D&D 5E The Next D&D Book is JOURNEYS THROUGH THE RADIANT CITADEL

We peered, poked, squinted, flipped, and enhanced the teaser image that WotC put out last week, and it turns out we got it right -- the next book is, indeed, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel.

Wraparound cover art by Evyn Fong​

Through the mists of the Ethereal Plane shines the Radiant Citadel. Travelers from across the multiverse flock to this mysterious bastion to share their traditions, stories, and calls for heroes. A crossroads of wonders and adventures, the Radiant Citadel is the first step on the path to legend. Where will your journeys take you?

Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a collection of thirteen short, stand-alone D&D adventures featuring challenges for character levels 1–14. Each adventure has ties to the Radiant Citadel, a magical city with connections to lands rich with excitement and danger, and each can be run by itself or as part of an ongoing campaign. Explore this rich and varied collection of adventures in magical lands.

• Thirteen new stand-alone adventures spanning levels 1 to 14, each with its own set of maps
• Introduces the Radiant Citadel, a new location on the Ethereal Plane that connects adventurers to richly detailed and distinct corners of the D&D multiverse
• Each adventure can be set in any existing D&D campaign setting or on worlds of your own design
• Introduces eleven new D&D monsters
• There’s a story for every adventuring party, from whimsical and light to dark and foreboding and everything in between

Slated for June 21st (update - I just got a press release which says it's June 21st "in North American stores"; I'm not sure what that means for the rest of us!), it's a 224-page adventure anthology featuring a floating city called the Radiant Citadel. The book is written entirely by people of colour, including Ajit George, who was the first person of Indian heritage to write Indian-inspired material for D&D (in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft). Around 50 POC writers were involved in total in various ways.

The Radiant Citadel is on the ethereal plane and is carved from the giant fossil of an unknown monster. A massive gemstone called the Royal Diamond sits at the core, surrounded by a bunch of smaller Concord Jewels, which are gateways to the Citadel's founding civilizations. DMs can link any world to the citadel by placing a Concord Jewel there.

The Citadel, unlike many D&D locations, is more of a sanctuary than a place of danger. The book's alternate cover features a Dawn Incarnate, a creature which is the embodiment of stories and cultures.

D&D 5E - Here's Radiant Citadel's press release

Dropped in my inbox a short while ago, if you want the official announcement. It's the same info as in the news article on the front page. Dungeons & Dragons Invites You to Explore the Radiant Citadel Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is a new collection of short adventures set in wondrous...

www.enworld.org

The adventures are as follows:

• Salted Legacy
• Written In Blood
• The Fiend of Hollow Mine
• Wages of Vice
• Sins of Our Elders
• Gold for Fools and Princes
• Trail of Destruction
• In the Mists of Manivarsha
• Between Tangled Roots
• Shadow of the Sun
• The Nightsea’s Succor
• Buried Dynasty
• Orchids of the Invisible Mountain

UPDATE -- the press release contains a list of some of the contributors: "Justice Ramin Arman, Dominique Dickey, Ajit A. George, Basheer Ghouse, Alastor Guzman, D. Fox Harrell, T.K. Johnson, Felice Tzehuei Kuan, Surena Marie, Mimi Mondal, Mario Ortegón, Miyuki Jane Pinckard, Pam Punzalan, Erin Roberts, Terry H. Romero, Stephanie Yoon, and many more."

Regular cover by Even Fong

Alternate Cover by Sija Hong​

 

[Stormonu]

hmmm, Sigil - for outer plane hopping, the Radiant Citadel - for prime plane hopping and a point in the Astral (the Vault of Chroneptis?) - for time hopping as a touchstone triumvirate. Maybe I can work with this...

 

[Malmuria]

hmmm, Sigil - for outer plane hopping, the Radiant Citadel - for prime plane hopping and a point in the Astral (the Vault of Chroneptis?) - for time hopping as a touchstone triumvirate. Maybe I can work with this...

Well there is the Rule of Three...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So, a Planescape for Zoomers, which is supposed to be magical and otherworldly but seems largely similar to California in the current year?

You’ve never been to California, have you?

It's a planar adventure anthology centered around a new planar hub city in the Deep Ethereal.

Not Planescape proper, but definitely Planescape adjacent.

Almost a bridge between Planescape and Spelljammer, thematically, but in practical terms it’s much more Spelljammer than Planescape, since it is tied only to places on the material plane.

In terms of trying to get more cultural diversity into D&D this was a pretty brilliant move by WotC. Instead of trying to revamp older takes or publish one new D&D world, they've used this book to essentially create a new campaign setting where a bunch of different civilizations based on non-European real world cultures (and authored by writers from those cultures) intermingle.

As for similarities to Sigil and Planescape, it was my understanding that Sigil was mostly a jumping off point for exploring the Outer Planes, right? This new Radiant Citadel is more of a central hub for a finite number of Material Plane worlds that are essentially conducting interplanetary trade.

Exactly. They’re very different locales.

As for the optimistic tone, I think at least a certain portion of Gen Z and Millenial creatives have just suffered from doom & gloom burn out. Science fiction in particular has been mostly bleak and depressing for as long as I can remember (I'm thirty-three), but you can look back at the early days of sci-fi and see a lot of hope for the future and humanity. Cynicism in media came about as a reaction to optimism but also resulted in a dearth of aspirational works, possibly even contributing to a lack of hope for the real world and humanity. It's not surprising that more optimistic and aspirational works would be created as a reaction to a prevailing trend of cynicism.

Hell yes. I am 37, and I grew up with some optimistic cartoons and stuff, and then 20+ solid years of just bleak dark nonsense everywhere.

Like, I grew up watching Star Trek. And I enjoyed seasons 1 and 2 of Enterprise, but then it just wasn’t dark enough, so season 3 happened.

Seeing the trailer for Strange New Worlds made me so damn happy.

It's super annoying, isn't? "California" gets treated like a curse in the Hinterlands...sometimes as a Californian my relatives back East will cause me to roll the eyes into the back of my head.

Absolutely. Try living in the Central Valley. The name of our state is practically a curse word here. Like…ok leave then?

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah. I’m absolutely here for some hopepunk, solarpunk, non-murder everything you come across D&D. Grimdark is so tedious and boring and pretentious.

 

[Nilbog]

Part of my knee-jerk reaction against this is that I don't like comedy or whimsy put in my sci-fi/fantasy. Growing up when I did, it was hard enough for my hobby and interests to be taken seriously. Seeing someone making a joke of it sours me. (Too many memories of bullies making fun of me, having to fight my parents to play games and read fantasy novels.) I don't read Douglas Adams or Terry Prachett, et al.
Reading a book with a cover like this at a local store, coffee shop, etc., and I'd get laughed at. Or at least, I would feel like I would be getting laughed at. This is why I don't like the aesthetic. (The short adventure format doesn't seem especially useful to me either from a practical standpoint.)
To address those who would say "dark times require levity in our escapism," that can be true, but where did we turn after 9/11? Dungeons & Dragons the Movie? No, it was Lord of the Rings.
And why did The Hobbit films fail? I think a contributing factor was the humor.
I have a hard time feeling satisfaction encountering displacer beast kittens or baby gnome mind flayers.
While I may not be the audience Wizards is trying to reach, I (and I assume many others) want a game where we can explore mature themes with other adults. Having the baseline of an adventure being a joke almost ensures that isn't going to happen.

I've not read the 30 odd pages following this post as it pretty much hits the nail on the head for me.

I'm all for hope and optimism in games and fiction, heck knows we need it right now, however hope and optimism does not equate to cutesy and fluffy. LoTR is one of the most uplifting stories written and is not covered in rainbows and cutesy creatures.

This book could be awesome, I'll reserve judgement once a few reviews are in and I've had chance to peruse it myself, however the initial asthetic for me falls too far into the cutesy spectrum and not something that initially appeals to me

 

[overgeeked]

D&D is serious business and it must have serious art to be taken seriously.

View attachment 153987

A picture from the AD&D Player's Handbook. One of the earliest and most brutal versions of the game.

 

[SakanaSensei]

Super late here, but I've been sitting on a thought about why representation of people from diverse backgrounds matters when it comes to being able to get our hands on unique content and why diversity, in itself, IS a solid selling point, even if you're someone who thinks it's unimportant.

I live in Japan, so I'm going to structure this with that in mind. If you look at any piece of Japanese media, whether it be games or television, that tries to replicate feelings of western fantasy, it is very clearly different from western fantasy. The Final Fantasy series, while having giant castles of stone, is definitely not Lord of the Rings in tone or execution. Elden Ring, even having had the hand of a western author in its creation, is not anywhere near close to the same kind of world as Game of Thrones. Any anime that works on tropes of western folklore, from Fate/Whatever to any number of a million of very long titled "So I Was a Normal Everyday Businessman But Died When I Stepped On A Crack the Wrong Way and Whoops Now I'm a Paladin" isekai shows.

These examples of Japanese media drawing on western influences are not inherently bad. For a lot of people, they're actively good and what they want! But I know I don't often reach for a lot of Japanese sources for my (western) fantasy kicks, because it just doesn't feel the same as (western) fantasy written by someone that grew up in the culture. Sometimes, an outsider perspective writing something inspired by other cultures is great. If Michael Kirkbride, a former writer for Bethesda, hadn't been interested in eastern religion as much as he is/was, we never would have gotten the beautiful weirdness of the Elder Scrolls 3's lore. But no matter how much I like some "outsider" media, from Morrowind to Final Fantasy, it's never quite the same as a Persona 5 representing Japan or a Red Dead Redemption representing America. (I feel like I'm definitely showing how much more my media landscape is video games more than books.) Even Ghost of Tsushima, lauded by Japanese audiences pretty broadly despite being developed by a Western studio, had some discussion when it released about how snarky/sarcastic characters could sometimes be because it pulled people out of the experience due to how unnatural it felt in Japanese.

Having products come out and knowing that it's written by a team of people of a culture different from my own tells me that it's going to probably feel different in a fundamental way than other material I've seen from people who share my cultural touchstones, and I think that's pretty neat.

 

[John R Davis]

When it comes to settings and adventures I think third party products are just so much better. I've spent way too much on Kickstarter projects. Though if this were a Kickstarter I'd pass as there's nothing particularly interesting about it.

2022 is shaping up to be the fourth straight year I haven't bought a WotC D&D 5e product.

Yeah. The 5th ed big book adventures have not been great but some have been in my zone. The recent tranche of stuff is not at all my thing, despite playing in a few bits of them.
It's great WOTC are giving such opportunities for folk to contribute, but im finding the art especially is putting me off, and some of themes
I'm sure it will sell well and more importantly I hope the contributors get to be proud of their work and got a decent amount of dollar for it

 

[Paul Farquhar]

For me the issue is that these sound like they will be too cultural and won't fit into my campaign world because of that. I'll have to see how inspired by the various cultures these are before I will buy it.

I think that is why they are plane hopping, so they don't need to fit into any particular world. Of course it may be that plane-hopping itself doesn't fit into your campaign.

 

[cbwjm]

I probably won't be buying this book, but I would be interested in a little gazetteer about the radiant citadel put up on DMs Guild.