I really liked that Halo effect, and it started toying around with it a bit. I ended up giving each chess piece a spotlight child (linked so I can make adjustments to them all at the same time) that comes down directly and a soft ambient Hemi light for the seen that over all left it with a kind of smokey atmosphere feeling.
Since the spotlights were directly above they weren’t going to cast shadows so I was able to cut some rendering time by just turning the shadows off on them.
The whole seen turned a bit noir-esque and I rather quite like it. 
(To Michael: No such thing as “too noir” 
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