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​

 

[Hussar]

It’s not petty sniping.

I know that my players would not have an issue with this. Or I’d be pretty surprised if they did.

They didn’t ever try to circumvent the restrictions in Candlekeep. Not once.

They spent a considerable amount of time in Waterdeep during my Dragonheist campaign ensuring that one pc became a recognized citizen of Waterdeep.

They rebuilt the wall at the 4e remake of the Caves of Chaos to protect the town, spending significant amounts of their own wealth to do so.

Yeah I’d say that my players have generally not had much problem at all with social restrictions in the game.

 

[pemerton]

They rebuilt the wall at the 4e remake of the Caves of Chaos to protect the town, spending significant amounts of their own wealth to do so.

I thought it was a major complaint about 5e D&D that there's nothing for players to do with their PCs' money!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, we're disallowed from arguing with this, but I would say, whatever name exactly you want to call it, Waterdeep is, according to FR lore, a deeply corrupt city ruled by a backslapping and backstabbing cabal of dodgy individuals which has a brutal and oppressive government, and some pretty bizarre and unexpected laws, which had extreme punishments attached to them and are unlikely to impress most players (or PCs!) as forms of "justice".

So it's always pretty bizarre to see most writing which mentions it treat it as some kind of cool cosmopolitan place where awesome dudes hang out and honest trade gets done, without ever mentioning the government or laws, or worse, acting like because the people in charge of Waterdeep as "badasses", they're "cool" too, rather than maximum yikes, which is what they actually are.

Yeah it’s not as bad if you only read 5e stuff, but it’s still not good.

Everything I know about the Forgotten Realms, I know because it was in one of the Adventurers League modules -- I've never read any of the books, and the only Forgotten Realms stuff I have read, is Ed Greenwood's original articles in Dragon magazine.

It's clear from Dragon Heist how corrupt Waterdeep is, but they have a whole book to go into it, and since it was "part of the adventure," that much I read. Neverwinter I know from a couple of 4E scenarios, Lost Crown of Neverwinter and Storm Over Neverwinter. They were railroady as heck, but that fit in with the corrupt nature of leadership -- you never really had a choice to do "the right thing" (whatever you thought that might be), Neverember manipulated you into doing what he wanted.

Yeah Neverember is a great villain.

Back on Waterdeep, I dug out City of Splendors, and I'm looking through the STAGGERINGLY DETAILED* multi-page breakdown of the legal system and criminal offenses (potentially against four different categories with wildly varying sentencing), and I'm not seeing anything at all which suggests that you automatically get punished for killing a citizen under all circumstances. It's funny because I thought I'd read that too - maybe it's in a 3E book or something - but in City of Splendors, that's not right.

It absolutely does allow you to get away with killing someone in self-defense, BUT and here's the big BUT, it's entirely with the discretion of the magister (judge) who you're brought before. If they want to, they can dismiss the charge, charge you with a lesser offence, and most pertinently to this whole discussion, can "set any lesser sentence they consider fitting (or none at all)" and it says they do the latter if the crime was "justified", which would presumably normally include reasonable self-defence, so @Hussar in fact Waterdeep is not, as we had thought, a city where you always get punished for murder. At least it wasn't as of City of Splendors back in 1994.

The legal system is clearly horrific, because there are no juries (which are very old concept, I note - in the UK they're recorded well since the 1100s but were considered "ancient" at that time), no lawyers allowed (they have the concept - they're banned, intentionally), no bail, little in the way of due procedure, little evidence that the magisters do anything but maybe ask a few questions and then make a quick decision, and it's basically 100% on which magister and what mood they're in. You can only appeal if you can convince a citizen of Waterdeep to ask for the appeal, and they suggest paying one off is the best way to achieve this! Then you go in front of the Lords of Waterdeep, which I gotta feel is usually going to be a bad idea, and they can do whatever the hell they like to your sentence. The Lords can also intervene at any point to just set whether you're guilty or not and the punishment they like. Don't piss off the corrupt oligarchs, I guess!

* = 7 pages on the system, 2 further pages of law enforcement NPCs - they don't make 'em like that anymore!

No lawyers lol man…the ancient Britons had lawyers.

God D&D has so many settings, but yeah none of them even come close to the FR on that. I read a fairly good Greenwood sourcebook on a frontier area of the FR a year or two ago and I remember just like reading the sourcebook normally and there's this big inn on a road through a forest and OH it turns out they hold massive group sex deals there and everyone running the inn is in a big old polycule OK wow damn I probably didn't need know that but now I do! And it's all written in like circumnavigate-y language that Greenwood always uses! Then it just goes on as normal, like, ok, cool.

I love that stuff. It’s such a fun way to add unexpected flavor to a session.

Let’s not forget

I mean…we could tho. Canon is an abyss.

I mean, I've only watched a limited amount of Critical Role for example, but absolutely none of them are, and many of them are very much the opposite.

Percival. And the whole team when acting together as Vox Machina, actually. Watch any episode where they first go to a new place. They’re donks, but they respect civil authority and care about the townsfolk’s well-being.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It’s not petty sniping.

I know that my players would not have an issue with this. Or I’d be pretty surprised if they did.

They didn’t ever try to circumvent the restrictions in Candlekeep. Not once.

They spent a considerable amount of time in Waterdeep during my Dragonheist campaign ensuring that one pc became a recognized citizen of Waterdeep.

They rebuilt the wall at the 4e remake of the Caves of Chaos to protect the town, spending significant amounts of their own wealth to do so.

Yeah I’d say that my players have generally not had much problem at all with social restrictions in the game.

Sounds similar to my group. We rescued dwarf slaves from having been sold to a cult, and we gave them the ship and the bulk of the loot on it, taking only what was very useful to us.

Whether it’s me or someone else DMing we have often spent time and money helping a town or nehgborhood build defenses or recover from something or whatever.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I honestly cannot think of a single D&D character I've ever even seen in a campaign who could honestly be called "civic minded" in a broad sense. I mean, I've only watched a limited amount of Critical Role for example, but absolutely none of them are, and many of them are very much the opposite.

Half of my long-running Ptolus/Praemal campaign (nine players, more or less) are agents of the empire or the local baron and are very civic minded. Of course, the other half are very much not and we had PvP in our third adventure, leading to a years-long split into two parallel campaigns until relatively recently.

 

[Hussar]

I have to admit it’s very different between tables.

The first thing my cleric did when we defeated the fire giants in Storm Kings Thunder was hand the whole mining operation over to my church.

So yeah Radiant Citadel is not much of a stretch.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I've certainly seen plenty of civic mindedness from player characters. Paladins who give everything to the poor, etc. Some of my players find it quite difficult to get into the mindset of ruthless self-serving characters, even when playing an underworld campaign.

 

[Shemeska]

If the original Shemeska still lurked here, I'm sure I would hear how this is a bad idea, but I think we probably have one more transitive plane than we really need. I think we could easily just make the Astral and Ethereal different regions of the same plane, with multiple ways of accessing it.

I lurk.

I won't say it's a bad idea, but I wouldn't do it myself. Though admittedly I've been playing almost entirely within the Pathfinder cosmology for years upon years now (as I've written a good chunk of it) and I haven't been enthusiastic about how WotC has handled the planes in 5e.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I haven't been enthusiastic about how WotC has handled the planes in 5e.

It is you!

I will say that every time I see they dropped the Isle of Dread into the Elemental Planes, I just wonder if there were actually plans to do something with that idea, instead of just yanking a classic adventure site off its traditional place on the prime material.

 

[Remathilis]

It is you!

I will say that every time I see they dropped the Isle of Dread into the Elemental Planes, I just wonder if there were actually plans to do something with that idea, instead of just yanking a classic adventure site off its traditional place on the prime material.

I just assumed it was an Easter egg to explain how the Isle of Dread existed in both Mystara and Grayhawk canonically.