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​

 

[jayoungr]

So does this rule out Sigil/Planescape/Spelljammer happening for 5E, or can this coexist with them?

 

[Retreater]

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.

 

[Zaukrie]

I'm on team new stuff, so I really hope this is good.

 

[OblivionDrive]

Credits page! And list of Twitter accounts!

Interesting in that only five of those are people I already knew about prior to this book (Justice, Ajit, TK, Surena and Jane) - gonna have to do some poking around to see what the rest have been up to.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

Sigil in the DMG, Mordenkeinens detailing planar conflicts. I dont quite understand what Planescape fans are looking for.

Sigil's write-up in the 5e DMG is smaller than Waterdeep's in SCAG.

Give the City of Doors something comparable to the gazetteer sections for Dragon Heist and Descent into Avernus (and/or what it got in the 4e DMG2), plus a proper "Manual of the Planes" for the Great Wheel, and that's pretty much all I need.

 

[Yaarel]

Planescape was always misnamed, it was always about exploring philosophy, not the planes. And being a heavily tattooed edgelord.

Half-serious,

So Planescape fans want "Evil is sexy" tropes and alignment mechanics?

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

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.

My problem is not the humor. Nor the levity. It's the quality.

 

[Mistwell]

I did not like Candlekeep Mysteries (though I went in expecting to like it), and I am surprised it's so well liked. I will note most reviews which are highly positive or highly negative speak a lot about theories and ideas which the book represents to them and very little about what they thought PLAYING or RUNNING the darn thing. Those few reviews I found which talk about actually playing in the adventure often talk about some of the issues I had, and a LOT of the reviews about running the adventure complain about many of the issues I have.

My opinion has zero to do with anything political or messaging or theories, nor do I have any issue with any authors. I think the authors did a good job, and I suspect more than one author is bugged by the editing job on what they turned in. I found much of it was edited poorly, and organized poorly by WOTC staff. It was all bit of a mess, and I think most of the issues are that it seems WOTC cut the page count on some level, or added more adventures than originally intended and cut everything to fit the page count they needed.

1. No index. Finding monsters and items was difficult.
2. Inconsistent adventure summaries.
3. Removing alignment was done poorly. It's not that removing alignment in itself is a bad idea - it's that removing it after the authors already turned it in with alignment made for a very poor choice lacking editing putting something else back in its place. With the lack of an index and inadequate cross-referencing, if your players happened to adventure into an area you as the DM had not prepped very recently, your ability to quickly discern things like "this creature is actually intended to be a good guy/ally, despite the physical description implying something else" was missing. Authors would have made sure that message had been better conveyed in the material they wrote had they known WOTC was going to remove that information from the adventure.
4. Huge swaths of details for individual adventures had obviously been removed. Numerous encounters simply didn't make as much sense or were less compelling, because background information had been edited out for that adventure which was important context for some encounters.
5. Lack of a theme made each adventure feel disconnected from the others.
6. Many adventures were simply not memorable (exacerbated from the lack of a theme, which meant you never reinforced or built on ideas).
7. There are not that many mysteries, in a book titled Mysteries.
8. Bad maps. Lacking details, shrunk down too much, and some seemed missing at times.
9. Almost all adventures are railroads. This, again, may be due to editing out other areas to explore and cutting each adventure to essentially a single path.

If Candlekeep is the model they're going to use for this new set of adventures, I probably won't like it unless they really improve their editing job and give the authors more room for their adventures. I will say I like what they've said so far about this, but then I liked what they said about Candlekeep before I saw the actual book as well.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Growing up when I did

Going up when we did, fantasy wasn't taken seriously. That has changed, thanks to the likes of Terry Pratchett, who dealt with serious issues with his fantasy and humour.

Also, when we where growing up West was getting richer, the Cold War was ending, and climate change was easy to ignore.

The world has changed. Personally, I prefer to change with it.

 

[Mind of tempest]

For all we know, that cute little scamper accidentally killed and ate his entire family, turned to drugs in his sorrow and is now stealing from human traffickers in order to pay off his dealers. Also he sleeps with strangers just to feel something in his infinite numbness. He doesn't love them. He can't even love himself.

There could be infinite needless darkness in this book for all we know.

hey hey, I like noble dark I like having people to hope for if I wanted grimdark I would look out a window or read the paper.
besides my dislike of hope punk is the bittersweetness of progress think like any utopia what would they do with the people that do not fit? they get left behind normally either in the grave or they get stuck on the outside looking in.