Bards and Barrels
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Bards and Barrels
S4 Ep. 16: Final Thoughts on Candela Obscura
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The end has come...part 10 of this fantastic series on Candela Obscura. Ross and Phil give their final thoughts on the horror TTRPG system from Darrington Press.
Today we give our honest opinions about Candela Obscurum. And there it is, the opening crack. It is time for another episode of Bards and Barrels. I'm Ross, along with me, Phil, for the ride today. Phil, how's it going, man? Good, man. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. It feels so strange to finally be at the end of this Candela series that we've been working on over the last, what, 10 weeks, 10 plus weeks, really?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I know. It feels too soon. I'm not ready to be done.
SPEAKER_00A little bittersweet, perhaps. Uh, but this is the final part of our Candela Obscure series where we've jumped in and we've talked, uh, we've talked about character creation, we've talked about uh GMing Candela, we've talked about playing Candela. Uh, and finally tonight, uh on the podcast, if you watched the video last week, you probably heard a little bit of our final thoughts, but this is the podcast version where we're gonna go a little deeper into some things and and we're gonna give some honest opinions about candela tonight. So let's you know without further ado, let's jump right into it, Phil. Um, what is your honest, honest opinion uh about Candela Obscura?
SPEAKER_01My honest opinion, which obviously this comes from a personal bias, right? It's my opinion, but I love playing this game. Um, I also feel like playing this game has made me a better DM in other TTRPGs, um, just by being able to pick up a lot of the story-driven components uh that Candela really has ingrained into the system. I think it's helped me develop that skill more um for the other games that I game master a DM for. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I I I I agree. I I think I think the interesting thing about Candela, and hopefully people as they play this really get a sense of this, uh, and and you talked about it so beautifully, is that it since it's so narrative driven, it it does force you as both a player and a GM to really lean into that yes and scenario. You're not stopping and calling for roles uh as much as you would in Dungeons and Dragons. Um and I think if if you're looking for something to really help you with your storytelling, this is an excellent game for that. I and I and I think the horror aspect of it, it it helps you lean into the humanity a little bit. I D, and we talked about this in past episodes. DD leans into that heroic, like the hero's journey. So so you know, you you end up being this very powerful character, and that is not what Candela is about. It's about the people who you never hear about that keep you safe every day, uh fighting the you know, the phenomenon that are out there that that could kill you in your sleep, but you never actually hear about them uh about candela or the phenomenon because of the work that they're doing. And so I think it's fun to have a system that leans into that and not just it's not just scary. It's like it's it's this very fantastic conduit and metaphor for humanity in a lot of ways. And and I love that about it.
SPEAKER_01Completely agree. One of the other parts that I love about this game is for me, this really ignited like a you know, how can I build the tension kind of a scenario too? Because that is a big component in this game, too. And uh my method of choice is via Foundry, right? So I've been able to do some things in Foundry that with you know music, scenes, just kind of setting those types of things too that I feel like can elevate it and really build that tension and kind of get players into that mindset. Um, and I I don't know that I would have gone to that level in some of other TTRPGs that we play. So I think this kind of helped me uh in that aspect as well.
SPEAKER_00Sure. It definitely changes your perspective and how you think about those moments to be able to take that back to DD or you know, even like a Call of Cthulhu or Daggerheart, if you're playing Daggerheart, to really like lean into those moments and and like you said, build that tension and and and create those arcs that that are impactful in a lot of ways, I think is a good way to put it. Um I I think there's one thing that I if if we can talk about things that I didn't care if care for. I'm not sure I totally like the D6 system. Um not that it's confusing, I I think it's just so so many years of playing DD. Like I I want like the variety of DD. Like I miss my D20. I miss like the the you know, because I can choose three dice to roll and put a gilded dice in there to earn back a drive. And if any of those is a six, it's a success. Which when you roll less and you have more impactful rolls, you want that higher chance of potentially having a success with you know mixed successes in there. I do still miss like the epic failures, and you and you get epic failures in this game too, but and then they're even worse actually in a lot of ways, but it it misses that kind of lightheartedness that some of those fails bring in some ways.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you don't you don't have the you know absolute joy of a crit and the absolute terror right of a Nat One. It's just different. Um, so that's true, I guess. I never really thought about it that way, but that uh living and dying by the dice, you still kind of do, but it's not it's different in a lot of ways. It's weird because I I wanted to say it's like it's like the stakes are different, but actually in Candela, like your stakes are way more important than they are, you know, in a game like D D. But yeah, it just feels different. That's true.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I don't I don't know if that's a make or break for me. I I don't think uh that you know somebody said, Hey, do you want to play an assignment in Candela? And I'm like, no, because I want to roll dice. I'm not I'm not gonna be like that. That's not gonna be the thing that makes me go, no. I just don't want to be if if I had to nitpick, and I guess that's really good for a system, if we're having to nitpick and pull things out, that maybe, maybe this is where it flounders a little bit, but not not really in a lot of ways. Um, I think another thing that that maybe uh people should look at when they go to play this game is if you're looking at playing like a long-term campaign, like you want this to arc, you know your friends, friends group is gonna want to like sit down and play this like three-year campaign where you have like all these tangential storylines and things like that. Candela may not be the right platform for you. D is go ahead.
SPEAKER_01That that that was gonna be mine, actually, is I I think for me, it's Candela is designed to be based on assignments, right? And really, your characters are their timeline is relatively short term, right? So you take quite a bit of damage, right? Marks, scars in Candela, and it's designed that you know your your player's gonna go on so many particular uh assignments, and eventually they're gonna get to a point where they're gonna have to retire, or if they go out and they get one more scar, they're gonna die, right? Right. So it's not necessarily designed for a three, five, seven year campaign with the same characters, right? I think you could potentially try to write a long-term intertwining story, but it would have to cycle through hey, these members all retired from the circle, and then now your new members have joined the circle, right? Or, you know, that circle's closed its chapter house doors and a new circle has opened up in town, right? And they can still try to continue that story, but that character development that you put in, right, is no longer there for that character, in essence, unless that you know they could retire and then maybe they become light keepers, right? And then you kind of they raise the next circle up. And I think there's some avenues that's very different than a long-term like DD campaign for sure.
unknownSure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, I I agree with that. And I think you it it lends a way that you could be super creative, like you said, to create something long-term if you really wanted to. Uh, it's just like again, going back to that hero's journey, if if that's really what you want is to level up your character uh over time and play this long story arc, it it really is meant more for a Dungeons and Dragons type TTRPG. And that's that's really kind of the funny thing in some ways, is like there's a lot of people moving away from DD, but for the reasons that they want to move away, it's kind of ironic that a lot of the the things that that people talk about, like the the mechanics in DD and things like that that they don't care for, that those are the things that make DD unique and work really well for like long-term campaigns and things like that, too.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_00Uh so let's also talk about um where where do you think Phil uh Candela fits in your TTRPG rotation?
SPEAKER_01Oh, this is a good question. Um so I think for for me, I was gonna say for us, but it's not fair for me to assume this is true for our whole party. Um for me, so where candela fits, um, especially right now, is I always try to have an assignment at least close to fleshed out. So that way if we are scheduled to meet and somebody can't make it, I can run a candela assignment. That's always kind of like a goal, just to have something that I can do. Um we our normal campaign uh Ross is currently DMing a side quest. Well, it's more like a side arc, side quest, side campaign, basically. Yes. Uh that Ross is running for us right now. We recently ported over our player characters from DD into Candela, and we're kind of switching into that system for we'll see, probably a little while, just based on how quickly we get through things as a party. Um, but still with the intention, right, of coming back out of Candela into our regular DD campaign. What we're playing has impact, right, on the overall story of what's going on. Um but that I think that's been a cool transition so far. We've just kind of started well, almost started, right? There. Um, we're just about into that realm. But um Yeah, well, I don't know. I like it.
SPEAKER_00For sure. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I think what we're doing is is very unique in our campaign. So so it's like our our primary D D campaign is of course in Dungeons and Dragons. It has been for the last four to five years. Uh, one of the things we wanted to do because it felt like the arc that we're on right now, and I can talk freely about this because Phil's like the overall DM of the campaign. So even though he's playing, he also knows details, but there's detail he there's details he doesn't know too, which is fine. Um, but I feel like this little side quest it in almost a way, because the our our normal characters are like level 13, 14. Um, the characters that started out here are level five with the intention of by the end of this arc, they would at least be to level 10. Um, but through our entire campaign, we're trying to set this tone that the stakes are getting higher and higher, not just for our characters, but for for the entire world that we're in. There, there's some whole like Asmodeus versus the gods things going on. It feels very Ragnaroky, uh, which is funny because that's kind of what that's what we titled this was it was Ragnarok. Um, but on this side quest, we're introducing some themes that we haven't necessarily seen. Like we've definitely seen like the good versus bad, but in this one, we haven't really got there yet, but we're going to get in there. But we're gonna use Candela as a catalyst to really like set the tension and where those stakes are at for where we're going. Because while it may not necessarily be life or death for the characters at various points through this side arc, it could be life or death for the world as we know it, depending on how they end up in this, right? And ain't we figured out that Candela, having played this in our group, was just such a good conduit for ratcheting up that tension and really setting the groundwork for uh essentially this character that that the group is gonna go try to convince to become an ally that's not really a good character. But we're reaching the point, and I and I want to use this in Candela to where we show like how deadly and how conniving and how meticulous this character is, and everything that they're doing is based off revenge they want. And when when I knew I wanted to do this, Phil and I had this sit-down conversation about like what was the best way to play this. And we both were like, man, Candela would work really well for that because we want the stakes to feel feel high, we want the roles to feel high, we want it to feel like if you don't solve this or you can't figure this out, that there are going to be massive repercussions down the road. And and we both immediately went to Candela is hey, this is the system we should go to to really ratchet up that tension. And it comes back to that horror theme in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_01It comes back to that, and then I think the other component of it too, right, is as we've you know played together as a party over these four or five-ish years, you know, what initially started as maybe kind of like a combat heavy group has definitely morphed into much more of a group storytelling campaign. So as we're leaning further into that side of it, Candela makes sense for all those notes too. So we're gonna ratchet up the tension and the horror themes, and then also we want everyone to be able to buy in and shape right this part of the story because it has impact on the rest of the game. So it really was the perfect tool for that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's it's been kind of funny. This is this is for a future episode, probably when we talk about that side arc uh after we're all done with it. But it's like we're really seeing like the differences in our DMing style come out and our GMing style come out uh as we float around to different people. Like not that that Matt has DM'd in this, but we've seen Matt DM before, and he's like this very good utilitarian type DM. Uh I am very much a theater of the mind, story-driven style DM. We just have not done a lot of combat in the things that I have run, which I feel like Candela is gonna be great for that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00All right, Phil, let's let's talk about like just final thoughts. So, like it it doesn't whatever you want to talk about. This is your chance to say anything you want about candela before we get out of here, and then I'll take a turn, of course.
SPEAKER_01All right, anything that I want. Um, if you've not given Candela a chance, I absolutely think that you should. Um you may find that it's not your flavor, and that is okay. That's why they make so many different TTRPGs, but I do think that experiencing it wants to be able to live through that tension, right? And to understand kind of what you can get out of this game and take potentially back to other games that you play is 100% worth it. Uh, it's not a large rule book, it does not take a long time to learn, it is a fairly easy system to pick up. Um that's those are my reasons. That's yeah, those are my thoughts.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I I I think you you nail it on the head. I don't I agree with you. I think this is something that everybody needs to try because it's it's not difficult to get into. And I and I want to reiterate a point that you said. You know, for those of you out there that that have played DD and collect every single DD book that comes out, I mean, even the core set is three books to really like understand the ins and outs of the game. You don't have to have those. You can play the game with the with the basic rules, of course. Um, but that is the nice thing about Candela, is it's literally one book. That's it, right there. This is the entire game. Everything you need to know, plus some D6 dice that you can probably go out, go pull out of, you know, Monopoly games and Yahtzee games that you have sitting in a drawer. Uh, that is really nice. And the fact that it's very approachable in both a resources way and in an ease of learning way makes it a very nice game just to have on hand to break things up. And and I kind of foresee like eventually, like I could see us doing like some multiple assignment arcs, but I really feel like where this shines for us in a lot of ways is like what you mentioned, Phil. It's the filler, it's when we don't have everybody for a week, but we know we all like candela, and we can do a candela assignment in an evening, and that and that's where it shines for us because it's just so condensed, and that's the whole purpose of it. And then if you want to have your characters go on, do something else, do another assignment, that's that's whatever. But the fact that it's a one session gets you through one assignment more or less, and then it's wrapped up in this nice, neat little bow, effectively. Hopefully, you get to that point. Um, and and then from there, you know, you can do another assignment or or whatever, but it's not tied to it, it should help you pull people together because you're not asking them to make long-term commitments, and I think that's a the great thing about this game.
SPEAKER_01It is, and in those nights where we've done one of these too, right? That process, like that single night, also included character creation. Yeah, so we created characters and played, right? And still we're able to do all of it like in one nightly session. So it does lend itself really well to being able to just roll in, teach it, play it right then and there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Man, I can't believe uh this is the the wrap-up for for this uh series. This is this is pretty dang cool, and I'm so glad that we did this. Uh, but I think that's gonna do it for the Candela Obscura series from from Bards and Barrels. So, you know, uh that's gonna do it for the series. That's gonna do it for everything. Thank you for listening to this. Uh, you can listen to all the past episodes of Bards and Barrels anywhere. You can find podcasts, you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, all the places. Uh, thanks for joining us on this journey, and we'll be back with more DD content and other things in the future. So we'll talk to you later. We'll see ya.
