D&D 5E Here's A Look At 3 Adventures from the Radiant Citadel

Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel features 13 adventures, all written by people of colour. Here's a quick peek at three of them, as details start to emerge across the internet!

• Salted Legacy (1st level, Surena Marie). Rival merchant families are at war in the Night Market. Various challenges such as a timed cooking challenge.
• Written in Blood (3rd level, Erin Roberts). Based on the black experience in the Southern US, features a haunted farm and commoners who becoming violent; the adventurers need to figure out why without harming them.
• Shadow of the Sun (11th level, Justice Arman). Persian-themed, factions in a city ruled by a celestial being are in conflict.

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...

www.enworld.org

The full list of adventures is:

• 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

 

[Monayuris]

The rules didn't actively discourage it tho - the advice for how to play the game optimally actively discouraged it, and you might figure it out on your won if you sat down and analyzed how to play optimally, but there was nothing in the rules that gave you the feeling you should be trying to sneak around the orcs instead of clobbering them to take their pie. The rules of clobbering were fun to engage with and the rules for sneaking gave you low probabilities of success compared to bursting into the room and just taking their pies. So the game's emergent play tended to encourage folks to fight instead of sneak or parley because absent a good DM that's where all the fun in the rules was.

With a good DM of course any of those approaches would be fun, but that's not the rules so much as it is having a trained DM who knew what they were doing. With a bad DM even the combat might not be fun.

Sounds like more of an experience / emergent game play thing.

In Od&d and basic, emergent game play leads to avoiding combat and finding non-violent solutions to problems.

Players will learn that If they fight all the time, their characters die frequently due to having so little hit points and to saves that work against you. They suffer this while, at the same time, they level slower since they get very little XP for killing monsters.

Finding creative non-violent solutions leads to characters surviving more frequently and greater experience awards from obtaining high value treasures while avoiding unnecessary combats.

This is the emergent play aspect of older editions.

Modern games don’t have that emergent game play towards non-violent solutions and problem solving. They approach this via adventure design…in that the system doesn’t reward non-violence but the narrative in their adventures do.

 

[Jer]

Sounds like more of an experience / emergent game play thing.

Correct - it's an emergent play thing. And for that style of play to emerge you need a DM who is running the game that way.

And IME few DMs were running a game where combat was discouraged. Most were running games where combat was highly encouraged. (And that style of play eventually was codified in the rules as the XP for treasure disappeared and monster slaying became the main/only way to earn XP - suggesting to me that the game was catching up to how people were actually playing as editions changed.)

 

[Azzy]

Older editions, going back to the original edition and revisions in the 80s (basic sets) actively discouraged violence, by rules as written.

The primary source of experience rewards came from acquiring treasure (an order of magnitude more than violence). Many monsters granted very little treasure or XP, making most situations to be better handled by avoiding violence and finding creative ways to solve problems / get treasure.

By '83 (with the Mentzer Basic Set), this wasn't the case. While XP was gained for (non-magic item) treasure, you could blink and miss the rules for such. It's no wonder that they were pretty much gone with 2e.

 

[Monayuris]

Correct - it's an emergent play thing. And for that style of play to emerge you need a DM who is running the game that way.

And IME few DMs were running a game where combat was discouraged. Most were running games where combat was highly encouraged. (And that style of play eventually was codified in the rules as the XP for treasure disappeared and monster slaying became the main/only way to earn XP - suggesting to me that the game was catching up to how people were actually playing as editions changed.)

Which is my point.

Not running the game the way it was intended caused unforeseen and undesirable outcomes.

The game, itself, was fine when played in the manner of its emergent game play. If people didn’t catch on or did not want to play it that way, that was their personal choice and not a problem with the game itself.

My point is that it seems that non-violent solutons are encouraged via game play/game rules in older editions and via narrative in newer editions.

 

[Monayuris]

By '83 (with the Mentzer Basic Set), this wasn't the case. While XP was gained for (non-magic item) treasure, you could blink and miss the rules for such. It's no wonder that they were pretty much gone with 2e.

I’m pretty sure xp for treasure was explicitly detailed in ‘83 Mentzer Basic set.

If i remember correctly, it went out of its way to explain how much more xp you get from treasure over defeating monsters.

But I’m done with distracting.

My point was only that non-violent solutions were always encouraged by D&D and D&D gets an unfair reputation for being encouraging of violence and hack-and-slash when it does nothing of the sort.

It is good that adventures that narratively encourage it are being produced as well, hope to see more and more variety of content.

 

[Azzy]

I’m pretty sure xp for treasure was explicitly detailed in ‘83 Mentzer Basic set.

If i remember correctly, it went out of its way to explain how much more xp you get from treasure over defeating monsters.

It's there (like I said), but "explicit" and "went out its way" are not how I'd describe it.

The first mention of it is in passing:

Afterwards, in the treasure section:

Pehaps I've missed where they explained how much more xp you get from treasure over defeating monsters.

 

[Vaalingrade]

As if I needed yet another reason to don my favorite shirt...

View attachment 153929

Just to let you know. I own this now.

Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

 

[Lidgar]

Happy to be of service. Wear it well my friend!

 

[Faolyn]

Pehaps I've missed where they explained how much more xp you get from treasure over defeating monsters.

My admittedly limited experience with 1e and 2e modules shows them giving heaps of treasure. So if 1 gp = 1 xp, you could easily get thousands of XP from just the hoard.

 

[Azzy]

My admittedly limited experience with 1e and 2e modules shows them giving heaps of treasure. So if 1 gp = 1 xp, you could easily get thousands of XP from just the hoard.

Yes, but Monayuris and I were talking about the text of the BECMI Basic set. I had said that the xp for treasure rules were pretty blink and you could miss them as opposed to being explicit (as opposed to Monayuris' memory on the subject), and as such didn't do anything to discuss the merits of treasure acquisition vs. monster slaying or actually discourage violence for xp. Perhaps earlier editions were more explicit, but my point was merely that BECMI was the mid-point to 2e's approach where xp for treasure had been relegated to optional status with a single, short paragraph. It wasn't mean to counter Monayuris' overall point, but to interject what I believe is where things began to shift.