Tips for running Ten Candles

In this article, we’ll go through six tips for GMs who want to run the game Ten Candles. The premise of the tragic horror roleplaying game, Ten Candles by Stephen Dewey is this: Ten days ago the sky darkened. Five days ago, They came. In this apocalyptic setting, you the GM and the players narrate the story of the final hours of a group of survivors. Ten candles are lit, and one by one they are darkened, until only one remains. In the final scene, every character dies.

The rules of Ten Candles are not hard to understand nor to adjudicate during the game. In addition, there is no prep required before running the game. In fact, the game instructs us GMs to not prep anything. Much of the world will be established by the players in the first couple of scenes.

But Ten Candles is also not an easy game to run. Because we don’t prep anything, we need to improvise a lot. We even improvise the bad guys, Them—what They are, how They operate, what Their goals are. But if we embrace this openness and the improvisational nature of the game, Ten Candles creates intense roleplaying sessions that will shock, impress, and shake us and the players.

After running Ten Candles twice, there are a few GM tips that stand out to me.

1. Explain the players’ role

One of the first things we need to make clear to our players is described in the rules as follows:

Though you know your characters will die,
you must have hope that they will survive.

It is crucial to the storytelling of the game that this is understood by the players from the beginning. Each character will die. This is not a story of heroic struggle, and happy endings. It is tragic horror. And to create tragedy at the table, everyone works together to tell the story of the demise and ultimate destruction of the characters.

Players know their characters will die, and yet, they must identify with them, hope with them, play them as desperate survivors, clinging to life and light wherever they can find it.

At the beginning of a Ten Candles session, we make this clear to the players. Their role is to hope for their characters, and yet their role is also to tell the story of their unavoidable downfall.

2. Encourage burning Traits

During character creation, each player will create a stack of index cards which includes, two Traits, a Moment, and a Brink. Only the top-most card is considered “active” and may be burned to reroll dice or gain a special Hope die. The Brink is the always the final card in the stack, with Traits and Moments on top of it, “blocking” the Brink from becoming active.

Traits, which become active earlier, can be used to reroll 1s after a conflict roll. The problem is that as the scenes go on, players have fewer and fewer dice in their pool, and hence fewer and fewer chances to roll 1s, which would allow them to burn their Traits.

Therefore, we should encourage players to burn their Traits and play through their Moment early in the game. Actually, in a game of four players or more, players should use their Traits and their Moment whenever it is possible, even if it doesn’t seem necessary.

Tell players upfront that they need to burn their Traits whenever possible, and play through their Moment as soon as possible. Otherwise the game might end, and there might still be multiple cards left unused in each player’s stack.

3. Write down names and Moments

Number 3 of my Ten Candles GM tips is simple but easy to forget. Write down the names of the characters, and each character’s Moment. The list of names will help us stay in the story without having to use player names or ask for a character name. We can glance at the Moment of each character to drive the story towards those. Moments allow characters to take the spotlight, to live through personal arcs, and to gain a Hope die.

Therefore, we should have a list of character names and their Moments handy to glance at during the game, and to drive the story towards the individual Moments.

4. Consider locations

When we pick a scenario or a “module,” as Ten Candles describes them, a GM tip becomes relevant which applies to all sorts of roleplaying games: Consider the locations which the characters might encounter during the game!

The Ten Candles book actually instructs us GMs to not prepare anything. But when I’ve run the game, I found it helpful to imagine or even write down some of the locations the characters could visit during their search for hope and shelter.

For example, in the module “The Last Boat,” the characters might start out in an abandoned island village, pass through a resort area, reach the northern shore, get on a boat or find themselves in open water. For each of these locations, we can think through three aspects that will help us describe them when the characters reach them. Here’s some examples for “The Last Boat”:

• The Island Village. Small, devastated shops. Corpses of dogs, cats, and people. Squeaky doors, rattling windows. The scent of burnt gasoline.
• Inland. Dense tropical palms, ferns, and other plants. A country road lined with abandoned cars. Bird and animal calls that suddenly fall silent. Cracking and rustling. A sudden car radio starting up and playing mumbled pop songs.
• The Resorts. Shredded lounge chairs and parasols. Deserted bungalows. Bloody surfboards in front of the surf shop. Wind chimes tinkle. The smell of barbecue.
• Open Ocean. Cold, endless dark expanse. Body parts drifting by. Huge shadows underwater. Salt, a sweetish smell of decay.
• The Boat. Clattering, foul-smelling engine. A growing leak. Ominous knocking from beneath the boat. Insects crawling out of crevices.
• North Island. Dozens of empty boats around a large coast guard boat. Not a single corpse. Flickering yellow light in the coast guard boat.

We can write these down on an index card, or simply think through the locations when we’re choosing the module. What’s important is that we have some ideas for the locations that the characters can reach in our head. Having thought through aspects of the locations can help us set the scene for the unfolding drama.

5. Embrace the atmosphere

Ten Candles has genius tools to automatically create a haunting atmosphere: candle light which gets dimmer as play progresses, voice recordings, ritual phrases spoken in unison… Perhaps the most important of my GM tips for Ten Candles is this: embrace the atmosphere of the game. Here’s what I mean by that:

• Voice. Speak with a calm, foreboding voice whenever possible.
• Seriousness. Take the game seriously. Try to avoid silly jokes, and stay in character as much as possible.
• Rituals. Insist on the ritual parts of the game. Speak the phrase, “These things are true. The world is dark,” after each scene, and ask the players to speak the phrase, “And we are alive” in unison.

6. Plan (and practice) the recording

The last of my GM tips for Ten Candles is hands-on. When the group records their farewell messages at the beginning of the game, it is vitally important that we, the GM, do not talk into the recording.

Nothing kills the mood more than the GM’s voice in the recording telling a player to hold the mic closer to their mouth. Do not talk when the players are recording their farewell messages.

The most important moment of the game is the end. When all the candles are darkened, all the characters have died, all hope is lost, the GM plays the recording made at the beginning of the session.

To ensure that this moment lands with maximum effect, try out your recording device beforehand, and try out quickly pressing play on the recording as well. Remember that you’ll be in the dark at the end of the game.

In short, we should do everything we can to guarantee a satisfying end to the game with the playback of the recording.

Play Ten Candles!

This game is fantastic. There is a lot we as GMs can learn from how it is designed and how it runs at the table. And most importantly, it’s a fantastic play experience. Everyone should play Ten Candles at least once in their life.