK-Verse

Every story begins on the surface. A village, a road, a city, a character trying to survive their own small corner of the world. But beneath the surface of the BADLVCK-Verse lies something far stranger.

Many of the stories connected to BADLVCK Press may appear different at first glance. Some take place in fractured realms. Others unfold in distant cities beneath neon skies. Some explore ancient systems, while others focus on masks, forgotten orders, impossible creatures, or worlds that seem entirely disconnected from one another.

Yet beneath all of them runs the same deeper structure.

At the heart of the BADLVCK-Verse are ancient forces known as the Laws.

The Laws are not gods, although some people worship them. They are not machines, although they often behave with terrifying precision. They are closer to fundamental principles of reality itself. Some govern chance, others govern order. Some shape identity, memory, consumption, decay, transformation, silence, reflection, or collapse. Many stories only encounter traces of them. A few stumble directly into their influence.

One of the most widely felt is BADLVCK, the Law of Crooked Chance.Tthe force responsible for improbable outcomes, unlikely survival, and the strange moments where reality seems to deviate from expectation. Opposing it in many ways is ΣYMM, the Law of Symmetry and inevitability, a force that seeks stability, balance, and predictable outcomes.

Others are stranger still. The Lantern guides, Decay erodes, The Faceless reshapes identity, The Nameless governs the power of names, The Hungering consumes.

And somewhere beneath all of them, deeper structures continue moving in ways few fully understand.

One of the ways these forces interact with the world is through crystals, Crystals are not simply magical batteries or enchanted stones.

They are interfaces, resonant fragments capable of interacting with deeper systems hidden within reality itself.

Some react to emotion, others respond to memory, intention, symbolism, or state of mind. A crystal held by one person may remain completely dormant, while the same crystal may awaken in another.

The further one moves into the deeper layers of reality, the stranger these interactions become.

This is where the Veils begin to matter. The Veils are not separate dimensions, but layers of interaction with reality itself. Most people live entirely within the Veil of Habit, experiencing only the surface of the world. Others learn to interact with deeper systems.

A rare few encounter reality almost directly, where the Laws stop feeling like distant influences and begin acting upon the world in unmistakable ways. What makes all of this particularly fascinating is that many of the ideas behind the BADLVCK-Verse emerged from real questions about reality itself.

Questions surrounding probability.

Patterns.

Observation.

Information.

Cause and effect.

The strange ways systems behave when complexity reaches a certain threshold.

While the BADLVCK-Verse remains firmly rooted in fantasy, mythology, and storytelling and Sci-fi, it often draws inspiration from real-world concepts found in physics, information theory, emergence, complexity, and the stranger edges of scientific thought. Not because the stories attempt to explain reality, but because reality is already strange enough.

The result is a universe where ancient myth and modern ideas frequently overlap, where a forgotten symbol may behave like a piece of code, where a story can influence a system, where meaning itself can become a force, and where the line between magic and understanding is often far thinner than it first appears.

The deeper you travel into the BADLVCK-Verse, the more those connections begin to reveal themselves.

Some doors open onto fantasy.

Some onto philosophy.

Some onto things far stranger.

But all of them eventually lead back to the same question:

What if reality is much larger than we think it is?

— BADLVCK Press