Candlekeep Mysteries

by All About Games

Get your copy here!!

GREAT BOOKS HIDE THEIR SECRETS WELL

An anthology of seventeen mystery-themed adventures for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

Candlekeep attracts scholars like a flame attracts moths. Historians, sages, and others who crave knowledge flock to this library fortress to peruse its vast collection of books, scribbled into which are the answers to the mysteries that bedevil them. Many of these books contain their own mysteries—each one a doorway to adventure. Dare you cross that threshold?

Candlekeep Mysteries is a collection of seventeen short, stand-alone D&D adventures designed for characters of levels 1-16. Each adventure begins with the discovery of a book, and each book is the key to a door behind which danger and glory await. These adventures can be run as one-shot games, plugged into an existing Forgotten Realms campaign, or adapted for other campaign settings.

This book also includes a poster map of the library fortress and detailed descriptions of Candlekeep and its inhabitants.

Adventure authors include: Graeme Barber, Kelly Lynne D’angelo, Alison Huang, Mark Hulmes, Jennifer Kretchmer, Daniel Kwan, Adam Lee, Ari Levitch, Sarah Madsen, Christopher Perkins, Michael Polkinghorn, Taymoor Rehman, Derek Ruiz, Kienna Shaw, Brandes Stoddard, Amy Vorpahl, and Toni Winslow-Brill.

 

For the last few years, Dungeons & Dragons books have bordered on formulaic. There’s a bunch of narrative or rules-heavy content up front, then a few appendices full of monsters, spells, and magic items in the back. It’s been a winning formula, to be sure, boosting the original role-playing game to newfound heights. But it’s also gotten a little stale.

Candlekeep Mysteries is completely different. Inside you’ll find 17 new adventures from 20 different authors, each of which could serve as the jumping off point for a home-brewed campaign or an interlude between published adventures. But, perhaps more than any other book in D&D’s 5th edition, Candlekeep Mysteries makes room for dreaming. It’s a set of one-shots — adventures that can be run in a single sitting — but it’s also a set of tools and tricks that can be placed in virtually any setting you can imagine. That makes it a resource that every Dungeon Master (DM) should have on their bookshelf.

The conceit behind Candlekeep Mysteries is that it’s a book filled with other books, each one taken from the shelves of a fictional library in the Forgotten Realms, the main setting for this edition of D&D. It starts out with a hefty preamble describing the layout and customs of the titular Candlekeep. There’s also a gorgeous poster-sized map of its confines in the back of the book. But exactly where these books are hidden in the world isn’t really important. Publisher Wizards of the Coast takes care to encourage DMs to place the library and/or its collection anywhere they like — including in the world of Exandria, home to the popular new setting created by Matt Mercer for Critical Role, but also Eberron and Greyhawk.

Each of the chapters in Candlekeep Mysteries is named after the title of an in-fiction book, and each one includes all of the new content you’ll need to run a single two-to-four hour game with your friends. Of course, you’ll need the three other foundational D&D books in order to run these adventures — the Player’s Handbook, the Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22315969/dungeons-dragons-candlekeep-mysteries-review

Leave a comment

Decklist

Buy a Deck

X