Well! My players are finally done running through the first of our Candlekeep Mysteries (D&D 5e) adventures. The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces is designed as a beginner-friendly adventure for 4 level 1 characters.
Since I have 5 players that I started at level 2, I had to get a little inventive with this one. I also don't run the assumed default setting, so I scrapped some of the details to fit them better to my own world. I'll discuss the changes I made and how they played out as we go, but first I'll start with a basic run-down of what the adventure-as-designed is meant to be and what I thought of it.
What is this adventure about?
Candlekeep Mysteries, for those not up on recent 5e releases, is one of Wizards of the Coast's popular anthologies. This gives us a bunch of stand-alone adventures that we can fit into our campaigns whenever and wherever we decide. I love these anthology books as they work very well for my custom homebrewed world. They're designed to be stand-alone which makes for a lot less effort to retrofit it for my own world.
In The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces the adventure setup is:
The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces was donated to Candlekeep with the rest of the library of the mage Fistandia, following her untimely disappearance. In her will, Fistandia bequeathed her collection to Candlekeep in appreciation for the many years she spent in its hallowed halls. This book is a treatise on extradimensional spaces similar to those created by the Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion spell. This information alone would make it worthy of note, but Fistandia's additions in the margins are even more interesting. In arcane shorthand, she details how she created a permanent Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion spell and records the command word to open the mansion's doorway.
Many researchers perused this book over the years it spent in Candlekeep, but knowledge of the command word was useless without the location of the gateway to the mansion—until a chance discovery by the sage Matreous, an expert in the application and removal of curses. Upon arriving at Candlekeep to further his expertise, Matreous cast detect magic, as was his habit. The spell revealed a gateway in the very study room he had been assigned!
Forgetting about his earlier purpose, Matreous asked for any knowledge of who might have created such a gateway. Research by the Avowed revealed that Fistandia requested this room each time she visited the keep. They also turned up mysterious reports that she rarely left the room for weeks at a time. Rumors said that she was not even seen to eat or sleep during her visits. She would, however, go missing for hours at a time. Matreous concluded that she must have gone through the gateway during those absences. By searching through the books Fistandia donated to the library, he found the command word to open the portal and stepped inside.
So, the setup is that this book made it into Candlekeep, a researcher got trapped inside, and our players need to be given a reason to also get trapped inside. They provide a few hooks on how to do that, though I've changed a lot of this initial setup as Candlekeep doesn't exist in my world and I had a prior quest that I was able to tie into this fairly easily. I'll talk about that more later.
My overall thoughts
The adventure itself is basically an escape room. You manage to get into the mansion, and then it closes and traps you inside until such time as you piece together the secret word allowing you to exit. There are a lot of fun details in this adventure and as far as a level 1 intro quest, it's fantastic. The combats are well balanced for a first-level party, and it has enough fun interactions with pets and a pair of NPCs, as to be a great introduction for any new players.
Overall, I had a lot of fun running this adventure. As mentioned, I did update and tweak a bunch of details, but the theme was well established so adding to the adventure was fairly simple. There are several combats that I simply increased the creature count for or subbed in slightly beefier monsters. A notable addition was the final fight of the adventure. By default, this is a living bookshelf with a few chains that it hits characters with. I added a pair of Star-Spawn Grue to this room and added two more chains which the Living Bookshelf had used to bond to/control the Grue.
Things I changed
As I mentioned I changed a bunch of stuff to better fit my world. First and foremost, I ripped Candlekeep itself out of this. Everything instead relates to one of my world's foremost arcane libraries - The Bandyhand Institute.
I got rid of the primary NPC Matreous, instead changing him to be one of my Bandyhand researchers. I also wanted him to be present for the majority of the adventure so I shoved him further into the mansion. As written, the NPC would typically leave immediately when the players enter, and then would be killed by an Imp he unwittingly releases when he goes back to his office. My NPC - Tully - had to survive as the entire reason the party came was for his expertise in removing curses.
Each fight I added monsters to so that they'd last long enough for everyone to get a chance to hit, or I pumped up the monster's HP and gave them a few more actions (following in the Matt Colville/MCDM style of action economy). This worked fairly well, and was enjoyable for everyone at the table.
My largest set of changes was in the Study. It is described as having a bunch of random books and paintings, so I threaded those all into my current plot. Of the four paintings in the room, three of them directly tied into world events for Trothguard, as well as tied to the characters themselves (by referencing areas they lived or things that impacted their ancestors). One painting in particular was handled specially. When the players touched it, they were mentally dragged into a 5-second bottled memory - a street view of a city they'd never seen. Ancient airships docking at a huge tower, and a silver-haired woman waving at the character's point of view. This was a really fun addition and hinted at a lot of history. The players correctly assumed that the view was from a Mach'Litheian city and that the silver-haired woman was one of the two mages named in the adventure (Fistandia and Freyot).
They also found out that all of the books in the study were journals written by Fistandia... journals that covered over a thousand years of time. An impossibly long period for almost anyone to live... and gave some hints about what's going on and how this mansion, and Fistandia and Freyot, have a larger connection to the campaign.
There are also two Faerie Dragons as part of this adventure, that I let two of the characters take on as companion pets.
Finally, the last thing I changed was that by design the book can only open into the mansion from within one specific Candlekeep study. I wanted a bit more freedom, so they are instead able to use the book from any city or area sufficiently close to a magical font - something like my world's version of lay-lines. This allows the mansion to be used more easily as a resting spot, but doesn't make it an instant DM problem where they'll just pop into the mansion any time they need to rest while adventuring. It effectively just means they don't need to spend as much time resting in taverns. Since the magical fonts aren't super common, there are still going to be a lot of towns and cities that this doesn't work in.
Also, with the adventure as written, there's ambiguity on where Fistandia and Freyot are. We establish that they're alive because there are two Homunculi within the mansion acting as servants, and per established 5e canon, a homunculus will die if the mage who created it is killed. This is a super important detail as it means that while the party has access to the mansion, at least one other person does too. Who has the other book accessing this place? Neither Freyot nor Fistandia have been within the mansion in the last 70 years. I did, however, establish that occasionally supplies are dropped through the door (to keep the dragons/homunculi/cats fed). So, someone out there has access, and that will no doubt be a fun little complication for me to throw in eventually.
In the end, the party walked away with a powerful relic providing a safe-ish retreat and a handful of minor items. They saved Tully, who was able to break the curse on the overly-eager apprentice wizard they'd hauled to the city, and they were offered a job as retainers for the Bandyhand Institute. So they'll be getting the odd book-related job from them.
All in all, this adventure kept us going for three sessions of about 4 hours each. You could definitely do it faster, but I let them go at their own pace and I think that even though it was longer than I expected (I had been mentally estimating two sessions), it worked out very well.
One of the characters captured a jar of zombie hands which has become a not-quite-safe "pet", and that alone derailed a bit of our second session in the very best way possible. It was a ton of fun, and I think if you're a DM that likes to throw problems at your players and see how they react and riff off of what they do... this is a great adventure to run.
With all that said, I'm out! As always, until next time friends: Happy Gaming!
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