The worst thing about Candela Obscura is that it's a game that hates itself, simultaneously a world written to induce horror and deathly afraid of creating discomfort for the people playing within it.
As a fan of 2E Ravenloft that's why I hated 5E Ravenloft. "Oh don't scare the players!" Well, I can't scare the PCs because they're superheroes who can shrug off everything with a long rest..
Reminds me of a lot of for tv horror from decades ago. Even some children horror shows would delve deeper and probe scarier subject matter than a lot of the adult ones did. And this project sounds exactly like that. Delve into nothing, because we want to keep everyone safe. What’s the use of having a Rated PG horror story of it’s not for 8 year olds?
It's insane that they're utopian in their conception of society, yet chose to wrap it in a romanticised late Victorian wrapping. Which makes it even shitty steampunk, as it apes the aesthetics but ignores the culture and history that gave rise to the aethestics and cultural mores.
Exactly. The funny thing is, this is literally cultural appropriation that they warn the reader against engaging in. They are wearing Europe like a costume while ignoring everything that makes it interesting or distinct.
@@blacklodgegames Oh but you see, Europe doesn't count. They don't have anything that's uniquely theirs, you know, being colonizers that stole everything from other cultures already. So you're totally justified appropriating whatever you want from them. Two wrongs, in this case, really do make a right!
I’m guessing the only thing they even touch on is a class system (rich, poor), but since everyone is harmoniously living together, it’s more of a window dressing than a meaningful distinction in how one lives. About as meaningful as whether or not you have cheese in your burger.
@@blacklodgegames Man you really touched on something epic here 10:56 - 11:47, include court alchemists and philosopher's stone type shit and I'm set for that setting and worldbuilding in a heatbeat!
The idea of the writers setting up an inherently positive diverse society but still feeling the need to tell people to know their place and not talk about cultures they dont belong to is honestly hilarious
Diverse cultures 'integrated' in the sense that they live in the same cities, but culturally and socially segregated from the PCs ... and the game master. It's so half-assed and hollow. Most of us have already gotten sick of the hollowness and somewhat contradictory nature of the 'inclusivity' and 'diversity' of the modern news _corporation_ watching 'anti-capitalists'. This setting's cultures are so lacking in description and explanation, that it fails to actually include any. 'Inclusivity' that doesn't actually include anything...
This could be actually really funny for the policemen to actually be very brutal with the people who want to stand out and impose their culture, for example etiquette or religion, cuisine and many more. Like imagine if you are walking down the street and then see a policemen arest an italian man in his 40s because he said that you do not eat his spaghetti with chopsticks, or put ketchup on them, in his restaurant
The lore talks about a ten year cold snap that has hit the region called "the shiver". Newfaire is in a relatively resource rich and temperate climate, but nations to the north have it much worse off, so the war was about "resources" (there is also a sidebar that implies there may have been a supernatural element to fuel the conflict). The world wars were not fought over resources, but ideology, and ideological conflict would have been much more interesting here.
@@blacklodgegames If it was ideological war then the war would have been about a bunch of religio-fascist KKK white people and their Emperor Drumpf. Which the people of Newfaire defeat easily and they then apologize for their evil ways and join in peace with the Newfairelanders.
I'm a huge fan of underdog stories, especially when said underdog is fighting against those real world problems; racism, police brutality, fascism etc. But when there's no institutional evils, no cultural clashes, no ignorance, no UNDER?! Then its just a dog story... If I wanted a dog story, I'd just watch Air Bud...
Aaaaand there's the problem with woke-iocy in books, games, movies, TTRPG's etc. If there is nothing convincingly evil, wrong, broken.... What is there left to do? Nothing that matters.
@@JacopoSkydweller I think there is still 'evil' but usually it's just moustache twirling villainy. The real problem is that the world that's created feels like a modern, 'progressive' society draped with the trappings of whichever time period you want to set your RGP in.
I personally don't even like underdogs. I like a even playing field like if people can't be mean then why are they passing out weapons and wanting people to fight? Who's evil? People are gonna not agree on SOMETHING. What is a story/game where the problem was solved before you could even play?
Their fans will viciously snarl and tear each other apart mercilessly over the least minutia and disagreement, while hunting the 'other' in grotesque purity spirals. Hell, that sounds more interesting that Newfaire.
I sounds like this is a RPG caught between a rock and a hard place. They simultaneously want a utopia and conflict, it seems to not know what it is doing whatsoever.
I wonder if there would even be a Red Lamp area if it is completely normalised? Why have a part of town for that when everyone's granny occasionally was at it for a loaf of bread or two? Maybe Grandad joins in too, maybe everyone does... So the seedy area of town becomes obsolete and there goes the atmosphere GM's need in order to portray tone, mystery, fear, uncertainty. It's funny, ironically this setting could actually work if it was the setting itself that was used as the real antagonist. The utopian homogenous gloop is a kind of mind controlled dystopia, where all is monitored, controlled and managed in order to keep the utopian peace (hence the police acting like something out of Logan's Run or 1984) and the 'evil' magic seeping into it would be fine if not resisted and blocked by someone in power. So bits of it seep through the defenses, but in twisted and altered form due to the supressed psyche underpinning everything. Instead people are told to shun it, ignore it and be happy, anyone failing to do these is carted off and re educated or never seen again. So everyone is 'happy'. Meanwhile the players are running the knife edge of being investigators charged with keeping a lid on the seepage, half the time helping the police, half the time asking too many questions and getting side-long looks and being tailed by their agents. Now that could work, especially if the players were starting off from the point of view that they were trying to save the world from the evil magic stuff, only to gradually figure out it was being twisted and by someone within society, within the London-esque capitol city, Nutopia or something..? By draining the diversity of thought and expression it was twisting the magic and creating a kind of dark mirror effect or backlash, all because of the repression coming from someone at the heart of power. That took 5 minutes and I reckon it has a better (?) take. But horses for courses and all that, Wretched Epoque sounds good.
Exactly, it takes almost no time to come up with interesting justifications of these things. Instead it's just a self insert of the writer's personal ideology and ends up clashing with the rest of the vision of the world.
The way it’s kind of explained here makes me think a bit of what the political scene might be like in this world. Are you even allowed to make a character that is conservative on these issues by the looks of these warnings I’d say not.
Critical Roles whole brand is based around harmony and no internal conflict, which they've done quite well over the years. If they were to create any kind of social strain in their setting, they would get eaten alive online and it would follow them for years. When their only source of revenue is their online presence, they have to play it safe. I'd even argue that their more political projections in the world building was motivated by their fanbases, who are mostly of a shared ideological mindset.
The cast being so proud of the effort they put into the intro to C3 where they explore forgotten ruins only for the insane twitter part of their audience be in uproar over the "glorification of colonization" was hilarious.
@@MannyNamiro Exactly, they can't catch a break. There are things about the CR crew that I'm not a fan of, but I'll always commend how well they handle online backlash.
@@MannyNamiro The intolerance of the pro 'tolerance' and 'inclusivity' crowd, the irony of that, never ceases to frustrate, or maybe disappoint... I think there's a word for it, where your exhausted from being frustrated. Exasperated, maybe?
the question is, is candela the best attempt of absolute amateurs with too much time on twitter? or a cashgrab ghostwritten by an unsupervised amateur with too much time on twitter?
The best part is that this shows how afraid they are. None of these people actually think, talk, or act this way when the cameras are off. It's hilarious - the mob has them forever in character. No wonder famous people pound hard drugs.
The video was great but I greatly enjoy the fact that you did not hide the game you would suggest in the end of your video and had the decency to add it to the title. You are worth more subs.
So basically the culture is like Star Trek's Federation of Planets where cultural and racial conflicts are handwaved away and the idea of intractable conflicts of interest are not allowed to be entertained.
Yeah, but Star Trek setting is a utopia with the problem of scarcity removed. However, most of the conflicts do come from the cultural differences and the Prime Directive of not interfering no matter how alien or barbaric other cultures looked like. The writers didn't treat the audience as children nor the episodes as soapboxes for their own personal politics. The conflicting sides were presented fairly and it was left up to the viewer to decide whether they agreed with the resolution. The cast of Critical Role are not writers at all and their disastrous third campaign has been the most obvious proof of it. Candela is just another example of the writers/world-builders not having actual real life experience and being incapable of empathy. This is a problem that plagues every single aspect of mainstream culture. That's why modern comics have superheroes and supervillains sitting around cafes or texting each other about their mundane relationships. That's why all the movies and shows have villains that make more sense and have more principles and moral than the "heroes." These people judge people by their surface characteristics and not by their deeds. A PoC can never be a villain no matter how reprehensible their actions are, and no matter how villainous the antagonist is, they can never be actually racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. This leads to stories being neutered and devoid of anything interesting.
Interestingly, the ideals of the Federation is that anyone can eventually be integrated into galactic community, but in reality there are always racial and cultural conflicts. Klingons. Cardassians. Borg. They sometimes become allies but there is always tension and disagreements, and often armed conflict. Half the episodes that involve an encounter with a new race ends up in tragedy or conflict. At least it's somewhat realistic in that regard. The writers would like for things to work out fine between races and cultures, but they definitely know it's not always the case. A recent show (Strange New Worlds) had a character say something that I found refreshing (I just looked it up again because I forgot what the exact sentence was): she says "The Federation teaches that if we can find a way to empathize with an enemy then they can one day become our friends. They're wrong. Some things in this universe are just plain evil."
The Humans in Star Trek at least have a reason to be less beholden to every facet of their culture because WW3 bombed everything nearly back to the stone age and everything on earth after was clawed back by luck and pluck. The meeting of the Vulcans was what really got humanity together and the formation of the Federation was as much to protect as it was to discover. Candela Obscura just seems to be all the payoff with none of the buildup or background to justify it.
@@MannyNamiro The moment you can't let "evil be evil" then what's the conflict? That's the problem they fear their own potental, so they rather be told what they need to do. Which is highly ironic from the very people that believe that they must "rebel" at everything. Yet when rebellion is mainstream it isn't rebellion it's conformity.
So sex work is something that exists, and seems to flourish, hinting at economic inequality, yet this inequality has not resulted in kind of prejudice, racism, classism or anything? Who is it that cops oppress? Everyone? Where is the power imbalance?
There is classism in the game, and it's sort of funny that that is the line they thought was ok for players to cross while every other ism was off limits.
@@blacklodgegames I was going to harp more on the writers, but I'm sure they meant well, but just didn't make enough effort to think well. Bless their hearts, at least they tried a little. Hopefully someone learns from this.
Someone mentioned star trek below; thought i’d make this observation: What makes Star Trek (TNG/DS9 era) interesting is the conflicts that erupt when the Federation bump into other factions that are different than (and opposite of) them. The Klingons are warlike/ federation is peaceful, the ferengi are capitalist/ the federation is socialist, the bajorans are religious/the federation is atheist. Etc They have to learn how to deal with or live with people who are fundamentally different from them. Later when the dominion war breaks out, they have to learn that sometimes you simply can’t come to a compromise or make a peaceful settlement with another entity and you must fight for survival. When you take that away, the setting becomes MUCH less interesting. Just like Candela obsura, if you have no conflict (of any sort), you have nothing to keep you interested in it. Candela obsura would be much more interesting if there was conflict created by different peoples and cultures moving into the same space at the same time. Much like real life cities (Boston, Chicago, New York to name a few) they all struggled with different peoples falling into conflict with each other as they tried to populate the same space.
Funny thing, the Borg were that 'you can't compromise or have peace with them' faction initially, but were too weighty and monolithic to be as compelling as the Dominion. You'd think the horrors seeping in would be that for Candela Obscura's world.
God, I want to hear and talk shop about this stuff with literally anyone, because this kind of garbage worldbuilding and writing makes things seem unfeasable while in actuality a world without conflict can be an amazing setting if done right, but these hacks are just dead-set on making it as boring as possible.
Defining and solving problems is almost exclusively the action and drama of a game, so I'm curious why and how you think that's true. Obviously those problems don't have to be between entrenched group identities, nations or other cultural institutions - but how are you going to generate motive and action without need and obstacle?
@@gagrin1565 Usually by having the conflict undermine the Utopia itself. I admit that I was a bit hyperbolic, but I am sure there are plenty of ways to make a chill setting investing. Coffee Shop AUs are popular for a thing.
Someone was mentioning Star Trek as the utopia idea for what you mentioned. The issue being that when compared to this, Star Trek easily works while this doesn’t for a myriad of reasons; but just a handful of them would be this: Star Trek had a narrative context that didn’t sanitize its backstory. Its backstory defined its narrative context. Unlike Candela Obscura which is incredibly vague, incredibly sophomoric and preachy about its subjects (Candela = diversity is good, war is bad. Melting pots are good, police, bad) Star Trek had a third World War as well as a eugenics war as part of its background for why culture had changed. ST had multiple technological and social reasons for sudden social change namely, the replicator, warp drive, and the discovery of races outside humanity’s own, which makes a more utopian society possible through eradicating poverty, giving humans something greater outside themselves to strive for (The Federation) and fulfilling the most fundamental desire of the human soul; exploration of the heavens. Candela Obscura on the other hand just has a vague war as its background. It only offers up two antagonists, the police force / investigative forces, and the corrupting magic. Outside of these two forces, there can be no actual conflict because there can be no stakes. The author of the game has already solved these problems for the player. - Star Trek on the other hand has infinite worlds to have conflict arrive from. And this conflict is pushed narratively from endeavoring to find a peaceable solution to often non-peaceful problems. The difference between Star Trek and Candela is, one explores the myriad of real life social conflicts in its narrative, while the other pretends they don’t and shouldn’t exist. The TLDR is simply, Candela is afraid of its own real world context, thereby writing next to nothing for its own historical one, meanwhile Star Trek isn’t afraid of the real world or its own universe’s own historical context.
Man, you are really raising the bar with those videos. You're raising it higher than I even care to attempt to pass. I guess I'll stick more to livestreams. Good job.
Candela Obscura a "game" in a utopia like world with little to no conflict, personality or feeling that then has "horrors" that do not pose any threat to you and when your character is used up they dont die they become a NPC much like the users of the "game" all while telling you not to say or think bad things, cant have personal conflicts with other player or characters and in turn making everything boring, dull, lifeless all while being preachy. What could you not love about all of that?
This is really unfortunate because I liked the actual plays a lot - but I will admit, I did have that same thought about magic throughout the series (plural), especially when EONS came up. I was left thinking, "wait, how many people know about magic and these supernatural incursions if there are two HUGE organizations involved with this stuff?" I remember as well in your mechanics talk, you mentioned that it is missing crucial mechanics, such as PVP play. I don't think I can necessarily agree with that everything that you said about Candela Obscura being CO's mistake, as I've played enough PbtA and FITD games to be frustrated with the limited mechanics before - it seems more like something that was taken from those systems and never corrected. They still should have done something about it, but it's not a mistake they made wholecloth. I also acknowledge that while watching the streams, I noticed many things that even without reading the book I knew were homebrew, which seemed strange to me. Why show off your new system by rewriting or ignoring the rules? Again, I loved the actual plays, but I was under no illusions that they were an accurate/faithful interpretation of the system as it appears in the books. I also agree with the feeling of tiptoeing through sensitive material makes it difficult at times to tell good stories, as a World of Darkness 20e player watching the changes made in 5e. One thing I did disagree with is, while I understand it was a jab at the rabid and unquestioning mob of Critters (a phenomenon that coalesces around any mildly popular thing), I wasn't exactly on board at the jab at their IQ. There's several things that we can mock the Critters for, but as someone who loved and still does love several of their properties, it wasn't something I was particularly excited to be lumped in with (and it's rather beside the point, but I am a huge fan of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, especially in the way that the latter has influenced our current collective interpretation of the city of Gotham in DC Comics!). Still loved your analysis - thank you for the honest and well written review!
And these same people call White Wolf crap for having actually tried something edgy, artsy, and risky on numerous occasions even if it didn't always work out.
I would say that Darrington Press is a great way to filter out a lot players from the TTRPG sphere. I think Mercer might be secretly based and doing everyone a service. "Yes, yes, Critters, run along and play your game where you can simultaneously hate everyone and be the 'victim'."
I'll never understand how a company's 'solution' to fighting racism was to segregate people based on race... but that's enough about Radiant Citadel. CR are appealing to the audience they have garnered over the years... CO is just an expression of their audience at this point - hate everything and love to play 'victim'.
there does seem to be quite a bit of contradictions it seems. But the whole' Oh we're 1920s but entirely integrating EVERY SINGLE CULTURE POST WAR SEAMLESSLY. There really seems to be no character motivation other than- stop the bad that doesn't stop
@@blacklodgegames I have to say, it's always mind bending seeing people try to say "we're culturally diverse" and also say "we have no conflicts of any kind"... as if they don't understand that cultural diversity means having people want different things and being unable to get what they all want. Also having a bunch of refugees flood in and actually IMPROVE the economy makes me question how bad the economy was.
@@marhawkman303 it really depends on the legal system and the immigrant culture. It's incontestable that, all things being equal, free movement of labor is a net boon to economic activity in a capitalist system. If all things are not equal, i.e. the immigrant population has bad ideology/ethics etc, this can be a net negative, even if economic output is increased
@@blacklodgegames IRL the biggest issue is with immigrants deciding to do their own thing and get in the way of the locals. So it's never actually equal. Also economic growth requires them to have jobs to work, and often immigrants struggle since... the jobs they want are already filled.
Had to come back and watch again and post one more time. The way to make a story engaging is by making the world full of conflict. Drama is what gets us invested and when an author writes a scene, he usually is looking at power dynamics within that scene to play off of. Like Joker’s interrogation in Batman: The Dark Knight. It’s very clear within a few seconds that Batman isn’t the higher status individual in this interaction. Joker has what Batman needs and he has no reason to give it to Batman, and like Joker says in the scene, “you have nothing to threaten me with.” It’s entertaining because of the conflict while the dynamic has shifted from the way you thought it would be. But these people are afraid of power dynamics. They look for it everywhere, even where it doesn’t exist, but are afraid that someone could make a compelling story while utilizing them. - American History X was a great film that showed someone who was a terrible person, one who judged others simply by their skin color, and judge them at the point of a gun, could change under a change in power dynamics and socializing with those he hated. They showed that a racist could become heroic. This game sanitized all aspects of a world filled with conflict and made the only areas of conflict be the police force and the creeping Eldritch magic. So any interaction without those two things is always going to be that way, sanitized. And having watched a couple of their Candela Obscura episodes, that’s exactly all the conflict and drama that exists. Any interaction outside of those two is pretty boring, because there’s no chance for conflict or drama. And because they can stack the deck and you have the GM telling you what the stakes are before rolling, there’s little to no stakes within any interaction that isn’t with police or magic involved.
Candela Obscura is the written manifestation of critical role as an rp campaign and brand, they obviously just have a surface level understanding of storytelling and what themes and aesthetics that are needed for the stories they want to tell but that's it. Every so often you'll find an interview of one of the cast members or on their own show will mention how they love a morally grey setting but if you actually read into the factions, ideas and actions of the settings they make the moral greyness is nonexistent or only mentioned after the fact. This is because the cast as a whole (much like the religious right of the 80's that started the satanic panic) find anything that is the opposite of what they believe morally repugnant and are emotionally and philosophically incapable of grappling with any sort of idea that they do not agree with.
The only thing that sounded good to me about this game was the backstory. The Oldfaire part of it. But you don’t need Candela Obscura for that. One of the most famous and praised comic book series in the world was X-Men and it’s entire premise is based around prejudices. Imagine how boring the story would be if they were all welcomed by the world they inhabit. It also drains any meaningful commentary on race or gender relations, which is the entire point of X-Men to begin with; to provide social commentary while not being too on the nose because at the time, that was illegal. These modern progressives are just mad that all meaningful fights have already been fought and won, and are trying to attack scraps and sanitize everything. They’re the puritans of the modern age and it makes them insufferable.
the table of a years-long double-campaign of a hacked version of Delta Green that i was in ran the spectrum of diversity- i am black and trans, in fact all of us were trans, neurodivergent, physically disabled, not straight, whatever, you name it. as a result of this, many of the NPCs were too; including some of the WORST people in the goddamn world! acts of terrorism committed by a [gay, black] man leave 500 people dead! one of the big villains is a sexually-obsessed [bisexual] murderer! there were NPCs who were homophobic or racist or what have you as well, just as in real life. we play morally-fucked agents of a shadow government agency who recruit by force or brutalize noncompliant witnesses into, well.. non-existence, sometimes. our lethal mistakes get covered up. more progressive organizations getting crushed by the one that we work for. we literally used to keep a document around called "99 Trigger Warnings but Human Branding Ain't One" just as a joke, filled with (more than 99) things we'd have to lay out as content warnings in a hypothetical adaptation of our campaigns. it was SO fun!! i kind of fear the difficulty of having to find another group who is able to "play hard", so to speak. i understand lines and veils, that's all fine and well, and even i can feel sometimes that a gritty realistic adherence to oppressive politics, even if fictional, can be kind of a drag on my soul. but.. isn't it fun to have so much of the world at one's fingertips? i think if more people stepped out of their comfort zone, they'd find that having conflicts of ideology, motivation, whatever, in their setting doesn't turn them into "bad people" to merely perceive, or to engage with in a work of fiction. i have never seen Critical Role, but i am glad that Candela Obscura exists, for the people who truly desire what it is and feel happy playing around with it. i say this about most every game, really. but, i will certainly be very happy to check out your recommendation!
Call of Cthulhu. Chill Stalking the Night Fantastic vassan Buror 13 Blades in the dark Wretched Vigilantes I mean there are dozens of Victorian Urban Arcana/Horror games that are better then CO
This is one of the best reviews on an RPG game I have viewed. Most excellent, concise, and offers a way forward. I have not looked at Wretched, but I look forward to accompanying you as you provide more Wretched content. :)
Wretched isn't well known, unfortunately for us. It's hard to get well known, especially when dealing with niche genres. But I believe this is the right place to expand our audience, since Ginger Frasier and Young Steven Buscemi share our gaming philosophy.
Gaining recognition in niche genres is tough. Aligning with influencers like Ginger and S. Bizzle, can be a key step in getting noticed. It's not just about growing an audience but finding the right one that appreciates your unique content. I think this is the place; of course, I am biased. I just now bought Wretched Apocalypse, Country, and Epoque, which should give me a good feel. @@TheRedRoomChannel
I would just play Call of Cthulu tbh. It's just such a solid system for playing normal people. Nice Twin Peaks sweater :) These structured videos are my favourites that you guys do.
Overall, this was a very fair and gracious review, especially given the design flaws that permeate the product. It seems we are in some sort of bizarre reality where followers now prop up poorly designed products and tear down any works by 'problematic others.' I recall being bullied and teased in the 90's for loving rpg's and the escape they gave. I never thought my own culture would cast me out and label me pariah for not conforming to the group think we all sought to escape.
It's a damn shame. I've been very fair and calm in these reviews and if you check over on reddit, people are referring to these videos as vitriolic rants by someone who is afraid of and threatened by inclusivity lmao lunatics.
The writer are unable to projec themselves into the mindset of a victorian society or even any non progressive viewpoint. This makes a setting that is superficial and vaccuous using an victorian aesthetic while ignoring the worldview and presupposition that make that world possible. It boggles the mind how such a well financed company couldn't find any decent writers or come up with something so bland. It seems they just made a lesser "spooky" version of blades in the dark. Anyway excellent video and hope to see more from you guys soon Any chance we will get more v5 content ?
I used to be a CR fan back at the start of C2. I didn't like that the show became overly preachy (at least before the actual play). However, I generally think that Mercer is a genuinely passionate DM, so I'm quite surprised they dropped the ball. Their new TTRPG actually sounds like it might have some decent mechanics but if CO is to go by, you can guarantee it'll be overtly 'progressive'.
@@Ryotbh I would like to think Mercer had little to no involvement, because his D&D tie-in books using his homebrew setting from the campaigns was quite good. But it is still their fault that they aren't managing their companies products better.
My favorite part of the video wasn't actually the precise and thorough destruction of this cynical cash grab by Darrington Press, but the part where Ginger pointed out that Critters all have room temperature IQs. If I was drinking anything at the time, it would have wound up on my screen.
Well done, gents. My guess is that the people who were going to buy this game will do so (and then praise the shit out of it) regardless of how awful it is.
I know that Call of Cthulhu has a lot of die hard fans, for me it just doesn't blow my kilt up. If I want a something to strike horror into my soul I will simply run Delta Green or watch one of J. Scott Garibay's videos on UA-cam. Steampunk likewise has consistently let me down as a genre that I find trite and over hyped. For those who disagree, rest assured I do not begrudge you having fun in any way shape or form.
@@MacAttack001 Call of Cthulhu can be set in any time period. There's Cthulhu Invictus, Cthulhu Dark Ages, Cthulhu by Gaslight, and yes, Cthulhu in the modern day. There is literally nothing stopping you from running CoC in 2024, and fiven the fact Delta Green as a system is 99% the same as CoC, saying you don't like one and love the other makes no sense.
@@stanalex4544Besides the fact that Delta Green has done ALL of the heavy lifting for you and has far better prose. Look, you like Call of Cthulhu and that doesn't bother me in the least. If you must know, and it seems that you must, I had a Twat Waffle run a CoC game once that sucked all the enjoyment out of it for me. Can we leave it at that and go about our lives?
Person 1: "Ok so we want to make a horror game set in a fictional Victorian era city. But can you make it so it doesn't offend anyone except cops?" Person 2: "So no horror, consequences, madness, or oppression? Just cops=bad for no apparent reason?" Person 1: "Genius. Send it to print! Who cares, the critters will buy anything we slap our label on!"
what.... did you watch ep 2? they have SO much conflict between characters, Half of them end up scarred for life, one betrays the group out of PTSD from the war he went to and killed another PC... (plus there are o cops)
This is what happens when activists who happen to be writers cannot separate their writing from their own politics. It's just lame and makes no sense. Can you imagine if conservative writers hamfistedly shoved their politics into an RPG system? Everyone would rightfully think it hacky and lame.
I don't think I've seen anyone not infested with consumer brainworms stand up for Candela Obscura, so I don't get this whining. Also, we don't need to imagine this, remember FATAL?
@@BrorealeK That was 5 edgy teens writing the most depraved shit they could. It exists only as a ridiculed PDF. CO got printed. It exists in game shops. Same level of preachy slop, but got shoved at people.
Just wanted to say that I respect you for reading through the text so that we didn't have to. Currently trying to read my way through Star Trek Adventures at the moment and I swear they have mentioned 'diversity and inclusion' more than rolling dice at this point.
“Let’s make a horror game, but let’s also bear in mind that we don’t want to make the players scared or uncomfortable in anyway. Let’s just make Call of Cthulhu lite and call it a day.” The fact that Crit Role thought it would be a good idea to make a horror game that ridicules horror elements is crazy. This is one of the reasons why I love 5e so much, primarily the smaller companies that make their own supplements for it, there’s a company called Dream Realm Storytelling and they have two books, one called Corpus Angelus, and the other called the Corpus Malicious. The Corpus Malicious book strives off of horror, it’s definitely taken hints from my favorite DnD book of all time “The Book of Vile Darkness”, there is a spell in the Corpus Malicious book where you can summon insects inside of a creature and the types of insects that ar summoned are based on the creatures size, and I the insects can burst out of the creatures chest if they’ve taken enough damage that they’ve fallen to 0 hp, or if they’ve failed 3 Con saves. DRS is super fuckin’ cool, at this point I think I prefer them over Crit Role’s shop and what not.
The setting for Candela Obscura reminds me of the Radiant Citadel book. Most problems that would be inflicted on a life bearing rock floating in the Astral plane are hand waved. Multiple ethnicities and cultures with real world differences in values living in close proximity? Hardly ever any actual problems that aren't just neighbors bickering. The Astral plane is dangerous and full of monsters, Gith, raiders, Illithids, and who knows what? Some god-like force keeps the place safe with an artifact used by the ruling council that always seem to agree on most things. No army or militia, just some pseudo constabulary group that spends more time mediating disputes than enforcing laws outside of petty theft and violence (which is rare in the first place) How did all the people get there? Refugees from tragedy that wind up there via serendipity or divine providence Economics of the place? The leadership basically tax anything that looks like it could cause any kind of advantage of one group over another in order to keep things "harmonious" and any outsider trade is tariffed beyond any notion of profit. Apparently being granted the chance to be in or around the Radiant Citadel is payment enough and really, they should be grateful they were given the privilege to breathe the same air as the citizens of the citadel.
Wow, Radiant Citadel sounds like an ideal 'ideological zealot' evil faction. Anyone from the outside can look at that and go 'wait that sounds horrifyingly sinister and their attitude worries me.' I might have to look that up to use as the outsider threat to a game's setting.
Damn, so well spoken and to the point. You are spot on. WOTC has already ruined D&D, wait til 6E.The rules are prolly gonna be the same but the verbiage will all be PC.
CO is like the person at the table that brings their personal baggage into their character and tries play through the ideal version of themselves, except they built the entire world using this logic. Its ironic seeing as how that is one of the most known tropes in roleplaying games and they went ahead with it anyway. Such a weird lack of self awareness this “game “ has.
Great video and a happy new year to the Black Lodge crew! Candela Obscura sounds even worse than I had thought from watching the first part of the review.
THANK YOU!!!! I really enjoyed the game as a player for a few sessions, but it quickly fell very flat. When I started to create a campaign for the system I found it wildly bland, nonsensical and grossly “woke”. In order to make the system workable I pretty much threw all the source material save the character creation and the map away. Halfway through I decided what I was left with was a watered down Cthulhu. Edit: I ran a game tonight using the core idea and world of candela that was insanely fun for the table. I forwarded the history by 30 years and otherwhere is back. The circle is essentially thrust into a WWII style special operations unit going behind enemy lines to run dual missions. On one hand they need to seek out and recover eldrich artifacts as well as disrupting and destroying enemy resources. It had a very Indiana jones meets inglorious basterds vibe… it was awesome. So in many ways, like DnD, if you hombrew your world and some mechanics, things get way more fun.
Yes, they banned us a while ago, but we are still alive and kicking. The book on Ginger Frasier's desk is the second edition, already released after we were invited out.
@@jbillings90 Not just one game, we as publishers were banned from DTRPG. To make a long story short, we published an RPG called MEN, a satirical game no one in their right mind would have released in 2023! One day after release the game was taken off their virtual shelf to be "reviewed" by their Publisher Relation's team, something that kept happening (we had some "friends" on social media who loved to report our releases for being "problematic"). And then we complained about it on our YT channel and Twitter. Big mistake! Those guys at OBS can't handle criticism, they call it "hostile marketing". We got the boot a day later, probably to make an example out of us: Better not be problematic but, if if you are, don't complain, accept their censorship with a smile on your face.
Very excited for MCDM RPG to release. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves from "not-DnD" to its own beast. The known classes all seem very cool in practice. Oh, sorry, Candela Obscura is the topic. Um....Brennan Lee Muligan plays a compelling Great War vet. But that has NOTHING to do with the game, he could play that same character in numerous settings. I started watching C.O. Needle & Thread after first seeing the Black Lodge review, and I could really see the gaping cracks in the system on display. It was basically just improv to an uncomfortable level...the game system didn't aid in the storytelling at all. Everything was GM fiat and talented players acting. Brennan looked like he was in a dazed stupor for stretches of it when he wasn't directly involved. And, not the game's fault, the GM trying to frame everything in literal cinema camera shots, ironically, took away from the attempt at cinematic presentation. Instead of focusing the players' senses, he was directing cinematography
i myself dont like games that solves all social conflicts before players join the story, good story grows from conflict and how players overcome it fantasy racism can give interesting moments for players to overcome, but smth like old school "drow are evil bcs thy are born like that" is dumb also, how about "drow is evil bcs they were banished from service and now they are angry and petty"
I haven't read Candela Obscura. But I think it's interesting that a lot of the stuff I hear as a criticism of Candela Obscura I saw personally in Delta Green: God's Teeth. Just constant condescending lectures on what exactly to describe and how to make people playing a horror game feel "safe". To the point of intentionally not describing horrific scenes and then lecturing the GM for even wondering what those scenes were. It was just so terrible to read. Horror games should make you feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Otherwise it's not scary. It's not horror.
For anyone who is interested in the premise of Candela Obscura but doesn't like how the rule system ended up, I encourage to take a look at Paranormal Order, a recent TTRPG that came out, not much earlier than Candela Obscura. The main creative director of Paranormal Order's universe is a streamer that streams the series on his channel on Twitch and his two-shot campaign Quarantine is the most viewed TTRPG stream on Twitch ever. I encourage you guys to take a look at Quarentine, since it's on youtube and it's in english, with content creator from different countries around the world
I think it would benefit your work to limit schoolyard insults, like the jibe at CR fan's IQ. You are hitting it out of the park in the actual criticism department. It's not about being reflexively nice. It's about making it costly to hate you. A lot of CR fans even know what is up with this game. Make it costly for them to dismiss you.
Yeah, +1 to this. You do make a lot of really well-thought out points, and then getting mean-spirited like this just spits in what is otherwise a lovely bowl of commentary. On principle I can't support people who maintain the ugliness of internet "discourse," regardless of their perspectives. Gotta unsub, right after I subscribed for the "role playing not acting" video. Sorry, man.
This sounds a lot like it has the same problem that I have with 40k as a setting. Its so removed from anything that makes life worth living that you would quickly hit population collapse. No one would be having kids just to feed them into the grinder. Now arguably there is a point that communications to the population in ww1 and 40k are so bad that you don't know that we just lost half of two army groups to gas.
So they’ve literally done what “cultural appropriators” do, they’ve taken late Victorian london stripped it down until it’s nothing but a asethetic and stuffed their own modern political views in there, because you can’t just let players do what they want you’ve got to fuse it to the lore, because god forbid somebody doesn’t agree and decides to homebrew your lore into a better state A way I can tell these things is that I could graft this lore onto any setting with minimal effort, the fact the fair lands wouldn’t be late Victorian wouldn’t change. The amount of lecturing is just aweful, like again in cyberpunk I wouldn’t have to lecture you on how policing is corrupt, it just is in the lore and you’d be an idiot to miss it
Normal people attacked as "cultural appropriators" aren't necessarily stuffing politics into an aesthetic, though. Just wearing a cheongsam while being white isn't a political act to anyone but a lunatic.
@@MeganDelacroix that is true, but here that’s what they’ve done very clearly, they’ve taken Victorian london and stripped it of everything except the asethetic for them to play with and bloat with their own politics, I’d say that’s cultural appropriation in every sense of the word. Again imagine if I took medieval Japan for inspiration, I make the samurai and the ninjas and shoguns and stuff but then I simply include no other reference to medieval Japan and instead just throw tonnes of right wing talking points in there as mt cultural development for these people
Candela Obscura is what happens when you get bad writers to opine about their political views and force a narrative into the world that is so intentionally obtuse and ignorant that not only is there no self-awareness or self-improvement but that you are actually awarded for being an unquestioning supporter of everything around you. Why be scared in a world of horror when nothing scares you? This game just flat out sucks and is indicative of people placing ideology over gameplay. To say different cultures don't clash is an insult to the actual fusing of diverse cultural norms. It so badly wants to "include everyone" and ultimately excludes EVERYONE due to its childish, ham-fisted banality.
You know. It makes me think about when I argue politics and some person goes off on a long-winded gamma explanation (*) about all the different reasons and socio-economic factors. It's like they have a pat and perfect explanation of what is happening. This explanation winds and twists - we call it Mental Gymnastics, so that it doesn't break any of the other ideas they have. It doesn't conflict. And that is BORING. Like this insistence that every social and cultural practice fine, perfect, and normal. No conflict, no excitement. No rough edges where we get friction and tension. Smooth Artifice has the least actual tolerance, if I may use Engineering/machinist lingo. *I should talk, I'm just saying what you said.
Yeah, the dichotomy of modern world-building in media. We all love each other, but don't you dare love any specific part of another culture, because you are then appropriating them. To go down the route of restricting player's choice because you as the game dev want your fantasy game to represent an idealized version of the modern world (or rather what the devs and their buddies think the modern world should be like), is so condescending and arrogant. Completely agree. It's a huge problem for CR by now. They feel the need to be so incredibly woke that it becomes a complete travesty. They've good friends who had been regular guest players in the past who haven't been on the show for years, because they are obviously not diverse enough. Each time a new side project starts or guests are invited, you can basically check off a list. There has to be someone who isn't straight, the majority should identify as female and not be white, and it would be preferable if we get more than he and she pronouns. It's even in the NPCs Mercer creates by now. Only European accents are fine, a significant number of NPCs has to be non-binary... it's ridiculous. And this philosophy of putting everything BEHIND their own agenda, their own idea of how the world should be is also part of Candela Obscura.
It's all about how you run it... I've got 9 people including 5 d&d players love it the way I run it. We have tonnes of laughs and hijinx as well as the horror. I set up my own investigative scenarios and give them a lot of freedom to co-create what happens. It's been great!
critical role have the money and resources so i am surprised they didn't hire few experience game makers to design the game properly with well written lore. i guess it's the typical get woke go broke.
I mean, this is the same CR that garnered an audience so 'toxic' and aggressive (re: 'progressive') that even they have had to apologise and distance themselves from it. Remember, Mercer got death threats for killing a character in campaign 2.
I think there's space for creating a game in which there are utopian attitudes about race, gender, sex work, since those are issues certain players may wish to have escapist fiction from. Also, in the real world we exist within, the depiction of police on TV and in movies are completely at odds with their reality. TV shows like Blue Bloods, Law and Order, CSI, even things like Castle or Brooklyn 99, depict police as objectively morally correct and never a real societal problem. The idea of producing a product which allows women and minorities to relax in escapist fiction while also not gaslighting them about the role of police in their lives is much more consistent when you consider the product one interested in creating an audience among people with a very different political perspective than you have. The TTRPG and many of its most central assumptions grow out of the Western, and its depiction of an 'unsettled' wilderness with dangerous near-human beings who must be killed in order for the west to be won. In that story, it is a time and place for violence, and it's on this violence that power can be seized for one's self. This is familiar to us because it's what we've seen all our lives. It makes sense that if we are to see a new form of storytelling being created, it would be unfamiliar to us, and we would see it as self-contradictory. Our own stories are self-contradictory. Lovecraft wrote horrific screeds about the inferiority of the Celtic people, and was Welsh on his mother's side. He hated the Jews, but married a Jewish woman. Irish and Italians have gone in and out of being considered 'white' largely on their willingness and ability to engage with and support white supremacy. The value created by society is the result of the labor of workers and workers alone, yet we place that wealth solely in the hands of those violent enough to claim it, and we call that justice. These contradictory narratives serve the ego of us as white people, and so we don't see these flaws as easily. So yes, you can find 'flaws' in a more inclusive narrative, because it's not interested in being consistent. Your narratives aren't either. You just see the inconsistencies easier because you don't find them obscured behind familiarity. That said, there was no need for the utopian vision they reveal to be presaged by the kinds of war and displacement that material conditions would dictate would result in some strife, at the very least from revolutionary sentiment against the existing governments, even if for whatever reason it never manifested along racial or cultural lines. It does seem to me also that the Critical Role members are themselves very white, and I worry that this is an example of white people speculating about what PoC must want out of gaming, possibly without consulting them, but that's speculation on my part.
Violence just isn't brutality but conflict overall. It's politics are how a dirty one claims they're gonna help a group then when elected basically abandons them only to profit for themselves and to hold power over others. That's violence! This game removes even that level of conflict by having the world perfect while also working off a "looming threat" yet a threat doesn't work without cracks in the glass due to strife within the perfection. People are gonna be upset at how things work, people aren't gonna like each other. Somebody is gonna have an accident that gets somebody hurt. This isn't an escape for minorities it's an insult because they removed agency due to their own fear of conflict.
love that you positively flip to a recommendation for a game you support that offers rules and setting to meet the need for a good game in the style and theme that would appeal !
Eberron and the city of towers avoids what of the pitfalls of Newfair. there is corruption and prejudice, but what makes it cool is that a) it is explained, and b) its not just lazy analogues of modern day prejudice. Refugees from the lost nation of Cyre are treated like crap, and its because any survivor must have necessarily been in another nation when the disaster that wiped out their nation occured, which means its logical to assume theyre all enemy combatants. Tribal warfare takes place in the rough port town of Stormreach. Half giants who wanna reconnect with their ancient ancestry but have no connection to it, gnomish colonists who founded the city and feel its more theirs, and human exiles from five different nations who have all been fighting for 100 years, not to mention gangs of wererats. So much prejudice and tribalism, and none of it is just "Orcs = black people so town guard = racist cops." You can actually roleplay as a participant in that bigotry and over a campaign learn to get over it. These guys just want the outward appearance of a gritty world, without earning it with historical justification.
Candela Obscura is Spanish for "Black Candle". Is this not at all set on a version of Spain or at the very list a Iberian culture? Surely, these writters are not just "culturaly appropriating" the usage of naming their gaming using a language from a culture they do not even pretend to represent in the game, right? Surely...
nope, youre wrong "candela obsucra" means nothing in spanish beacuse Candela is actually Vela and obscura doesnt mean shit but its "close" to the word Obscuro which is more like Obscure. Also, calling something in another language isnt appropiation just like calling Vox Machina a group isnt appropriating germans
I just realized what this setting reminds me of, the (mess of a TTRPG) Strike Legion. The city is the Star Republic on a smaller scale and without a generalized 'ball of all things bad' enemy akin to The Imperium.
It feels like they limbo under any interesting conflicts. I am not saying every game NEEDS racism and heck even an oddly harmonious city can be interesting... But you have to give people SOMETHING! Especially in a quasi-horror setting. . Heck why even introduce many of these elements? Instead of a migrant wave just have this city be a metropolitan trade hub... Done. Why even have a Non-corrupt corrupt police force that are evil for no reason? Why have the supernatural be so unknown? . As well why all this focus on diversity if your going to do NOTHING with it? (I know the answer... because they are at the level where even depicting other cultures is offensive. So they have to do lip service to say that they are there... but actually showing any diversity would require them to represent someone and that would be bad).
I like Blades in the Dark tbh, also its very hackable so I'm able to change a few things to fit more what my players and me like and it still works. Its definitely more organized than Candela Obcura.
I know yall sometimes respond to Scott Garibay content. I would love to hear your thoughts on the ESI vs SADAC revelation..... The secret code in the character sheet to save humanity. When I write the things he says it makes me feel like that guy is in a cult.
Thank you for adressing the issue of moralistic fantasizing. Not that such fantasy is inherently bad, but rather the placement of such a utopia within a setting closely resembling any real historic period is devoid of credibility. Settings that aspire to reflect the terrors of Medieval Age or the challenges of the Wild West or the constraints of the Victorian Era without any prejudices immediately seem way too artificial and unrealistic to me. And this is not because I wish to justify racism or sexism or any other -ism in the real life. This is because a society without any xenophobia would look VERY different from a real-world Victorian London. Can such society be portrayed in a game? Of course, yes, but then the authors would need to invest much more creative energy into it! They would need to imagine how things could work differently in a truly inclusive world. It would mean change not only in how people talk to each other, it would mean different family structures, different economy, therefore the housing would be different, certain workplaces and the streets of the city may look and feel quite dissimilar to what we have known in the real life! But actual production of such a world requires work and not just sticking the word "equality" on top of a rundown ghetto district.
The worst thing about Candela Obscura is that it's a game that hates itself, simultaneously a world written to induce horror and deathly afraid of creating discomfort for the people playing within it.
A project doomed from the beginning.
As a fan of 2E Ravenloft that's why I hated 5E Ravenloft. "Oh don't scare the players!" Well, I can't scare the PCs because they're superheroes who can shrug off everything with a long rest..
Reminds me of a lot of for tv horror from decades ago. Even some children horror shows would delve deeper and probe scarier subject matter than a lot of the adult ones did.
And this project sounds exactly like that. Delve into nothing, because we want to keep everyone safe.
What’s the use of having a Rated PG horror story of it’s not for 8 year olds?
Wokeness demonizes a subject's authentic form while trying to change it to fit an outsider's preferences.
Run from Safety Fools!
It's insane that they're utopian in their conception of society, yet chose to wrap it in a romanticised late Victorian wrapping. Which makes it even shitty steampunk, as it apes the aesthetics but ignores the culture and history that gave rise to the aethestics and cultural mores.
Exactly. The funny thing is, this is literally cultural appropriation that they warn the reader against engaging in. They are wearing Europe like a costume while ignoring everything that makes it interesting or distinct.
@@blacklodgegames Oh but you see, Europe doesn't count. They don't have anything that's uniquely theirs, you know, being colonizers that stole everything from other cultures already. So you're totally justified appropriating whatever you want from them. Two wrongs, in this case, really do make a right!
I’m guessing the only thing they even touch on is a class system (rich, poor), but since everyone is harmoniously living together, it’s more of a window dressing than a meaningful distinction in how one lives. About as meaningful as whether or not you have cheese in your burger.
@@rhysproudmourne1646 correct
@@blacklodgegames Man you really touched on something epic here 10:56 - 11:47, include court alchemists and philosopher's stone type shit and I'm set for that setting and worldbuilding in a heatbeat!
The idea of the writers setting up an inherently positive diverse society but still feeling the need to tell people to know their place and not talk about cultures they dont belong to is honestly hilarious
Diverse cultures 'integrated' in the sense that they live in the same cities, but culturally and socially segregated from the PCs ... and the game master. It's so half-assed and hollow. Most of us have already gotten sick of the hollowness and somewhat contradictory nature of the 'inclusivity' and 'diversity' of the modern news _corporation_ watching 'anti-capitalists'.
This setting's cultures are so lacking in description and explanation, that it fails to actually include any. 'Inclusivity' that doesn't actually include anything...
This could be actually really funny for the policemen to actually be very brutal with the people who want to stand out and impose their culture, for example etiquette or religion, cuisine and many more. Like imagine if you are walking down the street and then see a policemen arest an italian man in his 40s because he said that you do not eat his spaghetti with chopsticks, or put ketchup on them, in his restaurant
@@savasan1895 I'd play this game! =D
If everyone gets along so well, why was there a war?
The lore talks about a ten year cold snap that has hit the region called "the shiver". Newfaire is in a relatively resource rich and temperate climate, but nations to the north have it much worse off, so the war was about "resources" (there is also a sidebar that implies there may have been a supernatural element to fuel the conflict).
The world wars were not fought over resources, but ideology, and ideological conflict would have been much more interesting here.
@@blacklodgegames If it was ideological war then the war would have been about a bunch of religio-fascist KKK white people and their Emperor Drumpf. Which the people of Newfaire defeat easily and they then apologize for their evil ways and join in peace with the Newfairelanders.
@@blacklodgegamesSooooo it’s Frostpunk?
I'm a huge fan of underdog stories, especially when said underdog is fighting against those real world problems; racism, police brutality, fascism etc. But when there's no institutional evils, no cultural clashes, no ignorance, no UNDER?! Then its just a dog story...
If I wanted a dog story, I'd just watch Air Bud...
Aaaaand there's the problem with woke-iocy in books, games, movies, TTRPG's etc. If there is nothing convincingly evil, wrong, broken.... What is there left to do? Nothing that matters.
@@JacopoSkydweller I think there is still 'evil' but usually it's just moustache twirling villainy. The real problem is that the world that's created feels like a modern, 'progressive' society draped with the trappings of whichever time period you want to set your RGP in.
I personally don't even like underdogs. I like a even playing field like if people can't be mean then why are they passing out weapons and wanting people to fight? Who's evil? People are gonna not agree on SOMETHING. What is a story/game where the problem was solved before you could even play?
I think they based the inhabitants of Newfaire on their fans, which explains a lot.
Their fans will viciously snarl and tear each other apart mercilessly over the least minutia and disagreement, while hunting the 'other' in grotesque purity spirals. Hell, that sounds more interesting that Newfaire.
Deep!
I sounds like this is a RPG caught between a rock and a hard place. They simultaneously want a utopia and conflict, it seems to not know what it is doing whatsoever.
Holy crap their setting is vapid.
Also, if you’re reading this, you should pick up The Red Room’s “(In)Sanitorium” and “The Bastard King”
@@paddysparlor will do. And the setting is much worse than we had time for in this video. The whole thing sucks
I wonder if there would even be a Red Lamp area if it is completely normalised? Why have a part of town for that when everyone's granny occasionally was at it for a loaf of bread or two? Maybe Grandad joins in too, maybe everyone does... So the seedy area of town becomes obsolete and there goes the atmosphere GM's need in order to portray tone, mystery, fear, uncertainty.
It's funny, ironically this setting could actually work if it was the setting itself that was used as the real antagonist. The utopian homogenous gloop is a kind of mind controlled dystopia, where all is monitored, controlled and managed in order to keep the utopian peace (hence the police acting like something out of Logan's Run or 1984) and the 'evil' magic seeping into it would be fine if not resisted and blocked by someone in power. So bits of it seep through the defenses, but in twisted and altered form due to the supressed psyche underpinning everything. Instead people are told to shun it, ignore it and be happy, anyone failing to do these is carted off and re educated or never seen again. So everyone is 'happy'. Meanwhile the players are running the knife edge of being investigators charged with keeping a lid on the seepage, half the time helping the police, half the time asking too many questions and getting side-long looks and being tailed by their agents. Now that could work, especially if the players were starting off from the point of view that they were trying to save the world from the evil magic stuff, only to gradually figure out it was being twisted and by someone within society, within the London-esque capitol city, Nutopia or something..? By draining the diversity of thought and expression it was twisting the magic and creating a kind of dark mirror effect or backlash, all because of the repression coming from someone at the heart of power. That took 5 minutes and I reckon it has a better (?) take. But horses for courses and all that, Wretched Epoque sounds good.
Exactly, it takes almost no time to come up with interesting justifications of these things. Instead it's just a self insert of the writer's personal ideology and ends up clashing with the rest of the vision of the world.
Stay where you are, the Authorities are on their way! 😜
That's actually a really interesting spin. Wish I had the time to work up a campaign based on that.
@@justincoleman9946 Thanks, it could actually work really nicely I reckon, I've now been mulling over what I could do with it elsewhere..
The way it’s kind of explained here makes me think a bit of what the political scene might be like in this world.
Are you even allowed to make a character that is conservative on these issues by the looks of these warnings I’d say not.
Critical Roles whole brand is based around harmony and no internal conflict, which they've done quite well over the years. If they were to create any kind of social strain in their setting, they would get eaten alive online and it would follow them for years. When their only source of revenue is their online presence, they have to play it safe. I'd even argue that their more political projections in the world building was motivated by their fanbases, who are mostly of a shared ideological mindset.
The cast being so proud of the effort they put into the intro to C3 where they explore forgotten ruins only for the insane twitter part of their audience be in uproar over the "glorification of colonization" was hilarious.
@@MannyNamiro Exactly, they can't catch a break. There are things about the CR crew that I'm not a fan of, but I'll always commend how well they handle online backlash.
@@MannyNamiro The intolerance of the pro 'tolerance' and 'inclusivity' crowd, the irony of that, never ceases to frustrate, or maybe disappoint... I think there's a word for it, where your exhausted from being frustrated. Exasperated, maybe?
Hoo boy! There's nothing like harmony and lack of conflict to provide inspiration to drive the ::checks notes:: conflict that any good story needs.
@@4saken404 to be fair, "no internal conflict" was also Roddenberry's mandate for Star Trek and I'd say that worked out pretty well
the question is, is candela the best attempt of absolute amateurs with too much time on twitter? or a cashgrab ghostwritten by an unsupervised amateur with too much time on twitter?
Yes.
Why not both? 🤔
2
The best part is that this shows how afraid they are. None of these people actually think, talk, or act this way when the cameras are off. It's hilarious - the mob has them forever in character. No wonder famous people pound hard drugs.
@@madprophetusI long for Matt Mercer to just have a publicized slip-up that betrays his 4chan roots.
The video was great but I greatly enjoy the fact that you did not hide the game you would suggest in the end of your video and had the decency to add it to the title. You are worth more subs.
Thank you, really appreciate it! Wretched core book is free at the link in the description and Epoque is cheap cheap cheap
Damn bro really hit record and said, "we're burying candela today."
Im def picking up Epoch, sounds toppers
If you do, I hope you enjoy it!
Candela Obscura: "What if we stole John Harper's Blades in the Dark and then packed it so full of propaganda that it sucked?"
I recently played Bades in the Dark and your statement is exactly what I thought of Candela Obscura.
This is perfect take
So basically the culture is like Star Trek's Federation of Planets where cultural and racial conflicts are handwaved away and the idea of intractable conflicts of interest are not allowed to be entertained.
Star Trek is post WWIII where most people died and we all find out aliens are real. It's more plausible than faking it in the 1890s.
Yeah, but Star Trek setting is a utopia with the problem of scarcity removed. However, most of the conflicts do come from the cultural differences and the Prime Directive of not interfering no matter how alien or barbaric other cultures looked like. The writers didn't treat the audience as children nor the episodes as soapboxes for their own personal politics. The conflicting sides were presented fairly and it was left up to the viewer to decide whether they agreed with the resolution.
The cast of Critical Role are not writers at all and their disastrous third campaign has been the most obvious proof of it. Candela is just another example of the writers/world-builders not having actual real life experience and being incapable of empathy. This is a problem that plagues every single aspect of mainstream culture. That's why modern comics have superheroes and supervillains sitting around cafes or texting each other about their mundane relationships. That's why all the movies and shows have villains that make more sense and have more principles and moral than the "heroes."
These people judge people by their surface characteristics and not by their deeds. A PoC can never be a villain no matter how reprehensible their actions are, and no matter how villainous the antagonist is, they can never be actually racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. This leads to stories being neutered and devoid of anything interesting.
Interestingly, the ideals of the Federation is that anyone can eventually be integrated into galactic community, but in reality there are always racial and cultural conflicts. Klingons. Cardassians. Borg. They sometimes become allies but there is always tension and disagreements, and often armed conflict. Half the episodes that involve an encounter with a new race ends up in tragedy or conflict. At least it's somewhat realistic in that regard. The writers would like for things to work out fine between races and cultures, but they definitely know it's not always the case.
A recent show (Strange New Worlds) had a character say something that I found refreshing (I just looked it up again because I forgot what the exact sentence was): she says "The Federation teaches that if we can find a way to empathize with an enemy then they can one day become our friends. They're wrong. Some things in this universe are just plain evil."
The Humans in Star Trek at least have a reason to be less beholden to every facet of their culture because WW3 bombed everything nearly back to the stone age and everything on earth after was clawed back by luck and pluck. The meeting of the Vulcans was what really got humanity together and the formation of the Federation was as much to protect as it was to discover. Candela Obscura just seems to be all the payoff with none of the buildup or background to justify it.
@@MannyNamiro The moment you can't let "evil be evil" then what's the conflict? That's the problem they fear their own potental, so they rather be told what they need to do. Which is highly ironic from the very people that believe that they must "rebel" at everything. Yet when rebellion is mainstream it isn't rebellion it's conformity.
So sex work is something that exists, and seems to flourish, hinting at economic inequality, yet this inequality has not resulted in kind of prejudice, racism, classism or anything? Who is it that cops oppress? Everyone? Where is the power imbalance?
There is classism in the game, and it's sort of funny that that is the line they thought was ok for players to cross while every other ism was off limits.
@@blacklodgegames I was going to harp more on the writers, but I'm sure they meant well, but just didn't make enough effort to think well. Bless their hearts, at least they tried a little. Hopefully someone learns from this.
Someone mentioned star trek below; thought i’d make this observation:
What makes Star Trek (TNG/DS9 era) interesting is the conflicts that erupt when the Federation bump into other factions that are different than (and opposite of) them. The Klingons are warlike/ federation is peaceful, the ferengi are capitalist/ the federation is socialist, the bajorans are religious/the federation is atheist. Etc
They have to learn how to deal with or live with people who are fundamentally different from them. Later when the dominion war breaks out, they have to learn that sometimes you simply can’t come to a compromise or make a peaceful settlement with another entity and you must fight for survival.
When you take that away, the setting becomes MUCH less interesting. Just like Candela obsura, if you have no conflict (of any sort), you have nothing to keep you interested in it. Candela obsura would be much more interesting if there was conflict created by different peoples and cultures moving into the same space at the same time. Much like real life cities (Boston, Chicago, New York to name a few) they all struggled with different peoples falling into conflict with each other as they tried to populate the same space.
100%
Funny thing, the Borg were that 'you can't compromise or have peace with them' faction initially, but were too weighty and monolithic to be as compelling as the Dominion. You'd think the horrors seeping in would be that for Candela Obscura's world.
God, I want to hear and talk shop about this stuff with literally anyone, because this kind of garbage worldbuilding and writing makes things seem unfeasable while in actuality a world without conflict can be an amazing setting if done right, but these hacks are just dead-set on making it as boring as possible.
Defining and solving problems is almost exclusively the action and drama of a game, so I'm curious why and how you think that's true. Obviously those problems don't have to be between entrenched group identities, nations or other cultural institutions - but how are you going to generate motive and action without need and obstacle?
@@gagrin1565 Usually by having the conflict undermine the Utopia itself.
I admit that I was a bit hyperbolic, but I am sure there are plenty of ways to make a chill setting investing.
Coffee Shop AUs are popular for a thing.
Someone was mentioning Star Trek as the utopia idea for what you mentioned. The issue being that when compared to this, Star Trek easily works while this doesn’t for a myriad of reasons; but just a handful of them would be this:
Star Trek had a narrative context that didn’t sanitize its backstory. Its backstory defined its narrative context. Unlike Candela Obscura which is incredibly vague, incredibly sophomoric and preachy about its subjects (Candela = diversity is good, war is bad. Melting pots are good, police, bad) Star Trek had a third World War as well as a eugenics war as part of its background for why culture had changed. ST had multiple technological and social reasons for sudden social change namely, the replicator, warp drive, and the discovery of races outside humanity’s own, which makes a more utopian society possible through eradicating poverty, giving humans something greater outside themselves to strive for (The Federation) and fulfilling the most fundamental desire of the human soul; exploration of the heavens.
Candela Obscura on the other hand just has a vague war as its background. It only offers up two antagonists, the police force / investigative forces, and the corrupting magic. Outside of these two forces, there can be no actual conflict because there can be no stakes. The author of the game has already solved these problems for the player.
- Star Trek on the other hand has infinite worlds to have conflict arrive from. And this conflict is pushed narratively from endeavoring to find a peaceable solution to often non-peaceful problems.
The difference between Star Trek and Candela is, one explores the myriad of real life social conflicts in its narrative, while the other pretends they don’t and shouldn’t exist.
The TLDR is simply, Candela is afraid of its own real world context, thereby writing next to nothing for its own historical one, meanwhile Star Trek isn’t afraid of the real world or its own universe’s own historical context.
A full review of Wretched Epoque would be a good bookend to this series.
Agreed. I'd like to see the mechanics it runs on, in part as a final shovel of dirt in the grave.
Valid points AND a decent microphone? My cup runneth over.
Man, you are really raising the bar with those videos. You're raising it higher than I even care to attempt to pass. I guess I'll stick more to livestreams.
Good job.
Thanks man 🙏
I think it would be a shame if you stopped with your short form videos. You have a unique commentary.
Candela Obscura a "game" in a utopia like world with little to no conflict, personality or feeling that then has "horrors" that do not pose any threat to you and when your character is used up they dont die they become a NPC much like the users of the "game" all while telling you not to say or think bad things, cant have personal conflicts with other player or characters and in turn making everything boring, dull, lifeless all while being preachy. What could you not love about all of that?
If your character dies, it becomes a Critical Role watcher, the most cruel of fates.
We're in Hell!😮
This makes it sound like a watered-down uninteresting version of Harrison Bergeron.
This is really unfortunate because I liked the actual plays a lot - but I will admit, I did have that same thought about magic throughout the series (plural), especially when EONS came up. I was left thinking, "wait, how many people know about magic and these supernatural incursions if there are two HUGE organizations involved with this stuff?"
I remember as well in your mechanics talk, you mentioned that it is missing crucial mechanics, such as PVP play. I don't think I can necessarily agree with that everything that you said about Candela Obscura being CO's mistake, as I've played enough PbtA and FITD games to be frustrated with the limited mechanics before - it seems more like something that was taken from those systems and never corrected. They still should have done something about it, but it's not a mistake they made wholecloth.
I also acknowledge that while watching the streams, I noticed many things that even without reading the book I knew were homebrew, which seemed strange to me. Why show off your new system by rewriting or ignoring the rules?
Again, I loved the actual plays, but I was under no illusions that they were an accurate/faithful interpretation of the system as it appears in the books.
I also agree with the feeling of tiptoeing through sensitive material makes it difficult at times to tell good stories, as a World of Darkness 20e player watching the changes made in 5e.
One thing I did disagree with is, while I understand it was a jab at the rabid and unquestioning mob of Critters (a phenomenon that coalesces around any mildly popular thing), I wasn't exactly on board at the jab at their IQ. There's several things that we can mock the Critters for, but as someone who loved and still does love several of their properties, it wasn't something I was particularly excited to be lumped in with (and it's rather beside the point, but I am a huge fan of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, especially in the way that the latter has influenced our current collective interpretation of the city of Gotham in DC Comics!).
Still loved your analysis - thank you for the honest and well written review!
Thank you for this excellent comment. Really appreciate it
We've fallen quite a ways since White Wolf actually had the stones to green light Charnel Houses of Europe for Wraith: the Oblivion.
And these same people call White Wolf crap for having actually tried something edgy, artsy, and risky on numerous occasions even if it didn't always work out.
So CO is a RPG aimed at Darrington Press' critters.
I am not sure critters from the movie Critters would appreciate the comparison.
I would say that Darrington Press is a great way to filter out a lot players from the TTRPG sphere. I think Mercer might be secretly based and doing everyone a service.
"Yes, yes, Critters, run along and play your game where you can simultaneously hate everyone and be the 'victim'."
But does it look good unplayed on my shelf ? that is the real question.
Darrington Press opens up Radiant Citadel: "Lets call this Fairview and make it steam punk. Now...give us money."
Lol they got my $40 haha
I'll never understand how a company's 'solution' to fighting racism was to segregate people based on race... but that's enough about Radiant Citadel. CR are appealing to the audience they have garnered over the years... CO is just an expression of their audience at this point - hate everything and love to play 'victim'.
@@blacklodgegames you took the hit so the rest of us don't have to...not all heroes wear capes!
I remember hearing about a Chrulhu setting in Wiemar Republic era Berlin, the mythos stuff was less disturbing than Berlin.
It's weird, people like to rant about how bad they were IRL.... but ignore most of the actual bad stuff they did.
What's the name of the setting?
there does seem to be quite a bit of contradictions it seems. But the whole' Oh we're 1920s but entirely integrating EVERY SINGLE CULTURE POST WAR SEAMLESSLY. There really seems to be no character motivation other than- stop the bad that doesn't stop
Correct
Fashionistas!
@@blacklodgegames I have to say, it's always mind bending seeing people try to say "we're culturally diverse" and also say "we have no conflicts of any kind"... as if they don't understand that cultural diversity means having people want different things and being unable to get what they all want.
Also having a bunch of refugees flood in and actually IMPROVE the economy makes me question how bad the economy was.
@@marhawkman303 it really depends on the legal system and the immigrant culture. It's incontestable that, all things being equal, free movement of labor is a net boon to economic activity in a capitalist system. If all things are not equal, i.e. the immigrant population has bad ideology/ethics etc, this can be a net negative, even if economic output is increased
@@blacklodgegames IRL the biggest issue is with immigrants deciding to do their own thing and get in the way of the locals. So it's never actually equal.
Also economic growth requires them to have jobs to work, and often immigrants struggle since... the jobs they want are already filled.
Had to come back and watch again and post one more time.
The way to make a story engaging is by making the world full of conflict. Drama is what gets us invested and when an author writes a scene, he usually is looking at power dynamics within that scene to play off of. Like Joker’s interrogation in Batman: The Dark Knight.
It’s very clear within a few seconds that Batman isn’t the higher status individual in this interaction. Joker has what Batman needs and he has no reason to give it to Batman, and like Joker says in the scene, “you have nothing to threaten me with.” It’s entertaining because of the conflict while the dynamic has shifted from the way you thought it would be.
But these people are afraid of power dynamics. They look for it everywhere, even where it doesn’t exist, but are afraid that someone could make a compelling story while utilizing them.
- American History X was a great film that showed someone who was a terrible person, one who judged others simply by their skin color, and judge them at the point of a gun, could change under a change in power dynamics and socializing with those he hated. They showed that a racist could become heroic.
This game sanitized all aspects of a world filled with conflict and made the only areas of conflict be the police force and the creeping Eldritch magic. So any interaction without those two things is always going to be that way, sanitized. And having watched a couple of their Candela Obscura episodes, that’s exactly all the conflict and drama that exists. Any interaction outside of those two is pretty boring, because there’s no chance for conflict or drama. And because they can stack the deck and you have the GM telling you what the stakes are before rolling, there’s little to no stakes within any interaction that isn’t with police or magic involved.
Candela Obscura is the written manifestation of critical role as an rp campaign and brand, they obviously just have a surface level understanding of storytelling and what themes and aesthetics that are needed for the stories they want to tell but that's it. Every so often you'll find an interview of one of the cast members or on their own show will mention how they love a morally grey setting but if you actually read into the factions, ideas and actions of the settings they make the moral greyness is nonexistent or only mentioned after the fact. This is because the cast as a whole (much like the religious right of the 80's that started the satanic panic) find anything that is the opposite of what they believe morally repugnant and are emotionally and philosophically incapable of grappling with any sort of idea that they do not agree with.
The only thing that sounded good to me about this game was the backstory. The Oldfaire part of it. But you don’t need Candela Obscura for that.
One of the most famous and praised comic book series in the world was X-Men and it’s entire premise is based around prejudices. Imagine how boring the story would be if they were all welcomed by the world they inhabit. It also drains any meaningful commentary on race or gender relations, which is the entire point of X-Men to begin with; to provide social commentary while not being too on the nose because at the time, that was illegal.
These modern progressives are just mad that all meaningful fights have already been fought and won, and are trying to attack scraps and sanitize everything. They’re the puritans of the modern age and it makes them insufferable.
the table of a years-long double-campaign of a hacked version of Delta Green that i was in ran the spectrum of diversity- i am black and trans, in fact all of us were trans, neurodivergent, physically disabled, not straight, whatever, you name it.
as a result of this, many of the NPCs were too; including some of the WORST people in the goddamn world! acts of terrorism committed by a [gay, black] man leave 500 people dead! one of the big villains is a sexually-obsessed [bisexual] murderer! there were NPCs who were homophobic or racist or what have you as well, just as in real life. we play morally-fucked agents of a shadow government agency who recruit by force or brutalize noncompliant witnesses into, well.. non-existence, sometimes. our lethal mistakes get covered up. more progressive organizations getting crushed by the one that we work for.
we literally used to keep a document around called "99 Trigger Warnings but Human Branding Ain't One" just as a joke, filled with (more than 99) things we'd have to lay out as content warnings in a hypothetical adaptation of our campaigns.
it was SO fun!! i kind of fear the difficulty of having to find another group who is able to "play hard", so to speak. i understand lines and veils, that's all fine and well, and even i can feel sometimes that a gritty realistic adherence to oppressive politics, even if fictional, can be kind of a drag on my soul.
but.. isn't it fun to have so much of the world at one's fingertips? i think if more people stepped out of their comfort zone, they'd find that having conflicts of ideology, motivation, whatever, in their setting doesn't turn them into "bad people" to merely perceive, or to engage with in a work of fiction.
i have never seen Critical Role, but i am glad that Candela Obscura exists, for the people who truly desire what it is and feel happy playing around with it. i say this about most every game, really. but, i will certainly be very happy to check out your recommendation!
What a wonderful comparison of games and styles. I will have to be giving The Wretchiverse a try. I'll be looking into more of your content as well.
You can always get the core book for free and start from there.
The free core rule book is linked in the description.
Call of Cthulhu.
Chill
Stalking the Night Fantastic
vassan
Buror 13
Blades in the dark
Wretched Vigilantes
I mean there are dozens of Victorian Urban Arcana/Horror games that are better then CO
This is one of the best reviews on an RPG game I have viewed. Most excellent, concise, and offers a way forward. I have not looked at Wretched, but I look forward to accompanying you as you provide more Wretched content. :)
There will be a lot
Wretched isn't well known, unfortunately for us. It's hard to get well known, especially when dealing with niche genres. But I believe this is the right place to expand our audience, since Ginger Frasier and Young Steven Buscemi share our gaming philosophy.
Counting on it!@@blacklodgegames
Gaining recognition in niche genres is tough. Aligning with influencers like Ginger and S. Bizzle, can be a key step in getting noticed. It's not just about growing an audience but finding the right one that appreciates your unique content. I think this is the place; of course, I am biased. I just now bought Wretched Apocalypse, Country, and Epoque, which should give me a good feel. @@TheRedRoomChannel
Watch the rest of their content. It’s all this quality.
Something CR produced is preachy and too bloated with self-righteousness to function?? I’m shocked
Not even Nostradamus could have predicted this outcome.
I would just play Call of Cthulu tbh. It's just such a solid system for playing normal people. Nice Twin Peaks sweater :)
These structured videos are my favourites that you guys do.
CoC is solid. I play it and Delta Green as my go to horror games
@@the-real-Lovefist Yeah, my favourite game is Delta green. I think it's the best BRP.
Overall, this was a very fair and gracious review, especially given the design flaws that permeate the product. It seems we are in some sort of bizarre reality where followers now prop up poorly designed products and tear down any works by 'problematic others.' I recall being bullied and teased in the 90's for loving rpg's and the escape they gave. I never thought my own culture would cast me out and label me pariah for not conforming to the group think we all sought to escape.
It's a damn shame. I've been very fair and calm in these reviews and if you check over on reddit, people are referring to these videos as vitriolic rants by someone who is afraid of and threatened by inclusivity lmao
lunatics.
The writer are unable to projec themselves into the mindset of a victorian society or even any non progressive viewpoint. This makes a setting that is superficial and vaccuous using an victorian aesthetic while ignoring the worldview and presupposition that make that world possible.
It boggles the mind how such a well financed company couldn't find any decent writers or come up with something so bland.
It seems they just made a lesser "spooky" version of blades in the dark.
Anyway excellent video and hope to see more from you guys soon
Any chance we will get more v5 content ?
Yes, we will be going over every book in the v5 game line this year and making content about vampire not tied directly to the books.
The authors just want the look, so essentially Fashionistas.
Imma big CR fan but it does seem like they really dropped the ball on this one. Hoping they get themselves sorted before they make anything new.
Yeah, this should have been a home run out of the gate.
I used to be a CR fan back at the start of C2. I didn't like that the show became overly preachy (at least before the actual play). However, I generally think that Mercer is a genuinely passionate DM, so I'm quite surprised they dropped the ball. Their new TTRPG actually sounds like it might have some decent mechanics but if CO is to go by, you can guarantee it'll be overtly 'progressive'.
@@Ryotbh candela suffers from "too many cooks" in my opinion.
@@Ryotbh I would like to think Mercer had little to no involvement, because his D&D tie-in books using his homebrew setting from the campaigns was quite good.
But it is still their fault that they aren't managing their companies products better.
My favorite part of the video wasn't actually the precise and thorough destruction of this cynical cash grab by Darrington Press, but the part where Ginger pointed out that Critters all have room temperature IQs. If I was drinking anything at the time, it would have wound up on my screen.
Exactly… inconsistency like this is impossible to get past
"Put a wraith there and make it gay!"
LOL
Sounds legit. Maybe add a trans witch for funsies.
Well done, gents. My guess is that the people who were going to buy this game will do so (and then praise the shit out of it) regardless of how awful it is.
Thoughts of not liking it, are not allowed!
I know that Call of Cthulhu has a lot of die hard fans, for me it just doesn't blow my kilt up. If I want a something to strike horror into my soul I will simply run Delta Green or watch one of J. Scott Garibay's videos on UA-cam. Steampunk likewise has consistently let me down as a genre that I find trite and over hyped. For those who disagree, rest assured I do not begrudge you having fun in any way shape or form.
You are aware Delta Green is Call of Cthulhu, right?
@@stanalex4544 You are aware that Call of Cthulhu is set in the 1920's and Delta Green is present day?
@@MacAttack001 Call of Cthulhu can be set in any time period. There's Cthulhu Invictus, Cthulhu Dark Ages, Cthulhu by Gaslight, and yes, Cthulhu in the modern day. There is literally nothing stopping you from running CoC in 2024, and fiven the fact Delta Green as a system is 99% the same as CoC, saying you don't like one and love the other makes no sense.
@@stanalex4544Besides the fact that Delta Green has done ALL of the heavy lifting for you and has far better prose. Look, you like Call of Cthulhu and that doesn't bother me in the least. If you must know, and it seems that you must, I had a Twat Waffle run a CoC game once that sucked all the enjoyment out of it for me. Can we leave it at that and go about our lives?
Person 1: "Ok so we want to make a horror game set in a fictional Victorian era city. But can you make it so it doesn't offend anyone except cops?"
Person 2: "So no horror, consequences, madness, or oppression? Just cops=bad for no apparent reason?"
Person 1: "Genius. Send it to print! Who cares, the critters will buy anything we slap our label on!"
what.... did you watch ep 2? they have SO much conflict between characters, Half of them end up scarred for life, one betrays the group out of PTSD from the war he went to and killed another PC... (plus there are o cops)
This is what happens when activists who happen to be writers cannot separate their writing from their own politics. It's just lame and makes no sense. Can you imagine if conservative writers hamfistedly shoved their politics into an RPG system? Everyone would rightfully think it hacky and lame.
Yes, it would be incredibly cringe.
I don't think I've seen anyone not infested with consumer brainworms stand up for Candela Obscura, so I don't get this whining. Also, we don't need to imagine this, remember FATAL?
@@BrorealeK That was 5 edgy teens writing the most depraved shit they could. It exists only as a ridiculed PDF. CO got printed. It exists in game shops. Same level of preachy slop, but got shoved at people.
Just wanted to say that I respect you for reading through the text so that we didn't have to. Currently trying to read my way through Star Trek Adventures at the moment and I swear they have mentioned 'diversity and inclusion' more than rolling dice at this point.
Isn't that the whole point of the Star Trek universe? It's a world that has overcome bigotry. Unlike some of the people here.
“Let’s make a horror game, but let’s also bear in mind that we don’t want to make the players scared or uncomfortable in anyway. Let’s just make Call of Cthulhu lite and call it a day.”
The fact that Crit Role thought it would be a good idea to make a horror game that ridicules horror elements is crazy. This is one of the reasons why I love 5e so much, primarily the smaller companies that make their own supplements for it, there’s a company called Dream Realm Storytelling and they have two books, one called Corpus Angelus, and the other called the Corpus Malicious. The Corpus Malicious book strives off of horror, it’s definitely taken hints from my favorite DnD book of all time “The Book of Vile Darkness”, there is a spell in the Corpus Malicious book where you can summon insects inside of a creature and the types of insects that ar summoned are based on the creatures size, and I the insects can burst out of the creatures chest if they’ve taken enough damage that they’ve fallen to 0 hp, or if they’ve failed 3 Con saves. DRS is super fuckin’ cool, at this point I think I prefer them over Crit Role’s shop and what not.
They will sell alot of those books and they will be paperweights like most gaming books. ~Brian
The setting for Candela Obscura reminds me of the Radiant Citadel book. Most problems that would be inflicted on a life bearing rock floating in the Astral plane are hand waved. Multiple ethnicities and cultures with real world differences in values living in close proximity? Hardly ever any actual problems that aren't just neighbors bickering.
The Astral plane is dangerous and full of monsters, Gith, raiders, Illithids, and who knows what? Some god-like force keeps the place safe with an artifact used by the ruling council that always seem to agree on most things. No army or militia, just some pseudo constabulary group that spends more time mediating disputes than enforcing laws outside of petty theft and violence (which is rare in the first place)
How did all the people get there? Refugees from tragedy that wind up there via serendipity or divine providence
Economics of the place? The leadership basically tax anything that looks like it could cause any kind of advantage of one group over another in order to keep things "harmonious" and any outsider trade is tariffed beyond any notion of profit. Apparently being granted the chance to be in or around the Radiant Citadel is payment enough and really, they should be grateful they were given the privilege to breathe the same air as the citizens of the citadel.
Wow, Radiant Citadel sounds like an ideal 'ideological zealot' evil faction. Anyone from the outside can look at that and go 'wait that sounds horrifyingly sinister and their attitude worries me.' I might have to look that up to use as the outsider threat to a game's setting.
The Fairlands are so diverse that you can't use anything that would be considered part of another culture unless you want to be called a bigot.
lol true
Damn, so well spoken and to the point. You are spot on. WOTC has already ruined D&D, wait til 6E.The rules are prolly gonna be the same but the verbiage will all be PC.
And now that they've come out with the new set of core rulebooks, you're more right than you knew when you wrote this comment.
CO is like the person at the table that brings their personal baggage into their character and tries play through the ideal version of themselves, except they built the entire world using this logic. Its ironic seeing as how that is one of the most known tropes in roleplaying games and they went ahead with it anyway. Such a weird lack of self awareness this “game “ has.
Wow! Broken lore is even worse than broken game system imo. This game is TRASH!
Big true
Considering that you have plenty of time to make it make sense. 😂
Great video and a happy new year to the Black Lodge crew! Candela Obscura sounds even worse than I had thought from watching the first part of the review.
I knew you were going to win this argument when I saw your sweater. I want it, I'm jealous!
The sweater refutes all criticism.
THANK YOU!!!!
I really enjoyed the game as a player for a few sessions, but it quickly fell very flat. When I started to create a campaign for the system I found it wildly bland, nonsensical and grossly “woke”.
In order to make the system workable I pretty much threw all the source material save the character creation and the map away. Halfway through I decided what I was left with was a watered down Cthulhu.
Edit: I ran a game tonight using the core idea and world of candela that was insanely fun for the table. I forwarded the history by 30 years and otherwhere is back. The circle is essentially thrust into a WWII style special operations unit going behind enemy lines to run dual missions. On one hand they need to seek out and recover eldrich artifacts as well as disrupting and destroying enemy resources.
It had a very Indiana jones meets inglorious basterds vibe… it was awesome. So in many ways, like DnD, if you hombrew your world and some mechanics, things get way more fun.
Does the book come with rose-coloured glasses?
Wretched Epoque has been removed from drivethrough rpg. :/
Yeah they got banned from drive thru. Links to the red rooms store are in the description. Core rules for the game look to currently be free
Yes, they banned us a while ago, but we are still alive and kicking. The book on Ginger Frasier's desk is the second edition, already released after we were invited out.
@@TheRedRoomChannelWhy was your game removed?
@@jbillings90 Not just one game, we as publishers were banned from DTRPG. To make a long story short, we published an RPG called MEN, a satirical game no one in their right mind would have released in 2023! One day after release the game was taken off their virtual shelf to be "reviewed" by their Publisher Relation's team, something that kept happening (we had some "friends" on social media who loved to report our releases for being "problematic"). And then we complained about it on our YT channel and Twitter. Big mistake! Those guys at OBS can't handle criticism, they call it "hostile marketing". We got the boot a day later, probably to make an example out of us: Better not be problematic but, if if you are, don't complain, accept their censorship with a smile on your face.
Spot on review AND killer recommendation. Definitely checking out Wretched epoch.
Link for the core rules and setting are in the description. I've been running Epoque for a couple of months and it's a ton of fun.
Pay us a visit, the core book is free and you'll find some other freebies there to take a look at before you buy.
@@TheRedRoomChannelThanks! I’ll be picking it up for sure
Very excited for MCDM RPG to release. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves from "not-DnD" to its own beast. The known classes all seem very cool in practice.
Oh, sorry, Candela Obscura is the topic. Um....Brennan Lee Muligan plays a compelling Great War vet. But that has NOTHING to do with the game, he could play that same character in numerous settings.
I started watching C.O. Needle & Thread after first seeing the Black Lodge review, and I could really see the gaping cracks in the system on display. It was basically just improv to an uncomfortable level...the game system didn't aid in the storytelling at all. Everything was GM fiat and talented players acting. Brennan looked like he was in a dazed stupor for stretches of it when he wasn't directly involved. And, not the game's fault, the GM trying to frame everything in literal cinema camera shots, ironically, took away from the attempt at cinematic presentation. Instead of focusing the players' senses, he was directing cinematography
Totally agree re cinematizing the game to it's detriment. Also agree re Brennan Lee Mulligan, he's very good.
Godamn do I love this channel, so rare to bump into people that aren’t trying to suck up to the cr and mainstream bs inside the hobby
i myself dont like games that solves all social conflicts before players join the story, good story grows from conflict and how players overcome it
fantasy racism can give interesting moments for players to overcome, but smth like old school "drow are evil bcs thy are born like that" is dumb also, how about "drow is evil bcs they were banished from service and now they are angry and petty"
Happy new year fellas!
I haven't read Candela Obscura. But I think it's interesting that a lot of the stuff I hear as a criticism of Candela Obscura I saw personally in Delta Green: God's Teeth. Just constant condescending lectures on what exactly to describe and how to make people playing a horror game feel "safe". To the point of intentionally not describing horrific scenes and then lecturing the GM for even wondering what those scenes were. It was just so terrible to read. Horror games should make you feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Otherwise it's not scary. It's not horror.
Milk it, baby! Milk it!!!!
Honestly, I don't care how many of these you post just keep showing cool games as alternatives and get yo clicks!
I'm never talking about this terrible game ever again lol
@@blacklodgegames - LOL! I am serious though, I ordered Wretched core after you guys mentioned it. Excited to see what else you got.
@@jasonOfTheHills The Wretches at the Red Room thank your for your interest!
For anyone who is interested in the premise of Candela Obscura but doesn't like how the rule system ended up, I encourage to take a look at Paranormal Order, a recent TTRPG that came out, not much earlier than Candela Obscura. The main creative director of Paranormal Order's universe is a streamer that streams the series on his channel on Twitch and his two-shot campaign Quarantine is the most viewed TTRPG stream on Twitch ever. I encourage you guys to take a look at Quarentine, since it's on youtube and it's in english, with content creator from different countries around the world
I think it would benefit your work to limit schoolyard insults, like the jibe at CR fan's IQ. You are hitting it out of the park in the actual criticism department. It's not about being reflexively nice. It's about making it costly to hate you. A lot of CR fans even know what is up with this game. Make it costly for them to dismiss you.
I understand what you are saying, but we are not trying to just be liked. We like conflict and are trying to reach people of a similar mindset.
@@blacklodgegames Regardless I look forward to your future work.
Yeah, +1 to this. You do make a lot of really well-thought out points, and then getting mean-spirited like this just spits in what is otherwise a lovely bowl of commentary. On principle I can't support people who maintain the ugliness of internet "discourse," regardless of their perspectives. Gotta unsub, right after I subscribed for the "role playing not acting" video. Sorry, man.
@@RedEarthTaxidermy goodbye.
This sounds a lot like it has the same problem that I have with 40k as a setting. Its so removed from anything that makes life worth living that you would quickly hit population collapse. No one would be having kids just to feed them into the grinder. Now arguably there is a point that communications to the population in ww1 and 40k are so bad that you don't know that we just lost half of two army groups to gas.
So they’ve literally done what “cultural appropriators” do, they’ve taken late Victorian london stripped it down until it’s nothing but a asethetic and stuffed their own modern political views in there, because you can’t just let players do what they want you’ve got to fuse it to the lore, because god forbid somebody doesn’t agree and decides to homebrew your lore into a better state
A way I can tell these things is that I could graft this lore onto any setting with minimal effort, the fact the fair lands wouldn’t be late Victorian wouldn’t change.
The amount of lecturing is just aweful, like again in cyberpunk I wouldn’t have to lecture you on how policing is corrupt, it just is in the lore and you’d be an idiot to miss it
Yes
Normal people attacked as "cultural appropriators" aren't necessarily stuffing politics into an aesthetic, though. Just wearing a cheongsam while being white isn't a political act to anyone but a lunatic.
@@MeganDelacroix that is true, but here that’s what they’ve done very clearly, they’ve taken Victorian london and stripped it of everything except the asethetic for them to play with and bloat with their own politics, I’d say that’s cultural appropriation in every sense of the word.
Again imagine if I took medieval Japan for inspiration, I make the samurai and the ninjas and shoguns and stuff but then I simply include no other reference to medieval Japan and instead just throw tonnes of right wing talking points in there as mt cultural development for these people
I'm surprised that the Invisible College wasn't mentioned as a contemporary alternative.
Candela Obscura is what happens when you get bad writers to opine about their political views and force a narrative into the world that is so intentionally obtuse and ignorant that not only is there no self-awareness or self-improvement but that you are actually awarded for being an unquestioning supporter of everything around you. Why be scared in a world of horror when nothing scares you? This game just flat out sucks and is indicative of people placing ideology over gameplay. To say different cultures don't clash is an insult to the actual fusing of diverse cultural norms. It so badly wants to "include everyone" and ultimately excludes EVERYONE due to its childish, ham-fisted banality.
You know. It makes me think about when I argue politics and some person goes off on a long-winded gamma explanation (*) about all the different reasons and socio-economic factors. It's like they have a pat and perfect explanation of what is happening. This explanation winds and twists - we call it Mental Gymnastics, so that it doesn't break any of the other ideas they have. It doesn't conflict. And that is BORING. Like this insistence that every social and cultural practice fine, perfect, and normal. No conflict, no excitement. No rough edges where we get friction and tension.
Smooth Artifice has the least actual tolerance, if I may use Engineering/machinist lingo.
*I should talk, I'm just saying what you said.
Yeah, the dichotomy of modern world-building in media. We all love each other, but don't you dare love any specific part of another culture, because you are then appropriating them.
To go down the route of restricting player's choice because you as the game dev want your fantasy game to represent an idealized version of the modern world (or rather what the devs and their buddies think the modern world should be like), is so condescending and arrogant. Completely agree.
It's a huge problem for CR by now. They feel the need to be so incredibly woke that it becomes a complete travesty. They've good friends who had been regular guest players in the past who haven't been on the show for years, because they are obviously not diverse enough. Each time a new side project starts or guests are invited, you can basically check off a list. There has to be someone who isn't straight, the majority should identify as female and not be white, and it would be preferable if we get more than he and she pronouns.
It's even in the NPCs Mercer creates by now. Only European accents are fine, a significant number of NPCs has to be non-binary... it's ridiculous.
And this philosophy of putting everything BEHIND their own agenda, their own idea of how the world should be is also part of Candela Obscura.
It's all about how you run it... I've got 9 people including 5 d&d players love it the way I run it. We have tonnes of laughs and hijinx as well as the horror. I set up my own investigative scenarios and give them a lot of freedom to co-create what happens. It's been great!
nice sweater, its got more character than candela obscura
You've missed that this is the whole point. It's the Hegelian Dialectic applied.
"You don't get it man, it's *supposed* to be bad."
@@blacklodgegames nah, not just bad. So bad that it forces you to forget what was, at one time, good.
Ironically, the dialectic is nowhere to be found in here.
critical role have the money and resources so i am surprised they didn't hire few experience game makers to design the game properly with well written lore.
i guess it's the typical get woke go broke.
That is the most bizarre part of this. They easily could have had a home run on their first product.
There's a lot of Ego involved. That's my guess!
I mean, this is the same CR that garnered an audience so 'toxic' and aggressive (re: 'progressive') that even they have had to apologise and distance themselves from it. Remember, Mercer got death threats for killing a character in campaign 2.
@@Ryotbh lmao
It was never meant to be a game, but a political statement
Another banger. Good video, man.
Thanks!
I think there's space for creating a game in which there are utopian attitudes about race, gender, sex work, since those are issues certain players may wish to have escapist fiction from. Also, in the real world we exist within, the depiction of police on TV and in movies are completely at odds with their reality. TV shows like Blue Bloods, Law and Order, CSI, even things like Castle or Brooklyn 99, depict police as objectively morally correct and never a real societal problem. The idea of producing a product which allows women and minorities to relax in escapist fiction while also not gaslighting them about the role of police in their lives is much more consistent when you consider the product one interested in creating an audience among people with a very different political perspective than you have.
The TTRPG and many of its most central assumptions grow out of the Western, and its depiction of an 'unsettled' wilderness with dangerous near-human beings who must be killed in order for the west to be won. In that story, it is a time and place for violence, and it's on this violence that power can be seized for one's self. This is familiar to us because it's what we've seen all our lives. It makes sense that if we are to see a new form of storytelling being created, it would be unfamiliar to us, and we would see it as self-contradictory. Our own stories are self-contradictory. Lovecraft wrote horrific screeds about the inferiority of the Celtic people, and was Welsh on his mother's side. He hated the Jews, but married a Jewish woman. Irish and Italians have gone in and out of being considered 'white' largely on their willingness and ability to engage with and support white supremacy. The value created by society is the result of the labor of workers and workers alone, yet we place that wealth solely in the hands of those violent enough to claim it, and we call that justice. These contradictory narratives serve the ego of us as white people, and so we don't see these flaws as easily. So yes, you can find 'flaws' in a more inclusive narrative, because it's not interested in being consistent. Your narratives aren't either. You just see the inconsistencies easier because you don't find them obscured behind familiarity.
That said, there was no need for the utopian vision they reveal to be presaged by the kinds of war and displacement that material conditions would dictate would result in some strife, at the very least from revolutionary sentiment against the existing governments, even if for whatever reason it never manifested along racial or cultural lines. It does seem to me also that the Critical Role members are themselves very white, and I worry that this is an example of white people speculating about what PoC must want out of gaming, possibly without consulting them, but that's speculation on my part.
Violence just isn't brutality but conflict overall. It's politics are how a dirty one claims they're gonna help a group then when elected basically abandons them only to profit for themselves and to hold power over others. That's violence! This game removes even that level of conflict by having the world perfect while also working off a "looming threat" yet a threat doesn't work without cracks in the glass due to strife within the perfection. People are gonna be upset at how things work, people aren't gonna like each other. Somebody is gonna have an accident that gets somebody hurt. This isn't an escape for minorities it's an insult because they removed agency due to their own fear of conflict.
That sweater is the best thing I’ve seen on the internet today! The owls are not what they seem…
love that you positively flip to a recommendation for a game you support that offers rules and setting to meet the need for a good game in the style and theme that would appeal !
Eberron and the city of towers avoids what of the pitfalls of Newfair.
there is corruption and prejudice, but what makes it cool is that a) it is explained, and b) its not just lazy analogues of modern day prejudice.
Refugees from the lost nation of Cyre are treated like crap, and its because any survivor must have necessarily been in another nation when the disaster that wiped out their nation occured, which means its logical to assume theyre all enemy combatants.
Tribal warfare takes place in the rough port town of Stormreach. Half giants who wanna reconnect with their ancient ancestry but have no connection to it, gnomish colonists who founded the city and feel its more theirs, and human exiles from five different nations who have all been fighting for 100 years, not to mention gangs of wererats. So much prejudice and tribalism, and none of it is just "Orcs = black people so town guard = racist cops." You can actually roleplay as a participant in that bigotry and over a campaign learn to get over it. These guys just want the outward appearance of a gritty world, without earning it with historical justification.
I barely made it 30 seconds through your overview of the world. That's how terrible this game is.
About the different "cultures" and "people" they did the same in Exandria, now the species in their DND world are just skins, so boring.
Candela Obscura is Spanish for "Black Candle".
Is this not at all set on a version of Spain or at the very list a Iberian culture?
Surely, these writters are not just "culturaly appropriating" the usage of naming their gaming using a language from a culture they do not even pretend to represent in the game, right?
Surely...
nope, youre wrong "candela obsucra" means nothing in spanish beacuse Candela is actually Vela and obscura doesnt mean shit but its "close" to the word Obscuro which is more like Obscure. Also, calling something in another language isnt appropiation just like calling Vox Machina a group isnt appropriating germans
@@tomascrenzel7446 Wrong.
I just realized what this setting reminds me of, the (mess of a TTRPG) Strike Legion. The city is the Star Republic on a smaller scale and without a generalized 'ball of all things bad' enemy akin to The Imperium.
It feels like they limbo under any interesting conflicts. I am not saying every game NEEDS racism and heck even an oddly harmonious city can be interesting... But you have to give people SOMETHING! Especially in a quasi-horror setting.
.
Heck why even introduce many of these elements? Instead of a migrant wave just have this city be a metropolitan trade hub... Done. Why even have a Non-corrupt corrupt police force that are evil for no reason? Why have the supernatural be so unknown?
.
As well why all this focus on diversity if your going to do NOTHING with it? (I know the answer... because they are at the level where even depicting other cultures is offensive. So they have to do lip service to say that they are there... but actually showing any diversity would require them to represent someone and that would be bad).
A ripped off product that sucks and has no care put into it. What respect they have for their audience!
Candela Obscura: Weimar Germany but it was good actually. Trust us!
Glol
The whole cultural milieu described is classic “stuff white people like.”
What a great setting, yay 😒
I like Blades in the Dark tbh, also its very hackable so I'm able to change a few things to fit more what my players and me like and it still works. Its definitely more organized than Candela Obcura.
A few days ago i ordered Wretchedverse.
Thanks man!
You won't regret it. I'd highly recommend ordering one of their setting books like Wretched Epoque or Wretched New Flesh
@@blacklodgegames I ordered one of the setting books too.
@@TheRedRoomChannel I've been threatening this for too long!
I know yall sometimes respond to Scott Garibay content. I would love to hear your thoughts on the ESI vs SADAC revelation..... The secret code in the character sheet to save humanity. When I write the things he says it makes me feel like that guy is in a cult.
Nah we aren't going to bother with him anymore. He's a goof but harmless
@@blacklodgegames I understand, but man I would still give it a watch. It was crazy.
The woke scream for diversity but at the same time everyone has to be the same to the point where there is no diversity... o.O
Thank you for adressing the issue of moralistic fantasizing. Not that such fantasy is inherently bad, but rather the placement of such a utopia within a setting closely resembling any real historic period is devoid of credibility.
Settings that aspire to reflect the terrors of Medieval Age or the challenges of the Wild West or the constraints of the Victorian Era without any prejudices immediately seem way too artificial and unrealistic to me. And this is not because I wish to justify racism or sexism or any other -ism in the real life. This is because a society without any xenophobia would look VERY different from a real-world Victorian London. Can such society be portrayed in a game? Of course, yes, but then the authors would need to invest much more creative energy into it! They would need to imagine how things could work differently in a truly inclusive world. It would mean change not only in how people talk to each other, it would mean different family structures, different economy, therefore the housing would be different, certain workplaces and the streets of the city may look and feel quite dissimilar to what we have known in the real life!
But actual production of such a world requires work and not just sticking the word "equality" on top of a rundown ghetto district.
Outstanding! Cannot wait to totally ignore this book.