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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 8580741" data-attributes="member: 2525">I did not like Candlekeep Mysteries (though I went in expecting to like it), and I am surprised it's so well liked. I will note most reviews which are highly positive or highly negative speak a lot about theories and ideas which the book represents to them and very little about what they thought PLAYING or RUNNING the darn thing.  Those few reviews I found which talk about actually playing in the adventure often talk about some of the issues I had, and a LOT of the reviews about running the adventure complain about many of the issues I have.My opinion has zero to do with anything political or messaging or theories, nor do I have any issue with any authors. I think the authors did a good job, and I suspect more than one author is bugged by the editing job on what they turned in. I found much of it was edited poorly, and organized poorly by WOTC staff. It was all bit of a mess, and I think most of the issues are that it seems WOTC cut the page count on some level, or added more adventures than originally intended and cut everything to fit the page count they needed.1. No index. Finding monsters and items was difficult.2. Inconsistent adventure summaries.3. Removing alignment was done poorly. It's not that removing alignment in itself is a bad idea - it's that removing it after the authors already turned it in with alignment made for a very poor choice lacking editing putting something else back in its place. With the lack of an index and inadequate cross-referencing, if your players happened to adventure into an area you as the DM had not prepped very recently, your ability to quickly discern things like "this creature is actually intended to be a good guy/ally, despite the physical description implying something else" was missing. Authors would have made sure that message had been better conveyed in the material they wrote had they known WOTC was going to remove that information from the adventure. 4. Huge swaths of details for individual adventures had obviously been removed. Numerous encounters simply didn't make as much sense or were less compelling, because background information had been edited out for that adventure which was important context for some encounters.5. Lack of a theme made each adventure feel disconnected from the others.6. Many adventures were simply not memorable (exacerbated from the lack of a theme, which meant you never reinforced or built on ideas).7. There are not that many mysteries, in a book titled Mysteries.8. Bad maps. Lacking details, shrunk down too much, and some seemed missing at times.9. Almost all adventures are railroads. This, again, may be due to editing out other areas to explore and cutting each adventure to essentially a single path.If Candlekeep is the model they're going to use for this new set of adventures, I probably won't like it unless they really improve their editing job and give the authors more room for their adventures. I will say I like what they've said so far about this, but then I liked what they said about Candlekeep before I saw the actual book as well.</blockquote>

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