Can you provide a little synopsis of “Candela Obscura” and where the idea of the story centered around a bunch of people investigating paranormal activities and the occult came from?
Spenser Starke: “Candela Obscura” is an investigative horror role-playing game, kind of like what you [Rowan] said about searching out, containing, and what is the other word we use?
Rowan Hall: Protecting humanity.
Starke: Protecting humanity from — Searching out, containing, and fighting off paranormal entities from beyond The Flare. It is a game about basically going out and hunting, but really learning —
Hall: Hunting for knowledge.
Starke: Right. It’s hunting for knowledge, learning about what it is that these creatures from beyond The Flare, where they come from, what they want, and how we keep people safe from them. That was the premise that we came into with it. When I came onto the project originally, the idea had already been in place. It was a show that the production team wanted to do that Taliesin [Jaffe] was leading, and they were experimenting with a bunch of different ideas for what they could use, both system-wise and programming-wise. How were we going to do this show? What kind of format did it take, and what were we using to drive it?
There were a lot of things done at the wall, and they experimented with some different systems and things, and I was brought in to give my take on it. I was pulled off a different project and they were like, “What would you do with this?” I gave a pitch on what I would do with the show and what I do with the game, and I got the green light. We started working, and this was all in collaboration, of course, with the production team there, who are phenomenal, and were so supportive of the kind of thing that the whole creative team wanted to do. I sat down and started mapping out how we’d use the Illuminated Worlds System that was in developments from Stras [Acimovic] and Layla [Adelman], how we would use that as the basis, as the chassis for this game in particular.
From there, I knew that I needed another person to come on to help develop some of the myth and lore of the game, as well as have knowledge of mechanics so that I could bounce stuff around. Rowan is a mythologist. Rowan does a podcast called “Willing & Fable” that is all about history, mystery, and mythology. It was great, because we had met, and I had listened to a bunch of the podcast and loved how she and her podcast partner Tracey [Harrison] were able to take myths from all across the world and all across time and synthesize them, do a 20-page research paper, essentially, on them every week, and part of the podcast is then doing an original retelling, so contextualizing them in a new way that hasn’t been seen before. Those were the building blocks of what we were trying to do here in some respect.
We were taking this idea of cosmic horror, gothic horror, and we were trying to build our own version of a mythology around that. I brought Rowan in originally for just a week to help develop ideas, and then two weeks, and then a month, and then she was on the project full time, and then became a co-designer on the project.
Hall: Now I work here full time. You can’t get rid of me.
Can you provide a little synopsis of “Candela Obscura” and where the idea of the story centered around a bunch of people investigating paranormal activities and the occult came from?
Spenser Starke: “Candela Obscura” is an investigative horror role-playing game, kind of like what you [Rowan] said about searching out, containing, and what is the other word we use?
Rowan Hall: Protecting humanity.
Starke: Protecting humanity from — Searching out, containing, and fighting off paranormal entities from beyond The Flare. It is a game about basically going out and hunting, but really learning —
Hall: Hunting for knowledge.
Starke: Right. It’s hunting for knowledge, learning about what it is that these creatures from beyond The Flare, where they come from, what they want, and how we keep people safe from them. That was the premise that we came into with it. When I came onto the project originally, the idea had already been in place. It was a show that the production team wanted to do that Taliesin [Jaffe] was leading, and they were experimenting with a bunch of different ideas for what they could use, both system-wise and programming-wise. How were we going to do this show? What kind of format did it take, and what were we using to drive it?
There were a lot of things done at the wall, and they experimented with some different systems and things, and I was brought in to give my take on it. I was pulled off a different project and they were like, “What would you do with this?” I gave a pitch on what I would do with the show and what I do with the game, and I got the green light. We started working, and this was all in collaboration, of course, with the production team there, who are phenomenal, and were so supportive of the kind of thing that the whole creative team wanted to do. I sat down and started mapping out how we’d use the Illuminated Worlds System that was in developments from Stras [Acimovic] and Layla [Adelman], how we would use that as the basis, as the chassis for this game in particular.
From there, I knew that I needed another person to come on to help develop some of the myth and lore of the game, as well as have knowledge of mechanics so that I could bounce stuff around. Rowan is a mythologist. Rowan does a podcast called “Willing & Fable” that is all about history, mystery, and mythology. It was great, because we had met, and I had listened to a bunch of the podcast and loved how she and her podcast partner Tracey [Harrison] were able to take myths from all across the world and all across time and synthesize them, do a 20-page research paper, essentially, on them every week, and part of the podcast is then doing an original retelling, so contextualizing them in a new way that hasn’t been seen before. Those were the building blocks of what we were trying to do here in some respect.
We were taking this idea of cosmic horror, gothic horror, and we were trying to build our own version of a mythology around that. I brought Rowan in originally for just a week to help develop ideas, and then two weeks, and then a month, and then she was on the project full time, and then became a co-designer on the project.
Hall: Now I work here full time. You can’t get rid of me.