Candela Obscura is 1 Year Old!

We recorded our Candela Obscura Live Show from our Los Angeles event on May 25th! Come check out this special one-shot with players Matthew Mercer, Laura Bailey, Marisha Ray, and Khary Payton with a story led by led by Game Master Spenser Starke. The inimitable Taliesin Jaffe also joined us as our Master of Ceremonies!

Candela Obscura is a tabletop roleplaying game that places you in the roles of investigators working for an esoteric order.
In this game of investigative horror, individuals of varied talents are brought together under the organization Candela Obscura. You’ll pursue strange occurrences and encounter dangerous magicks, fighting back against a mysterious source of corruption and bleed.
Candela Obscura is the first to use the Illuminated Worlds System, a system that uses 6-sided dice and lends itself to narrative, arc-driven play.

The Circle of the Silver Screen

Alternate Front End VoD

Credits
  • Lead Game Design: Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall
  • Written By: Rowan Hall and Spenser Starke
  • Editor: Karen Twelves
  • Managing Editor: Matthew Key
  • Production: Ivan Van Norman and Alex Uboldi
  • Proofreading: Jacky Leung
  • Additional Game Design: Christopher Grey, Tracey Harrison, and Taliesin Jaffe
  • Layout: De La Rosa Design
  • Cultural Consultants: Basheer Ghouse, Pam Punzalan, Erin Roberts, Christine Sandquist, Liam Stevens
  • Military & Political Consultant: Anthony Joyce-Rivera
  • Game Development Consultant: Mike Underwood
  • Additional Editing: Jared Deiro, Darcy Ross
  • Additional Writing: Carlos Cisco, Tracey Harrison, Anthony Joyce-Rivera, Sam Maggs, Mike Underwood
  • Graphic Design: Aaron Monroy, Bryan Weiss
  • Artists: Shaun Ellis, Jamie Harrison, Allie Irwin, Amelia Leonards, Lily McDonnell, Justin O’Neal, Sunga Park, Gustavo Rodrigues Pelissari, Doug Telford
  • Map Design: Marc Moureau
  • Cover Artist: John Harper (Limited Edition), De La Rosa Design (Standard)
  • Artist / Ancient Languages / Spell Design: Stevie Morley
  • Original Concept Created By: Taliesin Jaffe and Chris Lockey
  • Illuminated Worlds System Design: Stras Acimovic and Layla Adelman
  • Illuminated Worlds Preliminary Design: Daniel Kwan, Eloy Lasanta, Matthew Mercer

Purchase Available in:

  • Critical Role shops (US, UK, CA, AU, and EU, standard & limited, bundled with a PDF)
  • Darrington Press Guild stores (standard & limited)
  • Other friendly local game stores (standard only)
  • Demiplane’s Candela Obscura Nexus
  • Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPMEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago


    Spenser Starke (left) and Rowan Hall (right).

    Here’s what it’s like to have a nerd world dream job: building games for the Critical Role empire

    by Cheryl Teh

    There are plenty of fun gigs in nerd world. But if you’re a Critical Role fan, building games for their gaming empire probably ranks right up there in your list of dream jobs.
    The people with these jobs are Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall, who help craft the worlds and games in which Critical Role’s famous faces play and make magic.
    Starke and Hall are credited as lead game designers and writers on the 211-page “Candela Obscura” core rulebook. Released by Critical Role’s publishing arm, Darrington Press, this is the handbook for anyone who wants to get into Critical Role’s gothic horror game.
    For those who wonder how it’s possible to make a living from making board games, Starke and Hall’s skills have a valuable niche at Critical Role. The company, co-founded by the eight main cast members of the “Dungeons & Dragons” live show of the same name, is a growing gaming empire in its own right — one that Amazon bet on after a record-breaking $11.3 million Kickstarter run.
    Hall and Starke also work on Daggerheart, another Critical Role game currently in open beta.
    Outside CR, Starke is an award-winning game-maker whose work has been optioned by Paramount Studios, while Hall hosts a history and mythology podcast.

    Mythology and Mechanics

    Starke and Hall worked on “Candela Obscura” for around 11 months, conceptualizing the mechanics, writing lore, and testing it extensively.
    Building on the Illuminated Worlds System, a six-sided, dice-based gaming system developed for CR, the duo fleshed out a game where investigators seek out dark secrets while navigating the horrors of a turn-of-the-century, war-ravaged society called the Fairelands.
    Starke said Hall joined him several months into the project to help write the lore while he focused on getting the game mechanics to a point where they “could be solid for the show.”
    “I came in the first day with this stack of mythology textbooks. I was ready to go,” Hall told BI. “Every day, we just worked together and bounced back and forth.”

    Easy to pick up, hard to put down

    Starke told BI that the rulebook released in November 2023 might be more than 200 pages long, but it is intended to be easy to grasp. Game masters can use the mechanics as a scaffold for inventive games in one’s own play space instead of memorizing lore about an entire metropolis.
    Through the game development process, both designers also worked with the cofounders — all professional voice actors who’ve played “D&D” on Twitch for nearly a decade — to play test and break the game. To add to the pressure, they had the unique experience of having a Critical Role live play version of “Candela Obscura” — run by cofounder and the show’s regular game master Matthew Mercer — air while they were still working out the mechanics.
    Starke later got his turn in the game master chair for the second season of “Candela Obscura,” which aired in August 2023.
    “The first season was airing while we were still writing the game,” Starke told BI. “And so Matt rolled with a lot of punches as we were like, ‘OK, this mechanic changed three minutes ago.’ So we were testing the game as we were playing it.'”
    B.I. was speaking to Hall and Starke while the “Circle of the Crimson Mirror” — main cast member Liam O’Brien’s turn at being game master — was dropping on Twitch.
    “Liam’s the best. I teased him the other day, saying, ‘You’re the best student ever.’ Because he came in and knew this book back to front, he had all of these intense, engaging, and fun questions, and I got to be his lore keeper while he was researching,” Hall said.
    While people might not see that much of Starke or Hall on Critical Role’s shows or the company’s Beacon streaming platform, that may soon change.
    Starke is the game master for Critical Role’s first “Candela Obscura” live show, which will be held on May 25 at The United Theater on Broadway in Los Angeles.
    “I miss being able to walk around the table when we used to play at home,” Mercer said during a May 21 fireside chat on Beacon. “And I think this game of Candela, this live show, I will be able to do that with the rest of the players — which will be kind of exciting,”

      • Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPMEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        I made a Weird: Medium on Demiplane. Chor (derivative of Petrichor) and their abilities are tied to an electric event that ended the war.

        Style
        There is a pulsing quality to Chor’s body movements that makes most people stay away out of instinct. It reminds them of a convulsing or rabid animal. Playing it off as dancing has only gotten so far. The reality is not too different, unfortunately, in that there is an involuntary contraction of muscles to such an extent as to twist them into unnatural poses. Chor appears normal when viewed directly, but in periphery, the muscle contractions are viewed more violently/accurately (twitches become pain-wracked poses in extreme moments), lending to even more unsettling perception from peers and the like. They have a linked piercing from septum to left ear lobe and the chain between is very thin. It normally rests on a temporary bandage because the chain has been sharpened. When the bandage is removed, the chain cuts into Chor’s cheek and keeps focus in times of distraction. The locals claim to hear music coming from Chor’s place of business (an unadorned curiosities shop with a noticeable residency of a number of local cats), though there are no musical instruments to be seen. The music has no source, though some claim it comes from underground, and they would be right. Chor has furnished what might be best described as a sound coffin rather than a sound booth. When the sounds and voices in Chor’s mind need competition, Chor gets into the sound coffin and has some powerful speakers within to sing back and bring equilibrium.

        Catalyst
        “Newfaire doesn’t care.” has been Chor’s motto for as long as it’s mattered.
        Born an orphan with supernatural abilities, Chor found a grand total of ZERO people who were able to resist the temptation to exploit Chor’s abilities and risk their execution as a heretic (such as The Pyre and the Esoteric Order of New Sciences (EONS) have nearly done). The Red Hand has expended the most effort to recruit Chor for their adept abtilities at scrying the essence of objects and persons magical.
        Fortunately for Candela, the Red Hand’s capitalist ethos keeps them from being truly trustworthy.
        Fortunately for Chor, being able to sense the betrayals has provided ample routes of escape.
        The Candela Organization is the only place where Chor feels human, seeing past all the trauma that has warped their life. For Chor, it’s easier to support a faceless thing that can’t be read for fear and deceit.