You’ve heard of Critical Role, right? In the wake of the OGL fiasco, they’ve started diversifying – leading to Darrington Press, their publishing arm, putting out Candela Obscura, an occulty trindie-ish narrative game with some interesting DNA. It’s got a fantasy steampunk setting, mechanics that are a drift from Forged in the Dark (FITD), an adventure structure that tips a hat to Vaesen, and a free, high-production value, quickstart you can get here.

There was a flurry of commentary about it on release, about how they’d failed to acknowledge their FITD base (now addressed in a later release), about how loose some of the rules were (I mean, it is a quickstart), and how this will either alienate CR fans or open up a great doorway to more narrative games for them. 

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But to really judge a game, you’ve got to play it – so I did. And you can watch it soon, on Unconventional GMs – so keep an eye out for that. I ran the quickstart in just over 2 hours with 4 players, and it was – I think I’d speak for everyone – more fun than we expected. So here’s my play-informed review of the quickstart.

The Setting Is Great

Fantasy steampunk stuff, in the shadow of a recent war, gives plenty of scope for exciting occult stuff to investigate. The titular organisation you work for deals with occult threats, so you’ll be sent to resolve them, and there are a couple of rival/enemy organisations that fit together nicely. There’s a big city on top of the monster-infested ruins of the previous civilisation, some other locales to investigate with towns and villages and stuff, and a good mixture of detail and speculation.

There’s also an edge of oppression, with the church, the state, and in particular the police force – the Periphery – very much cast as enemies of the people. I like this, and to be honest even if all it does it put off the “keep politics out of games” mob, that’s a win for me. All in all, there’s loads going on in the setting, and it’s got loads of “PCs do this” ideas in it to make it easy to think up adventures for.

The System is Decent – and Feels Different to FITD

There’s quite a few tweaks and drifts from classic Blades to keep you on your toes – my concern running it was defaulting to rules from Blades (particularly as my group had all played and run a lot of Blades). You have Gilded Dice, Resistances, and Drives which can all be spent to boost – this felt like it might be one too many extra resources, but in play it worked fine. 

The damage system felt good – Marks accumulate in different areas and turn into Scars on the fourth Mark – although it didn’t give as much peril as I’d like – maybe I was a bit soft on them in not doing more than one Mark at a time. Maybe this’ll be revisited in the full rules.

All in all, it felt like it might be better for a short run or one-shot (it’s probably, whisper it, better than standard FITD for a one-shot) – although, again, we’re playing with the quickstart so there may be many more options in the full book.

The Adventure Presentation is Terrible

We played through Dressed to Kill, the quickstart adventure, and this was the strangest part of the game. Its presentation has a really strange approach that makes running it significantly harder than it needs to be. The adventure itself is great in terms of concept, plot and structure – and leads to a satisfying showdown, but it often came up short in terms of what it supplies to GM to help actually run it. 

The adventure is presented as a sequence of broad, open scenes, with a “Reveal” in each one they need to find to progress to the next one. While the overall sequence is linear, the scenes are open-ended and offer a lot of player choice as to how to pursue them – I’m all for this kind of structure in a one-shot, and each scene has a good combination of hook-riddled NPCs to get some juicy roleplay going.

However, in this flexible presentation, they don’t make it easy. When you arrive at the village of Mordant Springs, the investigation is very much like a Vaesen setting – there’s multiple places they can visit, and several clues they can find in multiple places. Because this is presented as paragraphs of text, though, it’s quite hard to parse what these options are without making your own notes, or where each one could lead. GM guidance is often quite passive, “use a clue below or make up your own…” or offering “opportunities” for them to meet NPCs without a clear idea of what those NPCs might do or offer. And don’t get me started on the NPC (one they’re likely to interact with) with no name. Telling the GM they say “you don’t need to know my name” is insufficient, adventure writers – what is their name? Why won’t they tell them? What’s their deal anyway?

It’s all workable, and I made a few notes (Patrons let me know if you want a copy and I’ll send it out to you) – but for a quickstart that presumably will have CR fans new to running more narrative games reading it, it’s not terribly helpful. A more structured approach would have been easier to grab I think, or alternatively a wholly looser kind of thing where the mystery is presented much more like it would be in a FITD game.

I think it stands up because the overall quality of the adventure shines through, but I do  worry this is how they plan to present all their adventures, and they’re designed to be read, not GMed. We’ll see, I guess – if Darrington Press are reading this, please reconsider!

Overall I’m really excited to see Candela come out, and like I said, it played well. Merging some of the narrative / trad approaches is something I’m really into, and I’m excited to see more games embrace this. If you want to see it in action, there’ll be a link here when Unconventional GMs goes live with it. In the meantime, what do you make of it? And are there any other trindie classics you’d like to hear about here?