A library fortress filled with books that are themselves doors into adventure. Candlekeep attracts scholars, sages, and other folk who seek knowledge like a flame attracts moths. These folks typically approach the keep’s arched gates armed with a book, scroll, or other written work they believe contains answers to mysteries bedeviling them. The purple-robed monks at the gate review these works, and admit the seeker if the piece isn’t already in their collection or is particularly valuable to them.
Inside the keep, visitors find an outer courtyard (with buildings housing new arrivals lined up along it), a central area densely packed with towers, and reading-rooms. The upper levels of most towers house the monks. Lower levels serve a variety of purposes, including a hearth-room (dining hall) for guests, bathing-halls and sleeping-quarters for monks and travelers, temples to Oghma, Deneir, Gond, and Milil, herb-gardens (in shuttered levels high in many towers), granaries, wine-presses, and salt-slopes for extracting seawater pumped from the nearby fjord.
The library-fortress’s most valuable tomes reside in what are called the Inner Rooms, admittance to which requires a special pass. Higher-ranked monks do most of the actual research at Candlekeep, but lower-ranked and apprenticed reading-monks also debate truths, send others (or go forth themselves) to do practical research where tomes fail, do magical experimentation, acquire new tomes and other pieces of lore, and sift through long-hidden lore for truths and revelations.
While it makes some coin from the sale of books and scrolls, Candlekeep is a scholarly institution and primarily earns its money from the copying of these works. Its monks are thus highly incentivised to protect these manuscripts.