Critical Role launches Candela Obscura RPG with a free quickstart guide

Candela Obscura, Critical Role’s next livestreaming show, will premiere Thursday. Ahead of the highly-anticipated new series, the troupe’s Darrington Press imprint has released a quickstart guide that includes a preview of the Illuminated Worlds ruleset that the action will be based on. This is accompanied by an instructional video by Spenser S. Starke, lead game designer.Alice Is Missing).

Starke explains the mechanics of the adaptation, which is horror themed. Illuminated Worlds is built for narrative, cinematic play and uses a d6-based dice pool system that rewards high rolls while also leaving plenty of wiggle room for game masters to throw complications in players’ way. There are five different classes, each of which has two distinct subclasses. There are five classes: Face (journalist), Muscle (soldier), Scholar (professor), Slink (criminal), and Weird (occultist and medium). The character sheets are designed to provide additional information about how the character should be run at the game table.

Illuminated Worlds won’t use traditional stats common in other games like Dungeons & Dragons, such as strength and wisdom. Instead it lists three drives — nerve, cunning, and intuition — and ranks aspects of those drives across multiple categories from one to three. Those ranks will help add dice to player’s dice pools, rather than providing bonuses to the numerical value of the dice themselves. There’s also a “gilded” die that players will roll, and players can use it replenish their stats in the hopes of improving later rolls. This adds a strategic element to character management that will feed into the story as players choose which dice they want.

Candela Obscura The video will be released on June 8th, but the Twitch stream and YouTube premiere on Thursday evening at 7 pm PT. The podcast will be released on the same day. The podcast is available for download. Candela Obscura Quickstart GuideDarrington Press Website