u/LunarRingTCG

Welcome back to the Lunar Ring!

Once again I just want to extend my gratitude for people's kindness and intrigue! As requested this post will be going over how to play Lunar Ring.

I wanted to give a general overview of the gameplay itself without completely dropping a massive rulebook on everyone all at once.

At its core, Lunar Ring is a highly interactive dark fantasy/cosmic horror TCG focused around escalating weapons-based combat and surviving beneath the gaze of The Pale Stare.

Objective:

Force your opponent through all three of their Conditions before they do the same to you

Conditions:

Players have 3 conditions: Thriving/Wounded/Desperate. Each condition has its own abilities and health pools. Once your health reaches 0, you'll move into your next condition, and lose old abilities and gain new ones, as well as your health resetting (represented by the right hand number).

These conditions are incredibly important as they dictate how much "Resolve" you can have which is the main resource of the game (represented by the number on the left hand side).

Resolve:

Resolve represents a devotee's mental endurance and ability to withstand the horrors of Noxvel. Powerful cards often require players to test large amounts of Resolve to play, while many dangerous effects force players to Test Resolve repeatedly.

Combat/Weapons:

Combat itself is heavily interaction-based through a system known as “The Fracture.” Think of this as similar to the stack in Magic the Gathering.

As I noted above, Lunar Ring is a weapons-based game. Combat is initiated through attacking with the many weapons you'll have in your deck. Each weapon can attack once and you can have a total of 2 weapons at any one time. Each weapon has its own durability and will break after the specified number of attacks. This allows for new weapons to come in and keep the game consistently changing between both players.

But combat is not the only thing escalating during a match.

Pale Stare:

As players worsen through their Conditions and blood begins to spill, The Pale Stare itself becomes more invested in the violence unfolding before it.

Whenever a player’s condition worsens, The Pale Stare awakens further through its lunar phases: Closed/Crescent/Half/Full/Eclipse.

Each phase change allows the player who caused the suffering to choose a permanent global effect known as a “Presence of The Pale Stare,” altering the rules of the match for both players.

Some Presences increase aggression and damage output, while others distort resources, recursion, or even death itself.

My overall goal with Lunar Ring has been to create a game where the mechanics themselves reinforce the setting:

A brutal ritual of survival, sacrifice, escalation, and cosmic corruption.

In my next post I'll look to break down the various card types and keywords for each covenant as well.

Thank you again to everyone who has shown interest in the project so far. I genuinely appreciate all of the feedback and discussion the game has received already!

“Bathe in her cold glow and be made monstrous. But offer red ichor beneath her radiance and be made divine.”

Hello everyone!

I wanted to finally introduce a project I’ve been developing called Lunar Ring, a dark fantasy/cosmic horror TCG set in the dying world of Noxvel.

Noxvel exists beneath the gaze of a colossal moon known as The Pale Stare. Not a celestial body, but the lingering eye of something far greater.

Nothing remains unchanged beneath her light.

Entire forests have been found bleeding from their bark. Rivers have been seen flowing backwards. Some afflicted humans can become little more than hollow shells with arms raised skyward as if caught in endless prayer. Reality itself distorts beneath her gaze.

But humanity made a discovery.

Blood. The simple act of spilling blood seemed to alter the effects of her corruption.

What once created madness and deformity instead grants impossible strength, transformation, and powers mortals were never meant to possess. It is for this very reason that the Lunar Ring was born. On the surface it appears as nothing more than a colosseum for combatants to test their strength and executions to be put to the blade.

But to a trained eye. The Lunar Ring is worship, in its purest form.

Mechanically, matches in Lunar Ring are designed to escalate alongside this idea of ritualized violence.

As players lose health, their condition worsens from Thriving, to Wounded, and finally, Desperate.

At the same time, The Pale Stare herself begins to awaken and advance through lunar phases. Starting asleep and then moving through the moon phases of Crescent, Half, Full, and ending on the Eclipse.

Whenever a player's condition worsens, the moon advances further and permanently alters the match through effects known as “Presences of The Pale Stare” — global effects chosen by the player who spilled the blood.

By the time the game reaches Eclipse, violence itself becomes mandatory, with players beginning to lose health if no blood was spilled during a turn.

The goal with Lunar Ring has been to create a TCG where the world itself feels alive, hostile, and increasingly unstable as the match progresses.

I’ve finally reached the point where I wanted to start sharing the project publicly, and I’d genuinely love to hear what people think of the setting and overall direction so far.