Candlekeep Mysteries is the Dungeons & Dragons book I have personally been waiting for… Sort of. When I got back into D&D during 5E I was admittedly without content to play with, Wizards of the Coast has made sure players had LOADS of campaign content, Curse of Strahd, Icewind Dale, Prince of the Apocalypse, and SO MUCH MORE. But if you wanted something short, that you could play in one night or a few short sessions there was only the Tales from the Yawning Portal book, or you could MAYBE pull some “Adventurer’s League” one shots from that website.

Candlekeep Mysteries presents 17 one-shot adventures that are built around that iconic fortress of books in the Forgotten Realms “Candlekeep”. Each book features a title such as Mazfroth’s Mighty Digressions, Book of Inner Alchemy, or Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion. Each of the books contains the contents of a mystery adventure, and each adventure contains a slightly different tone and style from the rest, as well as a different level.

Further, WotC has made it possible to fit this library, the tomes, and setting into any of the available campaign worlds such as Eberron or Greyhawk should you not want to fit this into the Forgotten Realms. Admittedly, the aspect that all these adventures are tied together by wandering Candlekeep and finding them in a book doesn’t entirely work for me, but as Wizards of the Coast puts forth in the prologue these can be easily altered to be dropped into your current campaign, and as such these can easily be just used without the Candlekeep context should you choose to do that (Personally, I could see myself using 1-2 pulled from the shelves at Candlekeep, but the majority as more naturally landed upon adventures).

These adventures have such fun, and diverse tones that I couldn’t help but have fun just reading these as I went along reading the book. The previously mentioned Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion felt like the D&D interpretation of a Discworld novel, aside from that there are dark fairytales, ghost stories, and so much more in this book. I’ve been saying since I got the …Yawning Portal collection that we need more short adventures for play groups that don’t have a huge time investment, and this is just a fantastic start. I hope Wizards of the Coast continues creating content like this going out. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.