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​

 

[overgeeked]

And then there was what was possibly the bleakest and most nihilistic incarnation of Ravenloft D&D has ever seen.

Sorry to derail a bit, but what do you mean by this?

 

[Michael Linke]

But, you know it's much, much easier to simply presume bad faith on the part of others and then jump all over them for it. Kinda like an offhand comment about not finding the ending of LotR particularly uplifting, as if I ate a puppy. Good grief, the main character is scarred for life and never recovers, the implication is that magic drains out of Middle Earth and leaves it just Normal Earth. I don't find the story particularly uplifting, but, then again, I couldn't read the Silmarillion despite trying a few times because I found it mind numbingly boring. And, frankly, despite reading LotR more than a few times, I've never actually read it cover to cover because I keep skipping entire pages that I find mind numbingly boring.

Look, I get that for some people LotR is the epitome of the written word. I find it boring. I do. I'm sorry. It's just not something I like. And, honestly, that probably has far more to do with Tolkien fans than the work itself. I just can't get past the lionization of the writer and the work.

One time at an LGS, an obvious Whovian asked me how much I liked the new Dr Who season at the time. I said "The impossible Astronaut season was amazing, and I feel like every season since, I've wanted it to be that good again, and it just hasn't been and probably never will be." He looked at me quietly for a beat, then said "Wow. You're a jerk."

 

[Vaalingrade]

On the floating wall in the art

This is why we can't have cool fantasy in D&D. "OH noes, there's a floating wall in the setting, it makes no sense, it must be bad" is the same reaction we get to flying castles, floating islands or anything else that hasn't been done to death a hundred times over in a hundred other books.

There has for a very long time been a prevailing idea that fantastic things do not belong in fantasy; the only the direct result of discrete magical acts can and should appear.

And to that, I say thee nay.

 

[humble minion]

Sorry to derail a bit, but what do you mean by this?

Ravenloft has never exactly been cheerful, but the 5e incarnation deliberately went out of its way to remove any possibility of the PCs actually ever achieving anything meaningful, or that they can be satisfied with. It's primarily two factors.

First, darklords are now explicitly stated to ALWAYS return after defeat/destruction. This has sometimes been hinted at as a possibility in previous editions, so it's not a new thing, but I don't believe it's ever been stated in so stark and unambiguous a manner. Your PCs greatest successes are meaningless.

Second, VRGtR doubled down hard on the 'nothing and nobody is real here, NPCs are simply phantoms generated by the Mists to be backdrops and stage dressing to the darklord's torment' angle that CoS introduced, in contrast to prior editions where Domains were physically transported from the origin worlds and populated by the descendents people unlucky enough to get dragged along. This means that not only can you not get satisfaction from defeating a darklord, but you can't even get tiny satisfaction from saving an NPC from a darklord's lowliest minion creature. The NPC is a soulless puppet of the Dark Powers and so is the minion. The Dark Powers will probably regenerate both of them when your back is turned, so they can continue to play their parts, unless they only existed to interact with you in the first place and somehow torment the Darklord thereby. And if you're a PC who's native to one of these domains - all your loved ones are fake, your parents are phantom shadows, your family are soulless puppets of the Dark Powers. The only reason the book says that YOU aren't in the same boat is because it cops out in a shamelessly cowardly manner on following through on its own logic. There's nothing worth saving, nothing worth fighting, nothing worth protecting. It all means nothing.

 

[michaeljpastor]

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

Not Planescape proper, but definitely Planescape adjacent.

If it's Ethereal, it's Spelljammer. Think Taratuga for the Citadel.

If it's Astral, it's Planescape and Sigil.

That's why I was confused by Astral Elves being included with (Ethereal) Spelljammer and Star Frontiers races in UA recently.

 

[Hussar]

Well you can’t say it’s not dark.

 

[overgeeked]

Ravenloft has never exactly been cheerful, but the 5e incarnation deliberately went out of its way to remove any possibility of the PCs actually ever achieving anything meaningful, or that they can be satisfied with. It's primarily two factors.

First, darklords are now explicitly stated to ALWAYS return after defeat/destruction. This has sometimes been hinted at as a possibility in previous editions, so it's not a new thing, but I don't believe it's ever been stated in so stark and unambiguous a manner. Your PCs greatest successes are meaningless.

Second, VRGtR doubled down hard on the 'nothing and nobody is real here, NPCs are simply phantoms generated by the Mists to be backdrops and stage dressing to the darklord's torment' angle that CoS introduced, in contrast to prior editions where Domains were physically transported from the origin worlds and populated by the descendents people unlucky enough to get dragged along. This means that not only can you not get satisfaction from defeating a darklord, but you can't even get tiny satisfaction from saving an NPC from a darklord's lowliest minion creature. The NPC is a soulless puppet of the Dark Powers and so is the minion. The Dark Powers will probably regenerate both of them when your back is turned, so they can continue to play their parts, unless they only existed to interact with you in the first place and somehow torment the Darklord thereby. And if you're a PC who's native to one of these domains - all your loved ones are fake, your parents are phantom shadows, your family are soulless puppets of the Dark Powers. The only reason the book says that YOU aren't in the same boat is because it cops out in a shamelessly cowardly manner on following through on its own logic. There's nothing worth saving, nothing worth fighting, nothing worth protecting. It all means nothing.

Well...yeah. It's a horror setting. It's meant to be horrible. That's the point.

 

[JEB]

I'm not trying to rag on you, but I am genuinely fascinated that we have reached the point of 5E Grognard feelings...and 5E is still in print!

Considering current 5E books have become more and more overt about changes from 2014 5E, and it's increasingly clear 2024 edition will look and feel different from 2014 5E despite any degree of technical compatibility, this shouldn't really be surprising.

I'm sure there were also folks grumbling about late-era books for every previous edition as well, especially when they were obviously experimenting with mechanics meant for their successor (see late-era 3.5 books for some solid examples).

 

[humble minion]

Well...yeah. It's a horror setting. It's meant to be horrible. That's the point.

Horror is not necessarily the same as 'nihilistic and hopeless', but that's a debate for another thread. The point i was making is that with this extraordinarily bleak and depressing Ravenloft book still relatively recent in the D&D production history, it's maybe a little rich when people complain that WotC is only doing brightly-coloured happy-happy whimsical material these days.

 

[overgeeked]

Horror is not necessarily the same as 'nihilistic and hopeless', but that's a debate for another thread. The point i was making is that with this extraordinarily bleak and depressing Ravenloft book still relatively recent in the D&D production history, it's maybe a little rich when people complain that WotC is only doing brightly-coloured happy-happy whimsical material these days.

Sure. Fair points all around. Cheers.