Grab your magnifying glass, consult your most ancient tomes, and get ready to return to the Fairelands! Critical Role’s Candela Obscura is officially returning for a second chapter. Among the many exciting announcements from this past weekend at San Diego Comic-Con was the world premiere of the trailer for Chapter 2 of Candela Obscura, a horror-drama miniseries from the minds behind Critical Role. Though the first installment of Candela Obscura seemed like a fairly self-contained, one-off series to introduce viewers to the world and game mechanics of Candela Obscura (after all, it’s not just a miniseries—this is a TTRPG system that can be played at home), SDCC gave us our first glimpse of what this new chapter of the series has in store.
For the uninitiated, the first installment of Candela Obscura was a bold departure from Critical Role‘s typical content: it steps away from the traditional Dungeons and Dragons game mechanics most frequently used in the TTRPG community and instead serves as an introduction to Illuminated Worlds, an alternative D6-based RPG system produced by Darrington Press, Critical Role’s game imprint. Chapter one featured Matt Mercer as game master, with Taliesin Jaffe serving as The Lightkeeper, who introduced each episode with a menacing prologue.
Chapter one starred Jaffe and Mercer alongside Laura Bailey, Anjali Bhimani, Robbie Daymond, and Ashley Johnson as The Circle of The Vassal and the Veil, an unlikely group of arcane investigators who come together to uncover a terrifying mystery and combat otherworldly evils in defense of their home, the Fairelands. As we learned from this new trailer, though, Candela Obscura‘s second chapter will feature an entirely new cast of characters and a new game master—officially pushing the series into anthology territory.
The minute-long trailer (scored to menacing strings and full of dark, mysterious imagery) gave us our first glimpse at this new cast: Luis Carazo, Zehra Fazal, Brennan Lee Mulligan (who most Critical Role fans will know as the Dimension 20 game master), Marisha Ray, and Travis Willingham will make up this season’s batch of investigators, dubbed The Circle of Needle and Thread. Replacing Mercer as game master will be Spenser Starke, a game designer and writer who served as lead designer on Candela Obscura, who’s leaving his behind-the-scenes role and stepping in front of the camera for the first time in his tenure at Darrington Press/Critical Role.
Though it’s difficult to discern any semblance of the plot from this brief glimpse, the show’s website makes it abundantly clear that though they take place in the same world, chapters one and two are unrelated. So viewers can jump right into this second installment without having seen the first—though, of course, you’d be missing out on a great season of TTRPG. In addition to dropping the trailer, Critical Role also revealed at SDCC that the premiere of Candela Obscura chapter two would be getting a limited theatrical release at Cinemark Theatres, alongside a simultaneous Twitch and YouTube release—meaning fans can get their first taste of this new mystery on the big screen.
Following the first episode’s release, all future installments of Candela Obscura chapter two will premiere on the last Thursday of every month on Twitch and YouTube, followed by podcast and YouTube VOD releases two weeks after the initial broadcast.
(featured image: Critical Role Productions)
