D&D 5E Official Candlekeep Mysteries Announcement & Info About 'The Canopic Being' Adventure

The official announcement of the book that was revealed yesterday includes an image of the alternate cover. Clint Cearley did the standard cover and Simen Meyer did the alternate cover. It looks like this isn't the book spearheaded by Kate Welch and featuring Marisha Ray and Deborah Ann Woll, as they don't feature on the list of designers. The hardcover book will be available on March 16th...

The official announcement of the book that was revealed yesterday includes an image of the alternate cover. Clint Cearley did the standard cover and Simen Meyer did the alternate cover.

It looks like this isn't the book spearheaded by Kate Welch and featuring Marisha Ray and Deborah Ann Woll, as they don't feature on the list of designers.

The hardcover book will be available on March 16th for $49.95, and the alternate cover will be available from local game stores. Instead, the press releases describe it as a "New Book Full of Short Adventures from Up-and-Coming Designers".

1.jpg


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 writers 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.

candlekeep-key-small.jpg



WotC's announcement on Facebook includes additional writers not mentioned on the product page -- Hannah Rose, and Chris Lindsay. I asked the company who does WotC's press stuff and they confirmed that they contributed but not as authors.


The Canopic Being
One of the adventures, by Jennifer Kretchmer, is called The Canopic Being. It's 10-12 pages, designed for a single session.

Like all the adventures it starts in Candlekeep, the greatest library in the Forgotten Realms, and features a dungeon located in Tashalar far to the south of the Sword Coast. As a wheelchair user, Kretchmer's adventure is a dungeon crawl beneath the earth, filled with fantasy elevators and ledges accessible by ramps.

The word "Canopic" refers to ancient Egyptian vases or jars often used during the mummification process. Canopic jars store and preserve the body's internal organs.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


log in or register to remove this ad

Nathaniel Lee

Adventurer
It is very evocative of 3e covers. Perhaps that is why I like the alternative cover so much.
Interesting! Were there special alternative covers for 3E books as well? I only have the original core rulebooks myself. I didn't even know about the concept of alternative covers in RPGs back then. :)

And to be honest, I like this one a lot more than I like the 3E core rulebook cover designs. Those also were trying to emulate a physical design, but if real they would have been pretty bulky and gaudy books with large metal objects decorating them. LOL

This one looks like it's just trying to imitate that sort of leatherbound cover that a lot of Kickstarter projects opt for. Who knows? Maybe there's even some sort of physical aspect of it and it's not just printed...?
 

Lidgar

Gongfarmer
Yeah, love that book, but the Yawning Portal connection was... tenuous.
Right, I always felt that whole write up of the Inn was meant for the Undermountain release, but that there was some kind of SNAFU with Undermountain and they switched gears to make it about updating old adventures and teleporting characters there. Lo and behold, it turned out to be one of their more popular releases (perhaps even more so than Undermontain). This release seems a bit more planned out...
 

Nathaniel Lee

Adventurer
I am a huge proponent of shorter adventures ala AD&D, but I wish they wouldn't put them all into one book. Give me my 30page booklets instead. If I only like two or three adventures, I don't want to have to buy them all.
I totally get it, but I wonder whether that would be a financially lucrative enough approach for them? I think that "size" of a product makes more sense for something like DM's Guild where they can print on demand rather than having to plan out a full print order for a number of books that they don't even know they'll be able to sell. Just my $0.02.
 

Nathaniel Lee

Adventurer
Right, I always felt that whole write up of the Inn was meant for the Undermountain release, but that there was some kind of SNAFU with Undermountain and they switched gears to make it about updating old adventures and teleporting characters there. Lo and behold, it turned out to be one of their more popular releases (perhaps even more so than Undermontain). This release seems a bit more planned out...
I think it might be something else. The way I always looked at it, it was trying to evoke the sense of these sort of old classic adventures being stories told from within the Yawning Portal, the most famous of taverns in the Realms, and not really meant as a collection of adventures specifically to do with Undermountain.
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
I like the alternative cover, but it seems so different from the other alternative covers of the past. Ideally, they'd all be done by Hydro74, but even with different artistic takes, it seems odd that the design approach for this one would be so different (it almost looks like a "leather cover" sort of style) than the others. I'm definitely still going for the alternative, of course. LOL
Tasha's and Rising from the Last War had very different alternate covers, too.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
Right, I always felt that whole write up of the Inn was meant for the Undermountain release, but that there was some kind of SNAFU with Undermountain and they switched gears to make it about updating old adventures and teleporting characters there. Lo and behold, it turned out to be one of their more popular releases (perhaps even more so than Undermontain). This release seems a bit more planned out...

I remember an interview with Mike Mearls where he confirmed that the Yawning Portal connection was a late addition, yes. It shows
 

Lidgar

Gongfarmer
I think it might be something else. The way I always looked at it, it was trying to evoke the sense of these sort of old classic adventures being stories told from within the Yawning Portal, the most famous of taverns in the Realms, and not really meant as a collection of adventures specifically to do with Undermountain.
Sure, that's how it reads now. I was just speculating around how that write up might have evolved to become a plot hook devise to hold together a bunch of disparate adventures versus what it may have originally been written up for - as an extended opener to the DotMM book. The plot device used in this release sounds a bit more purposeful/planned out than that one.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
Sure, that's how it reads now. I was just speculating around how that write up might have evolved to become a plot hook devise to hold together a bunch of disparate adventures versus what it may have originally been written up for - as an extended opener to the DotMM book.

Honestly, they may have run out of space in DotMM: that book is huge.
 


Remove ads

Remove ads

Top