This review doesn’t really matter.

This review doesn’t matter because there are four types of people who will click on this review when they see it, and none of them are looking for more information in order to form an opinion. You will have critters who’ve already decided they love Candela Obscura and want to see if I do too, and then critters who’ve already decided they hate Candela Obscura, think switching rulesets was pointless…and want to see if I do too. On the indie/OSR side, you have those who can’t stand Critical Role, and want to see if I’m going to bag on it, ranting as long as I did when I reviewed Root. You also have those who are just thankful that the largest Actual Play in the game is using something other than D&D, and have already decided it’s better. Ultimately, I don’t think my conclusion is going to satisfy any of these camps.

It’s fine.

Now, given my own biases from both years of experience in RPGs as well as other media (not to mention writing to a specific audience for a living), I find it hard to believe that anyone was expecting a conclusion other than ‘it’s fine’ for the first ground-up new game from Darrington Press. Just like nobody should have expected Tal’Dorei to be a Planescape or Spelljammer or other setting that really pushes on the conventions of the D&D genre, nobody should really have expected that a new game from Critical Role Productions would do anything other than nestle neatly into the range of genres already popularized in roleplaying, specifically nestling in next to another bestseller, Call of Cthulhu.

I’m starting the review in this way because, ultimately, the specifics of Candela Obscura aren’t nearly as interesting as the reactions they’ve elicited. On Twitter, the first reactions I saw were mostly from indie designers who seemed primed to hate it. Apparently everyone became an IP lawyer since the OGL kerfluffle, because there were people outright claiming that the game had plagiarized Blades in the Dark and was violating the terms of the Creative Commons license (in case it isn’t clear, this is untrue). On Reddit, I read a lot of confusion about the system, though it’s hard to tell from comments if this is just from newness and lack of context, or if it is actually confusing in play. And, of course, the first big review expressed disappointment at how much of a retread the whole thing is.

To get into it, yes, Candela Obscura is heavily derivative of things that have come before. There are acknowledgments to both Blades in the Dark and Vaesen at the end of the Quickstart Guide, and having played both I see it fairly immediately. From Vaesen we get the implied gameplay loop; more specific than just investigators, the characters of Candela Obscura are aware of and investigating supernatural phenomena that most people don’t even believe in, let alone perceive. From Blades in the Dark we get the mechanics, John Harper’s dice pool modification of the three-result roll from Powered by the Apocalypse. The combination feels incredibly safe here in 2023, when Blades in the Dark is six years old, PbtA 13, and the supernatural horror RPG genre 40. That all said, if the intent is to maintain fan interest while diversifying from the increasingly crowded field of ‘like D&D, but’, then I can’t help but think this was a smart choice. I am inclined to believe that even if designers delivered something new and fresh to Darrington Press on a silver platter, they would have turned it away in favor of a bit of portfolio optimization.

At its core, Candela Obscura is certainly Forged in the Dark, using the same basic dice mechanics as I noted above. There are nine core verbs in Candela Obscura, as compared to twelve in Blades. Similarly, the Stress and Trauma system from Blades is both cut down but also diversified, becoming three kinds of ‘marks’ which indicate different types of harm (roughly speaking, physical, mental, and magical). Another thing which becomes clear if you read closely is that the watchwords of Position and Effect are boiled down into stakes, which seems to only really equate to Position. There are a lot of clever mechanics in here, but as you read you quickly realize they’re mostly clever mechanics from Blades in the Dark.

Moving onto the setting, I rather like the contrast of a very D&D fantasy origin with the setting’s low-magic society. Reading the entry about Oldfaire in the Quickstart Guide does imply that there is a lot of potential history that leads up to the sort of quasi-Victorian setting implied in the rest of the Guide, and I appreciate that someone gave some thought to it. 2000 years is still a long timeline for that sort of thing (we got from black plague to electricity in 600-ish), but it’s better than most fantasy timelines I read. Continuing into the description of the central city of Newfaire, and…well, I read Newfaire and Doskvol next to each other, and while they are not the same city by any means, they are structured similarly, down to being cities on the coast with a river running through them. I’d be willing to bet that when the full book comes out, each district will be detailed with traits like, oh I don’t know, wealth, security, criminal influence, and occult influence. Just a guess.

Turning to the sample adventure, things go wrong; I have to be honest, this rubs me the wrong way. Called ‘Dressed to Kill’, the sample adventure has the PCs investigating the death of a woman modeling a dress of a shade the world hasn’t seen before. As noted in the text, the adventure is rooted in the very real history of the Radium Girls and Scheele’s Green, two different historical cases of using very toxic compounds (radium and copper arsenite, respectively) in pigments, killing both workers and customers. The book notes that these are examples of worker exploitation and rampant capitalism, and then notes that ‘TTRPGs can be a safe place to explore [these] terrifying realities through fiction’. That…that seems incredibly tone deaf. I won’t go into spoiler territory, though I will say the adventure at least doesn’t do anything worse to diminish the inherent criticism of capitalism from the original histories. It still doesn’t sit well with me how they’ve been recast for an entertainment piece, for upper-middle class gamers to ‘explore’. Any mention of the implied politics of the Victorian era are always couched in escapism (there’s a sidebar on page 11 that does this), and it feels like skirting the issue in a big way. Contrast that to Doskvol, which earns its darkness and wears the exploitation, class struggle, and desperation firmly on its sleeve. I may be reading too much into it, but looking at what we have between the setting and the sample adventure Newfaire reads as neoliberal Doskvol, with all the baggage that entails. And honestly, with the drive towards simplistic morals and alignment charts and “good and evil”, this is probably the strongest link back to D&D in the material.

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At the end of the day, we have a Forged in the Dark game, distilled for Actual Play use. Many of the setting principles of Blades in the Dark and Vaesen are there but dulled down, lightening up the darkness and removing any allusions to actual capitalist exploitation or actual commentary on Christian expansion and hegemony as existed in Vaesen. “We just want to have fun, guys, not worry about all that stuff. But you can explore that all at home, as long as you write characters with integrity!” As I mentioned in the intro, I firmly believe that mechanically, this game was exactly the right move for what is simply a business, trying to sell subscriptions and sourcebooks. Setting-wise, though, what started out as perhaps a bit derivative ended up being a clear indication of a mind virus, though whether it’s a D&D mind virus or a Los Angeles/Hollywood mind virus I’m not entirely sure. Darrington Press desperately wants to have it both ways, to be seen as progressive and ‘with it’ but not actually engage with any politics or the implications of their setting. To be honest, I can’t think of a scenario where they wouldn’t have done this; way too much money is on the table. That said, they probably could have done it a lot better.

Considering everything, is it bad or good? It’s just like I said at the beginning; it’s fine. It is a corporate game being released by a corporation (Critical Role Productions is not as big as Hasbro but they still likely have an eight-figure revenue), and it reads like that. If it succeeds, the Illuminated Worlds line will make the company some more money and maybe a few more people will check out Forged in the Dark games. If it fails, it will serve as the banner for Critical Role to be ride-or-die for D&D forever. As a sign in the greater hobby, though, the fact that there is a non-D&D Critical Role game is a good thing. And even though I am squicked out by ‘neoliberal Doskvol’, it is nowhere near the worst thing out there.

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