The adventure storyline missions take a huge investment of time to find all the additional books and figuring out important locations not to mention player and world interactions like the Kraken, and ship respawns create huge setbacks. That's all fine and dandy and understandably part of the game.
However, it's incredibly punishing to invest all that time to fail the puzzle challenge and have the entire mission canceled and the journal lost forcing us to sail back to an outpost, and completely restart the whole process. It's absolutely ruthless!
I would recommend some way to allow players to respawn, whether inside that puzzle game state again, or have them interact with the totem once again... something other than completely canceling the entire mission altogether.