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​

 

[OblivionDrive]

Have you checked out Level Up yet?

I backed the KS - one of my last ones before their boneheaded pivot to blockchain stuff actually.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I never use used the Wheel in my campaigns.

Is Planescape like getting trapped in a movie, where all the NPCs are nonfreewill nonpersons playing out their story of bliss or damnation, and the player characters are the only real people?

You're thinking of new Ravenloft.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Well, we still have a lot of the fun stuff: I use the rest as a chance to improve my overall experience of the site.

All the "If we're getting X, that means we can never have Y, because X and Y share a few similarities" posts is what is getting to me. It's logically invalid, and we've seen it not be the case before, most recently with Dragonlance, which some people were adamant we would never see in this edition.

But anyway, I'm hugely intrigued by this new location. The Deep Ethereal is not somewhere that's been covered much (outside the 2e Ethereal Plane book). The set up for the hub sounds intriguing (different cultures living in a huge creature corpse), and I'm very interested to see the various linked worlds, as some appear to be well outside our typical fantasy norms.

 

[Yaarel]

You're thinking of new Ravenloft.

Actually, Eberron Feywild came to mind.

I find the suggestion by @ersatzphil, be alive among immortals, interesting. I am trying to get a sense of that.

 

[Faolyn]

You're thinking of new Ravenloft.

That's the way Ravenloft has always been, though. At least for many people. I remember discussions in the 2e days as to whether or not it was OK to kill NPCs in Ravenloft because they weren't real; they were just creations of the Mists.

 

[ersatzphil]

Is Planescape like getting trapped in a movie, where all the NPCs are nonfreewill nonpersons playing out their story of bliss or damnation, and the player characters are the only real people?

That's what the Sign of One believe, at any rate - they're not too far off from Spinozian Monadism. The Dustmen, in contrast, believe that this is the afterlife all right - you're already dead, even if you're too foolheaded to recognize it yet. The faction's are all answers to the question, "what does it mean to live in the afterlife?" What is it like to witness souls come from the Prime Material as petitioners to the outer planes, where the gods actually walk around and do stuff? What even is a god, at that point?

 

[Sumony111]

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.

Its shocking to hear someone talk about feeling like they would get made fun of for reading this at a coffee shop. My perception of society (and by that I mean the US, West Coast, Fairly Liberal society I primarily inhabit) is that there is so very little stigma about this stuff anymore. I see adults reading young adult fantasy all the time, on my honeymoon last fall I saw a guy laying on a cabana reading the dungeon masters guide and no less than three total bro's came up and high fived him over the course of a day. Seems like fantasy, any and all fantasy, is pretty widely accepted.

Even more so as you look at younger generations. My buddy is a middle school teacher and he said nearly half the student body joined the after school D&D club he helped students start.

 

[Parmandur]

All the "If we're getting X, that means we can never have Y, because X and Y share a few similarities" posts is what is getting to me. It's logically invalid, and we've seen it not be the case before, most recently with Dragonlance, which some people were adamant we would never see in this edition.

But anyway, I'm hugely intrigued by this new location. The Deep Ethereal is not somewhere that's been covered much (outside the 2e Ethereal Plane book). The set up for the hub sounds intriguing (different cultures living in a huge creature corpse), and I'm very interested to see the various linked worlds, as some appear to be well outside our typical fantasy norms.

Yeah, the microSettings feel like they could be spun out into entire campaign by themselves.

 

[Jer]

Yeah, the microSettings feel like they could be spun out into entire campaign by themselves.

As a mechanism to get new settings in front of people and see what they'd like, this is a good approach.

I've been mildly annoyed that Wizards has been doing nothing really new since 4e ended and here they're planning to drop a whole book of potential settings on us.

 

[EnochSeven]

I ran Candlekeep with my family and they loved it. Very happy to see another one with a similar hub type of standalone adventures. Sounds wonderful