Critical Role launches new tabletop RPG with a free quickstart guide
Candela Obscura, the next live-streaming series from Critical Role, premieres Thursday night. Ahead of the highly anticipated new series, the group’s Darrington Press imprint has a Quick start guide that contains a sample of the Illuminated Worlds ruleset that the action will be based on. It comes with one video playback guide by lead game designer Spenser Starke (Alice is missing).
In the video, Starke explains how the mechanics in the horror-themed adaptation will work. Built for narrative, cinematic play, Illuminated Worlds 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. The game features five classes each with two very different subclasses. They are face (journalist and magician), muscle (soldier and explorer), scholar (professor and doctor), devious (criminal and detective), and weird (medium and occultist). Each has a custom character sheet that provides additional details on how the character should perform at the table, as well as serving as a starting point for character generation.
Illuminated Worlds does not use traditional stats that are common in other games such as Dungeons & Dragons, such as strength and wisdom. Instead, it lists three drivers – guts, cunning, and intuition – and ranks aspects of those drivers into multiple categories from one to three. Those ranks help add dice to the player’s dice pool, rather than giving bonuses to the numerical value of the dice themselves. There is also a “gold plated” die that players will roll, and players can use it to top up their stats in hopes of improving later rolls. The result is a new strategic layer of character management, one that should be reflected in the story itself as players have to make tough decisions about which dice to choose.
Candela Obscura premieres Twitch And YouTube on Thursdays at 7 p.m. PT, with a video-on-demand release scheduled for June 8. A podcast version will also be available that day. You can download the Candela Obscura Quick Start Guide at the Darrington Press website.