Critical Role sent me their book! | Candela Obscura RPG Review 

Literal game changer!

lol same I like pocket edition sized books my dm journal is smaller than that too 😂

@@thedoom1772 I LOVE the Fabula Ultima core rulebook because of the same reason. It feels SO MUCH like a strategy guide for a PS2 game I absolutely LOVED.

My favorite smaller size book is the Hard City noir roleplaying book. And I've got a couple of Post Modern Giallo books. Micro RPG has great sizes too.

When I saw that PATHFINDER... PATHFINDER has pocket-sized books of their core rules, I was so disappointed in WotC. lol We need pocket versions of the 2024 books.

Thanks for pointing that out!

Worlds Beyond Number. Worlds Without Number is a game system, a good one too. Still confusing to me why they would name their new show basically the same thing as a family of game systems. It's not exactly a niche family in rpg spaces either.

​@@ZYR47Yeah, initially I thought it was because they were going to be playing world's without number

BLM played in Chapter 2 of Candela Obscura on their channel. Looks like they gave thanks to all the non-designer players (though wouldn't be surprised if he had some input too)

Bob, thanks for this. I was already leaning to acquiring it, but this help me make a firm decision.

Another reason not to buy it.

Thanks for the support and the testimonial! :D

Genuinely curious, what was your experience with Daggerheart like?

@@brandonrodriguez5670 My Daggerheart experience (at GenCon mind you) was mixed. I really enjoyed the Character Creation process. It was streamlined, easy, and your choices mattered. There was also a mad-lib kind of story you as a group filled out, so it felt like everyone had a hand in the game as a whole. Decent enough choices so if there were 2 "fighters", they could feel and function very different from each other. The parts that soured me on the game wasn't the game itself, but the way the events were handled, and the GM i was assigned to. I realize the rules are still in flux, but you should understand them at that moment in time if you are going to run an event at a Major convention for an IP that was getting A LOT of attention due to the people involved with it's creation. The GM also didn't seem like they ran too many games. Pacing was bad, no energy, no enthusiasm, nothing. The guy fell asleep waiting for us to tell him what to do next. Huh? Your the GM for Christ's sake! Dice rolls almost felt meaningless. The lack of knowledge on the rules at that time was disheartening. We all signed up to learn and experience and what i got was something my 9 year old daughter could have ran, and she's never played an RPG in her life. TL:DR I'm excited and interested in Daggerheart and i'll gladly wait for them to get it right, but if they decide to run another event at a convention i sincerely hope they vet their GMs. If im not interested in the game, i want it to be because the game doesn't speak to me and not because your volunteer wanted to be somewhere else doing anything else... Feel free to DM me if you like. I realize this is an incredibly long post, but i could keep going... :)

😂 Internet copy editors find everything 😂

Oof can't believe I (and they) didn't catch that

Bingo!

Yeah if you're interested in the genre, or just curious to see what Critical Role's first full rpg is like, I think it's worth picking up! But start with the free quickstart guide.

Thank you! :)

Yeah I'm a fan! Thanks for commenting!

I hear you. I buy most of my games on Bundle of Holding at steeply discounted prices (they currently have 16 Shadowrun 3e PDFs for 24$, and the whole collection for ~42$ IIRC). I also got Shadow of the Demon Lord and 13th Age for comparable prices, and have learned of many others through them. You may already know about them, but I thought I'd give them a shoutout anyway.

That's a great way to try out other RPGs! My group just decided to play a different RPG each week for October and this was one of them :)

Thanks! It happened pre-RU-vid shorts, so it's a whole different world out here now, but at around 15k I believe is when I had a couple videos in a row get a lot of views and gained a sudden bunch of subscribers

@@BobWorldBuilder oh gosh yeah, so true. That must have been quite the journey! Daaang 15k is crazy and seems so far off :,3 thats so cool though and thank you for taking the time to reply to me :,) I've been watching your stuff for years and just love it so much. You're such a big inspiration. And I love that you seem to have just remained You the whole time :3

Yes it was super kind of them. Didn’t know they would send the dice either!

It's not even about the usability of it, as a single bookmark in something like this is only so useful. But it shows an attention to small details, premium finish, and classic publishing that's nice to see, instead of just cost-cutting for maximum profit. When people buy a physical book, they want it to _feel_ good.

The character and circle sheets are available as a free download though?

@@Olooriel I guess? I didn’t see them when I placed my order or afterwards. Maybe I’m overlooking them.

There is indeed a typo. Unfortunate to have one on the back cover (plus the one Bob found). I'll probably wait until another print run fixes it, as those grammatical errors are off-putting for me personally. Hard to unsee once you know it's there.

Yeah as someone who's making my own ttrpg I'd love to hear more opinions, is 64 pages really considered rules-light? That seems dubious to me. If not, what would be considered rules-light?

It's not rules-light. It's rules-absent.

Blades In the Dark is heavily, HEAVILY mechanically tied to its theme of a punk-Victorianesque gang criminal underworld maneuvering. The core philosophy of all Forged in the Dark style games is to center roleplay and simulate the emotional experience of a point of view through mechanics. Many of us are used to 5e which seeks to lessen the importance of themes to give players a more universally applicable system (although of course it is NOT universally applicable, and does have a genre bent through its mechanics, it’s just been de-emphasized over time), so we may forget that some other mechanical systems are not smoothly reskinnable. A huge amount of the BItD rulebook is location and faction information for the city, and the society of the specific world that results in a pressure cooker of poverty, discontent, and crime. Another huge chunk goes in great depth to describe the structure of a cinematic heist and how to embrace the nature of a scrappy, short-lived scoundrel to push yourself to claw your way to the top, and how those tie together. The bulk of the rules descriptions are about setting limitations on your character in the context of heists, crimes, and negotiations to try to put pressure on you to look cunning and scrappy. The rules about dice pools could almost entirely be described by the character sheets themselves. So no, not really. If you want to play Candela Obscura, a game about investigating the dangerous and unknowable paranormal in an atmosphere of oppressive mystery, Blades In the Dark would be quite inadequate to your needs. I can tell you this simply as a GM of Blades. Perhaps a different Forged in the Dark system would get you close, but we are allowed to have similar experiences with different systems. For instance, I just bought the Dishonored RPG, which I anticipate to deliver a similar experience to Blades, which lists Dishonored as an atmospheric reference.

D'oh - now I can't unsee it.

While chat gpt can help with descriptions, and it can be kinda fun to tinker with its responses, I definitely think dScryb is faster and 9/10 times will make more sense than an AI generated description (I am obviously biased, but that's my opinion)