 Psst. Stick around to the end of this video for a secret surprise. Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and I hope you have your edibles ready because it's time to lift off into the ethereal plane with Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, a 13-adventure anthology a la Tales from the Oning Portal that goes from levels 1 through 14. I'm going to give a brief overview of each adventure and help you avoid buyer's remorse or otherwise be the talk of the table with the hottest new book. As always keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion and especially for adventure books like this it's impossible to form a 100% accurate opinion without playing the adventures first and I have a schedule of five days to put out this video so this is really my overview after having read the book. But with that out of the way let's begin. So Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is a focused effort by Wizards of the Coast to get racial. In a surprising move they reached out to third-party creators who have backgrounds in different real-world cultures and asked them to write up a one-shot so every adventure here takes heavy influence from the mythology and design of more lands than just vague Celtic slash Norse design of traditional D&D. As a concept this is a very good concept. There's an entire world of worlds that we kind of just ignore because it's not knights and nobles and rogues and I'm all for Wizards of the Coast trying new things now that we've had five years of traditional fantasy books. The only question is are these adventures good? Well first up we have the Radiant Citadel itself. As a hub world it stands floating in the ethereal plain as the resurrected ghost of a city formed by 27 civilizations that have long since passed. The entire city is actually one giant fossil of a creature no one remembers and every road and house is carved from its remains and surrounded by a giant maelstrom of magic called the Keening Gloom which constantly threatens to destroy. If that wasn't metal enough the city is punctuated by a massive crystal that formed in the center and ebb's life-giving magic but also changes its color randomly in some cryptic dance of iridescent doomsday. Why people live here I don't rightfully know except for the fact that it's surrounded by a mass of teleportation gems that can take people to and from one of the 15 original civilizations that managed to cling on through time and now govern the spectral city making this a hub world of not only adventures but also a great melting pot of cultures that all act in symbiotic harmony. Currently the Radiant Citadel acts as a beacon for lost and wayward travelers to access either through one of the 15 civilizations or by aimlessly floating through the ethereal plain until you happen upon a pretty glowing rock and try to pick it up. There's plenty more about the Radiant Citadel like the Society of Whispers but that's a video for another time. As for the adventures I should mention that they all take place inside of 15 civilizations connected to the Radiant Citadel but not the main city just like how candle keep and salt marsh use their namesakes as hub worlds to go in between stories and not as locales for the stories themselves. The reason I bring this up is because every adventure has a different gazetteer for their location at the back of the adventure and it looks like a lot of work was put into fleshing out each location. It's clear they want to make these places feel lived in enough for DMs to make their own stories after playing through the pre-written adventure. If you're the DM who likes taking inspiration from books this is a gold mine. However if you're just running what's written the adventures are short enough that they don't really warrant an entire tourist pamphlet so you can kind of just ignore them and move on with your day. Each adventure also has story hooks to answer why you're in this location in the first place and it gives suggestions on how to squeeze each adventure into a more traditional world like Aberon or the Forgotten Realms if you're a lore destroying heathen. Also also every story has a pronunciation guide that you should definitely print out for both your party and yourself because some of it is hard. The first adventure in the book is called Salted Legacy a story about two rival worship families who are both made the victims of sabotage and blame each other for the crime. One thing I'm noticing right away is that the adventure has a habit of presenting information to the reader as it becomes important which as an avid fan of detective adventures, shout out to city of mist, I find it annoying as a DM to not learn everything upfront. Also the story overplays its hand within the first like 10 minutes and I can't explain why without spoilers so maybe just skip what looks like an obvious clue during the intro scene. Later on the story shifts into a series of festival games with the mystery taking a back seat but once the mystery comes back into focus it's a lot more solid. I think that this game does a really good job of not revealing too much after the beginning but it also gives the players enough of a lead that they'll feel like they're unraveling the plot themselves. The ending definitely goes the way of social roleplay and there isn't much room for combat throughout the whole story unless the players use aggressive negotiations but I can see a few spots where the DM can force it if it looks like the players are itching for a fight. Written in Blood is an adventure for third level players where in a realm's annual celebration is interrupted by the greatest threat of all time, level 1 farmers. This leaves the party on a quest into dangerous lands that plays less like a detective case and more like a southern horror. The entire vibe of this adventure plays like something out of Curse of Strahd and the section about plugging it into another setting specifically calls out Ravenloft as an alternative locale and I think that fits perfectly. I won't show it here to save you the surprise but the final boss is hands down the scariest thing ever and the story itself is somber and creepy. This is a very good game to run on Halloween. The fiend of Hollow Mine is a Mexican inspired fantasy western on the eve of fantasy Dia de los Muertos. Growing up in a non-fantasy Mexican family I can vibe with this aesthetic. The story isn't much to write home about, it's basically just bad thing happened time to investigate but much like Written in Blood the fun comes from the atmosphere of the adventure. Being a sorcery cowboy strolling into a dusty village with a 10 gallon hat and a wand of magic missiles is never not going to be the greatest feeling in the world but I do think that this adventure is still a little too scared to go all in. Near the beginning there's a firefight in a small town but the banditos are all shooting long bows which throws off the vibe a bit when we as a community have come a long way for pretending that guns aren't D&D enough. At the very least give them crossbows but I digress. Wages of Vice is fantasy Mardi Gras and there is blood on the dance floor because it's a murder mystery. Unlike Salted Legacy this adventure is more focused in its story and the writing is better for it but it doesn't feel like the characters deduce any of the clues that an NPC doesn't just yell out on their own making it feel more like a roller coaster than a corn maze. The dynamics between the characters are better because you can kind of see where everyone is coming from even the designated bad guys but the ending really annoyed me by stifling its own closure and kind of letting the villains get off with a I'll think about how to punish you later. It's weird and hopefully DMs will find a better solution for the ending by the time they get to it. Sins of Our Elders is another horror story this time with a Chinese flair. There's a big old city, the city is haunted, and now the party has to be ghostbusters because nobody else can exercise. Now I have no Chinese heritage but this whole adventure reads to me like it's taking a shot at the rigid social traditions of East Asian culture because a lot of the drama is based around somebody breaking the rules but the rules of the society demands political politeness so no one is allowed to fix the problem because that would inherently mean acknowledging the problem which is a shameful thing to insinuate about someone. This ideology is challenged and refuted which I think is swell but if you don't care about any of that there's also plenty of monsters to punch. That's not to say that the adventure is preachy it's actually woven into the story naturally and it helps fit with the mystery and I'm starting to realize that Radiance Citadel is a terribly well-written book. Gold for Fools and Princes is a seventh level adventure about a mine that dug straight down and subsequently collapsed but night has fallen and monsters are spawning. Now the party has to stock up and prepare for the dangers that come when one digs too greedily and too deep. Pretty straightforward adventure, you get to study up about a particular threat and then you get to hunt down that threat which makes for a suspenseful fight that a more survival-oriented player should enjoy. If you're a fan of Lord of the Rings, Trail of Destruction is literally about traveling to a volcano to stop the forces of evil from destroying everything. It plays like an actual adventure, you know traveling around, dodging obstacles and traversing ruins, and fighting a big bad guy at the end. They're not the most memorable for its characters in my opinion but the journey to the hot place will likely have good moments for an eighth level party to look back on. In The Mists of Manavarsha is a beautiful adventure where nature meets culture and the players are called upon to clean up the mess. Despite a lot of the previous adventures, this story is a lot less horror or even combat focus, taking a step back and letting our wards do the fighting until that fails and we resort to punching plants. It's refreshing that these last couple of modules haven't been horror themed since Radiance Citadel isn't supposed to be inherently terrifying, and Mrs. of the Manaverse is mostly a serene storyline with just enough combat so the players can still destroy the rainforest. Between Tangled Roots is a story set in an island that worships an ancient dragon called a Bakunawa, or at least they did before the Bakunawa actually showed up, put on its trog door hat and started burnin' the archipelago. The players awkwardly show up just after the desolation and the town sends them to ask the dragon, what the fuck dude? If you've ever seen the rare species episode of The Witcher that has the same adventurous feel since the players aren't the only one interested in chatting with the dragon and there's a lot of room for the DM to play around with a certain NPC in his band of merry men for some philosophical combat before the phyllophysical kind. Shadow of the Sun is a wild tale about revolution in a state where the laws are put in place by a literal angel. It tackles the ideology of pure goodness and forces players to take sides over what constitutes goodness, as well as what lengths you have the right to go to in order to keep it sacred. This adventure is likely to split the party by design and fights are harder to take part in because you're not just fighting monsters half the time, you're fighting institutions. I have to give the writer credit that they didn't make one of the sides laughably evil. The choice might actually be hard to make. The only issue I have for this story is that each scene is a branching path depending on what side the party chooses, and those branches quickly start nodding together if the DM doesn't keep their notes straight. The Night Sea Sucker is another ghost story, this time aquatic-themed, and it starts out suspenseful before getting kind of weird. The party has to hop on a boat to find another boat lost to the seas countless years ago. Along the way, the spirits of wetness antagonize the party as they party their way through an Atlantean city. Unlike all of Ghost Assault Marsh, The Night Sea Sucker does the impossible by actually setting a water-themed adventure on the fucking water. This is the time to crack open your aquatic characters and engage in a fishy tale that starts out spooky but transforms into a political intrigue under the sea. Barry Dynasty is a tale about the party, stumbling their way through an ancient underground ruin, and it might be the first of these adventures that I don't really like that much. It's not bad, there are exciting moments, but the overall story is propelled not by the player's involvement, but by the NPCs having their own drama and the characters happening to stand next to them. I can count two moments of agency in the entire story, and one of them involves the players accidentally touching a thing that they very obviously should not touch. It kind of purports to be a mystery, but it's more like a bunch of revelations that the party gets told by other characters, with an essay about what they learned at the end. As the penultimate adventure, this is disappointing. Anyways, the last adventure is Orchids of the Invisible Mountain, and in a fitting fuck you, it takes place in the Fate Wild. The story of this game goes from 0 to 100 fast, and as the concluding adventure, it kind of fits, but it's also super jarring because it all comes out of literal thin air. Basically, monsters are coming in from beyond the material plane, and the party has to travel dimensions and get them to knock it off. Along the way, they get an animal companion, they make a mountain out of a molehill, and battle supernatural forces in a fittingly epic end to the Radiant Citadel series. Overall, Journey Through the Radiant Citadel has some of the most interesting one-shots I've seen from any compilation books. If you're looking to cherry pick, my personal favorites are Written in Blood, The Fiend of Hollow Mine, Sins of our Elders, and Shadow of the Sun. Hopefully this video has helped you decide whether to go out and buy yourself a copy. Or wait a month for all the PDFs to be leaked online. But that'll almost do it. Instead of my usual call to action, I want to shout out the massive project that I've been working on called How It Feels to Play a Barbarian. You may have noticed that the trailer came out earlier today, or if you're on my Patreon, you would have gotten it earlier, along with some behind-the-scenes footage and photos. This is a massive undertaking, so if you've ever considered pledging to my Patreon, I'll be releasing more behind-the-scenes of this and my upcoming projects that are set to come out real soon. But yeah, Davi out.