The Keep on Candcor Hill

 

Top post of r/candcorhill (May 2025)

The Keep on Candcor Hill

"Nodens"; 1983~84? 
Self-published

B/X D&D

 

The Keep on Candcor Hill is a megadungeon in four spiral-bound booklets, written by an unknown author and printed in a single run of 25 numbered sets. The faded blue covers are graced only with the title, booklet number, author, and an ink drawing from a skilled amateur's hand: a knight on a horse, a shadowy figure peeking out from behind a stone arch, a weeping noblewoman, and a decagram.

 

The contents are a flash-grenade of text, information crammed on the page so tight that it looks symptomatic of schizophrenia. But the sentences in that explosion are lean, beautiful things. The richest words that can be afforded in a text that wastes none of them.

 

If the prospective reader doesn't immediately give up after the initial shock of a superficially-unreadable book, they'll soon run into the module's next hurdle: all those lean, beautiful sentences are fully dedicated to obscuring everything they can from the reader. It's a module where every animated skeleton has a name, history, and relationships - and it will tell you none of that directly.

 

At no point in the text does the author pull the camera back to provide a bird's-eye view or to introduce an omniscient narrator: all information besides mechanical statistics, including the DM guidance, is strictly limited to what the player characters can see, hear, smell, and touch. The closest it ever gets to breaking this kayfabe is the lone opening paragraph that explains the premise, but even that is put in quotation marks and framed as information presented to the PCs, rather than to the players. 

But all that information that would otherwise be put in the mouth of the dungeon master still exists in the world of the module, waiting to be pieced together; The Keep on Candcor Hill was setting out bait in front of the rabbit hole for the lore hounds a quarter-century before Demon Souls.The iceberg meme at the top of this page represents just a fraction of what has been found, theorized, and debated in discussion threads over the last decade. 

 

All of this would have been lost, were it not for someone cleaning out their father's attic and posting pictures of books 1 & 2 online in late 2015. The internet smelled a scavenger hunt, and the rest is history.

 

As of 2026, four manuscripts have been identified:

• #19 - Moderate wear and tear; books 3 and 4 are missing. (2015)
• #04 - Heavy wear and tear and water damage; first complete set found (2018)
• #11 - Full set in possession of a private collector in Austria: no scans provided, but confirmed the publishing date range (2018)
• #15 - Full set in good condition; emerged after a Vice article brought the module and its fandom to wider attention (2020)

So then: what remains? More mysteries, many of which are unlikely to ever be solved. An anonymous author who, at some point in the early 80s, ordered a set of 100 spiral-bound booklets from a local print shop and distributed their self-funded passion project to a handful of people, who through the entropy of time lost, threw out, passed on, or forgot The Keep on Candcor Hill. But by the grace of circumstance, KCH has dodged the fate of nearly all human art.

If you wish to take the plunge yourself, the pinned comment of the Candcor Hill subreddit has links to the collated scans of manuscripts 04, 15, and 19, as well as the Candcor Plaintext Community Edition and The Commentaries.