Thread by @hexcrawl

My copy of #CandlekeepMysteries finally arrived, so I'm diving in.

Beautiful cover art by Clint Cearley.

This is more or less live-tweeting. So expect to see a lot of raw thoughts.

So my honest first question with this book was: Will it render the excellent DM's Guild book Elminster's Candlekeep Companion by @justicearman and @Thrawn589 obsolete?

The answer: Not at all. I would say it actually super-charges it.

As a visual example of this, consider the incredible poster map that Marco Bernardini did for the Companion. When I heard there was a going to be a poster map in Candlekeep Mysteries, I thought it was a shame that Bernardini's work was going to be rendered superfluous.

But no!

AFAICT, #CandlekeepMysteries deliberately follows Bernardini's design, but from a unique angle. (Unless I'm missing something, the only antecedent map was from the Baldur's Gate video games and was very different.)

Consider these two insets:

That's not just similar. That's the same place mapped from a different perspective.

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

When I reviewed the Companion, I said it was probably worth buying just for the poster map alone. #CandlekeepMysteries doesn't change that; in fact, it's probably even MORE true.

When my PCs head to Candlekeep, I'll definitely have both maps on the wall.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4472…

What's true visually here is true in general: #CandlekeepMysteries 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 CM scenarios.

In other news, I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS SHIP.

This is from the image of Candlekeep in #DescentIntoAvernus, which doesn't strictly correspond to the maps above, but you can see a ship of similar oddity on those maps.

... but flipping through the Companion I've just realized they already go into it.

All right, I'm clearly going to have to close the Companion so that I actually focus on #CandlekeepMysteries. 😉

The First Reader is charged with expanding Candlekeep's collection and each visitor is required to submit a book that does not already exist in the collection.

When I first heard about #CandlekeepMysteries I actually thought THIS would be the focus: Questing to find books.

This kind of cries out for a DM's Guild adventure anthology. You could call it CANDLEKEEP: BOUNTIES OF THE FIRST READER.

It would be cool to just have a list of books that are not yet in the Candlekeep collection. Even if getting the book is just resolved through a quick skill check before heading for Candlekeep, having that little POP of flavor would be a big value add.

In The Complex of Zombies, I had a similar list for use when rummaging through a ruined library belonging to the Sons of Jade. Stuff like:

Shards of Nephiroth
Aspects of a Chaotic Mind
Journeys Across the 8th Dimension
The Eleventh School of Magick

drivethrurpg.com/product/28409/…

Roughly 80% of my brain has been occupied with surprising scenario hooks this week, so it's probably NOT surprising I'm thinking about what this looks like for book-quests.

Often these will just be treasure quests with the book as the treasure. So a lot of treasure-hook stuff will apply.

You'd generally want to avoid any "the book is fake!" or "it rotted away!" twists, as these kind of rug-yankers can wear out their welcome pretty quickly.

Works of the Avowed would be a very different play-oriented list. Kind of tempting to do them up in Latin?

Breviarium de musica
Ars cantus mensurabilis
Hippocratis rescindi nequeat
Articella de Zakhara
Tractus de magis subtilia

(Translated:

Breviary of Music
Art of the Measureable Song
Hippocratic Aphorisms
Compendium of Zakhara
Treatise of the Weave)

Although, upon reflection, Hippocrates probably isn't meaningful in Faerun. (Although perhaps Elminster brought it back from our world.)

A chosen group of the Avowed (librarians) travels around Candlekeep ceaselessly chanting the prophecies of Alaundo the Seer.

RANDOM PROPHECIES OF ALAUNDO THE SEER is another DM's Guild gimme.

Okay, the spoilers begin now.

The book is an anthology, so I'll probably be looking at each adventure, starting with THE JOY OF EXTRADIMENSIONAL SPACES by Michael Polkinghorn.

I have a bunch of new followers, so I will take a moment to say:

This is a reaction thread, not a review thread.

The important distinction is that if I say "here's a thing I would change when running the adventure" that doesn't translate to "this book is bad."

The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces is a good scenario: The PCs come to Candlekeep to meet with a researcher and find them missing. The investigation leads them to a hidden extradimensional sanctum, where they have to solve a puzzle to figure out the passphrase home.

The sanctum uses hub-and-spoke exploration. Good environments. Nice mix of roleplaying & combat encounters with the surviving experiments and constructs of Fistandia (the mage who built the sanctum).

(Would have liked some encounters designed to potentially go either way, instead of all being clearly predesigned for either interaction or fighting.)

Now I'm going to do some gritty analysis that shouldn't be interpreted as detracting from that top line: Good scenario.

Here's the big problem: The scenario needs all the PCs to go through the portal and get stuck.

The whole scenario breaks if only one or two PCs go through first to scout things out.

And this is made far more likely because the missing researcher (Matreous) is waiting for them directly on the other side.

As scripted:
- PCs go through portal.
- Immediately see Matreous.
- Matreous says, "Stay here while I go back."
- Matreous goes back and is immediately killed, leaving the PCs trapped.

You can see how this gets mucked up if even one PC stays behind.

There's no easy solution if you keep the adventure's metaphysics (i.e., someone outside the sanctum can open the portal and allow people to escape), because the only way the PCs get trapped in there is if they're really stupid.

Even if they all go, they just need to tell the Avowed what's going on and what the password is and it'll render the whole problem moot.

So ditch the metaphysic: One password opens the portal in, but that doesn't let you escape. You NEED the other password to open an outbound portal.

Leave Matreous where he is or drop his corpse somewhere in the sanctum, depending on your interest in roleplaying an NPC tag-along for the whole scenario.

Alternatively: If you drop Matreous' corpse deep in the sanctum, you can leave the metaphysics alone.

If the players are smart enough to avoid getting stuck? Good for them!

(Hopefully they figure out the version where one of them doesn't just sit out the whole adventure.)

(You need to drop Matreous' corpse here because otherwise there's only passive motivation to search the sanctum and no pay-off from doing so.)

Tip for running one-way portals: When a PC goes through, don't describe what happens. Start a counter & keep track of the number of rounds it takes for each PC to go through or decide never to.

Then flip to the other side and play it out on the count.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4609…

The adventure also has a bunch of continuity glitches: For example, there's an Avowed in the room when they go through the portal, but they're never mentioned again.

The premise of the adventure is that Fistandia wrote a book about to create her extradimensional sanctum, but then it later turns out Mystra just gave it to her.

And so forth.

Nothing that's a big deal, but stuff that I'd definitely want to iron out before running the scenario.

Something else I'd like to know is what the puzzle books are like.

There are seven identical books in the sanctum that each have a single letter on the spine. The seven letters are an anagram of the password you need to get out.

The covers of the books are described... but what's inside them?

Once the PCs realize that these books are a puzzle they need to solve, they're going to go through them with a fine-tooth comb.

I'd like to know the answers to those questions.

Speaking of the puzzle books, though, this is also NOT how you want to run a puzzle: The PCs enter a room and the DM simply says, "You should check out the weird books."

I've talked about this a bit in relation to traps, but anywhere you've got these "and then the game automatically plays itself" interactions, you should generally be massively skeptical about the.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4502…

In Area M5 there's also a journal that literally says, "Fearful that a guest might become trapped in the mansion, Fistandia hid the command word to open the portal to Candlekeep on the spines of seven books in her mansion."

So that's less of a "puzzle" and more of an activity.

(This also highlights the fridge logic of the scenario: If she doesn't want people to get stuck, why not just hang a sign over the portal? And it's a little hazy why she even needs the sanctum.

But you can mostly handwave this with "eccentric magi be eccentric, yo.")

The truth is that it's tricky to have "there's one important book on this shelf full of books" puzzles in a tabletop RPG: The players aren't actually in the room and it's difficult to frame this interaction in a way which meaningfully involves player interactivity.

One way is to prep a list of sample titles from each shelf/pile with a puzzle book:

Volo's Guide to Monsters
Zakharan Feng Shui
Tales of the Mysterious Isle
T
Beyond the Borderlands
A Canticle for Elminster

Get a couple of these & you can zero in on the weird one-letter title.

Then leave one of the puzzle books lying out somewhere conspicuous (e.g., mentioned in the boxed text: "You enter a dining room. There's a book lying on the table.")

Maybe place one with Matreous' corpse.

Oh, hey. It's the Three Clue Rule.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118…

The reaction thread continues over here.

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1373992354164531207