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]

And again, in this sort of heavily GM-curated play, can't the GM call for an INT or WIS check to be made to see if the players have a sense of what will be accepted as a fair payment?

They can make a request by filing form 234B.

 

[Azuresun]

It's the hub for the adventures in the book.

And maybe the 'wider audience' is tired of dystopias all the freaking time.

Can't like one place -- one single location in the overall setting -- ever be nice and clean and not fraught with hamfisted 'lessons' on human fallibility? Not everything has to be all edge, no point and be very good at cutting cheesy Italian delicacies.

Bit of an excluded middle there. RPG settings by definition need to have imperfections and threats--otherwise, what do the PC's do?

What springs to mind is Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. The Culture would be a great place to live and is mostly free of conflict with the only endemic problems being a lack of greater purpose and humanoids living in a kind of species-wide retirement home. But Banks still tells interesting stories about the Culture by examining the grey stuff it does on the side to get "primitive" (by the judgement of the Culture) societies ready for integration and how dissidents from the Culture react to it, and the question of if the Culture actually eliminated the problems of human nature or if it just papered over them with high-tech bread and circuses.

 

[Hussar]

Heh, this discussion reminds me of a player I had who absolutely lost his poop when he learned that in Waterdeep, self defense is not a justification for killing a citizen. There are no legal defenses in Waterdeep for killing a citizen, full stop. Your punishment might change due to circumstances, but, if you kill a Waterdhavian citizen, and get caught for it, you will be punished, regardless of circumstance.

He absolutely lost his poop over this. Couldn't even imagine a society where that could possibly be true. When it was pointed out that there are numerous societies where this actually is true - to varying degrees - he still couldn't wrap his head around it.

This is the same thing. Gift societies exist. They really do and they function. I made a comment way upthread about going to church. Let's see you skip the collection plate a couple of times at service and see what happens. Absolutely not against the law, but, guess what, no one does it. Or, at least, no one does it twice.

Having lived in a gift giving culture for years now, it's still astonishing to me the lengths people will go to to give gifts. You cannot travel anywhere in Japan without coming back with boxes of gifts for everyone. My students constantly are giving me little boxes of cookies or whatnot every time they go away pretty much anywhere and come back. And I'd be in deep doo doo if I didn't do the same.

Not everyone is American. There are other cultures in the world. Heck, even in the States, where you have tipping culture. Let's see you regularly go to the same restaurant and not tip. People might bitch about tipping, but, guess what, they do it. Because, that's what's done.

 

[Azenis]

This is kindof a gross thing to keep repeating.

Everyone who worked on the book plays D&D.

Perhaps entertain the idea that rather a lot of people play the game differently than you do.

Spare me the shirt tearing. I didn't say they didn't play D&D but whoever inserted the Shieldbearer 'code' I doubted had much experience with it.

Adventurers are not police, they are troubleshooters. And like it or not, D&D has always been a game about combat. There's plenty of other rpgs that support this playstyle better. Open any random page in your phb and 90% of the time it's going to be related to some rule aspect regarding our more complicated version of Cops & Robbers. You can have a PC or two with more pacifistic attitudes (that manage with the rest of the PCs covering them a bit when it comes to kicking that orc in the junk and taking that pie), but to force that style of play on an entire party... Yeah people play the game differently than I do but the majority of players I've played with (hundreds over decades) aren't playing it this way (including a outright pacifist concept or two). There's a lot of problematic things with the Radiant Citadel chapter that restrict what stories you can tell there and how you play them for a wider audience.

A number of those elements are 'hardwired' into the RC that even looking at tweaking them to suit, I'm pretty much at rewriting the entire section and just yanking the map & some place descriptions and re-envisioning how things work. I always expect to 'add to' a setting (not rewrite tho) and especially tweak pretty much any 'canned' adventure, but as I posted before it might be interesting to see what my PCs get up to if I ran this one 'as is'.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Not everyone is American. There are other cultures in the world.

Which is the explicit theme of the book. And yeah, a bunch of the cultures emulated within are gift-giving cultures, which is likely why that thinking leaked into the citadel itself, both in-game and without.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Spare me the shirt tearing.

I didn't say they didn't play D&D but whoever inserted the Shieldbearer 'code' I doubted had much experience with it.

Those are the same statement. You can’t nitpick your way out of responsibility for your own words.

It’s gross to suggest that people whose preferences you don’t share are just inexperienced with the thing in question.

Maybe take note of just how many people disagree with your entire rant, and again, imagine a world in which other people play the game differently from you.

 

[Azenis]

Those are the same statement. You can’t nitpick your way out of responsibility for your own words.

It’s gross to suggest that people whose preferences you don’t share are just inexperienced with the thing in question.

Maybe take note of just how many people disagree with your entire rant, and again, imagine a world in which other people play the game differently from you.

No, 'little' experience is not 'doesn't play D&D'. As far as 'just how many people disagree', so what? That's what, maybe 10 people commenting on a commercial product...and I doubt very few of those actually play the game to avoid combat nor 'take sides' in conflict in a game at it's essence is heroic fantasy (and punching monsters in the face).

I've run sessions with zero combat but there was always conflict (drama) whether it was in intrigue, politics or whatnot. Guess what this setting section kneecaps? I'm sure the author of this section didn't intend it, but in actual play...what a bore. I think the creepy factor might be interesting tho.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, 'little' experience is not 'doesn't play D&D'.

As far as 'just how many people disagree', so what? That's what, maybe 10 people commenting on a commercial product...and I doubt very few of those actually play the game to avoid combat nor 'take sides' in conflict in a game at it's essence is heroic fantasy (and punching monsters in the face).

Most people aren't seeing what you're seeing. The reason for that is that what you are seeing isn't actually there.

I've run sessions with zero combat but there was always conflict (drama) whether it was in intrigue, politics or whatnot. Guess what this setting section kneecaps?

Nothing. That you can't think of any conflict in a city where people tend not to try to skip out on their taxes, and crime rates are low, that is on you, not the adventure writers.

I'm sure the author of this section didn't intend it, but in actual play...what a bore. I think the creepy factor might be interesting tho.

The only creepy factor is the one you've invented. The city is depicted as the writer intended. The writer has probably played as much dnd as you have, and wrote a city that thousands of groups have used in their games with no mention of this supposed problem you've invented.


Like...you do realize that the text of the adventure doesn't even support your take? The taxes aren't voluntary, the people who collect them take people's situation into account, and just like real life ancient Alexandria took books the Great Library didn't already have as payment in place of the docking fees you'd otherwise have to pay, the Citadel takes things the incarnates find similar value in, in place of monetary payment.

 

[Umbran]

Spare me the shirt tearing. I didn't say they didn't play D&D but whoever inserted the Shieldbearer 'code' I doubted had much experience with it.

Mod Note:
So, basically, this amounts to "if you don't do what I like, I will dismiss you as ignorant."

That's not going to fly. Please reconsider your rhetoric, before it causes a problem.

 

[Tutara]

I bought Radiant Citadel on a whim, because I like the anthology style collections like Yawning Portal and Saltmarsh.

I've mentioned previously that I see the Citadel like the Citadel in Mass Effect - strange, unknowable alien tech (magic!) left behind for adventurers to pick over, and I feel that the set up supports that well. Yes, you could make it sinister, but I rather like the idea that sometimes people are okay. It makes me a little sad that we can imagine world-ending elder gods and sentient magical items, but not a society where people look out for each other.

I fully intend to move it to the Astral and mash it up with Spelljammer to run a bootleg DS9/Bab5 campaign.