The Game Design

What is this game about?

Nine Candles is a game of tragic horror. This means that it is not about if you can survive - everyone will be dead by the end - but about who you are in your final days and hours. As a live roleplay it's run in a narrativist tradition, but in the British (as opposed to Nordic) style preferring immersion and impactful live choices to planned and scripted scenes. Each of the refs is likely to bring their own gamerunning strengths to the parts of the game they are in charge of.

Nine Things about Nine Candles

• This game is intending to very closely mimic the ambience of the Ten Candles tabletop game. If you have played Ten Candles before you will recognise a lot of the mechanics, and although they have been altered in form to make them suitable for a live roleplaying setting we hope they will approximately serve the same functions.

• This game will make use of Quaker mythology. This will include the concept of an inward spiritual light, the Quaker Testimonies, the structure of a Quaker Meeting for Worship, and the idea of a Quaker Concern as a spiritual leading which must be acted upon. You do not need to be a Quaker or know anything about Quakers to play this game, though.

• This game is set in the modern day. You can bring your phone (although the wifi and phone signal won't exist in-character), any gadgets you want such as torches (although the batteries are dying), and clothing suited to what your character would wear in March 2025. You may be sleeping in-character on Friday night, but any modern sleeping gear you would use is setting-appropriate. We suggest you wrap up warm, wear sturdy footwear, and and bring a backpack or clothing with good pockets in anticipation of needing to carry some things around.

• This game will involve the use of light and darkness as a central storytelling tool. Different colours of light will have significant meanings, and the dimmer the candlelight gets, the stronger THEY become. This game will also involve the use of real fire, although for fire safety reasons the titular candles will be battery-operated.

• This game is a horror game and will be aiming to evoke strong emotional effects in you for storytelling purposes. These will include needing to make complex ethical choices with no good options, being let down or even actively sabotaged by other player characters, letting others down, and a general sense of escalating hopelessness and dread as the light dims and the darkness grows. We will staying away from a list of themes known to be widely triggering, and will be asking about specific roleplaying limits on the sign-up form.  However, particularly if you have never been to a live roleplaying game before, you may find that you struggle to cope with the atmosphere and the "always-on" nature of the advancing horror. Please talk to someone if it's becoming an issue for you - your emotional (and physical) safety is our top priority.

Here are four things this game is not:

• This game, compared to a lot of other live roleplaying, is not rules-heavy or crunchy. Although there is a defined system under which the game is run, there are not any hits, or stats, or calls. You will not need to memorise anything to play - if something is relevant, it will be available written down. We will be prioritising immersion over complexity of system.

• This game is not a combat game. There will be no formalised combat system. While you may at times be attacked by THEM, you will only be faced with whether to run, hide, or scream as THEY tear you apart. Mostly you will be staying within the safety of the light - either the electric lights of Pardshaw's central rooms, or the candle you will carry out into the darkness when venturing out to answer a Concern.

• This game is not a game about who THEY are. It is a game about who you are. While your characters may be very interested in investigating what has happened and why, you should not expect the answers you come up with to be correct or even consistent across the playerbase. THEY are nothing but the black theatre backdrop against which each of your stories are told, and what exactly THEY are may shift depending on the story. Black goes well with every colour.

• This is not a game about fatally betraying your fellow players, or about your character dying before you want them to. Unless agreed upon in advance with the player, actions such as pushing another character out into the darkness alone to die simply won't lead to anything, and are not in the spirit of the game. In the course of playing this game, you will be occasionally taking on the role of THEM under the supervised direction of a ref. In doing so, you are helping other players tell their character's stories, not trying to kill those characters. Remember: everyone will be dead by the end. The question is when and how, and for your character that answer will be left within your control.

Ten Candles is a tabletop game. How are you managing to adapt it for a live roleplaying setting?

There are multiple challenges here: live roleplay takes place in a defined physical space, with a larger number of players who don't all know what the others are doing, and over a longer period of time than tabletop roleplay does. For the curious, here's our rough plan of the game system:

Players will spend much of this game answering Concerns, which are Quaker inward spiritual leadings of something that must be done or alternatively physical cards prepared for a specific character in advance of the game and handed out by a ref at an appropriate time. To answer a Concern, two player characters will carry out a candle into the darkness in a lantern for protection - one who was given the Concern card, and one who is using their Virtue or Vice (which are physical objects you must burn). You probably hope the other person is using a Virtue. Two other player characters will silently hold them in the light (the Quaker version of praying) while those players put on black robes and follow them out as NPC crew to play other survivors, the wind in the trees, the angel and devil on your shoulder, or THEM. A ref will conduct a scene for the group in a roughly Ten Candles storytelling style. Over the course of this scene, the candle will dim, and the darkness will grow. The scene will last up to an hour, and then the group will return with a dimmed candle.

Once all the candles have gone dim, the whole group will sit down in the style of a Quaker meeting and speak a number of Truths. The first Truth will always be that the world is dark, and will put out a candle. The other Truths will brighten candles back up, and will be using people's Moment and Brink (which are physical objects you must burn).

There are therefore 8+7+...+2+1 = 36 Concerns to answer in this game, nine each themed around the four Quaker Testimonies and run by four refs. This means that each player will be playing four, and NPCing four, over the course of a day and a half. We will be having multiple Concerns being run out at once by different refs, but we still expect the game to speed up towards the end as fewer candles remain lit, as occurs in Ten Candles using dice rolls.

The stories told through this system will remain a mystery for now. If you want to know them, come and play!

How will character creation work?

You will be creating your characters via a Google form as part of booking for the event. This will probably happen in January 2025. Expect the form to be fairly short, and structured similarly to the Ten Candles character generation process. The refs will reach out to discuss with you if we have any suggestions, queries or concerns about your character submission, or if you ask for help on the form. We are also intending to have a few elements of collaborative character generation with the other players on-site just before the LARP begins.