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​

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The rulebook assumption is one session, basically.

That was at the start of 5e though. The seems to be a general shift to faster levelling. Take a look at the "starter" adventures in Wildemount for example. If the characters don't level up immediately after their first encounter they will be toast.

 

[Arilyn]

One of the reasons I've extended the adventures is to slow down the rapid levelling. The plot hooks in the realm gazeteers are useful for this.

 

[Greg Benage]

I’ve been following Justin Alexander’s Let’s Read of this book on Twitter.

The only adventure he’s really disliked so far is the gold mine one. I’m curious to see what he makes of the later ones.

It seemed to me he's been pointing out many of the issues but studiously avoiding any overall judgments (such as "they're ass."). To be more charitable, they're full of, uh, some more or less interesting story plots, whether or not they make sense as written or would play at a typical table. And there are some very well-drawn NPCs.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I’ve been following Justin Alexander’s Let’s Read of this book on Twitter.

The only adventure he’s really disliked so far is the gold mine one. I’m curious to see what he makes of the later ones.

Bringing back the aurumvorax (and re-examining how they work) buys that adventure a lot of leeway with me.

 

[SkidAce]

These days the general assumption seems to be that level 1 will last less than an hour of play.

Bah! *



* not directed at you, but the idea of that assumption...

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, I would say it's very relevant. Because it's fictional, you can change something, forget it, or delete it without having to justify or explain the change.

Tell that to fans of literally any popular franchise. I'm sure they'll all be on board with that idea.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It kinda comes across that new Mesoamerican inspired adventures must use Maztica as their locale under this logic, which is on it's face reductive. We don't require that there be only one Germanic pastiche in all of DnD for example. Why should a new writer have to write within an existing setting if they honestly feel the way it has been used in the past just doesn't hold up today? Is Maztica even a popular setting that is being slighted by this? If a DM buys Citadel and earnestly wants to change the place names to reflect previously, they can do so easily enough. I am blending the new Ravenloft material with the 3.5 takes that Swords and Sorcery did back in the day just fine.

Something being popular is not reason enough to WotC to not make massive changes to it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well after wading through a whole bunch of rather strange posts about how Maztica is being given the old Stalin treatment I went and reread the “Forgotten Realms Style Guide” issued around the time of Wild Beyond the Witchlight for people writing in the Forgotten Realms and blow me down – there are Zakhara and Kara Tur extensively mentioned, as well as a few references to Maztica as well. If it’s being “disappeared” no one informed Wizards of the Coast I guess. But I’m sure any moment now Maztica will be locked up in the same detention centre as Mike Mearls.



I don’t see why someone interested in “diversity” would want to delete the only non-European themed cultural areas in Toril, replacing them with a strange blancmange of flavourless goop. You have some great and rich cultural descriptions in the new book that can be used to rebuild and enrich areas of Toril that weren’t utilised to their full potential in 2E. I fail to see how throwing out the baby with the bathwater helps anything – not when you’ve got 100+ years of unexplored history to play with. If the Faerunian colonies in Maztica is really a big problem, then just say the natives have invaded and destroyed these places. It’s not that difficult.



What’s really happening here is WoTC’s refusal to countenance anything happening in Toril outside the Sword Coast – and if that means plopping down a Latin American town right near Renfaire Cormyr they’re going to do it. It won’t generate Twitter-rage I guess.



(As a final note of ironic hilarity, plenty of the cultures depicted in the Radiant Citadel are themselves the product of the post-colonial mix of European and non-European cultures, and would be almost by definition impossible to arise without that cultural mix. But far better to just pretend certain events in history never happened, right?)

It's quite difficult for flavorless goop to offend anyone, and that is a big (maybe the biggest) priority for WotC.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I have to wonder whether Maztica, if rebuilt from the ground up with an eye toward sensitivity, would still be somehow bad just because it kept the name. But, it could just be that they don't have time to clean up or rehab the Maztica setting, and they don't want new players to read a reference to Maztica in this book, and get the wrong idea that all of Maztica's baggage is hanging in the background of the setting they've just learned about in what was supposed to be a culturally sensitive book written by a diverse set of authors.

And yet, they seem to be doing exactly that with Dragonlance...

 

[Micah Sweet]

Bringing back the aurumvorax (and re-examining how they work) buys that adventure a lot of leeway with me.

I love the aurumvorax, but the Monster Manual Expanded series already brought it back, and a bunch more besides. As is often the case, WotC was too late.