Go to Part 1

THE CURIOUS TALE OF WISTERIA VALE (Kienna Shaw), much like “The Lore of Lurue,” is a fantasy holodeck in book form. But unlike “Lurue,” Shaw’s “Wisteria Vale” is a brilliant success.

What’s the difference?

Beyond a simply higher level of craft and execution, it largely boils down to stakes.

Wisteria Vale is a fake reality being used to imprison a cursed adventurer until such time as the cure can be found.

… which, it turns out, is right now.

The PCs are hired to take the cure into the book, cure the cursed hero, and bring them out again. The PCs then discover that the book has ended up in Candlekeep, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Because the things that happen in Wisteria Vale actually matter, everything about the adventure is heightened and it can give you things to actually care about. And because the PCs are given meaningful agency in the adventure, the stakes of the adventure are placed in meaningful jeopardy and the things the PCs achieve (or fail to achieve) are meaningful (and, therefore, exciting).

In Wisteria Vale itself, of course, the PCs discover that things have gone awry in the pocket dimension/simulation, and they’re confronted with a mystery which alternates freely between the creepy and the surreal as they seek to unravel the Vale’s enigmas.

Shaw does a particularly fantastic job of prepping a situation rather than a plot, giving the GM lots of tools for actively responding to whatever course of action the PCs choose.

Conversely, the players are given a cool little playground where they can run wild to the limits of their imagination.

There are cool places, cool characters, and cool events.

It’s just cool.

Grade: A

THE BOOK OF INNER ALCHEMY (Daniel Kwan) features the Order of the Immortal Lotus, a school of martial artists under the instruction of Master Bak Mei who have fled from eastern lands and established a temple in the Cloakwood near Candlekeep. The adventure begins when Bak Mei sends several of his monks to break into Candlekeep and steal several pages from The Book of Inner Alchemy which contain instructions for making a legendary ki-stealing magic item called the gloves of soul catching.

The break-in goes awry, however, and although the monks escape with the pages, they leave several dead Avowed in their wake. Candlekeep hires the PCs to track down the killers.

The atmosphere of the adventure seems very much intended to evoke the kung fu flicks of the 1970’s, including the cheesy, badly translated dialogue:

• “Do you really think you can defeat my Immortal Lotus style? You were mere worms slithering through the mud on a rainy day. I am the bird, here to feast!”
• “Before you get a chance to fight Bak Mei, you’ll have to deal with me—Steel Claw!”
• “My Immortal Lotus style was supposed to be… unbeatable!” <dies>

Overall, the adventure is fairly threadbare, but quite serviceable. There are some things to nitpick (the central premise is that somebody decided to hide a book that must never be read by shelving it in the correct section of the most famous library in the world), but the only serious problem I see here is that the PCs are not positioned as the protagonists. The story just kind of happens to them.

Here’s a simple example, which is perhaps also the most clearly egregious, from the initial murder investigation:

A character who examines the bodies and succeeds on a DC 13 Intelligence (Investigation) check discovers a torn piece of white cloth clutched in the fist of one victim. The scrap of fabric is emblazoned with a white lotus inside a black circle. The Avowed recognize this as the symbol of the Order of the Immortal Lotus, a league of monks led by a master martial artist known as Bak Mei.

Ignore the bit where the PCs need to make a skill check to find the one-and-only clue that allows the adventure to happen (Kwan deals with that shortly thereafter by just having an Avowed find the clue for the PCs) and focus on what happens after the PCs find the clue: Instead of being put in a spotlight (making an Intelligence check to identify the symbol themselves or being allowed to research it while standing in a giant library), the PCs are automatically shunted to one side so that an NPC can solve the mystery for them.

It’s a small thing, but there’s a lot of small stuff like this through the whole adventure. And it drags the whole thing down.

Grade: C-

THE CANOPIC BEING (Jennifer Kretchmer) has an absolutely fantastic hook. The PCs arrive in Candlekeep to do some research and, shortly thereafter, are summoned to meet with Great Reader A’lai Aivenmore, who shows them a copy of The Canopic Being. This ancient tome contains incredibly dangerous rituals that allow a mummy lord to place its organs, normally sealed within canopic jars, into living hosts.

The ultimate chapter details how Valin Sarnaster, an honored oracle of Savras, has studied the work and intends to follow its instruction and ascend as a mummy lord. The final page contains a list of the living victims in which Valin will place his organs.

The last names on the list?

The PCs.

This is one of those hooks that’s so good that it more or less demands that you run the adventure. And the rest of the adventure follows through on its promise.

The PCs track Valin back to his tomb. Here Kretchmer designs an absolutely stunning dungeon featuring an incredible array of unique divination-themed encounters. It’s magical and amazing and creepy, offering a dungeon experience that’s not only solid in its fundamentals, but delightful and memorable in its execution. Things are further fleshed out with a tight cast of memorable NPCs, with everything eventually culminating in a stunning set-piece battle with Valin in the mummy lord’s zero-g demesne.

As a high-level adventure (targeted at 13^th level PCs), Kretchmer does an absolutely fabulous job of lacing advice throughout the entire adventure on how it can be tightly integrated into an ongoing campaign — through foreshadowing ahead of time; by planting lore from your wider campaign within the adventure; and with a thoughtful breakdown of how the aftermath of the adventure might play out over time.

This adventure is a rare gem.

Grade: A

THE SCRIVENER’S TALE (Brandes Stoddard) features an incredibly creepy cursed book which is also the prison for the Princess of the Shadow Glass, a powerful and evil archfey. After accidentally triggering the curse, the PCs need to backtrack the book, discover the true history of the Princess of the Shadow Glass, and eventually figure out how to free (and then defeat) her. All the while, the Princess herself will be in telepathic communication with them, hoping to make them her allies.

The adventure is solid throughout and does a very admirable job of capturing an epic scope (it’s designed for 14^th level characters) while only having a handful of pages to work with. My one critique is that it would benefit significantly from a clearer and more concise summary of the Princess’ history for the DM.

The adventure’s shining achievement, however, is the curse of the Scrivener’s Mark. Stoddard has put a lot of careful thought and care into its design, and the results have paid off: The curse is progressive, slowly growing in dread as its effects grow worse and the tell-tale Elvish script which slowly begins to cover the victim’s entire body, until it finally consumes them and turns them into a statue made of solid, smoky glass.

This is made particularly clever, however, because Stoddard has designed each stage of the curse to have both a drawback AND a benefit. These start with simple things — the character stops casting a shadow and begins speaking strange languages they’ve never known before — but then grow steadily worse and more powerful as the character’s nature is drawn into that of the Princess of the Shadow Glass. The curse is thus flavorful and terrifying in its looming doom, but not something that the players will simply resent.

It’s complicated and beautiful… much like the Princess.

Grade: C+

ALKAZAAR’S APPENDIX (Adam Lee) features the fabulous stories of Alkazaar’s Thrilling Tales… and also a small appendix detailing the one adventure Alkazaar was never able to complete. If the PCs take the hook, they’ll be able to follow Alkazaar’s directions and locate the Lost Golem who has been seeking its master for centuries.

What seems like a fairly charming fairy tale, however, suddenly rolls back to reveal a fantasy epic: The golem’s master was a king who enacted a mighty spell to seal away the Nether Scroll of Azumar and keep it from the rapacious grasp of an evil wyrm. The king remains trapped within the seal, the wyrm has transformed itself into a dracolich, and the PCs are about to get right in the middle of the ancient feud.

“Alkazaar’s Appendix” is a fun adventure. It’s a little fragile in parts (requiring alliances with specific NPCs at specific points for the adventure to continue), has a few hiccups (like intermittently forgetting that the PCs’ guides exist), and a few missed opportunities (the picture-portal used to go to the golem should be a functional puzzle the players can solve and not just something that “requires 1 hour of study” and then the DM tells you what you did). But I would comfortably describe this as “eminently playable.”

And the emotionally resonant ending — where, if all goes well, there is a heart-touching reunion between golem and master (and, if not, other emotions to be had) — adds significant flair, in my opinion. Lee grounds the adventure in characters and human drama, which elevates the material above a procedural hack ‘n slash.

Grade: C+

 XANTHORIA (Toni Winslow-Brill) features Xanthoria, a druid who became obsessed with immortality and has transformed into a lichen lich. This central concept of the undead remnants of a druid clinging to existence through a perverted symbiosis-turned-parasitism with the natural world is really cool and well worth pilfering.

Unfortunately, the associated adventure is a bit naff.

The opening is very awkward, and I’ll let the adventure speak for itself (through its opening boxed text):

A fungal plague is ravaging the Sword Coast, spreading quickly from one settlement to the next. Although magic has proven effective at ridding individuals of the spore infection, the plague is spreading too quickly to contain. Creatures that become infected fall ill with a fever and sprout disgusting, gooey, fungal growths before losing their autonomy, acting like zombies. They also release spores that infect other beasts and humanoids. Eventually, the plague reduces all infected creatures and foodstuffs to puddles of ooze.

Humanoids infected with the plague drone the word “Xanthoria” over and over for no discernible reason before death finally claims them. You have determined that there’s a book by that name contained in the library-fortress of Candlekeep. With luck, the book holds information that might help you end the saprophytic plague before it wipes out every village, town, and city in Faerûn.

As you dig into the mechanics of the plague, you’ll discover that it is, in fact, truly horrific:

• Anyone within 10 feet of a plague victim must make a DC 20 Constitution saving throw or become infected, forcing additional DC 20 saving throws until they die.
• If you’ve had the disease, you’re immune… for 24 hours. Then you can get sick again.
• It also infects (and can be spread by) animals.
• It infects food and crops, which are automatically destroyed within a day and can also spread the plague.

So avoiding infection is basically impossible, more than half of the population is going to die the first time they catch it, and most of the rest will follow shortly thereafter. I’d say this is literally a biblical plague, but it’s actually much, much worse than that and even if people DO survive, it’s going to be followed by a famine of almost unfathomable proportions.

This is literally the Apocalypse. Even if the PCs manage to destroy Xanthoria and end the plague, the Sword Coast will have already been destroyed.

But here’s the thing: You can’t blow up an entire setting and then “fix” it in 15 pages, for the same reason that The Lord of the Rings isn’t a short story.

In an adventure like this, the set up for the Apocalypse has to be so scant (as demonstrated in practice by the boxed text above) that it’s impossible to set the stakes and have the players take the situation seriously. And even if you put in the legwork of setting up the saprophytic plague, adding all the pre-“Xanthoria” scenes of apocalyptic horror as the plague spreads, and then structuring things so that the PCs actually discover the existence of the book at Candlekeep (instead of just being told that they do)… you’re still faced with the impossible task of satisfactorily resolving the entire Apocalypse of the Sword Coast in a one-shot.

So “Xanthoria” is fatally flawed from the beginning.

Okay. So let’s say you scrap that entire premise and reframe things: The plague has broken out in a single city and it is so utterly horrific that the consequences if it’s allowed to spread are clear. The PCs are in a race to prevent the Apocalypse, and they’re following a lead to Candlekeep. (Let’s say that, once the plague victims start droning “Xanthoria,” a local bookseller remembers selling a unique book of that title to a scholar who said they were going to use it to gain entrance to Candlekeep. The person who brought the book to the bookseller is already dead of the plague.)

Is the adventure itself any good?

I’d say it’s serviceable, but rather mediocre. It’s saddled with a twee, amnesiac NPC who turns out to be Xanthoria’s living phylactery, so the only way to actually solve the adventure is to “convince Thunderwing to give up her life” with a Charisma check. (For some reason just stabbing her is never even mentioned as an option.) This is supposed to be very, very, very, very sad… but is only moderately so because the PCs met her like three seconds ago and not-at-all so because these are 16^th-level characters and they can just cast raise dead. Except they can’t because, if they could, it wouldn’t be “sad.” (No other reason is given.)

The adventure itself is a little dungeon with eleven rooms. The key for these rooms feature a lot of cool descriptions of fungus and some moderately creepy fungoid experiments being carried out by Xanthoria that also let the PCs slowly discover the tale of her fall… if they hadn’t already read about it in the titular book. The lore here is atmospheric, but the combat encounters seem perfunctory and aren’t balanced correctly for a 16^th-level party. Similarly, some efforts are taken to nerf the abilities of 16^th level characters that would trivialize the challenges presented, but even if I thought this was a wise effort, I don’t think it’s a successful one. (If you use the adventure, I would aim for a lower PC level and tweak things accordingly. It would be significantly less work than the more drastic alterations required for the reverse.)

Grade: D

CONCLUSION

What I’m personally looking for in an adventure anthology (or any anthology, really) is just a good selection of stuff I like. Some of the best anthologies I’ve ever read only have a hit rate of like 80%. I’m not expecting every single entry to be good (or suited for my tastes if it is). I can ignore the stuff I don’t like. There just needs to be enough of the stuff that I do like.

In some cases, just one truly phenomenal entry can make an entire anthology worthwhile.

With that in mind, let’s briefly survey the scenario grades:

Anything with an A or B grade is an adventure I would definitely run. Stuff with a C grade I’m more skeptical of, but are likely salvageable if you particularly like the concept or content.

So out of seventeen adventure we have:

• 8 that I would definitely run;
• 4 that could be salvaged; and
• 5 that I think are a complete miss.

That, by itself, is not quite hitting “greatest anthology of all time” levels, but it’s a very good anthology. If you break that down, it works out to about $4 per really good scenario and that feels like a no-brainer to me.

But to this must be added that two of these scenarios — “A Deep and Creeping Darkness” and “The Canopic Being” — aren’t just good scenarios, in my opinion, they’re truly great scenarios. Honestly, even if everything else in the anthology were utterly unusable, I’d probably still recommend it just on the strength of those two adventures.

So the only mystery left to Candlekeep Mysteries at this point is why you haven’t bought it yet.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Project Lead: Christopher Perkins
Writing: Graeme Barber, Bill Benham, Kelly Lynne D’Angelo, Alison Huang, Mark Hulmes, Jennifer Kretchmer, Daniel Kwan, Adam Lee, Ari Levitch, Chris Lindsay, Sarah Madsen, Christopher Perkins, Michael Polkinghorn, Taymoor Rehman, Hannah Rose, Derek Ruiz, Kienna Shaw, Brandes Stoddard, Amy Vorpahl, Toni Winslow-Brill
Rules Development: Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor, Taymoor Rehman

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip: Running Portals
Review: Candlekeep Companion

Go to Part 1

SHEMSHIME’S BEDTIME RHYME (Ari Levitch) has the PCs trapped in the annex of a library that’s struck by a magical curse. The Avowed place the annex under quarantine, creating a kind of bottle episode where the PCs are locked in with a small cast of NPCs.

The adventure, therefore, is a mixture of roleplaying with the NPCs; an escalating series of horror vignettes resulting from the curse; and a mystery where the PCs are trying to figure out the source of the curse.

Unfortunately, “Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme” doesn’t quite work. It’s not a bad scenario, but it also fails to be a particularly good one.

There are two fundamental problems here. The first is that, while the adventure isn’t precisely railroaded, the author does spend a lot of time trying to script the events as if they were designing a computer game.

For example, in Event 1: Quarantined, all of the NPCs have an immediate scripted reaction to Varnyr announcing that they’ve been quarantined (p. 65-66). Then the text immediately gives ANOTHER set of scripted reactions to Varnyr’s announcement to each NPC.

I initially couldn’t figure out why Levitch wouldn’t just list each NPC once with ALL of their reactions, but it clicked into place when I realized he was scripting a cutscene followed by the subsequent “click on an NPC” conversations of a CRPG.

The entire adventure, unfortunately, is sabotaged by this linear scripting. In addition to the NPCs, each of the events is also heavily scripted. And, since the author obviously can’t control the PCs, this leads to the common problem of everything in the adventure being described as a cool scene from a movie that the PCs watch play out in front of them.

Sure, the PCs can get involved and muck up these scripts. But because they’re designed as scripts, the adventure material quickly becomes worthless in actual play (unless you force the script).

An even more fundamental problem are the NPCs themselves. If you think of John Carpenter’s The Thing or Ridley Scott’s Alien or Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, the thing that makes these stories click is that the high stakes and paranoia combined with the need for unified action cause the characters to slam into each other: I think we need to do A. You think we need to do B. We can’t do both. That is a conflict that needs to be resolved.

But that doesn’t happen in “Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme.” Everyone wants the quarantine to end. No one really has any idea how to do that, so they all just sit passively waiting for the PCs to click on them for their scripted dialogue.

Salvaging this adventure would mean scrapping the scripts and then re-designing from the ground up so that there were multiple high-stakes issues in play that could be played off against each other. Unfortunately, that would probably mean scrapping almost the entire adventure as written and starting over from scratch.

Grade: D-

PRICE OF BEAUTY (Mark Hulmes) features the titular “book of tips for channeling self-love and inner-beauty” which is also a literal portal to a spa shrine dedicated to Sune, the god of love and beauty.

Unfortunately, the shrine has been suborned by hags, who are using it to curse the supplicants.

“Price of Beauty” is a pretty good example of how Candlekeep Mysteries takes scenarios with offer-type mystery hooks and then sandbags them with heavy-handed patron hooks. The adventure here begins with the PCs unexpectedly encountering the book and discovering that there’s a magic portal in it. This is an offer! It’s interesting! What will the PCs choose to do?

And the answer is: Be immediately interrupted by an NPC who comes in and says, “Oh good! You have the magic book! I need you to find the missing person who was last seen holding the book!”

Fortunately, “Price of Beauty” recovers easily from this sandbagging. It’s a nicely done creepy horror scenario where a beautiful place is revealed to have dark and terrible secrets. It has good maps, good flow, and good NPCs.

One fantastical element the adventure touches on that I really like is the concept of “this is an ancient text, written hundreds of years ago and a cultural touchstone for multiple generations… also, the author is an elf and still alive, so you can go chat with her.”

If you’re looking to run this adventure, I’d prep both an adversary roster and a revelation list. They’ll make it a lot easier to run the rich complexities of the scenario.

Grade: B

 BOOK OF CYLINDERS (Graeme Barber) is a difficult scenario to talk about. Shortly after Candlekeep Mysteries was released, Barber publicly disclaimed the adventure as it had been published. He reported that it had been substantially altered between his final draft and publication. You can see his original Twitter thread and also a lengthier description of the entire creation process (and its aftermath) here.

This review, obviously, is going to be looking at the adventure as it was published.

And the biggest problem “Book of Cylinders” has, as published, is that its core structure is incoherent.

For example, the whole thing is set up as an investigation: The grippli village that provides fish to the Avowed of Candlekeep have stopped sending fish and the PCs are asked to investigate. Something is wrong with the grippli. What is it?

The PCs need to figure out that yuan ti have taken over the grippli village.

… but the initial quest-giver just tells them that yuan ti have taken over the village and that the grippli leader has fled to a nearby trading post.

Then the PCs talk to other people at Candlekeep, who tell them that yuan ti have taken over the village and yada yada yada.

Then they talk to a ship captain who tells them that yuan ti have taken over the village and yada yada yada.

Then they talk to the grippli leader-in-exile, who tells them that yuan ti have taken over the village and yada yada yada.

“I’d like you to investigate the murder of Bob, who was definitely killed by Lara” doesn’t make for a great murder mystery.

Every adventure in Candlekeep Mysteries, of course, is supposed to have a book for its hook, so the quest-giver also gives the PCs a grippli book with a prophecy describing the events currently happening at the village. The book, of course, tells the PCs that yuan ti have taken over the village and yada yada yada. But the prophecy also doesn’t match what’s actually happening at the grippli village… so the whole thing is supposed to be a red herring, I guess?

The adventure is then structured to give the PCs a choice of how they want to go to the grippli village (and there are vestiges of a version in which this was a legitimate choice and the adventure had been designed to flexibly accommodate whatever the PCs chose to do)… but one of the choices is WRONG and you will be PUNISHED for choosing it:

In addition, you might pit the characters against some random encounters along the way, to hint at the error of their ways in turning down the sea voyage.

Once the PCs get to the village, a big deal is made out of what the yuan ti are up to:

The evil serpentfolk are here for a particular purpose, and as a rule they have no quarrel with anyone who doesn’t directly threaten their plan or try to impede what they’re doing.

The yuan ti have an agenda! They’re here for a reason!

What is it?

Couldn’t tell you.

The adventure never explains it.

The resolution of the adventure seems pretty straightforward: The PCs kill all the evil yuan ti, free the grippli and the good yuan ti, and everyone is happy about it.

But the adventure never provides a roster or count of the yuan ti in the village!

As published, therefore, I would describe “Book of Cylinders” as literally unplayable.

Grade: F

SARAH OF YELLOWCREST MANOR (Derek Ruiz) is another highlight of the book and a really good adventure.

While perusing the stacks of Candlekeep, the PCs trigger a haunted journal. Sarah of Yellowcrest’s ghost points them on a path to seek vengeance for her murder. The ensuing investigation is spread across three far-flung locations — Candlekeep, Waterdeep, and the village of Greenfast.

(It would be pretty easy to use this as the framing device for a mini-campaign if you wanted to — inserting other adventures as the PCs travel from one location to another, getting hooked into urban shenanigans in Waterdeep, and so forth. It could also be easily woven into a larger campaign, such as Storm King’s Thunder.)

The investigation itself is meaty, with a good mix of investigation methods: research, roleplaying interactions with varied NPCs, evidence collection, etc. Then the whole adventure culminates in a nicely xandered dungeon with a really satisfying key.

Plus! Ruiz wraps things up with a nice, tight write-up of potential fallout from the scenario. What I really like about this is that (a) it is, in fact, kept tight and (b) it provides concrete guidance, but is very flexible and reflective that the details of what the PCs actually do in the adventure will vary a lot. The adventure would be top-notch even without this final flourish, but it really seals the deal.

Grade: A

LORE OF LORUE (Kelly Lynne D’Angelo) is another adventure in which the titular tome turns out to be a magical portal. This particular portal leads to a demiplane that basically functions as a holodeck simulation of the 4^th century DR.

This pseudo-holodeck includes quick saving (if you die, you can rejoin the rest of the group when they enter the next room). Unfortunately, it also uses the plotting of a Call of Duty game:

After the characters enter the book, their literal path is dictated by the story… If anyone tries to move away from the forest they are halted by an impassable barrier of force that disallows any other route.

(…)

No map is necessary for the adventurers to get from one place to the next; if they try to deviate from the direction the story takes them, the same barrier of force prevents them from making any progress.

Frankly, this is crap.

The arbitrary (yet completely meaningless) encounters that the PCs are arbitrarily shuffled between are… fine. Nothing particularly wrong with them. Nothing particularly interesting about them, either. They are functional and varied.

I could point out that the metaphysics of the scenario are inconsistent (characters who aren’t present when the book is opened are allowed to join after the fact, but later the adventure says that they can’t). But it doesn’t really matter.

Because railroad.

I will note that the book is called Lore of Lurue and the holodeck demiplane is supposedly designed to instruct the reader/player in said lore…

…except, as far as I can tell, that doesn’t actually happen.

The closest the adventure seems to get is this passage:

In the prologue of Lore of Lurue — not a part of the story that the characters witness — Ecamane Truesilver describes the underlying truth of the situation…

Which is mind-boggling on multiple levels.

First, because the book explicitly does not have any text except an introductory scroll that plays when the PCs open the cover. (And so, no, there is no such prologue.)

Second, because this is the literally the adventure saying, “We’re just going to skip the part that lets players have any clue about what any of this crap means.”

As a result, what you’re left with is a bunch of meaningless encounters that culminate with: “If the characters vanquish the corrupted avatar of Lurue or are in danger of being vanquished themselves, read [this deus ex machina].”

And: “Regardless of the outcome of the characters’ efforts, the book’s final scene ends the same.”

A simulated, heavy-handed railroad with no stakes, no meaning, and no consequences?

No thank you.

Grade: F

KANDLEKEEP DEKONSTRUKTION (Amy Vorpahl) has a concept: The janitors of Candlekeep — who have names like Rooster Muffin, Pig Wheat, and Ram Sugar — are actually a secret society who have learned that one of the towers of Candlekeep is a rocketship.

Not a magic rocketship. Or a spelljamer. Just a rocketship. That’s also a stone tower.

As the summary might suggest, this adventure is pretty deep in the wacky-for-the-sake-of-wacky school of D&D design. Wackity-schmakity-doo.

And, to be perfectly honest, this is clearly something that some people want, but it’s never done anything for me. I assume it’s meant to be funny? “Ha ha! There’s a dwarf named Rooster Muffin! So random!”

In short, this adventure is so far outside of what I’m interested in that anything designed like this is automatically unusable for me.

But if this sort of thing works for you, then this adventure is probably pretty good. Solid structure. Cool premise.

There are just a couple of things I would take a closer look at.

First, the scenario hook is a trifle… convoluted?

• A dwarf carrying a book walks up to the PCs and dies.
• The adventure assumes the PCs will read the book in detail before reporting the corpse to the authorities.
• The authorities are then assumed to confiscate the book.
• The PCs are assumed to then just go about their business until an earthquake hits.
• They are then assumed to talk to one specific person hanging out in the Candlekeep courtyard.
• That person will then escort them to the site of the adventure.

That probably needs a little TLC.

Second, the adventure assumes that the PCs will want to STOP the rocket ship from launching into space.

I mean… that doesn’t seem likely, does it?

“Here’s a flamethrower loaded with liquid awesome. You are not supposed to fire it!”

(If it were me, that rocket is definitely headed straight to an abandoned Spelljammer space station in orbit around Toril.)

Grade: C

ZIKRAN’S ZEPHYREAN TOME (Taymoor Rehman) starts with the players discovering a friendly djinni that has been trapped inside one of Candlekeep’s books.

The only way to help him?

Track down the wizard who trapped him in there.

Getting down to brass tacks here: This is just a really solid adventure.

The PCs pick up Zikran’s trail at one of his old, abandoned labs (which has been taken over as a lair by a young dragon). Then they follow clues to Zikran’s new lair, which is located in a HAUNTED CLOUD GIANT AIR FORTRESS that he’s trying to repair.

These are great locations, absolutely dripping with atmosphere presented near flawlessly with well-developed keys. The ghosts are incredibly creepy. I love them.

Grade: A

Go to Part 3

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