D&D 5E The New D&D Book: Candlekeep Mysteries: 17 Mystery Adventures [UPDATED!]

The cover of the upcoming D&D book has been revealed! Candlekeep Mysteries is an anthology of 17 mystery-themed adventures for character levels 1-16.

The image has appeared on Penguin Random House's product page for the book.

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UPDATE! Penguin's product page appears to have now vanished, but we now have the product description! Thanks to @Fezzwick for spotting that!

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?

· 17 mystery-themed D&D adventures, each tied to a book discovered in the famed library fortress of Candlekeep
· Easy to run as stand-alone mini adventures or to drop into your home campaign
· Adventures span play from levels 1 to 16
· Includes a full poster map of Candlekeep, plus detailed descriptions of the various locations, characters, and creatures that reside within it
· Introduces a variety of Dungeons & Dragons monsters, items, and non-player characters (NPCs)

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.

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There have been mentions of an upcoming adventure anthology since 2019, with Kate Welch's name attached, along with other celebrity adventure writers including Critical Role's Marisha Ray, and actor Deborah Ann Woll. There were also suggestions that the authors might all be women. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow!

 

[Demetrios1453]

And now we have a description on Amazon...

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?

· 17 mystery-themed D&D adventures, each tied to a book discovered in the famed library fortress of Candlekeep
· Easy to run as stand-alone mini adventures or to drop into your home campaign
· Adventures span play from levels 1 to 16
· Includes a full poster map of Candlekeep, plus detailed descriptions of the various locations, characters, and creatures that reside within it
· Introduces a variety of Dungeons & Dragons monsters, items, and non-player characters (NPCs)

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.

Now that is interesting - especially that we'll actually get an official map of Candlekeep itself, which I'm pretty sure we haven't had before. Also the adventures run up to level 16, which means we'll be getting some higher level content - higher than anything official outside DotMM actually.

It also does sound like these will be more like the "mysterious person/location/creature" type of mystery rather than the Agatha Christie type of mystery like I suggested earlier in the thread.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I hope there's an alt cover, but not expecting it (Yawning Portal didn't have one, but Saltmarsh did). Which is too bad, because I'm not super stoked about the cover revealed in the OP.

I'm pretty sure that every release from 2019 on has had an alt cover, even adventures. I'm thinking that DotMM was the last without one...

 

[Older Beholder]

I saw the cover on twitter and it didn't even register with me that it was the next official release.

I never picked up Yawning Portal or Saltmarsh as one of my games is being run by a new DM so I don't pick up things that he might be drawing material from if I can help it. So I'm keen just to get a feel for some shorter adventures, seems pretty useful to me.

 

[John R Davis]

Might be interesting. By 5th level spells and such tend to overcome much mystery, but I do like the idea of 12-15 page adventures

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

It talks about mysteries. It has not to be always about murders. And when I read the word "mysteries" I can't to avoid thinking about Scooby Doo and Shaggy.

And the adventures are designed for +12y DMs, they can't be too complex.

And investigations in D&D is strange. I mean theorically the best one to investigate crimes should be the rogue, but to search clues or detect liers we need the clerics because these have got the highest Wisdom.

If I am not wrong, the most-sold TTRPGs after D&D are World of Darkness and the Call of Chulthu. D&D 5th is perfect to be a dungeon-crawler, but if WotC's strategy is "don't put all the eggs in one basket" then the d20 system has to be tested to know how to allow more social interactions and investigations. How should be the XPs reward for a perfect questioning of suspect, or the interrogation of a witness or person of interest? Could a wizard's familinar with its animal senses trained to search clues or traces?

Do you remember the "week monsters" from "X-Files"? Most of them were relatively weak in D&D terms, but them to be found and catched was a true challenge for our FBI agents Mulder and Scally. And the DM also can use magic to trick players, for example if the killer is a döppelganger who changes the face.

 

[Parmandur]

Now that is interesting - especially that we'll actually get an official map of Candlekeep itself, which I'm pretty sure we haven't had before. Also the adventures run up to level 16, which means we'll be getting some higher level content - higher than anything official outside DotMM actually.

It also does sound like these will be more like the "mysterious person/location/creature" type of mystery rather than the Agatha Christie type of mystery like I suggested earlier in the thread.

Yeah, it looks more like "figure out the nature of this strange magical item or phenomenon" mysteries, not whodunnits.

 

[Parmandur]

Mysteries like this:

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, it looks more like "figure out the nature of this strange magical item or phenomenon" mysteries, not whodunnits.

Which is fine by me, honestly. I'm not one of those who thinks D&D can't handle mystery adventures, but I wouldn't have high hopes for such adventures as written by WotC. More traditional adventures that involve some mysterious elements is a safer bet, and probably easier to integrate into your average campaign.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No RPG can handle a Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot style detective story well, since it either requires the PLAYER to be brilliant enough to assemble the clues, or reduces things to an unsatisfactory skill roll and the GM explaining the solution.

Fortunately, most mystery stories are not like that. From the Hard Boiled detective subgenre*, to the Famous Five, to modern police procedurals, most mystery stories simply involve following a trail of fairly obvious clues (just like a treasure hunt) punctuated by regular fights, chases, or other action sequences that put our dogged detectives in jeopardy. D&D can do that perfectly well.


* The Dixon Hill parody in Star Trek TNG calls this out - every story begins with someone bursting into the office with a gun.

 

[Don Durito]

The way you handle magic in D&D mysteries is to turn the players expectations about magic against them.

Say the players use Speak with Dead on the corpse and the corpse tells them exactly who killed them. They can track down the murderer only to find that he's dead too. So they cast speak with dead on the new corpse and he tells them the first victim killed him (because Disguise Self is a first level spell).