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

SPOILERS FOR DESCENT INTO AVERNUS

Descent Into Avernus begins by having the PCs stand around doing nothing while the GM describes an NPC doing awesome stuff.

It then proceeds to “if they don’t do what you tell them to do, the NPCs automatically find them and kill them.”

It’s not an auspicious start.

EVERYBODY INTO THE HANDBASKET!

Although titled Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus, this adventure has very little to do with Baldur’s Gate.

It does begin in the city, however, with Baldur’s Gate being overrun by refugees from Elturel, a city further up the River Chionthar which has mysteriously vanished from the face of Toril. The PCs will spend a couple of days investigating Zarielite cultists in the city, discovering that they may have something do with Elturel’s disappearance. They will then be sent to Candlekeep to research an infernal puzzlebox they’ve recovered during their investigation, and Baldur’s Gate is never seen again.

A scholar at Candlekeep opens the infernal puzzlebox for them, revealing that Elturel has been taken to Hell as the result of a pact signed between the High Observer of Elturel and Zariel, the Archduchess of Avernus. The PCs are then sent to a different wizard, further down the road from Candlekeep, who can take them to Hell.

Arriving in Hell, they discover that Elturel is floating above the hellish plains of Avernus and slowly sinking into the River Styx. Jumping through a number of hoops, with NPCs sending them hither-and-yon, they eventually encounter an NPC who tells them that he’s had a vision from the god Torm, and the PCs are supposed to go forth and find the Sword of Zariel if they want to save the city.

So where is the Sword of Zariel?

Well, back in Candlekeep they were also introduced to a small, golden, flying elephant (technically an angelic being known as a hollyphant) named Lulu. Lulu came with them to Hell and it turns out she used to be Zariel’s warmount, but she’s lost all of her memories. She does remember one thing, though: She was at a place called Fort Knucklebones, and she met a couple of kenku there.

So the PCs leave Elturel and journey across Avernus to Fort Knucklebones. It turns out the kenku don’t know anything, but by a stroke of luck the hag who runs Fort Knucklebones has a machine that can restore Lulu’s lost memories. So Lulu gets strapped into the machine, she recovers her memories, and remembers where the Sword is!

… or, at least, that’s what Descent Into Avernus claims will happen. We’ll come back to this, but the reality is that Lulu has no idea where the Sword. Fortunately the PCs can jump through some more hoops and eventually claim it.

With the Sword in hand, they can confront Zariel and either redeem her, make a deal with her, or decide to join her. The last of these is rather unlikely (although good show to the book for considering the possibility), while either of the former two result in Elturel being saved and the PCs escaping from Hell triumphant!

THE REST OF THE BOOK

While the adventure may not be overly concerned with Baldur’s Gate, the same is not strictly true for the book. About fifty pages are given over to the Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer, detailing the city as it exists in 1492 DR. (Oddly, the campaign itself is described as taking place two years later in 1494 DR. There have been some recent indications that the campaign is canonically being moved back to 1492 DR in order to maintain continuity with Baldur’s Gate III… so we’ll just mark this down as “thoroughly confused.”)

The Gazetteer itself is quite serviceable, although much like the gazetteer of Waterdeep found in Dragon Heist, it pales in comparison to previous sourcebooks detailing the city. It notably includes a number of player-facing options, including customized backgrounds for characters from Baldur’s Gate.

The oddity here is that the discordance between the focus of the background material and the actual content of the campaign (in which the PCs are likely to only spend 48 or maybe 72 hours in Baldur’s Gate) renders the gazetteer largely useless for anyone actually running Descent Into Avernus.

It can also actively mislead DMs and put them on a bad footing. For example, the gazetteer includes a section on Dark Secrets:

During character creation, once players have developed their characters, they should collectively choose a dark secret shared by the entire party. Every member of the party is entangled in this dark secret, regardless of how new they are to the city or how incorruptible their morals. Maybe they’re merely witnesses, maybe they’re covering for a friend’s crimes, or maybe they’re deep in denial. Regardless, in the eyes of the law, they’re guilty. Each dark secret shares a number of elements. Players should work with you, the DM, to customize these particulars to the group.

These dark secrets include Conspiracy, Murder, Theft, and a Failed Coup. Each type of secret has multiple versions, and also details the PCs’ roles in the secret, the consequences of what they did, and who in Baldur’s Gate knows their secret.

This is a really cool concept and, for any campaign set in Baldur’s Gate, it’s a fantastic way of giving the PCs deep and meaningful ties to the city (and to each other).

The problem, of course, is that Descent Into Avenus ISN’T set in Baldur’s Gate.

So you get the players invested in these connections to Baldur’s Gate and lay down the seeds of what seems like an epic campaign. (For example, you want to overthrow the patriars and lead an egalitarian revolution.) Then, after just a couple sessions, the PCs blow town and leave all that stuff just dangling in the wind.

And some Dark Secrets are completely incompatible with the campaign. For example, the primary campaign hook is the PCs getting hired by the Flaming Fist to investigate some cult-related murders. One of the Dark Secrets is, “The Flaming Fist is corrupt. You turned against your commanding officer, seeking to take the Fist in a new direction. Now you’re branded a traitor.”

AMAZING IDEAS, FAILED EXECUTION

Unfortunately, a lot of Descent Into Avernus is like this: There’ll be an amazing idea, incredibly cool concept, or breathtaking revelation, but then the execution of that idea will be broken or simply lackluster.

For example:

DIA: Do you want to play MAD MAX IN HELL with infernal muscle cars fueled by the souls of the damned?

Me: Fuck yes, I do!

DIA: Just kidding. We’re not doing that.

Me: …

These infernal war machines were actually hyped quite a bit in the pre-launch marketing for Descent Into Avernus. In the book itself, there are two and a half pages which are the introduction to a Warlords of the Avernian Wastelands campaign. It is straight up cooler than anything else in the entire book.

And then it just… vanishes.

There are a couple of scenes where an infernal motorcycle is parked nearby because that’s how an NPC showed up.

That’s it.

It’s really weird.

My best guess is that this was a really cool idea that somebody had really late in the development of the book and they just couldn’t integrate it?

But maybe not. Because, like I said, this is kind of a pervasive problem for the book.

DIA: Do you want to explore HELL ITSELF ON THE WAR-TORN PLAINS OF AVERNUS?

Me: Fuck yes, I do!

DIA: Just kidding. We’re not doing that.

Me: … stahp.

The book frequently talks about how the PCs are going to be “exploring” Avernus. But then it goes out of its way to stop them from doing that in almost every way possible.

For example, it’s impossible to make a map of Avernus. Apparently the Lawful Evil plane of Avernus is so chaotic and ever-shifting that anyone trying to map it goes insane.

(This is, it should be noted, something that was made up specifically for this adventure. It not only doesn’t make sense — read my lips: Lawful — it explicitly contradicts preexisting lore.)

The reason they don’t want you making a map is because navigation is meaningless. If you want to go somewhere, it’s completely random whether you get there or not:

Using the map to chart a course from one location to another is unreliable at best… When charting a course through Avernus, ask the player whose character is overseeing navigation to roll two dice:

• Roll 2d4 if the characters are traveling to an unvisited destination marked on their map.
• Roll 2d8 if the characters are returning to a destination they’ve visited previously.
• Roll 2d10 if a native guide is leading the characters to their destination.

If the rolls of both dice don’t match, the characters arrive at their destination as intended. If the dice match, they wind up somewhere else: pick one of the other locations.

Despite maps being both impossible and useless, the adventure nevertheless gives the players a poster map. It’s unlabeled and, again, the spatial relationships it depicts don’t actually exist, so it’s utterly useless for literally anything you might actually use a map for. But it is very pretty, so it has that going for it.

(Astonishingly, neither Elturel nor Fort Knucklebones — the two places the PCs would start navigating from — are depicted on the map. The DM is told that they can put them anywhere on the map they want, but — once again! — this is pointless and has no meaning.)

The one thing the map does do is magically talk to the PCs: Every time they go somewhere, the map tells them exactly what it is and where they are before they have a chance to explore and find out.

“Okay, we’ve made sure it’s impossible to run an exploration scenario on Avernus.”

“But what if the players nevertheless accidentally discover something for themselves and feel a momentary frisson of delight at exploring the unknown?”

“Oh shit! We gotta put a stop to that!”

Without actually seeing it in the book, I think it’s difficult to really believe the lengths Descent Into Avernus goes to in order to make sure that the players absolutely cannot explore Avernus in any possible way.

Even the smaller cool ideas in the book are often mucked up. For example, there’s a Zarielite cultist in the first part of the adventure whose dying words are, “See you in Hell!”

Which is so goddamn clever, right? Because the PCs are going to go to Hell later on and then — presto! — there she is.

… she doesn’t show up in Hell.

THE WEIRD RAILROAD

DIA: Do you want to play a nice game of CHOOSE. THAT. RAILROAD?!

Me: Fuck no!

DIA: All aboard! Let’s GO!

Me: Goddammit.

The problem with shouting, “It’s time to explore Avernus!” but then blocking any and all attempts to actually explore Avernus is that you’ll need some other mechanism to move the campaign forward. Descent Into Avernus chooses to do this by presenting the players with the choice of two different railroads they can follow.

It’s difficult to explain how poorly this is done.

We start with Lulu getting her memories back. She wakes up from the procedure and shouts, “The sword! The sword! I know where it is!”

Spoiler Alert: She doesn’t.

Instead, her “dreams lead the characters on a wild goose chase to Haruman’s Hill.”

There are a couple problems with this. First, there’s no clear reason given for why Lulu thinks Haruman’s Hill is where the Sword of Zariel is. Second, given the timeline presented in the book, it’s fairly clear that Haruman’s Hill did not and could not exist when Lulu was in Avernus.

But, OK. Fine. This thing that makes no sense happens.

So the PCs go adventuring at Haruman’s Hill for a little while, they figure out that Lulu took them to the wrong place, and then Lulu says: “I’m so sorry! My memory is a little hazier than I thought! Having pondered my dreams further, I think there are two sites in Avernus that are important to finding the sword! Choose between a place where demons manifest and one where demons are destroyed.”

But, once again, there’s no reason given for why Lulu thinks either of these locations have anything to do with the Sword of Zariel.

And that’s because they don’t.

They have nothing to do with the Sword. They have nothing to do with Lulu’s memories. There is absolutely no reason for Lulu to say that the PCs should go there. And if you do go to either location, it becomes immediately and abundantly clear that this is the case.

Despite Lulu telling the PCs to go to the wrong place and then immediately doing it again, the book assumes that the PCs will just continue blithely along the “path” they’ve “chosen,” even though there’s no discernible reason for them to do so.

This is not the only example of weird scenario structures in Descent Into Avernus. At the beginning of the campaign, for example, the PCs have followed a lead to the Dungeon of the Dead Three. In order to the adventure to continue, they have to speak with a specific NPC. But:

• The NPC is located behind a secret door. (Which the designers bizarrely go out of their way to make difficult to find, even going so far as specifying that a normal rat will absolutely NOT reveal its location if someone randomly casts speak with animals on it.)
• The NPC immediately identifies himself as the serial killer they’re here to kill.
• The NPC, having just confessed that he’s the serial killer they’re here to kill, says, “Hey, can you help me take revenge on the people who tried to kill me?”

Assuming the PCs agree to help this guy for some reason (and, remember, they MUST do this in order for the adventure to continue), he tells them that they should kidnap his brother so that they can use him as leverage while negotiating with their mother.

But negotiating with their mother to do… what?

Descent Into Avernus doesn’t seem to know. And promptly forgets the idea except to briefly tell you it definitely won’t work (because their mother will “happily watch any of her sons die before consenting to ransom demands”).

The failure of the scheme doesn’t bother me. (“Go ahead and kill him, I don’t care,” is a perfectly legitimate moment and builds pretty consistently from her known relationship with her kids.) What bothers me is that there doesn’t seem to BE a scheme.

The PCs are, once again, told to do a thing, but given no coherent reason for doing it.

This happens again when an NPC tells them they should teleport to Hell and save Elturel. They’re 5^th level characters who have no special abilities, knowledge, or resources teleporting to a city which has been established to be filled with high level arcanists, clerics, and warriors who obviously haven’t solved the problem. What are they supposed to do, exactly? And why does that make more sense than investigating the Elturel crater or seeking a cure for Lulu’s amnesia?

Later Lulu tells them that she remembers meeting some kenku at Fort Knucklebones. Maybe they’ll know about her lost memories?

So the PCs go to Fort Knucklebones, they meet the kenku, and the adventure says, “The kenku Chukka and Clonk instantly recognize Lulu, since they’ve met her previously.”

And then… nothing. Literally nothing. The kenku remembering Lulu is never mentioned again.

What is going on here?

It’s a cargo cult.

THE CARGO CULT

Let’s take one step back: RPG adventures are built using scenario structures. A dungeoncrawl is one type of scenario structure. A mystery is another. There are many others, including things like heists, hexcrawls, raids, etc.

A significant problem in RPG design is that these scenario structures aren’t really talked about. DMs and even designers just kind of pick them up (often imperfectly) by osmosis. Most of them are limited to just dungeoncrawls, mysteries, and railroading.

What’s happened with Descent Into Avernus is that the designers have sort of flailed their way into a malformed scenario structure which consists of, “An NPC tells the PCs where to go and then the PCs go to there.”

Once you realize that, you can’t unsee it: The entire campaign is just that one structure repeated infinitely. An NPC tells you where to go, you go there, and you find another NPC who tells you where to go.

Because this malformed structure is apparently the only thing they have, it seems to have become a kind of cargo cult for them: They know that NPC A has to give some sort of “explanation” for why the PCs need to go to NPC B, but they don’t actually care what that explanation is.

And they assume the players won’t care either. The presumption is that the players are onboard and the words coming out of the NPC’s mouth are just, “Blah blah blah Vanthampur Villa blah blah blah.”

So why do they put essential encounters behind secret doors? Because if the PCs haven’t found the NPC to tell them where to go next, clearly the players will know to keep looking until they find them!

Why are the PCs told to go talk to people without being given any coherent reason for doing so? Because the reason is irrelevant. It’s just white noise around the person’s name.

Why does the adventure assume the PCs will plane shift to Hell without having any reason to do so? Because an NPC told them to!

Why doesn’t the adventure tell you what the kenku remember about Lulu? Because the writers don’t care. “The kenku might remember Lulu” was just the blah-blah-blah dropped around “Fort Knucklebones.” Once the kenku tell the PCs that they should “blah blah blah talk to Mad Maggie blah blah blah,” the writers assume that you will no longer care about the previous blah blah blah.

It’s a cargo cult because the designers have seen PCs talking to an NPC and then going where that NPC tells them to go. But this interaction has become ritualistic. The designers repeat the form, but with none of its semantic content. It’s a hollow shell lacking meaning and seemingly ludicrous to anyone seeking to rationally understand it.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

So what is Descent Into Avernus, exactly?

First, it’s a pretty good gazetteer for Baldur’s Gate.

Second, it’s a big ol’ bundle of cool concepts studded with memorable moments, evocative lore, and epic stakes.

• Mad Max in Hell
• The redemption of the Archduchess of Avernus
• The secret history of the Hellriders
• The fall of an entire city into Hell (and its possible salvation)
• Machinations among the dukes and duchesses of Hell
• Thrilling political stakes in both Baldur’s Gate and Elturel

Along with a gaggle of vivid dungeons crammed with flavor and featuring unique gimmicks (sewer temples, ghost prisons for damned souls, floating hellwasp nests, a crashed Avernian warship, etc.).

We should also not discount the huge cast of varied, larger than life characters (broken families, nefarious cultists, magical shields, maniacal scholars, proud leaders, pitiful victims).

Third, it’s a couple of pretty fantastic poster maps.

Unfortunately, all of this is wrapped up in a completely dysfunctional package. The intriguing characters and big ideas are hopelessly morassed in the broken logic of the campaign and crippled by a careless disregard for continuity. The cool set pieces are sapped of meaning, frequently broken by poor execution, and almost universally left as hollow disappointments of unrealized potential.

Would I recommend it?

Unfortunately, no. The amount work required to salvage Descent Into Avernus is, sadly, staggering in its scope. Despite its potential, there are simply so many better adventures out there that do not need to be completely revamped from the ground up to make them work that it’s impossible to say that you should spend your time grappling with this one.

(Unless, of course, some hopeless fool has already done a bunch of that work for you.)

Style: 4
Substance: 2

Story Creators: Adam Lee (lead), James Introcaso, Ari Levitch, Mike Mearls, Lysa Penrose, Christopher Perkins, Ben Petrisor, Matthew Sernett, Kate Welch, Richard Whitters, Shawn Wood
Story Consultants: Joe Manganiello, Jim Zub
Writers: Bill Benham, M.T. Black, Dan Dillon, Justin Donie, James J. Haeck, James Introcaso, Adam Lee, Chris Lindsay, Liane Mersiel, Shawn Merwin, Lysa Penrose, Christopher Perkins, F. Wesley Schneider, Amber Scott, James Sutter
Developers: Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor, Kate Welch

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 256

A thousand years ago, we built twelve giant mecha to fight a cataclysmic war. We call them Thrones. Each was unique, a paragon of war…

Down the generations since the Great War, dynasties have formed, each drawing its legitimacy from the ownership of a surviving Throne. These titans are ancient weapons with grand legacies of battle and betrayal, but they are also symbols of dominance and entitlement. Possession of a Throne bestows wealth, power, authority over whole solar systems, and a seat on the Galactic Council.

That’s why you’re going to steal one.

Stealing the Throne is a storytelling game by Nick Bate. It is GM-less, and can be played by 3-5 players in 1-3 hours. (The game I played with four players lasted for one hour and fifteen minutes.)

The core concept of the game is evocatively summarized above, and your reaction to it probably makes this review superfluous: If stealing a giant mecha in a heist with galactic stakes makes you say, “Hell, yeah!” then you should buy this game, play this game, and love this game.

Taking a closer look, we’ll discover that the game is broken down into four phases:

• Building the Throne
• The Heist
• The Getaway
• The Finale

In Building the Throne, the players will follow a simple collaborative process that will establish the scene of the crime (where the heist will take place), the history of the Throne, the look of the Throne, and the major subsystems which define the Throne’s capabilities.

You will also, in a step whose importance may initially slip by you, establish at least three Reasons why you want or need to steal the Throne.

During the Heist, each round of play begins with a player volunteering to be the Throne — a GM-like figure who gets things rolling by establishing the next seeming insurmountable challenge in the Heist. Once the challenge has been established, a different player will take on the role of the Thief by saying, “This is what I’m here for. I’m ________, and I’m the master of ________.”

In creating your Thief, you can specify any area of expertise you can imagine, but examples include cracking impossible locks, precision timing, and forbidden technology. The Throne and Thief roleplay through the challenge, eventually reaching the Pivotal Moment in which you determine the outcome of the challenge.

The Pivotal Moment is fail-forward, with a very clever mechanic that results in one of four results:

• Unqualified success. (Woo-hoo!)
• A call for assistance. (In which one of the other players can offer their assistance to overcome a surprisingly difficult obstacle… but only at the cost of making it more difficult for them to accomplish their own goals and getaway later on.)
• A blaze of glory. (“The Thief throws in their hand and goes out in a suitably spectacular fashion,” describing how they overcome the current obstacle, but are captured or killed in the process.)
• (With the player revealing that their character is secretly a traitor, a truth which will become manifest in the fiction only later.)

In play, this process is tense, exciting, and has just the right amount of mechanical richness wed to narrative truth to relentlessly push your story right to the edge.

Each player gets one turn being the Thief and one turn being the Throne, at which point the Heist draws to a close and the Throne is seized!

But just because you’ve taken control of Throne, doesn’t mean you’ve managed to escape. In the Getaway, players have the opportunity to power up the Throne and then attempt their escape. (This is also when all sudden-yet-inevitable betrayals will play out with, in my experience, usually devastatingly amazing results.)

If any of the Thieves manage to survive the Getaway, then the Finale wraps things up. A secret vote is conducted as everyone indicates what Reason for stealing the throne is obviously the most important and must be pursued first. The almost unavoidable disputes which result inform a brief epilogue. (An alternative structure is given for epiloguing a scenario in which only one Thief escapes.)

The only other thing to mention here is that the rulebook includes several playsets, each describing a Throne. These playsets are optional, but provide a little extra structure and a fodder of creative ideas that can subtly shape and inform play in order to create unique experiences. I’m looking forward to experimenting with these playsets in the future.

There is only thing I would change about Stealing the Throne: As written, you only utter your introductory statement (“I’m ________, and I’m the master of ________.”) when it’s your turn as the Thief. I would tweak this to say that you should utter the introductory statement at whatever point your Thief makes themselves known in the narrative (including when they’re offering assistance during another Thief’s turn).

I mention this mostly because I think this minor (and only!) tweak is actually the strongest indication of just how great Stealing the Throne is. It’s smooth, it’s fast, and it’s satisfying.

(The speed of gameplay here should not be ignored: Being able to pick up a storytelling game and have an experience this rich in just over an hour is phenomenal. My guess is a typical session will be about 90 minutes long, which makes the game incredibly appealing as something you can pick up and play more or less on a whim. Or as a deeply rewarding filler on boardgame night.)

Stealing the Throne will be entering my gaming rotation. I think it should enter yours.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Nick Bate
Publisher: ickbat.itch.io
Price: $10.00
Page Count: 40

Disclaimer: I have worked with Nick Bate previously, having hired him to work on Infinity, Over the Edge, and Feng Shui.

Thanks to Heather, Erik, and Allen for playing this one with me.

SPOILERS FOR STORM KING’S THUNDER

Personally, I’m a sucker for the core concept of Storm King’s Thunder. A War Against the Giants campaign has been on my bucket list for many a year now, so the premise of giants beating the war drums is basically custom made for me.

The basic premise here is that Annam the All-Father, god of the giants, is upset that the giants did jack-all to stop Tiamat’s machinations during the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. So he dissolves the Ordning — the divinely decreed feudal(?) order which keeps giant society in order. This is a little vague in the book, but here’s how I think of it: Imagine that the divine right of kings was actually real; the legitimacy and authority of political leadership ultimately derives from the fact that a god said, “That guy is in charge.” And then one day the god shows up and says, “Not any more. None of y’all need to pay taxes.”

Pandemonium.

With the storm giants no longer king of the hill (giants), it’s a toss-up who’ll become the new King of the Giants. Ironically, this allows a draconic faction led by the blue wyrm Iymrith to infiltrate and decapitate the storm giant court, further destabilizing the situation. So now every giant is planning how to stomp their competitors, profit from the chaos, and/or prove that they should be the new king, and the conflict is boiling out across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier.

Enter the PCs.

Storm King’s Thunder can then be broadly broken down into six phases:

Phase 1: The PCs deal with the aftermath of a cloud giant attack in the small village of Nightstone.

Phase 2: They follow a lead from Nightstone to one of three cities (Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, or Triboar), which is then attacked by giants while they’re there.

Phase 3: In the wake of the giant attack, they receive a plethora of plot hooks that will pull them towards various locations across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier. This section of the campaign basically functions as a pointcrawl, with the PCs navigating the Forgotten Realms and running into additional plot hooks and mini-scenarios (most of which are themed to the giant troubles) as they travel.

(If you’re not familiar with a pointcrawl, the basic structure is a map of points connected by routes and keyed with content. PCs travel along the routes to get where they want to go, passing through points along the way and triggering the content keyed to those points. The pointcrawl in Storm King’s Thunder, although not referred to as such, is a pretty pure example of the form: The points are generally settlements on the map and the routes are literally the roads and trails connecting them.)

Phase 4: The PCs learn of the Eye of the All-Father, a powerful giant oracle. In exchange for recovering artifacts stolen by the Uthgardt barbarians, the oracle will tell the PCs that they need to travel to Maelstrom, the court of the storm giants.

Phase 5: The PCs raid one of five giant strongholds to retrieve a magical artifact they can use to teleport to Maelstrom.

Phase 6: The PCs journey to Maelstrom, forge an alliance with the storm giants, investigate the disappearance of Hekaton, the storm giant king, and (hopefully) rescue him. He then leads them to attack Iymrith’s lair.

The general “only the PCs can discover a hidden evil fomenting a war between giants and small folk” is clearly taking a thematic note from the classic GDQ series, but this is much more a conceptual riff than a Ravenloft-style reboot. It’s an ambitious campaign with epic stakes and a worldwide scope.

FRAGILITY

What my summary of Storm King’s Thunder plot hides, unfortunately, is that the transitions between the different phases of the campaign are incredibly awkward at best.

For example, let’s take a look at Phase 3. The basic idea here, as described briefly above, is that you rescue one of the cities in Phase 2 and receive a bunch of plot hooks that drive you to travel across the map. Here are what the hook lines look like for Bryn Shander (red), Goldenfields (yellow), and Triboar (blue):

Although drawn in straight lines (rather than along likely routes of travel), it should still be clear how following these leads will send the PCs crisscrossing the landscape. And, as they travel, they’ll be having encounters — from either scripted random encounters or keyed locations throughout the North — which will give them more leads to pursue. Pursuing those leads, of course, will lead to more encounters, which will result in more leads, which will… Well, you get the idea.

Eventually, in the course of these adventures, the PCs will discover the existence of the Eye of the All-Father and transition to Phase 4 of the campaign.

Unfortunately, there are some significant problems with this.

First, too many of the scenario hooks that transition the campaign from Phase 2 to Phase 3 are, for lack of a better word, boring. In Goldenfields, for example, they include:

• Deliver a letter for me.
• Come with me to visit my friend.
• Deliver a message for me.
• Deliver a letter for me.

I think of these as mail carrier hooks. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mail carrier hooks, but the structure of a mail carrier hook is so utterly devoid of purpose that it becomes crucial for the message itself to be of great import.

A good example of this in Storm King’s Thunder is the quest Darathra Shendrel gives in Triboar: Giants are invading! The Harpers must be warned!

That’s clearly meaningful. It matters. The PCs will feel important being asked to do that.

Unfortunately, most of the hooks in Storm King’s Thunder look like the one given by Narth Tezrin. “Hello! Heroes who just rescued this entire town! Could you deliver some horse harnesses for me?” This is almost demeaning. It’s clearly meaningless and there’s absolutely no reason why the PCs or the players would care about this.

The lackluster quality of these hooks is then exacerbated by the fact so many of them just… dead end.

For example, Darathra Shandrel tells the PCs to bring urgent word to the Harpers of the threat of the Giants! When the PCs arrive, the Harpers… just don’t seem to care that much. So that which seemed meaningful suddenly isn’t.

Others just trail off without any explanation. In Bryn Shander, Duvessa Shane asks the PCs to carry a message to a ship called the Dancing Wave in Waterdeep. When they arrive, the PCs discover that the ship is missing! Storm King’s Thunder then spends several hundred words detailing how the PCs can hire a ship to go looking for the Dancing Wave and then… that’s it. No explanation of what they might find if they go looking. No explanation of what actually happened to the Dancing Wave.

This actually happens a lot in the book. In Goldenfields, for example, the PCs are sent to look for a missing druid. They’re sent to talk to someone who might have seen him. That person says, “Nope. Haven’t seen him in awhile.”

And, once again, that’s it. No clue what happened to him. No suspicion on the part of the writers that the PCs might want to keep investigating.

The problem perpetuates on a macro-scale at the other end of Phase 3: None of the PCs’ expeditions actually go anywhere.

They go to places in the North and they point to other places. Along the way they run into giants doing various things. And, logically, this should all be taking you some place: Your new faction alliances should give you anti-giant operations to pursue. You should slowly be piecing together clues and your investigation into the giants should ultimately lead you to the Eye of the All-Father and the next phase of the campaign.

But it doesn’t.

What happens instead is that, at some completely arbitrary point unrelated to anything to the PCs are doing, the DM is supposed to trigger an encounter with Harshnag, a friendly giant, who says, “Hello! The DM has sent me with the next phase of the campaign! Would you like to know more?”

We’ve looked at Phase 3 here (coming and going), but unfortunately this type of fragility is endemic to the whole campaign:

• Phase 1 ends with three mail carrier scenario hooks pointing to Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, and Triboar. But rather than giving the PCs the choice of which lead to pursue, the book instructs the GM to instead railroad them.
• The Phase 4 into Phase 5 transition is designed to loop so that the PCs can get multiple leads from the Eye of the All-Father in case something goes wrong and they can’t get the magical artifact they need from the first giant fortress they raid… except the adventure bizarrely slots in a cutscene where the Eye of the All-Father gets blown up so the PCs can’t go back there.
• Even starting the investigation in Phase 6 requires the PCs to get a clue from an NPC who is innately hostile to them. It then requires the PCs to reach several conclusions for which no clues are included at all, while the threadbare breadcrumb trail which does exist is peppered with gaping plot holes.

Perhaps strangest of all, the adventure doesn’t actually have an ending. The central goal of the campaign is “stop the giant attacks.” The rescue of Lord Hekaton and the death of Iymrith is presented — structurally, textually, and diegetically to the characters — as the way to achieve this.

But because Iymrith’s deception and Hekaton’s disappearance are not what broke the Ordning, there’s no logical reason to think that resolving either of those things will result in the Ordning being reformed and the crisis coming to an end. And, in fact, the book more or less concedes this in the “Adventure Conclusion” section on page 230.

CRASHING THE PARTY

Let’s back up and talk about Harshnag for a moment.

When he shows up and says, “Follow me to Phase 4!” this creates a giant-sized problem for Storm King’s Thunder.

Harshnag is a prototypical Realms NPC who is much, much cooler and much, much more powerful than the PCs and shows up to hog the spotlight.

Storm King’s Thunder at least briefly acknowledges the Harshnag Problem and attempts to solve possibly the least important part of it (combat balance) by having Harshnag literally patronize the PCs by pretending he’s not as powerful as he actually is (p. 120):

Harshnag tries not to dominate combat if it means making his smaller compatriots feel inferior. He doesn’t want to be seen as a showoff. He can reduce his combat effectiveness in the following ways:

• He makes one attack on his turn instead of two.

• He uses the Help action to aid a character’s next attack against a foe. […]

• He does nothing on his turn except taunt an enemy who might otherwise attack a character. Assume the effort is successful and the target switches it attention to Harshnag, unless the character insists on being the target of that threat.

I sure hope no one dies while you’re jerking off, Harshnag.

After that half-hearted effort, Storm King’s Thunder gets back down to the work of completely mishandling a powerful NPC ally. We can start with the railroad doors to the Eye of the All-Father that are needlessly designed so that only the NPC can effectively open them and then eventually culminate with an NPC-focused cutscene where the PCs are turned into mute bystanders while Harshnag solos Iymrith.

(The adventure is so insistent on this that it will literally KILL A PC rather than let them try to participate in the cutscene.)

For a detailed explanation of why this sort of thing is a terrible idea, check out How NOT to Frame a Scene. But the key thing is that, while having a much more powerful PC show up is not inherently bad, there are generally two maxims you want to follow:

1. Make sure the game remains focused on the PCs.
2. Use the NPC’s awesomeness as a way of establishing how awesome the PCs are.

Imagine Barack Obama shows up at your birthday party. In Scenario #1 he grabs a fistful of birthday cake, poses with people for selfies, and tells stories about the situation room when Osama Bin Laden was assassinated for the rest of the evening.

In Scenario #2, he comes over to you, throws an arm around your shoulder, and says, “This is a party I could not miss once I heard about <that cool thing you did last week>.”

Which Obama do you want at your birthday party?

Storm King’s Thunder struggles with this because Harshnag’s role in the campaign is not to hype the PCs up.

He’s here to tell them that everything they did in Phase 3 was a pointless dead end.

This is also a problem that the “ending” of the campaign has: After all of their epic adventures, the PCs are reduced to footsoldiers taking orders from an NPC.

DEUS EX AIRSHIP

With all that being said, I want to emphasize that the bones of Storm King’s Thunder are fundamentally really good, and there are quite a few clever things the designers do.

For example, at the end of Phase 1 as the PCs are leaving Nighstone, a cloud giant citadel that’s floating past spots them and flies down. It belongs to Zephyros, a cloud giant who is looking for the PCs because the DM… err, I mean STRANGE PLANAR ENTITIES have told him that he needs to give them a lift to the next part of the adventure.

This is a really cool moment.

Oddly, though, it’s not the only time this happens in the adventure. Later on, a random airship will swoop out of the air and declare that the DM… err, I mean A MYSTERIOUS DRAGON has sent it to give the PCs a lift.

So why does this happen?

The core of the campaign — Phase 3 — is spread across North Faerûn. Locations across this entire region are keyed so that the PCs can travel almost anywhere and (theoretically) encounter campaign relevant stuff. The trick, though, is that all of this material is:

• Keyed to the specific range of levels the PCs will be in Phase 3.
• Designed to funnel the PCs towards the Eye of the All-Father.

If they went overland from Nightstone to Bryn Shander at the end of Phase 1, for example, they’d encounter a bunch of stuff that (a) they’re not ready for and (b) assumes the continuity of the adventure is more advanced than it is.

So to avoid that problem, you have Zephyros show up to literally fly them over these locations. And later, after Phase 3, you give them an airship for the same reason.

If you were prepping a similar adventure for your home campaign, we could imagine keying material appropriate for Phase 2 for their journey and then, later, advancing or updating that key as their journeys continue. If the book had infinite space, we could similarly imagine stocking the entire pointcrawl multiple times with different material for each phase.

But since the book can’t be infinite in its size, this is a very clever structural trick to make it work.

GAZETTEER OF THE SAVAGE FRONTIER

Did you know that Storm King’s Thunder has a significantly more detailed write-up of Bryn Shander — the capital of Icewind Dale — than the one that appears in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden?

In fact, the hidden treasure of Storm King’s Thunder is that it contains an encyclopedic gazetteer of the Savage Frontier. Although there’s some overlap with the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, Storm King’s Thunder’s location guide is almost identical in length to Sword Coast Adventurers Guide’s treatment of the Sword Coast. This makes Storm King’s Thunder an invaluable resource for any North-ranging Forgotten Realms campaign, whether you’re interested in an adventure about giants or not.

What’s great about the adventure tie-in, though, is that the gazetteer ends up studded with play-ready material. This is high-value stuff.

You can also flip this around. Because of how it’s structured, a good chunk of Storm King’s Thunder can basically be boiled down to a list of “terrible things that giants are doing.”

So if you’re running any campaign in the Forgotten Realms, you can use Storm King’s Thunder to supply what I refer to as Background Events — a second timeline of future events running in parallel with your PCs’ adventures. These are events that don’t directly affect the PCs, but which are nevertheless taking place and moving the campaign world forward.

In other words, you can take most of Storm King’s Thunder and just have it “running” in the background of your campaign: The world is large and there’s all this giant stuff that’s happening up north or one town over or whatever.

This sort of thing can add incredible depth to your campaign world. And, of course, if the PCs decide to follow up on any of this… well, hey! You’ve got a whole campaign book you can launch into!

On a related note, Storm King’s Thunder also does something similar in reverse, by dropping in little references to other published D&D campaigns: The crisis is triggered by Tyranny of Dragons. There are elemental lords from Princes of the Apocalypse actively seeking alliances. And so forth.

None of these require your group to have owned, read, or played the other adventures. But if you DO, then these are great little pay-offs and they make the world feel HUGE.

THREE CITIES, THREE FIGHTS

Something else that Storm King’s Thunder does very well are the three big giant fights in Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, and Triboar.

You may have gotten the impression that these fights are generic or interchangeable because of the campaign’s structure, but each location is well-developed and each encounter is crafted with very specific strategic goals and tactics. Each is full of unique interest, framed as large-scale strategic conflicts spread out across an entire community, in which the PCs will need to make tough choices about where and how to engage the enemy.

There is one caveat here, though.

The book doesn’t want the PCs fighting alongside NPC guards. This is most likely a deliberate choice to simplify the DM’s cognitive load and is mostly fine, except they accomplish it primarily by handing out idiot balls.

In Goldenfields, for example, they’re just explicitly incompetent:

There are no guards in the abbey, just a handful of acolytes. One of them, Zi Liang has scolded Father Darovik many times for putting the defense of Goldenfields in the hands of incompetent military leaders, which has made her somewhat unpopular.

With a little extra effort, however, some careful DMing can mostly work around these problems. In Goldenfields, for example, it’s not too difficult to set up the Chekhov’s Gun of The Guards Are Terrible Here.

Similarly, in Bryn Shander, all the guards at whatever location the PCs choose to fight are supposed to immediately run away (while all the other guards in town stay and fight). This is a problem because it flattens the strategic choices available to the players. (Instead of being able to choose how and where to reinforce the NPCs, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices, the PCs have no choice except to go all-in on the completely undefended location.) But about 90% of the solution is to just ignore the direction to have the NPCs run away and instead playing to find out.

CONCLUSION

I like Storm King’s Thunder.

It has weaknesses, but these are well-balanced by its ambition. If you can successfully pull the campaign off, it’s studded with amazing set pieces and gives ample opportunities to become one of the most memorable experiences you’ll have at the gaming table.

But that IF should not be casually ignored.

I’ve spoken to a large number of players and DMs about their experiences with Storm King’s Thunder, and a disconcerting number of them have reported campaigns which floundered, frustrated, meandered their way into boredom, or crashed spectacularly.

And these are problems directly connected to the shortcomings in Storm King’s Thunder’s design.

The one I would consider probably most significant is the campaign’s subtle-but-persistent deprotagonization of the PCs. Whether that’s all-powerful GMPCs, demeaning scenario hooks, or too-frequent “nothing you’re doing actually matters” dead ends, the result is demoralizing to the players and debilitating to the health of any long-term campaign. Why keep doing things if your actions keep getting characterized as meaningless?

The fragility of the adventure shouldn’t be ignored, either. There are far too many places where Storm King’s Thunder is (a) on rails and (b) can easily go hurtling off those rails with catastrophic results.

So, in many ways, Storm King’s Thunder is a needlessly frustrating and complicated campaign for the DM to run. But if you’re willing to tackle the challenge and can successfully thread the needle, I believe you will find it to be a highly rewarding one.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Authors: Jenna Helland, Adam Lee, Christopher Perkins, Richard Whitters
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 256

Buy Now!

FURTHER READING

Brindlewood Bay is a storytelling game by Jason Cordova. The players take on the roles of the Murder Mavens mystery book club in the titular town of Brindlewood Bay. The elderly women of the book club, who are huge fans of the Gold Crown Mysteries by Robin Masterson starring the feisty super-sleuth Amanda Delacourt, somehow keep finding themselves tangled up with local murder mysteries in real life.

And there are a disturbing number of murders per capita in this sleepy little vacation town.

The reason there are so many murders here are the Midwives of the Fragrant Void, cultists who worship the “chthonic monstrosities that will usher in the End of All Things.”

That’s right. We’re mashing up Murder She Wrote with Lovecraft, along with a healthy dose of other mystery TV shows from the ‘70s and ‘80s (including Remington Steel, Magnum P.I., and even Knight Rider).

Brindlewood Bay sets things up with a fast, elegant character creation system that lets you quickly customize your Maven, sketch in their background, forge connections with the other PCs, and flesh out the group’s personal version of the Murder Mavens. Then it wraps the game around a Powered By the Apocalypse-style resolution mechanic, performing evocative moves by rolling 2d6 + an ability modifier with three result tiers (miss, partial success, success). To this now familiar mix, it adds a couple mechanical wrinkles:

• An advantage/disadvantage system tuned for the 2d6 mechanic; and
• Crown moves, which allow you to override the results of a die roll by either playing out a flashback scene (developing and deepening your character) or advancing your character’s connection to the dark forces in Brindlewood Bay, moving them inexorably towards retirement.

The Crown moves, in particular, seem to work very well in play, with the former building organically on the sketchy foundation established during character creation and the latter relentlessly advancing the dark, long-term themes of the game.

Brindlewood Bay’s real claim to fame, however, is its approach to scenario design. It comes bundled with five one-sheet scenarios (and provides guidelines for creating your own), but these notably do not include the solution to the mystery. In fact, there is no solution until it is discovered (created) in play.

Instead, each scenario presents:

• An initial scenario hook that presents the murder,
• A cast of evocative suspects,
• Several locations, and
• A list of evocative clues.

Examples of these clues include:

• An old reel of film showing a debauched Hollywood party.
• A bloody rug.
• A phone message delivered to the wrong number.
• A fancy car, the brake lines cut.

And so forth. There’ll be something like two dozen of these clues for each scenario.

The idea is that the PCs will investigate, performing investigation moves that will result in the GM giving them clues from this list. Then, Rorschach-like, the Mavens will slowly begin figuring out what these clues mean.

So how do you know what the solution actually is?

This is actually mechanically determined. When the Mavens huddle up, compare notes, and come up with an explanation for what happened, they perform the Theorize move:

When the Mavens have an open, freewheeling discussion about the solution to a mystery based on the clues they have uncovered — and reach a concensus — roll [2d6] plus the number of Clues found … minus the mystery’s complexity.

On a 10+, it’s the correct solution. The Keeper will provide an opportunity to take down the culprit or otherwise save the day.

On a 7-9, it’s the correct solution, but the Keeper will either add an unwelcome complication to the solution itself, or present a complicated or dangerous opportunity to take down the culprit and save the day.

On a 6-, the solution is incorrect, and the Keeper reacts.

When it comes to roleplaying games, I’m generally pretty skeptical of the “have the solution be whatever the players think it should be” GMing method. I mention this for the sake of others who share this opinion, because within the specific structure of Brindlewood Bay as a storytelling game it works great.

One key thing here is that the players must know what’s going on here: That the clues have no inherent meaning, that they are assigning meaning creatively as players (not deductively as detectives), and that the truth value of their theory is mechanically determined. I’ve spoken to some GMs who tried to hide this structure from their players and their games imploded.

Which, based on my experience playing Brindlewood Bay, makes complete sense. The game is entirely built around you and the players collaborating together to create meaning out of a procedural content generator stocked with evocative content. (If you’re looking for an analogy, Brindlewood Bay turns the GM’s creative process when interpreting a random wandering encounter roll into the core gameplay.) If the players aren’t onboard with this (for whatever reason), it’s going to be grit in this game’s gears.

But if everyone is on the same page, then the results can be pretty memorable.

For example, in my playtest of the game the players created a really great theory for how the circumstances of the murder came to pass. Then, on a roll of 8 for their Theorize move, I twisted the revelation of who was actually responsible for the death itself in such a way that the Mavens all collectively agreed that they needed to cover up the crime. Simply fantastic storytelling and roleplaying.

There are a couple niggling things about the game that I think merit mention.

First, instead of having the first scenario of the game be the Maven’s first murder mystery, the game instead assumes they’ve been doing this for awhile. (Sort of as if you’re joining the story in the middle of the first season, or maybe even for the Season 2 premiere.) There are kind of two missed opportunities here, I think.

On the one hand, the story of that “first Maven mystery” seems pretty interesting and everyone at my table was surprised we weren’t going to play through it. On the other hand, having posited that the Mavens have already solved several mysteries together, the game doesn’t leverage that during character creation. (By contrast, for example, the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game from Evil Hat Productions assumes the PCs have prior stories in common, but builds specific steps into character creation in order to collaboratively establish those events and tie the characters together through them.)

Second, I struggled to some extent running Brindlewood Bay because the game’s structure requires that the clues be presented in a fairly vague fashion. (This is explicitly called out in the text several times, and is quite correct. Like the rest of the group, the GM doesn’t know what the true solution of the mystery is until the Theorize move mechanically determines it. So the GM has to be careful not to push a specific solution as they present the clues.) The difficulty, for me, is that I think clues are most interesting in their specificity. And, for similar reasons, both I and the players found it frustrating when their natural instincts as “detectives” was to investigate and analyze the clues they found for more information… except, of course, there is no additional information to be found.

The other problem I had as the GM is that the Rorschach test on which Brindlewood Bay is built fundamentally works. Which means, as the story plays out, that I, too, am evolving a personal belief in what happened. But, unlike the players, I have no mechanism by which to express that belief, except by pushing that theory through the clues and, as we’ve just discussed, breaking the game. It was frustrating to be part of a creative exercise designed to prompt these creative ideas, but to then be blocked from sharing them.

These are problems I’ll be reflecting on when I revisit Brindlewood Bay. Which is a trip I’ll definitely be taking, because the overall experience is utterly charming and greatly entertaining. I recommend that you book your own tickets at your earliest opportunity.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Jason Cordova
Publisher: The Gauntlet
Price: $10.00 (PDF)
Page Count: 40+

BUY NOW!