Candela Obscura Core Rulebook Review: Deep Campaign Setting, Straightforward Narrative Game

The Candela Obscura Core Rulebook brings a deep and intriguing world and a simple narrative-driven game system to tabletop RPG players. Due out for release next week, Candela Obscura is the first tabletop RPG published by Darrington Press, the game publishing arm of Critical Role. The Core Rulebook is both a campaign setting book describing the Gilded Age-inspired world of the Fairelands and a rulebook that showcases the Illuminated Worlds game engine designed by Stras Acimovic and Layla Adelman. While the world of Candela Obscura is deep and filled with mystery and intrigue, the underlying game engine and accompanying mechanics is perhaps a touch too straightforward for the world itself. 

The Illuminated Worlds system is heavily inspired by Blades in the Dark, a gothic low-fantasy heist TTRPG designed by John Harper that in turn uses a game engine based on Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker. Blades in the Dark is specifically cited as one of the main inspirations for Candela Obscura in the opening pages of the book and its easy to see both how Candela Obscura drew heavily from it in terms of the core mechanics. Both Candela Obscura and Blades in the Dark use a similar party-driven advancement system, both games use the same D6 pool system (in which players roll a pool of D6s and take the highest number as the result), and both games are focused on narrative instead of crunchy rules to dictate results. 

However, there are a few key differences – for one, Candela Obscura's narrative is much more defined by its Game Master rather than the player (in Blades in the Dark, players are encouraged to describe how a success or failure plays out, while Game Masters take on this role in Candela Obscura.) There's also a nifty drive system that allows players to add dice to their dice pool by spending a resource known as "drive" that is restocked when players choose to use the results of special gilded dice (as opposed to taking the highest result) on rolls.  Additionally, the consequences for failed actions or rolls in Candela Obscura are trade-offs rather than outright injuries or penalties. When a player takes enough Marks (a stand-in for damage), they take a Scar that forces them to shift a point from one action rating to another to reflect how that Scar has permanently changed (but not debilitated) their character. It's a more nuanced approach to a horror genre often defined by systems that gamify mental illnesses and physical impairments and the Candela Obscura rulebook goes to great length to show "the humanity in horror" throughout its pages. 

Where the rulebook really shines is in describing the campaign setting of the Fairelands, the region that serves as the home for Candela Obscura's adventures. The Fairelands is set in a post-war atmosphere, where emerging technologies such as electricity are mixed with strange alchemy and corruptive Magick. While Candela Obscura seemed to at first take inspiration from cosmic horror tropes, it's clear in reading through the history of the Fairelands and the kinds of dangers that populate it that's it's as heavily inspired by occultism and esotericism as well as gothic horror themes. That in itself lends a lot of flexibility to Game Masters to tell the sort of story that they want to tell. Reading through the book, it's clear that a lot of labor and love has been put into fleshing out the world of the Fairelands, filling it with a variety of potential narrative hooks and mysteries to explore within the game. 

My main issue with the Candela Obscura Core Rulebook is that the underlying ruleset feels remarkably thin compared to the deep world of the game. The game engine feels like a streamlined adaptation of the Blades in the Dark ruleset, one that serves well for a relatively contained narrative arc but will struggle in a longer campaign length format. It's telling that Critical Role has promoted the Candela Obscura game with three-session "Chapters," because I don't think the game lends itself to longer campaigns. While Blades in the Dark had systems in place to keep players invested in growing their crew's prestige and notoriety, that system doesn't exist within Candela Obscura and thus the advancement system feels a bit lacking as a result. A strong GM and passionate storytellers can work around the shortcomings of the game engine, likely through the use of different characters as the Candela Obscura game system can be quite deadly, but the game engine doesn't really have much for players to explore even compared to other narrative games. Additionally, I feel like the ten subclasses are a bit limited in what they can do, furthering the idea of shorter campaigns to prevent players from feeling like their character is growing mechanically stale. 

I think Candela Obscura will thrive at certain tables, especially those who enjoy Powered by the Apocalypse-style games or those who want games where the mechanics only exist in service to the storyline. But I think it will have a one and done shelf life at other tables, particularly those who are looking for more mechanical heft to their games. I personally am curious about the underlying Illuminated Worlds system and how Darrington Press plans to use it. Will this be a system primarily made to launch other strong campaign settings? And how adaptable will it be for other genres of games? Those questions are just as intriguing (at least to this tabletop RPG-focused journalist) as the deep and dark world of the Fairelands themselves.