Critical Role reveals Candela Obscura character classes

polygon.com:

With Candela Obscura, the cast of Critical Role heads off into uncharted territory. Debuting in May of this year, the long-form streaming series doesn’t use Dungeons & Dragons as the basis for its actual play action. Instead, the team has dreamed up a set of rules it says are custom-built with performance in mind. Polygon sat down with lead designers Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall to learn about the game’s most fundamental concepts — the roles and specialties players will use to build their characters at home. Here’s a quick look inside Candela Obscura Core Rulebook.

For those who haven’t yet been introduced to the world of the world of the Fairelands through Critical Role’s streaming series, know the setting blends gaslamp-style fantasy with the glamorous 1920’s decor of The Great Gatsby. It’s a world where the industrial revolution butts up against the rediscovery of magic, and where powerful forces bubble up from the ancient caverns that lie below.

“Candela Obscura is a horror role-playing game that focuses on a secret society of supernatural investigators,” Starke said in a recent interview. “It’s really an investigative horror game that asks you to think about the humanity in horror as much as the horror in humanity.”

As such, it was important for the designers to ground the game with a very specific set of character templates — but to make them appealing to modern audiences as well.

“Speaking as a queer woman, it’s not really fun being a woman who can’t go to college, couldn’t marry another woman, and is going to experience hate and oppression on all sides,” Hall said. “And yet, that doesn’t stop people from wanting to play in that place of incredible technological advancement, [a time] when the layman didn’t know