Yet as the world seems to advance, it has not totally left magick behind. Between this realm and the Beyond stands a barrier, the Flare, and where the Flare is weak, there are ‘thinnings’ through which magick seeps. To the average citizen of the Fairelands, the myths, legends, and folktales of old explain what real magickal phenomena they might have seen. If a thinning is opened wide enough, creatures from the Beyond steal into our realm, whilst powerful magick can result in corruptive Bleed that can twist and kill. Whilst The Office of Unexplained Phenomena of the Periphery will go to any lengths to keep knowledge of magickal occurrences from the public, the Exoteric Order Of New Sciences would seek to harness it as new technology, and the Pyre of the Ascendancy put all knowledge and occurrences of it to the flame, the Candela Obscura investigates such supernatural happenings, studying them, and seeks to protect the world from them. It even has a facility within the Flare itself, the Fourth Pharos, where it stores the most terrible tomes, awful artefacts, and other powerful phenomena, away from prying and greedy eyes. It is organised in circles, each of which has a Lightkeeper, a veteran Candela Obscura investigator who has retired from active investigation and is appointed to advise those who can conduct investigations in the field. The latter, of course, are the Player Characters.
This is the set-up for Candela Obscura, the roleplaying game of paranormal investigative horror published by Darrington Press, part of and showcased by Critical Role. It is an alternate Edwardian era, intentionally so because it avoids the institutionalized racism, homophobia, transphobia, or other forms of prejudice rife in the period of our own history. Players take the roles of members of the Candela Obscura, investigating magical phenomena and horrors, containing them, and keeping the greater world around them safe from their corruptive influence.
A Player Character in Candela Obscura is first defined by a Role and then by nine Actions. The nine Actions are divided into three thematic Drives. Nerve includes the Move, Strike, and Control Actions; Cunning the Sway, Read, and Hide Action; and Intuition the Survey, Focus, and Sense Actions. Each Action is rated between one and three, indicating how many dice a player will roll to have his character an action. Each Drive has its pool of points which can be expended to add more dice to roll for Action under its theme. Then for every three points of Drive, a Player Character has a Resistance, which can be spent in order to gain rerolls on a task. He carries with him three pieces of Gear, although these do not have to be declared until in play. An item of Gear might increase the effectiveness of a task or allow a Player Character to actually attempt a task.
There are five different roles—Face, Muscle, Scholar, Slink, and Weird—each of has two Specialties. The Specialties for the Face Role are Journalist and Magician (as in stage magician); for Muscle, Explorer and Soldier; for Scholar, Doctor and Professor; for Slink, Criminal and Detective; and for Weird, Medium and Occultist. Each Speciality and Role provides the base Action values for a Player Character, whilst each Speciality gives three abilities to choose from and each Role a choice of six to choose from. Abilities give out bonus dice or enable a particular action. For example, the Face Ability of ‘I Know a Guy’ enables a player to ask the Game Master once per assignment if there is someone nearby who can help his character, whilst the Sharpshooter Role Ability for the Soldier grants the Player Character two bonus dice if the player expends a point of his Nerve Drive.
To create a character, a player selects a Role and a Speciality, and then assigns the base Action values. He raises another from zero to one and then another three points to anyway he would like, and then he does the same for his character’s Drives. Penultimately, he selects an Ability for his character’s Role and Speciality. Lastly, he has a set of prompts to answer to help flesh out his character and form relationships with the fellow members of his Circle in the Candela Obscura.
Name: Tabitha Blythe
Role: Weird
Speciality: Medium
Role Ability: Let Them In
Speciality Ability: Cold Read
Nerve: Drive 2 Resistance 0
– Move 1 Strike 0 Control 0
Cunning: Drive 3 Resistance 1
– Sway 1 Read 2 Hide 0
Intuition: Drive 4 Resistance 1
– Survey 1 Focus 1 Sense 2 (Gilded)
In addition, the players, as a group, create their characters’ Circle in the Candela Obscura. There are a series of questions that they need to answer about their Circle, name it, decide on the location of its chapter house, choose a Circle Ability, and assign Resource Points. For example, ‘Stamina Training’ provides three bonus dice during an assignment and ‘Nobody Left Behind’ grants a bonus die on any attempt to help another Player Character who has too many Marks (or damage). There are only six Circle Abilities to choose from, and they include ‘One Last Run’, indicating that the next assignment is the Player Character’s last and they will retire afterwards. This grants the other Player Characters advantages when they next advance, whilst also suggesting that the play of Candela Obscura is intended to be long term. The Resource Points are Stitch, used to reduce the Marks a Player Character has suffered; Refresh, used to regain Drives and Resistances for a Player Character; and Train, used to grant bonus dice.
Mechanically, Candela Obscura uses what it calls the Illuminated Worlds system, a stripped-down version of the mechanics from the Blades in the Dark roleplaying game. When a player wants his character to attempt a task, he rolls a number of six-sided equal to the Action being used. Drive can be expended to add more dice, though loss of Drive is permanent, and the maximum number of dice that can be rolled is six. The highest die is counted. Any result of a six indicates a complete success, whereas a result of four or five is a partial success, and three or under is a failure—essentially, a ‘yes’, ‘yes, but’, or ‘no’ result. If more than a single six is rolled, the result is a critical success. In addition, some Actions may be ‘Gilded’. This means that one of the dice rolled for an Action must be of a different colour. If a player rolls a Gilded die as part of a task, then he can choose between the highest result or the result of the Gilded die. If a player chooses the result of the Gilded die, he gains the benefit of the number rolled and an extra benefit. This is to recover a point of Drive. So, in effect, what a player might do is ignore the complete success he rolled in favour of the four or five he rolled, a partial success, in order to recover a point of Drive. Lastly, Resistance can be expended to gain a reroll.
Conversely, failure can narrative, such as adding a complication or losing an opportunity, but at its worst, it can mean damage. The latter is suffered in the form of Marks to either Body, Brain, or Bleed, representing physical harm, mental strain, or magickal corruption, respectively. A Player Character cannot suffer more than three Marks in any one of the three categories, lest he drops to the ground incapacitated and suffering from a Scar. A Scar both indicates permanent damage suffered by the Player Character and changes how he approaches the world. The latter is reflected mechanically, by the player having shift a point in one Action to another. There is a lot of advice here on how to handle this, especially how to handle Brain and Bleed Scars, Candela Obscura wanting to avoid harmful mental health representation in the horror genre.
In all of this, it is the Game Master who sets the stakes and expectations, explaining what a Player Character has to gain from attempting the task or lose from attempting the task. The Game Master also sets the Action to be rolled for the task that a player wants his character to attempt. This comes back to the ‘fiction first’ ethos of Candela Obscura, that is, the Game Master fitting the right Action to what the player describes his character doing. However, the play of Candela Obscura is still a conversation and the player is always given a chance to adjust, decide on using Drive, and so on.
Candela Obscura provides some details of the supernatural world and of the organisation itself, as well as its enemies. This is where Candela Obscura begins to underwhelm as a horror game. There is more of a focus on the Candela Obscura organisation and its enemies, and an overall description of Newfaire and the Fairelands. The latter is particularly rich and detailed, and accompanied by scenario hooks. Similarly, there is excellent advice for the Game Master on running Candela Obscura, beginning with some core principles, such as ‘Paint the world in darkness and in light. Show the humanity in the horror and the horror in humanity.’, ‘Make the world grounded, dangerous, and terrifying’, and ‘Say “yes,” unless you must say “no.”’. There is also a good guide to how an assignment is constructed, from hook, arrival, and exploration to escalation, climax, and epilogue. Even better is the fact that each of the four example assignments in Candela Obscura, all four of them very good, is accompanied by an example session of what each might look like when played. This is a fantastic extra, really helping the Game Master who is less experienced, whether in running a roleplaying game in general or investigative horror scenarios in particular, to visual the play of an assignment. It also nicely complements the lengthy example of play given earlier in the book.
Physically, Candela Obscura is a lovely looking book. The artwork is suitably art nouveau in style and that very much fits the period setting of the roleplaying game. Plus, the rulebook is lavishly illustrated with documents, letters, diagrams, and the like. It really is a nice-looking book.
Unfortunately, where Candela Obscura underwhelms is in the treatment of its genre—horror. Where there is plenty of support in terms of setting and factions ordinary, there is just not enough of the outré in Candela Obscura, whether that is details of the threats and monsters that the Agents might meet or advice for the Game Master on running a horror game. Consequently, it is nowhere near as easy as it should be for Game Master to create her own threats and in fact, it feels as if there is more advice on avoiding the dangers of running a horror game than there is on actually running one. Thus, whilst that advice is far from unwelcome and certainly pertinent, the overall result is that the horror aspect of Candela Obscura is actually its weakest.
Ultimately, even if Candela Obscura does keep its horror a little too veiled, there is still a good roleplaying game here. The setting of the Fairelands and Newfaire and the factions present are nicely detailed, the mechanics are geared towards storytelling and the narrative consequences of confronting magick and the supernatural, and there are four good Assignments for a game to get started. Candela Obscura is a very modern horror roleplaying game, despite being set in an alternative Edwardian period, one that the Game Master will need to work a little harder with to bring the horror into play.
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