95% of GMs fail to take full advantage of advantage.

The other 5% like made up statistics.

SPOILERS FOR CANDLEKEEP MYSTERIES

Candlekeep Mysteries is an adventure anthology for 5^th Edition D&D featuring seventeen adventures — one each for every level from 1^st to 16^th (plus an extra one for 4^th). The central conceit is that the hook for each adventure is a book: You find a book at the great library of Candlekeep. That book contains a mystery. You solve the mystery.

(The hook for the book is that the hooks are books? Try saying that five times fast.)

It’s a great premise. It gives the individual authors a huge amount of latitude in creating unique and imaginative scenarios. You can easily imagine an entire campaign where the PCs are a specialized team of acolytes or specialists working for Candlekeep to investigate new books being added to the collection (or resolving “cold cases” from the forbidden shelves), but it also makes it trivial to pluck out any one scenario and use it as a one-shot with the Dungeon Master having a huge amount of freedom in how they choose to actually use the scenarios: You can, after all, put a book basically anywhere.

It’s unfortunate, therefore, that the book so consistently fails to deliver on this promised premise. The problem is that Candlekeep Mysteries doesn’t trust the players to be tantalized by the strange mysteries at their fingertips. What if they open the book and — oh, no! — aren’t interested in it? So, with a few exceptions, every scenario in the anthology starts with a book… and then almost immediately has an NPC pop in to tell the PCs exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and often offering them a cash payment to do it.

The frequent result is an unnecessary railroad that simultaneously locks the adventure tightly to Candlekeep (since it now depends not on the book, but on a specific set of Candlekeep NPCs) and greatly limits the utility of the book. It’s particularly frustrating in those scenarios where the authors were clearly writing to the premise, but the railroad was then lathered on in development. In these scenarios, you get books with weird mysteries in them… and then an NPC pops into the room and solves the mystery for you before giving you a To Do List.

Despite this systemic failure, many of the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries nevertheless succeed. In some cases, they succeed brilliantly. And so we’re going to take a look at each of them in turn.

CANDLEKEEP GAZETTEERS

Before we dive into that, however, let’s take a quick moment to look at the brief gazetteer of Candlekeep that’s included in the book.

If you’re not familiar with Candlekeep, it’s a library-fortress built along the Sword Coast in the Forgotten Realms. It’s the Library of Alexandria on steroids. In order to access the library, you need to offer Candlekeep a book which does not already exist in its collection. (This can be a great adventure seed in its own right.) Even after you’ve gotten your foot in the door, however, there are layers of secrets to be peeled away within the strange and labyrinthine buildings and vaults.

In 2020, about a year before Candlekeep Mysteries came out, there was a DMs Guild supplement called Elminster’s Candlekeep Companion. I reviewed the book in June 2020, and I thought it very, very good. So one of my first questions as I sat down to read Candlekeep Mysteries was actually: Will this book render the Companion by Justice Arman, Anthony Joyce-Rivera, M.T. Black, and others obsolete?

The answer: Not at all. In fact, I would say that it actually super-charges it.

And this appears to be the thoughtful and intentional effort of the team at Wizards of the Coast. To take one simple, visual example of this, consider the incredible poster map created by Marco Bernardini for the Candlekeep Companion and the equally impressive poster map created by Mike Schley for Candlekeep Mysteries, as illustrated by these insets:

These maps are not just similar. It’s the same place mapped from a different perspective.

And the beautiful result is that both maps complement each other.

What’s true visually here is true in general: Candlekeep Mysteries provides a good, well-rounded briefing on Candlekeep as a setting. Elminster’s Candlekeep Companion goes deep, with a ton of play-oriented material that will add a ton of value to anyone running the scenarios from Candlekeep Mysteries.

I’m not here to regurgitate my review of the Companion, but check it out if you’re thinking about grabbing a copy of Candlekeep Mysteries. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

THE ADVENTURES

THE JOY OF EXTRADIMENSIONAL SPACES (Michael Polkinghorn) is a good scenario. The PCs come to Candlekeep to meet a researcher and find them missing. The subsequent investigation leads them to a hidden extradimensional sanctum, where they have to solve a puzzle to figure out the passphrase home.

The sanctum uses a hub-and-spoke design for exploration and is studded with flavorful environments. There’s a nice mix of roleplaying and combat encounters with the surviving experiments and constructs of the mage (although having a few of these encounters designed to go either way, instead of each being clearly designed for specifically combat or specifically roleplaying would have been appreciated).

There are a handful of continuity errors, but the one significant flaw here is that all of the PCs need to go through the portal together and get stuck. The scenario’s whole premise breaks if only one or two PCs go through first to scout things out: When the portal snaps shut, the PCs back with the book can just open the portal again.

Even if all the PCs go through the portal at the same time, all they need to do is tell someone at Candlekeep what the password for opening the portal is (or leave a note) and the scenario similarly breaks.

I’m honestly confused how this survived playtesting, and it’s not an easy problem to fix if you keep the metaphysics the way they’re set up in the adventure, but there are a few different solutions that aren’t too difficult to graft into place. So this should not, in the grand scheme of things, overly detract from the top line here: Good adventure.

Grade: B-

MAZFROTH’S MIGHTY DIGRESSIONS (Alison Huang) is a really nice, tight scenario that demonstrates Huang’s trademark style of layering complexity into her antagonists: The PCs are sent to investigate some criminals who are indirectly defrauding Candlekeep and putting people in danger. Except it turns out the criminals aren’t aware of the true dangers of their actions and their motivations are closer to desperate altruism.

… until you take a closer look and all the ethics turn murky.

The hook is that the PCs are attacked by a book that they’re reading in Candlekeep. It turns out that this is the third such incident in recent weeks, all occurring with books that have recently been donated to the library. When the PCs investigate the source of these books, the trail leads them back to a bookseller in Baldur’s Gate.

(You could experiment with this hook by having the book that comes alive and starts attacking people be the one that the PCs themselves submitted to gain entry to Candlekeep! This would sacrifice some of the intrigue, since the PCs would know where they got the book, but crank up the stakes on the hook, since the PCs would now be responsible for the situation.)

The meat of this scenario, as I say, is that there’s no simple or straightforward solution. The villains aren’t villains (except they are?), and it’s not hard to imagine the PCs getting themselves tangled in knots trying to unravel the complications here. It’s an elegant bit of adventure writing.

Grade: B

BOOK OF RAVENS (Christopher Perkins) is, to put it bluntly, bafflingly bad.

The first thing to understand is that this isn’t really an adventure. It’s more of an extended scenario hook: “Book of Ravens” leads the PCs to an isolated chateau where they can be recruited by a secret guild of wereravens who monitor the Shadowfell and fights its evils.

There’s nothing wrong with setting up an entire campaign premise.

The problem is that literally nothing in the scenario makes sense.

Let’s start with the hook: The PCs find a treasure map in a book that leads to the chateau.

Why is the map there?

Well, 150 years ago a member of the wereraven society decided that they should recruit new members by putting the map in an obscure book at Candlekeep on the off-chance that somebody reading the book would (a) follow it and (b) be the sort of person to join their secret society.

That’s not necessarily the worst marketing idea I’ve ever seen, but…

Actually, no. That’s definitely the worst marketing idea I’ve ever seen.

And I guess the proof is in the pudding here because no one HAS found the map in the past 150 years. Although maybe this wereraven society was running a huge ARG and these TR3AZURR MAPZZ were being spammed everywhere. Outhouse in Daggerdale? Treasure map in the toilet paper! The Well of Entry at the Yawning Portal was choked full of them. This map is just the forgotten detritus of a huge 14^th century fad.

Okay, regardless: Treasure map! Treasure maps are cool! Puzzling them out! Figuring out how the map relates to the territory! Following a treasure map is a cool adventure!

… one that they didn’t include in this book. “Book of Ravens” instead chooses to literally say, “Please design this adventure yourself.”

Hmm. All right. That’s fine. The real focus is on getting recruited by the wereravens, right? And the bulk of the scenario is dedicated to describing the secret sociey’s cool chateau hideout in detail. If you decided to embrace this campaign concept using, say, the Ravenloft sourcebook, having all this detail for the society’s hideout would be really useful!

… if any of it made a lick of sense.

Which it doesn’t.

First, at least 150 years ago (because that’s when they ran the ineffectual ARG) everyone in the chalet died and the wereravens moved in. But, despite living there for 150 years, they’ve done literally nothing to fix the place up: Every single room still lies in decaying ruin as a testament to the Brantifax family who built the place and then died in various gothic tragedies.

150 years! Multiple generations of wereravens!

 Second, the wereravens came to the chalet because there’s a shadow crossing into the Shadowfell here. They monitor the crossing, keeping tabs on whatever crosses over.

… except the end of the scenario reveals that the shadow crossing has literally never been used. Not once. Not ever.

The wereravens have been monitoring a closed, unused door for One. Hundred. And. Fifty. Years.

Third, the wereraven society’s modus operandi is to find evil magical items and secure them, removing their evil from the world. When the PCs arrive, in fact, the society is currently discussing what they should do with an evil statue of Orcus that they’ve just gotten their claws on.

If the PCs don’t interrupt the meeting, the ravens conclude that the statue should be hidden here in the chalet.

Three important facts:

1. They’ve been doing this for 150+ years.
2. They hide the items they find in the chalet.
3. There are no other such items at the chalet.

… is this literally the first time they’ve ever done this?

In any case, this is how the scene plays out:

Wereraven 1: We should hide it here in the chalet.

Wereraven 2: Good idea!

And then Wereraven 2 hops over to the corner of the room, drops the statue on the floor, and piles some random rubble on top of it.

Job done!

(There’s rubble lying around, of course, because, once again, they’ve done literally zero cleaning in the chalet for the past 150 years.)

This is unusable nonsense.

Grade: F

A DEEP AND CREEPING DARKNESS (Sarah Madsen) is one of the best scenarios I’ve seen in recent years. It’s actually been awhile since I read an adventure I would run without making any changes and it’s a pleasure to find one here.

In “A Deep and Creeping Darkness,” the PCs are hired by a mining consortium: A few decades back there was a small village with a platinum mine that was abandoned. The consortium has found the records detailing the mine, but they don’t know why it was abruptly abandoned. They have, however, heard that there’s a trove of documents from the survivors that was deposited at Candlekeep and they’d like the PCs to investigate and determine if it’s safe to the re-open the mine.

When the PCs go to investigate, of course, they have an opportunity to end the horror which plagued the mining village in its final days.

What makes this scenario sing are the personal stories that Madsen laces into the experience. These stories are layered, but also presented in myriad ways: A journal. Meeting with survivors. Clues in the ruins themselves.

Even better, the PCs are invited to become a part of these stories, bringing closure to the tangled emotions, painful enigmas, and unfinished business of those final, chaotic days.

Meanwhile, in a contrapuntal rhythm with these stories of loss and nostalgia, Madsen weaves a creepy horror laced with suspense: The events of the past begin to echo into the present as the same horror threatens to sweep over the PCs.

And then, of course, there is the ultimate closure, as the PCs end the horror which destroyed the town and, ultimately, help to bring the town back to life.

It’s just fabulous stuff.

The only thing I’ll flag is a small bit of undisclosed homework for the GM: A NPC named Lukas “can give them a rough map of the village.” But no such handout is included in the published adventure, so you’ll want to take a few minutes to sketch it out. (It’s probably also worth working up the titular journal that the PCs find at Candlekeep as a lore book handout.)

Grade: A

Go to Part 2

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Go to Part 1

THE MAPS OF WATERDEEP

Now that we’ve walked through the textual history of the Yawning Portal, let’s take a peek at how the location has been mapped over the years.

The first official map of the Yawning Portal’s interior appears in the City System boxed set. But to fully understand these interior maps, we first need to take a look at the exterior maps of the inn, starting with the Waterdeep city map from FR1 Waterdeep and the North:

I’ve enhanced the shape of Building #4 (Yawning Portal) here to make it clear, since the only available scan was done with a potato.

The next exterior map is from the City System boxed set. The Yawning Portal is still Building #4 and it still appears in the same general location (on Rainrun Street between Cook Street and Beinimbra’s Street), but the shape of the building has changed to a simple rectangle:

The orientation of the map has also been rotated.

The next map of Waterdeep is found in TM4 City of Waterdeep Trail Map (1989), which is simply a recolored version of the FR1 map. The map in Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep, similarly, is a re-scaled version of the same map. FRE3 Waterdeep makes the map even smaller and colors the whole city gray.

In 1990, the Forgotten Realms Atlas by Karen Wynn Forstad included a new map of Waterdeep. A version of this map in red scale was also reproduced in the manual for the first Eye of the Beholder video game:

It shows a rectangular building, although given the style and scale of the map I wouldn’t read too much into that.

A new map of Waterdeep was created for 3^rd Edition’s City of Splendors sourcebook, and featured the Yawning Portal as building C48:

You may notice that the shape of the building reverted to the original FR1 map, with a few slight differences.

I am fairly certain that the next map of Waterdeep was found in the 4^th Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. This map was never reproduced at a large scale (nor was it made for such) and is more or less useless for our purposes.

Finally we have the 5^th Edition poster map produced for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist:

You’ll notice that this map features a new outline for the Yawning Portal, although I think it can actually be interpreted in two different ways. The first is a slight variation of the City System map (with a new building directly to the east of the tavern):

And the second seems to be more of a variation on the FR1 shape:

In addition to these maps, there are two other interesting depictions of the Yawning Portal along similar lines. First, the Descent Into Undermountain computer game featured a navigational splash screen that identifies a specific building as the Yawning Portal:

Obviously Waterdeep is somewhat abstracted here (they could only model so many three-dimensional buildings), but the Yawning Portal resembles its rectangular presentation in the City System boxed set.

However, in addition to its prodigious poster maps, the City System boxed set also included a poster depicting an aerial view of Waterdeep. This poster is pretty spectacular. Although only depicting the southern end of the city due to perspective, its execution is meticulous: You can track specific streets and navigate through the city’s depiction.

And if you navigate to Soothsayer’s Way and then drop down to Rainrun Street… there’s the Yawning Portal:

I’m not certain if the artist actually knew they were depicting the Yawning Portal here. But although not strictly accurate (following the map, there should be an alley on the east side of the building), it’s (a) a 3-floor C-class building and (b) its shape is remarkably similar to that shown on the FR1 map (which is quite possibly the version the artist was working from if the City System cartography hadn’t been completed yet).

In the same vein, we can also look at Mike Schley’s map of the city used for the Lords of Waterdeep board game:

Other depictions of the Yawning Portal’s exterior are quite rare, actually. Notably Clyde Caldwell’s cover for FRE3 Waterdeep (and novelization) included the inn’s sign, the design of which was then clearly followed for an interior illustration by Ron Spencer in Expedition to Undermountain:

(Ironically, the description of the sign in Expedition to Undermountain of being “a board weathered to a silvery hue” is clearly describing the Caldwell cover, not the definitely-not-silvery wood of its own illustration.)

MAPS OF THE YAWNING PORTAL

Now we’ll turn our attention to the maps depicting the interior of the Yawning Portal. As I’d mentioned, the first such map was found in the City System boxed set:

It’s my belief that the cartographer here didn’t get a full brief. In the City System boxed set, the Yawning Portal is only described as, “Building 4, Inn.” So he drew a map that matched the dimensions of Building 4 on the city map.

One thing to note is that, up to this point, the number of floors in the Yawning Portal had not been definitively listed. The map indicates “Upper Floors” (plural), so how many floors in total? At least three. And three is, in fact, the answer listed in City of Splendors a few years later.

But there’s no staircase from the second to third floor.

For years, when looking at this map, I’d also erroneously concluded that there was, hilariously, no Well! But that’s because I was looking for the Well where I expected it to be: in the common room. But the Well actually is shown: It’s in the small room second-to-the-left at the top of the map.

You know who else missed it, though?

The cartographer for Expedition to Undermountain, which is also our next map of the Yawning Portal:

You can see that the cartographer more or less follows the same floorplan as the original map, although due to their somewhat chunky assets compromises have to be made. (For example, multiple rooms no longer have beds.) It’s possible that the reason the well disappeared from the back room is because the cartographer just didn’t have an appropriate asset to drop in.

(But given the reputation of the Yawning Portal at this point, I would love to know what decision process resulted in this map being created and published.)

In 2012, we finally get a map of the Yawning Portal which includes the titular portal. From Halls of Undermountain:

The other thing to note about this map is that the outline of the building is based on the original outline (as seen on the FR1 and later City of Splendors maps), not the rectangular outline from City System. Maps for the other floors of the building are not given, but you may notice multiple staircases up and one leading down to the “lower chambers.”

I have a few quibbles, but this is a most excellent map and almost certainly the one I would choose to use when running the Yawning Portal: It’s got the Well of Entry, private meeting rooms, properly arrayed tables, etc. It even has privies! (Which I can only imagine drop waste directly down into some unlucky portion of Undermountain. Of course, there was one unfortunate incident where tentacles reached up and sucked a patron down. But only occasionally do otyughs come rambling up looking for a second helping…)

Our final official map comes from DDAL08-00 Once In Waterdeep:

Although this map seems to take some inspiration from the Halls of Undermountain map (compare the Kitchen, Meeting Room, and Lounge running down one side of the map), the overall effort is, unfortunately, quite underwhelming. It lacks quite a few key features, reverts to the rectangular outline of the building, and quite underwhelms by only offering eight guest rooms in total.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Besides the depictions of the Yawning Portal in video games (which we’ve already discussed), there have been quite a few illustrations of the interior of the Yawning Portal scattered around various D&D books (although not as many as you might think). Most are actually quite generic in character and I’m not going to attempt to catalogue them all.

There are, however, two notable exceptions, both of which come from 5^th Edition.

First, this illustration from the 5^th Edition Player’s Handbook by Scott Murphy:

Notice the devil-head fireplace in the background. As far as I can tell, this is the first time such a fireplace is described or depicted in the Yawning Portal, but it has since become iconic, appearing time and time again in illustrations of the inn.

One of the reasons for this, I believe, is because of its appearance in this image by Jason Thompson from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist:

This image is not a map, but it is incredibly detailed and has had a significant impact on the mental image most people have of the tavern.

One thing I will note here is that this image does NOT depict the Well of Entry thrusting through the front wall of the tavern. In researching this article, I became aware that this had somehow become a semi-popular interpretation of the image.

But Thompson’s art is clearly a cut-away view. You can see that the floor in front of the Well has been cut away to show the adventurers descending.

Next: The Definitive Yawning Portal

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26D: Elestra Digs Deep

Jamill slammed back the last of his amber-colored drink. “Okay, this is your last chance. Who sent you?”

Elestra suddenly became aware that two rather large men with short clubs strapped to their thighs had suddenly materialized out of the crowd behind her. She stammered, unable to find any kind of answer that would satisfy Jamill.

Jamill jerked his head and headed towards the back of the bar. The two thugs laid their hands on Elestra’s arms. She got the message and let them hustle her out through the back door of the tavern.

When you have factions in your game, those factions should react to the actions of the PCs.

But if factions act as if they know every action the PCs take – as if they were omniscient, all-knowing entities with an eavesdropping device planted under the gaming table — that becomes a frustrating experience for the players and stifles their ingenuity.

There are a number of methods you can use for handling this, but I’ve generally gotten good results taking the decision out of my hands and mechanically determining it.

For example, you might have a random faction encounter check, similar to a random encounter check. For example, roll 1d6 once per day and if you roll a 1, some faction is going to take action against the PCs (or, at least, based on what they know about the PCs’ actions). Increase this to a 2 in 6 chance if the PCs have been making a lot of “noise.”

Another option is to mechanically check whether specific PC actions are detected by relevant factions (e.g., the faction they’re taking the action against or a faction that has them under surveillance). You can think of this as a stealth-type resolution, but at a more abstract level (and possibly using different skills).

Note: This is different than a situation where a faction DEFINITELY knows what the PCs are doing. For example, if the PCs break into a Renraku facility and get spotted by surveillance cameras or fight NPCs who escape and can identify them, you can just actively play Renraku’s response.

A key thing I recommend here is that the PCs should be able to influence the outcome of these mechanics, ideally in a way that involves meaningful choices by the players and is more than just an all-or-nothing decision to take or not take the risky action.

For example, the events in this session use the counter-intelligence system I shared here on the Alexandrian back in 2010. (When I originally mentioned them in this article and talked about the gameplay they made possible that otherwise would never have arisen, it was specifically this Ptolus campaign I was talking about.)

The other thing to note about these counter-intelligence mechanics is that they aren’t uni-directional: The players can also use them to figure out if people are asking questions about them.

In the case of this session, the impact on play was pretty straightforward:

• Elestra succeeded on her Gather Information check to gain information about the cult Iltumar was involved with.
• But the cult also succeeded on their counter-intelligence check to detect that Elestra had been asking questions about them, resulting in the ambush at the Onyx Spider.

Elestra really had dug a deep hole for herself here, and I thought it quite likely that the scenario was now going to turn into a rescue op by the other PCs. (Or possibly even somebody finding Elestra’s body in an alley. The decision not to tell anyone else in the group what she was doing was incredibly risky.) But she managed to turn the tables quite nicely.

Taking Jamill back to their rooms, on the other hand, was a potentially disastrous decision from a counter-intelligence standpoint: The bad guys didn’t know who Elestra was, but if they knew where she lived they’d be able to figure it out pretty quick.

Tee recognized the risk and took some very smart actions to blunt the counter-intelligence vectors that had been established. Just dumping Jamill somewhere would have left him free to continue trying to figure out who Elestra was and why she’d been asking questions. Running him out of town under the guise of the cult itself AND planting the idea that Elestra had been “dealt with” even if she decided to stay in town was both a plan and a contingency plan.

The follow-up decision to then use Jamill’s identity to infiltrate the cult itself was also smart play, and would shape how the entire scenario would play out.

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 27A – Running the Campaign: Missing Clues
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index