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D&D Ideas — Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of radiant we’re positively beaming after a huge surge forward on preproduction for Mage Forge. We’re incredibly excited to deliver these deluxe collections of 250 magic item Tarot cards. You can get Nerdarchy the Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

Nerdy News

Take a style lesson from the week that was! Learn the best fighting style for magical warriors, squeeze more juice out of magic item attunement and learn the high concepts of Zoo Mafia RPG plus our weekly hangout, a live chat with an industry pro and a new live plays of Zoo Mafia RPG and Untraditionally Arcane round out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

We discussed Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel for our weekly live chat like we do with all of our newsletter topics when Wizards of the Coast dropped the first chapter of the upcoming anthology of D&D adventures on D&D Beyond for free. There are some lessons to be learned this first chapter about the city located in the Ethereal Plane whether or not you have access to Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel.

First off the Radiant Citadel itself shows us how to create a base of operations for characters, and one allowing them to travel the planes no matter what their level. There are a bunch of vessels called Concord Jewels. These crystal structures can carry groups of people and cargo on them. Each one is capable of traveling between one specific location on another plane and the Radiant Citadel. The Concord Jewels plane shift back and forth when operated.

The book explains how the Concord Jewels only go between two places but your D&D game can be different. A special one be capable of  going anywhere. You don’t need to own Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel to borrow these ideas for your adventures. It would be easy enough to swap out portals for Concord Jewels or whatever else you want to use.

Let’s explore fun ideas using Concord Jewels or some other magical device to performs the same function. I don’t know why but I think of Star Trek when I think of Concord Jewels. Any episode where something goes awry with a transporter or shuttle away team could be converted into a D&D plot. You could have Concord Jewel mishap where the transport ends up at the wrong spot or break downs in the deep ethereal. What do the adventurers do? How will they figure out where they are or solve their predicament?

Another takeaway idea from this book is the Shieldbearers, an organization whose operatives travel the planes exploring and helping others. They operate in teams of 4-6 members. (Convenient!) These again make me think of Star Trek away teams. This is a built in quest giver for D&D characters. The command tells you where to go and what to do. Easy peasy — the adventure begins.

The Radiant Citadel itself offers plenty of opportunity for adventure and political intrigue. It’s a cool planar metropolitan city. If you aren’t using the Radiant Citadel itself the concept of a planar metropolitan city is still a fun idea. It’s not even a new concept to D&D. Anyone familiar with the older editions of the game’s lore would probably know about the Planescape campaign setting. Sigil, the City of Doors, is full of portals to other places and factions. Both the Radiant Citadel and Sigil are great examples of ways to incorporate planar adventures into your D&D games early on.

From Ted’s Head

The Radiant Citadel is something akin to the Candlekeep Mysteries as a series of adventures based around a single location. In my early days of gaming having a central location to come back to was not something our characters liked to do. They were wanderers seeking fame fortune and adventure. Maybe a few campaigns had us frequenting locations time and again but never anywhere we would truly call home.

With the dawn of fifth edition we decided to try something new with our home games and we based them out of the same location, with two campaigns that kept the adventurers coming back to a true home. It changed the way I viewed gaming.

Several years later they released the Candlekeep Mysteries. While I personally have not played through any adventures I have watched most of the games on my friend’s YouTube channel. If you are into watching gameplays Mini Terrain Domain is an excellent channel and you can find the Candlekeep Mysteries playlist here.

I only bring this up as Jake expertly adds additional material to the prepared material for his plan to use the book to run a full 1st-20th level campaign. Should you choose to do the same with Radiant Citadel you could take a page out of Jake’s book.

As regards to the specifics on Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel I am going to highlight a cool part of the lore without giving away any of the campaign material. This is a quote from the freebie anyone with a D&D Beyond account could claim:

Auroral Diamond

The Auroral Diamond is the heart of the Radiant Citadel. A massive gemstone of unfathomable power, its life-giving magic runs through the entire city; the city’s vegetation, water, light, and unique artifices depend on the Diamond.

The Auroral Diamond changes color for unknown reasons. Sometimes it holds a color for an entire year, while other times it shifts twice in a single week. Rarely does it ever repeat a color. Some scholars believe each color represents the birth of a new civilization somewhere in the multiverse, and repetition of a color means the death of that civilization. Other scholars hypothesize the changing colors are a countdown to some unknown event.

The Auroral Diamond is indestructible. Whatever magic hollowed out the gemstone’s center and created the Preserve of the Ancestors (described later) is unknown.

This little blurb is filled with so many possibilities as a Dungeon Master it is rather ridiculous. An indestructible magical color changing gem is pretty cool. If it is hollowed out are there fragments out there in the multiverse tied to its unknown origin and mission? Could adventurers discover those fragments and do something with them? Could those fragments be ioun stones or could it be where ioun stones initially came from in the first place?

It speaks of a deaths of civilizations and the vast multiverse. Is this a multiverse like in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or more in all of the planes of existence? The specifics matter here, people. As always the great part is since each DM has the ability to do as they like with their game it could be whatever. You want to have your own multiverse of madness? Go for it. Is that too much chaos? No problem there either. Have it your own way!

I could go on and on with ideas inspired by just the one section on the Auroral Diamond. It really has my brain whirling. Mage plots to absorb its power. A campaign designed around the prophetic warnings of the colors and factions trying to decipher them and warring over the different interpretations all while assuming their own doom is lurking overhead. The diamond being the initial thing to spawned the gem dragons and them rising up together to retrieve it as a draconic artifact.

I can do this all day but I am gonna save those other ideas for another time.

While I have always been a homebrew DM this small thing is why I like checking out the prepared material. It lets me know how other DMs are creating things. It sets a nice foundation of lore and gives me oodles and oodles of ideas to draw from as either small plots to add into my games or for vast campaign to run at some point in the future.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

Nerdarchist Dave’s got me thinking about Star Trek now. (TOS is the best.) I’ll do my best to boldly go in another direction and dovetail this closer look at Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel’s first chapter with an idea that’s been germinating in my mind for a while and sprouted some new insights for me in a recent newsletter.

My default approach to any sort of setting material hovers somewhere between indifference and skepticism and looking through the free preview promotion from D&D Beyond wasn’t any different. I do dig what I read though but not because of anything specific. Looking at the content through the lens of what it brings to the table shows something fresh, fun and most importantly fantastic — expansive ideas pop culture audiences can wrap their heads around.

Never did I or any other nerds I knew as a kid think someday the average moviegoer would know who Thanos was, or a talking cybernetic racoon would have a fanbase or heck even cheer for Doctor Strange. The extremely fantastic and unfathomable scale of heroic stories in the movies these days demonstrates how big people can imagine. An exciting new campaign setting like the Radiant Citadel presents a place from where to embark on incredible adventures right from the get go and I’m definitely on board for this approach to super heroic fantasy gaming.

During the live chat I mentioned how the Radiant Citadel setting answers a frequently encountered scenario for lots of D&D players. The abundance of character options can make a DM’s head spin to those for whom species and cultural dynamics are a big priority. An extraplanar nexus city solves a lot of those issues. Sure, it’s amazingly magical and there’s plenty of players whose preference lie in more mundane pursuits.

Consider the following. Members of the Shieldbearers get dispatched to various worlds as problem solvers with directives not to interfere too much. Characters who form a cohort with proven success on a particular world (like the lower magic setting the players enjoy but who also still wanna play with exciting character options like exotic races and magical classes) could very well be on special detail and only receive quests upon that place. Boom. Problem solved. It even gives the unusual characters a more approachable path to NPC interactions. The strange newcomer doesn’t elicit the same hostility as a homebrew society who hates <insert unusual race> and becomes aggressive on sight. Food for thought anyway.

In a recent newsletter I explored how 5E D&D feels like it’s really distinguishing itself in the fantasy RPG market with a distinctive flavor — superhero fantasy. I won’t say it’s a genre so much as a style of play. Getting around D&D’s principal paradigm of facing monsters, traversing perilous places and communicating with various entities remains the same throughout every edition but the set dressing always changes. I think it’s cool to see 5E D&D uncovering this path.

A book like Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel might not pique my interest by it’s particulars but I dig the fresh perspective in an official source. Get wild with your adventures, nerds! There’s an entire multiverse worth of amazing adventure limited only by your imagination.

*Featured image — Armor that deals radiant damage, charms that confer immunity to radiant damage, weapons that allow you to exhale radiant energy, keys that unlock radiant energy bursts, arrows that deal extra radiant damage to liars, lanterns that trap radiant souls and more are only a hint at the spectacular magic items within the Mage Forge. Watch for a BIG UPDATE this week and make sure to preorder before it’s TOO LATE right here!

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