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​

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Fantasy Australia would be wild. It already has so many weird animals. How much crazier would that be with magic? Drop Bears! Couatl religions! (As a D&D version of the Rainbow Serpent.) Teleporting Quokkas! Dire Dingos! Giant Blue-Ringed Octopuses, Platupi, and Echidnas! Infernal Tasmanian Devils!

The name of Fantasy Australia in the Forgotten Realms is a bit on the nose (Osse), but it could be a cool concept, if executed correctly.

Yeah, the bestiary alone would be amazing. I'm honestly surprised we don't have a bunch of bestiaries already.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For folks who are interested in the pre-colonial Philippines as a D&D setting (which seems like people interested in the Radiant Citadel might be), a second Islands of Sina Una book is now on Kickstarter. The original has very good reviews and Sina Una could easily be used to extend the map of Dayawlongon from the Radiant Citadel, although the signature Dayawlongon monster (the bakunawa) has a different interpretation in Sina Una, so it's not a perfect one to one match.

 

[JEB]

Yeah, the bestiary alone would be amazing. I'm honestly surprised we don't have a bunch of bestiaries already.

Funny enough, I did just find this on DM Guild after rating another product by the same creator: Australian Bestiary (5e) - Dungeon Masters Guild | Dungeon Masters Guild

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Funny enough, I did just find this on DM Guild after rating another product by the same creator: Australian Bestiary (5e) - Dungeon Masters Guild | Dungeon Masters Guild

"Lost Austrians" tells me this is an authentically Aussie product.

 

[FallenRX]

I recognize that a lot of this is ultimately subjective, and that different player groups will present the DM with different problems and opportunities, so your experience isn't going to be the same as mine, but...comments like this still make feel as though our standards for a good adventure have collapsed. To be fair, you never called them "good," so maybe I should say "standards for an acceptable adventure."

These are almost exclusively (probably just exclusively) event-based scenarios in which tried-and-true structures for presenting event-based scenarios have been discarded in favor of scripts, and unfortunately, the scripts a) all to often make little sense, and b) are typically relatively thin on the actual "adventuring." A DM could run them as written and just hope for the best at the table (with odds of success unique to their player group), or they could keep the events and NPCs, toss the scripts, and create the structures to run them effectively.

I think that stinks and I wish Wizards would stop doing it. A lot of the 5e-era campaigns have had this "feature," where they're full of a lot of good (even great!) adventure material, but the event-based stuff and connective tissue ranges from "weak" to "WTF." In a big campaign, the payoff to fixing that stuff isn't so bad: It takes some work, but you do it once, you get lots of meat, and you end up with a year or more of campaigning out of it.

But Radiant Citadel is an adventure anthology, so it gives us the poor event-based stuff and connective tissue thirteen times, and then there's precious little page count left for good adventure material. That basically wrecks the DM's cost-benefit formula, at least for me. I expect I'll try to pull out some of the excellent mini-settings and NPCs and use them as planet-of-the-week fodder in a Spelljammer campaign. But as an adventure anthology you can pull off the shelf and run? I'm sorry, it's just bad. IMO.

As someone who read a lot of old school adventures, this is better than a lot of them, not everyone of them is a winner, and definitely a point about event based scenarios, but for the most part, they are well put together with decent tissue, and competently doen where they are easy to run. As somehow who is pretty critcal of a lot of adventure design espeically in 5e, these i think for the most part are just fine.(With some stand outs)

 

[Nathaniel Lee]

No ones asking you to bust out the Maztica boxes set and reenact the glorious adventures of Cordell’s legion, merely recognise that there’s a part of Toril where thematically this adventure really fits.

If it wasn’t done well in the past the first step to a better depiction is tying it up this material rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

Is it actually useful, though, to reference a part of the Forgotten Realms that has no published material for this version of the game? Sure, the old boxed sets exist, and you could go to DM's Guild and buy some stuff, but for all intents and purposes to the mainstream general audience, it's non-existent in any practical way.

 

[Nathaniel Lee]

Aside from Radiant Citadel, there haven’t really been any more opportunities to mention them, so I’m not convinced they’re on a “no mention” list … unless WotC has publicly stated somewhere that they’re not going to mention them any more?

I'd think that if they had made the deliberate decision to never mention those places again—especially if it was for reasons strongly tied to those behind many of the other cultural related changes—they would have updated that in the newest printings of those books?

 

[Nathaniel Lee]

On the topic of the book itself, I found the adventures to be a mix of good, bad, and meh (just like with Candlekeep Mysteries). A lot of the art is really great. Some pieces depict people in clothing that just feels a bit too modern for my D&D preferences, though (e.g. denim overalls and pumps).

I also feel like a good chunk of the adventures follow the same formula: go to this place, there's a festival going on, find out there's a problem, do some investigating, face off against the monster causing the problem. In many cases, it's going to end up being a group of PCs vs one monster, which means it's going to be a somewhat anticlimactic fight.

I also feel like the connective tissue of the Radiant Citadel itself is very weak. The adventures were very clearly written to be used as standalone adventures and if you want to tie them into the Citadel, once again, you have to do the work. (Yes, I know, it's par for the course for the DIY Edition but still ...)

I haven't looked at the add-on stuff on DMs Guild yet, but I've heard it helps.

I picked up the game store exclusive cover to both support my FLGS and support Wizards' investment in this sort of material, despite being pretty certain ahead of time (and having already confirmed after reading through since) that I would likely never use any of this material as-is in any of my games. Overall, the adventures just don't really fall into what any of my groups are really interested in—at least right now—and the general "theme" and "personality" of the book doesn't really fit within any of my existing campaigns. With Candlekeep, I can definitely see at least one or two adventures heavily being drawn upon at some point in one of my campaigns, but I don't realistically see Radiant Citadel finding its way into any of my games until possibly when we're starting a brand new campaign from scratch.

 

[Azenis]

I can probably adapt most of the adventures in some way to my campaign, but honestly I couldn't stop laughing reading the section of the Radiant Citadel itself and thinking about how it would play when the rubber meets the road when you throw a bunch of PCs into the mix (if presented 'as is'). I've run for a number of different folks over the years, variety of age groups & backgrounds, but I can't imagine not one of them not eventually making the Radiant Citadel itself the main focus antagonist of the entire campaign.

And it's not the unrealistic ultimately mind control enforced (dys)utopia thing going on (though that factor in Citadel society would certainly become another thing that will garner PC ire). It's the taxes (and the expectation they'd pay them or face public recrimination....). I have never taxed a group of PCs ever in my time DMing without my Players trying their utmost to try to avoid them (and resenting the npc trying to impose them). And there's always at least a few PCs that are going to have run-ins with the 'law'....what they set up in the Citadel ultimately will get their attention pretty quickly.

What they present has me wondering how much experience the person who wrote that section actually has when it comes to running the game. That bit of the setting is boring and doesn't have easy hooks for a DM to use for PCs to easily get involved & interested in (and care about) the place they're supposed to based out of. It's just some place they keep their stuff while any real conflict (i.e. adventure) happens elsewhere. I'm not saying the place has to be a filthy cesspool of crime & villainy, but jeez....PCs could find more excitement in a nice safe theme park and frankly it comes across a bit creepy overall with the other elements hardwired in. Might be fun to torture my players with the setting running it straight as is.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I can probably adapt most of the adventures in some way to my campaign, but honestly I couldn't stop laughing reading the section of the Radiant Citadel itself and thinking about how it would play when the rubber meets the road when you throw a bunch of PCs into the mix (if presented 'as is'). I've run for a number of different folks over the years, variety of age groups & backgrounds, but I can't imagine not one of them not eventually making the Radiant Citadel itself the main focus antagonist of the entire campaign.

In contrast, when I was running a setting-less one shot for my group this weekend, they mentioned that they could not wait to start our Radiant Citadel campaign next month. I suspect what each group brings to the game from outside it is going to affect how they react to the citadel itself. (And some of your objections echo the long-ago objections some folks had to Blue Rose, which is part of why I think this.)

That said, if someone hated the citadel itself, it's shockingly (to me) secondary to the adventures. It's there as a potential framing device, but the adventures run fine without it. One could spelljam between these worlds, have some other form of planar travel, but since they're all apparently set on the Prime Material Plane, one could just run them for a wandering party of adventurers, which is probably still the dominant model for most games.