Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is the latest release for Dungeons & Dragons, it’s an adventure anthology with a central theme around travelling through different worlds solving problems. It releases on July 19th and, as an adventure anthology, it’s one to keep an eye on for groups who get their tabletop roleplaying game fix digitally.
Such as, for one off-the-cuff example, people who browse websites called pcgamer.com.
Why do I say that? The nature of the one-off scenarios lets you more simply add or drop a player from week to week when someone doesn’t show up for game time, or run well with a larger rotating cast of players.
The series of 13 separate adventures starts at levels 1-2 and ends at level 14, providing a slew of only-very-loosely connected scenarios that can string together into one big campaign. That lets you either use the titular Radiant Citadel as a home base between world-hopping or adapt the adventures for your own world—easy to do, since the Citadel is located in the mysterious Deep Ethereal plane. (It has been said before, but I’ll remind you that nobody really does planar fantasy like D&D.)
I’ve gotten a look at the book ahead of official release, and I’m writing this because of how these adventures are written on the whole. While they’ve got the usual focus on fights and journeys that characterizes D&D, none of them focus on sprawling multi-level dungeon crawls. They’ve all got primary plots that, while they could span two play sessions, will resolve in four to six hours. Combine that with digital access to maps and you’ve got a recipe for success when playing online.
Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is also notable as the first book of adventures written entirely by Black and brown writers drawing from their own cultures and backgrounds to create worlds with a richness unlike others made previously in D&D. That design ethos led to some really rich and inspired settings, drawing from cultures in Central America, South and East Asia, the Caribbean, and more. What you want when world-hopping is strong hooks, and this is a book with strong hooks indeed.
You can find Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel on the D&D website, along with where the book is sold both physically and digitally, including platforms like D&D Beyond, Roll20, and Fantasy Grounds (which is also on Steam.) It releases on Tuesday, July 29th 2022.
