Critical Role reveals Candela Obscura character classes

The following are some alternatives to the word “Advantage” Candela ObscuraCritical Role’s cast ventures off to uncharted territories. Debuting in May of this year, the long-form streaming series doesn’t use Dungeons & Dragons as the basis for its actual play action. The team created a custom set of rules that they claim are designed with performance in the forefront. Polygon sat down with lead designers Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall to learn about the game’s most fundamental concepts — the roles and specialties players will use to build their characters at home. Here’s a quick look inside Candela Obscura Core Rulebook.

For those who haven’t yet been introduced to the world of the world of the Fairelands through Critical Role’s streaming series, know the setting blends gaslamp-style fantasy with the glamorous 1920’s decor of The Great Gatsby. It’s a world where the industrial revolution butts up against the rediscovery of magic, and where powerful forces bubble up from the ancient caverns that lie below.

Picture: Marc Moreau/Darrington Press

“Candela Obscura is a horror role-playing game that focuses on a secret society of supernatural investigators,” Starke said in a recent interview. “It’s really an investigative horror game that asks you to think about the humanity in horror as much as the horror in humanity.”

As such, it was important for the designers to ground the game with a very specific set of character templates — but to make them appealing to modern audiences as well.

“Speaking as a queer woman, it’s not really fun being a woman who can’t go to college, couldn’t marry another woman, and is going to experience hate and oppression on all sides,” Hall said. “And yet, that doesn’t stop people from wanting to play in that place of incredible technological advancement, [a time] when the layman didn’t know if magic if ghosts if spirituality was real, because science also felt like magic.”

In many cases, the face will be the charismatic person in the group. In playtesting, that often made it the most popular — but the specialties themselves came later. In the past, the journalist had been included with the thief to serve as a “slink”. The magician, on the other hand, was a much newer creation, and a subtle nod at the fact that few people, even those who say they understand magic, can actually do so in Candela Obscura.

Meanwhile, the muscle role includes the game’s tanks — the explorer and the soldier. These roles have been given a greater narrative importance than other similar game systems. While the soldier grapples with their experiences from the Last Great War (the game world’s analogue for World War I), the explorer will be on the front lines of discovering what mysteries lie beneath the surface of the Fairelands itself.

“It’s a really fun way to be clever about history,” Hall said, which can be found within the sprawling undercroft known as Oldfaire that lies below the setting’s largest city.

The scholar role includes the doctor and the professor, which both include some of the system’s more thematic abilities. The Non-Combatant ability, for instance, gives doctors benefits only if a character hasn’t hurt anyone yet during an encounter. Meanwhile, the professor’s University Resources mean they have knowledgeable akin to Dr. Brody or Sallah waiting in the wings.

Starke and Hall have worked closely with Lilly McDonnell on a visual tie-in between the criminals and detectives in the game. The Core Rulebook. The thief card, for instance, includes a heavy use of the iconography of the Red Hand, the setting’s criminal organization.

The final option for players to choose from when they play the odd role is the choice between the occultist and the medium. In either case, the classes allow players to make an interesting decision about their motivation.

“You have a game that deals with spookiness and monsters and has death,” Hall said, “but then you also have a real world that where people are grappling with death and what that means. […] The medium sits in this unique place of having to decide if you’re telling the truth or not.

“Ultimately, the Canadela Obscura is a secret society,” Hall added. “Ideally, innocent people aren’t having to learn about magic. But also, ideally people aren’t losing their loved ones. I think getting to make a spiritualists’ parlor is a really good place to lay a lot of clues.”

Candela Obscura Core RuleboookOn Nov. 14, a hardcover edition will be released for $39.99 at local stores and on the internet via Darrington Press. Also available is a quickstart guide.