This post was edited on November 5th, 2023. I added the Radiant Citadel Campaign Tracker, links to which you can find at the bottom!
Linking Radiant Citadel’s fantastic adventures
Journeys through the Radiant Citadel by Wizards of the Coast is a fantastic collection of adventures. In this article we take a look at how we can string the adventures together to create a coherent campaign. Essentially, the following steps let us create a custom Radiant Citadel campaign for our group:
- Use the Radiant Citadel as the party’s home base and adventure hub
- Let the party choose a group patron in session zero
- Use a job board approach where players choose their next adventure, and fill it with additional adventures
- Introduce overarching villains such as the Keening Gloom, the Sapphire Wyvern, and scheming Speakers
At the end of this article, you will find a Radiant Citadel Campaign Tracker. A document (PDF or google sheet) which you can use to track your party, their group patron, the job board, and the villains of an ongoing Radiant Citadel campaign.
Use Radiant Citadel as a home base
The Citadel itself is an underutilized location within Journeys. All of the adventures take the characters away from the floating city in the Ethereal Plane even though it’s hard to imagine a more evocative adventure location. In a Radiant Citadel campaign, we can use the Citadel as the home base for the characters. Before the game begins, we can tie characters’ backgrounds to the Citadel, connect them to core NPCs, and let players come up with their characters’ motivation to love and protect the floating city.
Over the course of the campaign we will run adventures within the Citadel and explore its mysteries such as the Auroral Diamond, the Concord Jewels, and the Incarnates. We’ll have to come up with our own adventures to incorporate these aspects into the campaign. However, I found the concepts described in Journeys so evocative that generating adventure ideas was a joy.
Tie characters to the Citadel before the campaign begins so that they and their characters care about the city. Run homebrew adventures as part of the campaign which explore the fantastic aspects of the Citadel.
Let players choose a Citadel group patron
An effective way to tie a party of adventurers together is a group patron. The concept comes from another fantastic book, Eberron: Rising from the Last War. In our session zero for our Radiant Citadel campaign, we can present a few options for group patrons to the players:
- Speaker Sholeh. An influential brass dragon who searches for the lost civilizations of the Citadel.
- Turquoise Lion. One of the mysterious Dawn Incarnates who fiercely opposes the Sapphire Wyvern.
- Doña Estela. The undead leader of San Citlán—one of the founding civilizations—with a strong economic interest in the survival of the Citadel.
- Arayat Faerinthar. Commander of the Shieldbearers, the peacekeeping force of the Citadel.
A group patron can tie the characters together and provide a compelling way to give secrets, lore, and adventure hooks to the party.
Give players adventure options with a job board
Journeys comes with one adventure per level. For most groups this pace of leveling is too fast. Instead, we can add our own adventures for each level, and let players choose which adventures they want to go on, and in which order. The easiest way to do so is through the group patron.
Here’s how: The group patron will regularly provide the characters with three adventure hooks to choose from. These are jobs the group patron wants the characters to complete. After one adventure is successfully concluded, a new job option will appear. Once an adventure hook has been refused twice by the players, it disappears from the list of options as other allies of the patron have taken the job.
This approach means we need to add more adventures as options besides the adventures from Journeys. We can either create our own adventure hooks inspired by the themes and lore of the Radiant Citadel, or reskin adventures from other sources. Here’s three collections of excellent short adventures which we can easily drop into our Radiant Citadel campaign:
- Jeff Stevens’s Adventures from the Potbellied Kobold
- Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Lairs
- MCDM’s Where Evil Lives
Offer three quests to the players by adding adventures from other sources. Let players choose a new quest at the end of each session so you can prepare the adventure. Eliminate adventures once they haven’t been chosen twice.
Tie the campaign together with villains
To run a coherent campaign instead of a series of one-shots, we need villains. These long-term antagonists of the characters and their group patron have goals and agendas of their own. They send their minions to oppose the players early on, but later a direct confrontation is inevitable.
Here are the three villains which I chose for my Radiant Citadel campaign:
- Keening Gloom. The massive storm which hovers near the Citadel is a powerful primordial which wants to use the Citadel as a gateway into the Material Plane.
- Sapphire Wyvern. The ancient sapphire dragon roams the Ethereal Plane in search of the Concord Jewels which it wants to consume to gain immense power. It is aides by a cult called the Sapphire Claws.
- The Obsidian Cabal. A secret organization of scheming Speakers who plan to overtake the Citadel and subjugate the weaker founding civilizations.
For each adventure, we try to introduce minions of one or more of these villains who advance the villain’s agenda. For example, Serapio in the fourth-level adventure “Fiend of Hollow Mine” from Journeys could be possessed by an aspect of the Keening Gloom instead of the demon lord Pazuzu.
Introducing campaign villains lets us tie the adventures together into a coherent campaign. For each adventure the characters choose, we can think about how one if our villains might be involved. Over the course of the campaign characters face more and more powerful minions, until they must confront the villains themselves.
Turning Journeys through the Radiant Citadel into a long-term campaign
Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a fantastic collection of adventures. But to run it as a coherent campaign, instead of a series of one-shots, we need to make some adaptations. Tie the characters to the Radiant Citadel as a home base. Let the players choose a group patron before the game begins. Use a job board approach with the adventure options. And introduce campaign villains to tie the adventures together. With these few additions, a Radiant Citadel campaign can become a refreshing, fantastic D&D experience.
