Ten Candles: Light in a Dying World

The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long

These things are true.

The world is dark.

And we are alive.

Thus begins Ten Candles, a horror roleplaying game (RPG) about dying in a dark and hopeless world. Released in 2015 by Stephen Dewey, Ten Candles sees you take on the role of a group of survivors in a world gone dark. The arrival of Them, an unknown threat that your group gets to shape, threatens your survival. With people dying off, it is only a matter of time before They get you too.

Why has the world gone dark? What are They? It is up to your group to decide, but chances are that you will all have died before getting to find out.

Ten Candles is a simple system that, much like Dread, uses its mechanics to tell a grim and scary story. The biggest difference between Ten Candles and Dread is that you have a chance of surviving in Dread. In Ten Candles, the ending is set in stone: your characters will all die before the final candle goes dark. The question is what you do before that point.

A Game of Candles and Dice

Character creation is simple. Every character has two traits, a virtue and a vice, each written on an index card. They also have a “moment,” something they wish to accomplish before the end of the game that will fill them with hope, and a “brink,” an aspect of their personality that they keep hidden until pushed to their limit. These four index cards make up the entirety of your character.

Once everybody has a character, the game master (GM) ignites ten tea candles, places them in a circle around a fireproof bowl, and turns out the lights. Each candle represents a single “scene” in the story, and every time a candle goes out, whether intentionally or by accident, the scene you are playing ends and the next scene begins. No game of Ten Candles lasts longer than the life of a single candle.

Ten Candles uses a pool of ten dice to determine its outcomes. At the start of the game, all ten dice belong to the players. But every time a candle goes out, one of those dice goes to the game master. Players may earn an additional “hope die,” by successfully fulfilling their characters moment from character creation.

Whenever a player performs an action in-game, they must roll their pool of dice. If at least one of those dice is a “six,” then the action succeeds. However, every die that turns up “one” is placed to the side and cannot be used again for that scene. A player may choose to reroll any “ones” by burning one of their character traits — literally setting their index card on fire and dropping it into the fireproof bowl.

The game master also rolls any dice they have. If the game master rolls more sixes than the player, than the player succeeds, but the game master narrates how they succeed, and what consequences they suffer. Think of this as “success at a cost.”

Any time a player fails, a candle is snuffed out, and a new scene begins. Players begin each scene by reciting a series of “truths,” one truth for each candle still lit. These truths can be anything, and establish new facts about the story you are telling. This continues until only the final candle remains. At this point, no new truths are added, and any character who fails a roll immediately dies. The final candle is snuffed out only when the final character has met their fate.

In summary, the gameplay is designed to take away more and more creative control from the players and hand it to the game master instead, until only the final candle remains lit and the players are left to the game master’s mercy.

Controlling the Narrative

Mechanically, the thing that fascinates me about Ten Candles is how it utilizes narrative control. Players do not fight for points or rewards, but control over what happens next. While players are encouraged to create difficulties for themselves if it makes for a better story, the tendency is for players to create advantages for their characters. The game master on the other hand, while also aiming to tell a good story, are primed to act against the players and give Them power to ruin their lives. Game masters cannot kill their players before the final scene (unless a player willingly sacrifices themselves beforehand), but they can create setbacks and dangers that make characters’ lives difficult.

Dice do not determine victory, they simply give players the chance of defining their accomplishments. But as the candles go out, the dice pool shrinks, and the game master’s dice pool grows, players will inevitably find themselves less and less in control of what happens to them.

Compare this with Dread, where players are always allowed to snatch narrative control away from the game master so long as they can pull a block from the tower. This power never diminishes, only pushes them closer to a point of losing it completely. Other storytelling games distribute narrative control evenly among players, including the GM, allowing anybody to shape the narrative so long as they have the tokens to pay for it. Those games are built around generating tokens to enable narrative control.

By handling narrative control in this way, Ten Candles is able to create a very specific kind of story, one that emphasizes a growing feeling of helplessness in order to create a bleak sort of horror. Dread asks you what you do to get out of bad circumstances. Ten Candles asks what you do when escape is not an option.

Finding Hope in Hopeless Places

Ten Candles is not a game about winning. It is a game about struggling against he inevitable, and everything about the game is designed around that theme. The way that characters literally burn away parts of themselves to keep going. The way that survival is tied to the fickleness of a tea candle.

It is not all hopelessness, however. Ten Candles is meant to give meaning to the characters struggles, even if they lead to nothing. At the start of the game, players take turns recording an audio log as their character — the only role-playing that is required of players. The audio log is set aside until the end of the game, hours later, when it is pulled out in the wake of the characters’ demise and replayed. The juxtaposition of hearing a character’s final message to the world after spending time in their shoes gives the moment a poignancy and the characters that you invented a depth that other games can struggle to pull out of their players.

Everything about the game, including how it is set up, is crafted to make you feel the fear, hope, and despair of your characters. The darkness which grows as the candles dim, the audio recordings that recall the voices of characters now lost, the ritual of repeating truths at the top of each scene, all serve to lull the players into a sombre and contemplative mood.

It is easy to feel hopeless these days. So much of our lives are out of our control and things only ever seem to get worse. Where do we find those moments of hope that keep us going, despite the powerlessness we feel? I think Ten Candles helps us find these moments. Whether it is something we leave behind, a moment of victory in the face of impossible odds, or a scene of forgiveness after our worst secrets come to light, Ten Candles leaves room for us to discover these little lights within the darkness.

Conclusion

Ten Candles, like Dread, is an excellent game to pull out on Halloween. It is far easier to set up, and is designed to be played in a single session. It does require players that are willing to create a story on the fly, which not everyone may be comfortable with. Fortunately, the atmosphere this game creates is wonderful for inviting people in. The tone is also overtly bleak, with opportunities for hope, but no guarantees. Make sure your players understand this before starting a game.

But if you and your friends are up for a little bleak horror, then Ten Candles is a wonderfully poignant game to play this time of year.

The game is available in both PDF and print-on-demand formats.

Next Time…

This month is the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, or IF Comp! Look forward to a deep-dive on the modern Interactive Fiction scene and some recommendations from this year’s competition!