Candlekeep Mysteries First Impressions

 I picked up my copy of Candlekeep Mysteries today (from my friendly local game store) and I've started reading through it.

So far, I've read through the first four adventures and am nearly done with the fifth, the delightfully creepy "Shemshine's Bedtime Rhyme." Unlike the previous anthology books, I think that the adventures contained within here are actually likely to be doable in a single session, and are all built to work as either a one-shot or as a brief interlude in an existing campaign (or in some cases, a great jumping-off point for a major chapter in a campaign.)

The book begins with a description of Candlekeep, the library-fortress on the Sword Coast, which also happens to be where my most-played character, an Eldritch Knight Fighter, developed his Sage background. (I'll have to discuss with my DM as to whether he technically counts as a member of the Avowed or if, by leaving the citadel, he has forfeited his right to come and go as he pleases.) There are some fun bits here, including stat blocks for the Sages and Master Sages who make up most of the Avowed (Candlekeep's monastic librarians) as well as a draconic ghost who guards the depths of the castle's vaults. (These would be cool stat blocks for any big fantasy library. I definitely think I'll borrow them for the Isemeri Library in Ravnica when my players inevitably have to explore that to find out about enemies they might have in House Dimir.)

Unlike the Yawning Portal's pretty classic dungeon crawls, the emphasis here is much more on, well, unraveling mysteries (as such, reading the adventures as a prospective DM really spoils the surprise, so reader beware - some of the adventures are something like "this place is abandoned, because this one type of monster moved in and did bad things to the people here," which sounds dull on paper but can be very atmospheric if you run the adventure with an eye toward keeping things obscured.)

Occasionally, you might need to do a bit of work to motivate the players to investigate. Chris Perkin's Book of the Raven points the players to a creepy place, where they might discover more or less what happened there, and they can stumble into a very dangerous place indeed, but what defines "success" in that adventure is sort of up to the DM - it's mostly a lore dump and a pretty good prologue for a Ravenloft campaign.

Organizationally, they've played a bit with formatting in what I assume is an attempt to make it easier for a person to run things out of the book - non-Monster Manual stat blocks are put in the adventure chapters themselves rather than an appendix at the back of the book. The downside is that it's harder to just rush to those chapters and see what the cool new monsters are. The emphasis here, though, really is more on the exploration and mystery, putting the Exploration Pillar front and center in a way that I guess other adventures haven't.

There are 17 adventures here that provide stuff up to level 16 (which is the highest level of tier 3.) I'm a little disappointed there's nothing here for tier 4, as I'm really curious to see how the pros structure an adventure for people that powerful (I still need to get Dungeon of the Mad Mage.) You could just make a campaign out of the book, but these are probably better designed to do individually.

For now, the one I'm almost finished reading, Shemshime's Bedtime Rhyme, is my favorite - filled with atmosphere, though definitely an adventure that you should do after getting a clear list of soft and hard limits on creepiness factors.