Go to Part 1

ADVENTURE OVERVIEW

Each adventure in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is built on a common template:

• Background
• Setting the Adventure
• Character Hooks
• Starting the Adventure

Followed by, of course, the adventure itself and then the accompanying setting gazetteer.

Setting the Adventure suggests three options where each adventure could be set. One is “Through the Radiant Citadel,” which, as noted, indicates where the Concord Jewel is located. Another suggests where this civilization could be slipped into the Forgotten Realms. And the third does the same for some other official D&D campaign setting, either Eberron, Greyhawk, or, in one case, Mystara.

Character Hooks are interesting. Each scenario ostensibly includes multiple hooks (usually three, sometimes only two). There’s some variation here, of course, across the many adventures, but these “hooks” are generally just reasons the characters might be visiting the region. For example:

• The characters are going to a local festival.
• The characters are visiting a friend.
• The characters are hired as guards by someone visiting the area.

In a few cases the “you’re in the area to do X’ can at least loosely qualify as a surprising scenario hook (because it has at least some proximity to the scenario premise), but mostly it’s just, “You’re traveling through Y, and then…”

So the “hooks” are then followed by Starting the Adventure, which is almost always a random encounter that informs the PCs of the scenario’s existence. This random encounter is what I, personally, would consider the actual scenario hook.

The intention of having multiple scenario hooks is great: It would theoretically make it easier for DMs to incorporate these adventures into their campaigns and/or make hooking the PCs into the scenario far more robust (because if one hook failed, there would be additional opportunities). But because the actual hook is the random encounter, this can, unfortunately, lead to very fragile hooks in actual practice. For example, in “The Fiend of Hollow Mine” the PCs need to:

• Not detect and decide to skip the bounty hunter ambush.
• Not chase the bounty hunters who are scripted to flee.
• Accept a random barkeep’s invitation to have a drink, rather than continuing on to their actual goal.
• Get approached by Paloma the Outlaw and decide NOT to capture her for the bounty they’ve just been informed she has on her head.
• Finally, accept the job offer from Paloma.

That sequence of events probably happens more often than not when running “Fiend,” but it’s A LOT of potential points of failure to navigate through before the adventure has technically even started.

One more decision I really don’t like in this book is that no clear credit is given to the writer of each adventure. This was done in both Tales from the Yawning Portal and Candlekeep Mysteries, and its absence from Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel feels particularly grody given how much of the marketing campaign for the book was, rightfully, focused on the phenomenal writing talent that made it possible. I should not have to use Google to figure out which author wrote which adventure, which is why I’ll be indicating authorship for each adventure below.

GAZETTEERS

Before we do that, however, let’s take a moment to consider the setting gazetteers that accompany each adventure. These include the usual list of locations (usually labeled on a map) and cultural information, but there are a few notable features I’d like to call special attention to.

Legends of X. This section presents a lovely blend of history and myth, while also typically grounding the setting into a unique fantasy metaphysic. It’s a nice way to neatly encapsulate the unique spin each setting gives to D&D.

Adventures in X, which gives four adventure seeds. These are pretty excellent throughout the entire book: They’re not generic ideas, instead being spiked with specific details that add value. Nor are they vague ideas. Too often I see seeds like this say stuff like, “There’s a weird glowing light, I wonder what it is?” In Radiant Citadel, the seeds reliably tell you exactly what that weird light is. Finally, the details provided generally give a clear direction for development.

Characters from X. If a player chooses to create a character from this civilization, this section includes three questions the DM can ask them to help ground the character into the specific context of the setting. For example, in Yeonido, these are:

• What is your social class and clan?
• Do you have a special role in the city’s hierarchy?
• How have gwishin [the ubiquitous ancestor spirits of the setting] affected you?

Each question is accompanied with a short guide and list of suggestions, perfect for guiding the conversation.

Names. Each gazetteer includes a list of sample names you can use for NPCs. I love having an NPC name list as a resource, and it’s particularly valuable here because the range of cultural inspiration drawn from for Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is so diverse that literally everyone using this book will almost certainly find that some majority of the cultures detailed are exotic to them (and, therefore, more difficult to improvise appropriate names off-the-cuff).

The only shortcoming here is that it would be great if the sample name list was longer. (Which is why I actually expanded the lists in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: A List of Names.)

But this is actually the biggest shortcoming of the gazetteers in general: The practical realities of the book means that the really cool settings can only be sketched in with broad brush strokes. Sometimes this just means that you’re left hungry for more (a great problem to have), but in some cases the lack of detail can really cripple the settings and, in some cases, the adventures connected to them (a much less great problem to have).

For example, in the land of Godsbreath, the Proclaimers of the Covenant are charged by the gods to record the history of the Covenant’s chosen people.

Who are the Covenant?

They’re a pantheon which is “for you to define” (because I’ve hit my word count) “and might include gods appropriate to your campaign’s setting or deities unique to Godsbreath.”

… well, this is probably fine, because the gods are only <checks notes> the primary focus of the entire setting?

Oof.

The lack of detail also spills over and creates a lack of scale. For example, consider this excerpt of text describing Siabsungkoh:

Traders from Siabsungkoh’s scattered communities flock nightly to the Dyn Singh Night Market, an ever-changing, town-sized market…

The [Outer Edges] that border the wilderness … are overgrown with lush greenery and lau-pop flowers. Many of the scattered communities here and across the valley reject the bureaucracy and crowds of the market district, braving the dangers of the nearby wilderness to stay self-sufficient.

And now compare it to this map of the region:

There are no “scattered communities” and the “Outer Edges” are, in fact, only a half mile from the Night Market itself, so (a) you can probably see one from the other and (b) there’s no room for multiple communities, let alone communities in separate “districts.”

Plus, the whole “civilization” is just a half dozen miles wide. A pattern which repeats throughout the book: “empires” that consist of a couple of towns; bustling “metropolises” with only a couple dozen buildings; and so forth.

So what happened here?

Well, based on my experience, I think it’s almost certain that the cartographer accurately (and evocatively) presented everything that was likely on the design sketch they were given to work from. But because there’s only room to present the setting in the broadest strokes, there just wasn’t enough detail on the design sketch.

Even without the scale that locks it in on the final version, barrenness on a map is interpreted as tininess.

What I do love about the Siabsungkoh map is the inclusion of locations NOT described in the limited text, including Monkey Mask Farm, Silver Carp Farm, and so forth. I’m a big believer in RPG maps inviting the user — including the DM — to explore the world. To ask, “What’s this?”

Is Monkey Mask Farm run by awakened monkeys?

Does it literally grow monkey masks on magically enhanced teak trees?

Do the farms of Siabsungkoh hang masks above their gate, representing the patron animal who protects their crops? (Are some of these masks possessed/enchanted?)

Tabula rasa is the scraped tablet. The empty spaces on the map. Those spaces can be fun to fill. But rasa is the fundamental flavor or essence of creation, and offering just a hint of it can often by even more powerful than the blank spaces.

So my bottom line on the setting gazetteers is this: What’s here seems consistently good-to-great. But issues with limited word count seem to consistently choke out their potential.

As a final note, I will suggest that the book could have done itself a lot of favors by presenting the setting gazetteers before each adventure, instead of after.

First, because the adventure comes first, the writers feel obligated to include a whole bunch of explanatory detail in the adventure that more logically belongs in the gazetteer (i.e., cultural information).

And then, second, many of the writers fall prey to the trap of using the limited space in their gazetteer to repeat descriptions of locations that are already amply detailed in the adventure itself. Yes, it’s easy to think, “This list of ‘Noteworthy Sites’ is supposed to include all the locations in the setting, so it logically must include all the places we visited in the adventure.” But, particularly when you’re fighting word count, this can really hurt the utility of your work.

If the gazetteers came first, both the temptation and necessity of repeating information would’ve been drastically reduced, freeing and encouraging the writers to pack more value into the book.

Go to Part 3

SPOILERS FOR JOURNEYS THROUGH THE RADIANT CITADEL

If you go way, way back to the earliest days of D&D, one of the coolest things is just how much of a kitchen sink it was: Read something cool in a fantasy book on Tuesday, get a crazy idea on Thursday, dump ‘em into your game on Sunday.

Over time, the lore of D&D has tended — as the lore of such things often does — to ossify. But the game is still at its best, in my opinion, when the taps are open and the sink is overflowing.

This, of course, brings us to Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, an anthology of thirteen adventures for 5^th Edition D&D, which foregoes the taps and opens the floodgates.

The concept here is that there’s a magical city floating within the Deep Ethereal. A set of giant gemstones-slash-transport vehicles orbit the city and connect it to fifteen civilizations across multiple realities. Each adventure in the anthology takes the PCs to one of these civilizations, effectively slamming open the doors, taking the wildest, most amazing fantasy visions available, and pouring them into a fantasy crossroads where they can all swirl and mix together into a beautiful smorgasbord of the fantastic.

AMONGST THE CONCORD JEWELS

The Radiant Citadel is a “fossil” that’s wrapped around a gargantuan gemstone called the Auroral Diamond. And the 15-page gazetteer describing the Citadel is, if you’ll pardon the pun, the jewel of this book.

Right off the bat, I’m immediately tantalized by the Citadel’s mysteries. (A fossil of what I’d love to have an answer to!) I also love the three-dimensional nature of the city’s spiral.

But here, unfortunately, we run into a bit of friction, because the spiral of the city means that Mike Schley’s map is rather flawed: Because the upper turns are blocking the lower turns, it appears that more than a third of the city is missing.

And, to be painfully honest, this will set something of a theme for the Citadel: What’s included in the gazetteer is fantastic. What’s missing, on the other hand, can undercut a lot of its strengths.

To start with, however, let’s focus on the positive.

Returning to the Auroral Diamond, this is the heart of the city, in more ways than one. It has life-giving powers which blanket the entire city, and it also glows with magical colors. Legend says that each color represents a civilization being born somewhere in the multiverse; and if the color repeats, that civilization has died.

Orbiting the Auroral Diamond are the Concord Jewels. Each jewel, as I mentioned above, is actually a magical transport vessel connected to a separate civilization on one of many worlds. There are twenty-seven jewels in total, each “capable of holding hundreds of people and tons of goods,” but at the moment only fifteen of them are active. At some point in the past, a catastrophe befell the Radiant Citadel and it was abandoned, severing its connection to the great civilizations which were once connected to it. Recently, however, the descendants of some of these civilizations have returned to the Citadel, and they hope that still others can be re-contacted.

The connection between the Citadel and these civilizations is more than just physical. Within the Auroral Diamond is the Preserve of the Ancestors, a liminal space that is one part civic center and one part mystic savannah. Notable here are the Incarnates, such as the obsidian eagle and the ruby pangolin.

Souls of those who die within civilizations linked to the Citadel have their spirits incarnated within gemstones, and these gemstones aggregate together into the Incarnates. Other entities from the civilizations, such as nature spirits, may also be incarnated within the gems. Each Incarnate, therefore, is a gestalt of a civilization’s souls, speaking with the wisdom of centuries, the insight of myriad points of view, and the authority of cultural hegemony.

The incarnates somehow manage to be simultaneously one of the most wholesome and one of the most metal-as-fuck things I’ve ever seen.

There are three major institutions in the Citadel:

• The House of Convalescence uses the Auroral Diamond’s healing properties to create a powerful center for magical healing.
• The Palace of Exiles takes advantage of the Citadel’s existence as a dimensional nexus to provide refuge to the desperate and downtrodden from multiple worlds.
• The Shieldbearers are a search-and-rescue organization that ventures from the Citadel into the many worlds on a wide variety of special ops.

The first two organizations serve as Great Attractors. You can use them to easily justify bringing PCs or adventure hooks to the Citadel. And once the PCs are there, you can hang a full campaign on the concept of being Shieldbearer agents without breaking a sweat.

This is phenomenally precise and insightful design, packing a ton of utility into minimal word count with laser-like precision. You can see similar design instincts being exercised with the NPCs included in the gazetteer. Space appears to be limited, so only a few are described, but they include:

Sholeh, the elder Speaker and brass dragon who’s such a nervous wreck that she neurotically “picks her scales in private as she tries to find relief.”

And also, Arayat, the leader of the shieldbearers. “He bristles against the rules of engagement imposed by the Speakers. He has cremated a hundred fallen comrades-in-arms and seen horrors few can comprehend. The toll has pushed him to his limits.”

This is really subtle worldbuilding and I love it.

Look at our utopia! Isn’t it beautiful and lovely and perfect?

Also, all of our leaders are nervous wrecks on the verge of cracking open like a rotten egg.

… interesting. Very interesting.

A PROMISE UNFULFILLED

In case I haven’t been clear, I really love the Radiant Citadel gazetteer. I love the concept of the setting. I love how much rich detail and flavor gets packed into its slim page count. This Gathering Place of Strangers and Stories is a pure delight. Stunningly evocative. Intensely creative. Packed with dynamic elements ready to explode across your campaign.

But, of course, it’s only a fraction of the content in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. The other 200+ pages are dedicated to the thirteen adventures that will take the PCs through a grand tour of the civilizations linked through the Citadel. Each of these adventures consists of the adventure itself, plus a short gazetteer (usually accompanied by a map) that describes the civilization itself, opening it up for further exploration in your campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s a missed connection here. Or, rather, thirteen missed connections.

The Radiant Citadel, as described in its gazetteer, is a collaborative society jointly ruled by its member civilizations. It’s a major hub of trade, linking these civilizations together in a pandimensional society. There are diplomats and embassies. On the darker side, there are references to revolutionary groups using the Citadel as a staging ground for “incursions against their home governments.”

But when you flip over to the setting gazetteers, none of this is true.

There are no embassies. No indication of trade or travel between the civilizations. No suggestion that there is, in fact, any connection between these settings and the Radiant Citadel.

For example, consider the Concord Jewels. These are the vital arteries connecting these civilizations; they are the links through which all trade and travel occur. But although each adventure includes a “Through the Radiant Citadel” section describing where the civilization’s Jewel arrives, this is clearly an afterthought. It’s never depicted on the maps, is almost always located in the middle of nowhere (in many cases there’s not even a road!), and frequently is not even given a specific location (instead just being described as, for example, “within a few miles”).

This would be like arriving at O’Hare International Airport and having the GM describe it as, “Your plane lands in the middle of a small forest clearing. There is no road, but your flight attendant tells you that if you walk south for a few hours you should see some signs of civilization.”

The metaphysics don’t link up any better. For example, I mentioned that the Incarnates are made up of constituent spirits, including the souls of the dead from the founding civilizations. That seems like a pretty big deal, but it’s not reflected in the religious beliefs or customs of any of the civilizations, many of which have completely different (and, in my opinion, incompatible) cosmologies for their afterlife.

Even on the structural level, I’m surprised by the disconnect between the Citadel gazetteer and the setting gazetteers. For example, the Shieldbearers are clearly set up to serve as a campaign frame: Join the Shieldbearers, travel to extradimensional civilizations, meet interesting and exciting people, and save them!

So where are the Shieldbearer scenario hooks? Each adventure includes three different hooks (more on those later), but only one of the thirteen adventures includes one for members of the Shieldbearers.

Obviously what happened here is that the whole book was written at the same time, and there either wasn’t time or a development process (or both) to harmonize everything into a coherent vision. It would be fascinating to see what the original spec sheet for the freelancers looked like: Did the concept of the Radiant Citadel already exist, and simply wasn’t detailed enough for the writers to sync their material to it? Or was the original pitch just focused on the mini-settings and the Radiant Citadel was added later as a bridging device, but without the ability to fully revamp the adventures accordingly?

Regardless, as much as I love the setting presented in the Radiant Citadel gazetteer, the “O’Hare in a forest” problem rather badly undercuts it in actual practice. The easiest solution (recharacterizing the Citadel as a motley assembly of refugees without strong political or economic ties to the individual civilizations) unfortunately moves the Citadel away from a lot of the stuff that, in my opinion, makes it so cool. Going the other direction and keeping the vision of the Citadel intact, on the other hand, would require rather extensive modifications to more than a dozen individual settings.

Go to Part 2

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of depthcrawl mini-campaigns by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen. It would probably be more accurate to describe them as THE depthcrawl mini-campaigns, since the entire depthcrawl concept was invented by Allen for these books.

The Gardens of Ynn came first. A 79-page, PDF-only book with fairly crude productions values, but golden content. The Stygian Library was more or less the sameF, but a 2020 Kickstarter saw this book revamped with gorgeous gothic illustrations and a deluxe printed edition.

INTO THE GARDENS

One day you may find a strange door in a garden. It wasn’t there yesterday. It may not be there tomorrow. But today it looks as if it’s been there for a hundred years, and above it are written the words The Garden of Ynn by way of Whiteoak. Or Hobbiton. Or Waterdeep. Or Bywater-Under-the-Bay.

On the other side of the door is a different garden. A strange and feyish place of glass-roofed mausoleums, singing orchards, and frozen silk-gardens. Haunting these hedgerows are bonsai turtles, giant caterpillars, animated chessmen, and ferocious white apes. And if you choose to go exploring – to go deeper – there are stranger things to be found as the skein of the garden peels back: steam pipes and splicing vats and the vivisection theatre.

LOST IN THE LIBRARY

“Put enough books in one place, and they distort the world.” The Stygian Library is that place between worlds towards which any building stacked high with books (or scrolls or tomes) is bent. Pass between the shelves, explore the chambers of learning, and you may find yourself passing to another realm where the rows of shelves continue without end.

Here there are chained books, silent printing presses, time-locked vaults, and spirit planetariums, all carefully attended by the five Orders of Librarians – Red, Yellow, Black, White, and Grey – who pursue a secret agenda that is somehow related to the spirit tubes and phantom pumps that seem to lace the library’s hidden ways.

Because the Library connects all great stores of knowledge across the multiverse, the answers to almost any question you might ask can be found here… and this is precisely what will lure many into its dusty halls.

WHAT IS A DEPTHCRAWL?

I’ve written up a detailed overview of depthcrawls, but here’s the quickie version: Depthcrawls are a method for procedurally generating an exploration scenario. Each keyed site is created by randomly combining three or four different elements:

• Location
• Detail
• Event
• Encounter

So, for example, in the Stygian Library you might generate:

• Reading Lounge
• Funeral Urns
• Footprints, Litter, Notes, & Other Signs of Passage
• 5 crawling things

These are not, it should be noted, simply enigmatic entries on a random table: Each element is supported by a meaty, play-oriented entry. And so, in this case, I know that the PCs find an assortment of funerary urns arranged around a comfortable room with richly upholstered couches and elegant coffee tables. From several of these urns, there are footprints leading away from them… and as I’ve generated “crawling things” as the encounter, it’s reasonable to intuit that these “foot” prints belong to crawling things which have somehow emerged from the ashes within the urns.

Or perhaps something completely different.

That’s the beautiful alchemy of the depthcrawl: In the process of bringing these disparate elements together (both with each other and with the current circumstances and continuity of the campaign), you – as the GM – will be performing a constant series of creative closures, making every journey into either the Garden of Ynn or the Stygian Library utterly unique. In practice, it very much feels as if you an Allen are engaged in a beautiful dance, your own creative impulses – and those of your players – swirling endlessly with the raw fodder of these setting/adventure books to summon forth something truly magical.

As the PCs journey deeper (into either Garden or Library), their current “depth” serves as a modifier on the random tables, slowly pushing the results towards both greater terrors and terrifying truths.

LIMINAL SPACES

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are in some ways completely different from each other, but in many others are clearly cut from the same cloth. Indeed, one might say that they are superficially distinct, but unified by a common soul.

What they most essentially share in common is a fey-ish tone that I would describe as “a somber funhouse.”

Funhouse dungeons are designed like carnival rides: Whatever wild whims seize their GM are thrust together, usually with a wacky or comedic result. Ynn and the Library are built to similar effect, but their sense of the absurd is a deliberate invocation of an inhuman and alien environment beyond mortal ken; it hews true to the spirit of Alice in Wonderland, which seeks enlightenment in madness.

“Don’t look too close,” says the funhouse dungeon. “We’re just here to have fun!”

“Look very close,” says Ynn and the Library. “For what could be more fun than the absurdity of truth?”

WHO CAN VISIT THE GARDENS & LIBRARY?

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are OSR products, designed for that vague smear of pre-1985 D&D and/or the many clones and near-clones of those games which have appeared over the last couple decades.

Personally, I ran The Gardens of Ynn for 5^th Edition without any great deal of difficulty. The most troublesome bit are the monster stat blocks, but you can achieve a great deal with some simple re-skinning. Honestly, the adventures find such a unique vibe that any GM with moderate experience could probably easily use them in a wide variety of systems and settings with little difficulty: Numenera, Savage Worlds, Monsterhearts, etc.

QUIBBLES

The Gardens of Ynn and the original edition The Stygian Library both list their locations, details, and so forth in the order that they appear on the random tables. In my experience, this made it unnecessarily difficult to find the entries for stuff as I generated it. Someone appears to have figured this out, however, and the revised edition of The Stygian Library alphabetizes everything.

… that’s it for my quibbles.

CONCLUSION

Either or both of these books get my highest recommendation.

I’ve run The Gardens of Ynn several times, including with the Alexandrian Game Club, and it’s been a smashing success every time. I described it as a “beautiful alchemy” above, and that really is the experience of running it at the table. It’s been such a wonderful experience that I’m looking into the possibility of launching an open table with the campaign.

It’s not just the depthcrawl itself, which is a very nifty structure for procedural content generation. It’s Emmy Allen’s crystal-clear creative vision, which effortlessly flows from the page directly into your campaign with soul-searing pathos, innocent whimsy, and a delightfully surprising pulp steampunk.

If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, I’ve done a video on Twitch demonstrating a simulated run of what using the book looks like from the GM perspective.

Regardless, these are both books you should pick up as soon as your pocketbook allows!

GARDENS OF YNN

Style: 3
Substance: 5

Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: Dying Stylishly Games
Cost: $5 (PDF)
Page Count: 79

STYGIAN LIBRARY (Revised)

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: SoulMuppet Publishing
Cost: $30 (Physical) / $9 (PDF)
Page Count: 160

Go to Part 1

THIS BROKEN RAILROAD

By its nature, Call of the Netherdeep is a linear campaign: Festival of Merit → Emerald Grotto → Bazzoxan → Ank’Harel → Cael Morrow → the Netherdeep.

In theory, this should be fine.

In practice, however, the designers have decided to link these set pieces together with a railroad.

And, unfortunately, it’s a really shoddy railroad. Honestly, just sloppy, terrible, ill-conceived infrastructure. Maybe not quite, “there’s a dragon attacking a town that’s also being besieged by an army, and our expectation is that the 1^st level characters will decide to just walk into town,” bad, but close.

Let’s start with the hook for the entire campaign.

At the end of the Festival of Merit, the Elders of Jigow choose the two most successful teams to compete in the Grand Finale race through the Emerald Grotto. One team will be the PCs. The other team will be the Rivals.

This is a little weird, because literally none of the festival games up to this point have been team-based events. The only previous mentions of a “team,” in fact, were (a) an event where you are explicitly FORBIDDEN from competing as a team and (b) a different event where you competed with a partner (which is not the same thing as the five-ish person teams selected at the Grand Finale).

So, to kick things off, there this’s big, glaring continuity error squatting right on top of the event which is the lynchpin for the entire campaign.

In any case, the PCs and Rivals have to race through the Emerald Grotto and claim the Emerald Eye. Whichever team returns with the Emerald Eye wins the race.

Oddly, the adventure then acts as if the races ends as soon as someone grabs the Eye. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

But let’s move past that, too.

The real problem here is that the entire campaign hook is horribly broken.

Here’s how it works:

• The PCs get to the end of the Emerald Grotto and they spot a shark that has the Emerald Eye strapped to its side.
• They fight the shark.
• When the shark dies, it crashes into a stone pillar, causing the wall of the cavern to crack open.
• This reveals a passage “awash with golden light.”
• If the PCs go down the passage, they will discover the Jewel of Three Prayers, which — as noted above — is the essential McGuffin on which the entire plot is built.

Problem #1: It’s a race.

So, yeah, the glowy light is interesting. But the PCs are motivated by their immediate and only goal to NOT explore the light right now. Generally speaking, you want scenario-crucial actions to flow from the established goals of the PCs, not in direct contradiction to them.

The same is true of the Rivals, of course, but ultimately you, as the DM, control their actions, so you can just decree that they go and check out the glowy light even if the PCs don’t. The campaign is designed to hypothetically work if the Rivals claim the Jewel of Three Prayers (more on that in a second), so you can route around this. It’s just kind of awkward in its design.

The bigger problem is that you don’t have to fight the shark.

In fact, fighting the shark is probably the dumbest way for the PCs to get the Emerald Eye.

Even if you overrule an Animal Handling check, that still leaves alternative solutions like mage hand (to grab the amulet), an animal friendship spell, or just a Stealth check (with or without invisibility). And it should be noted that the writers know that these options exist, because animal friendship is how they get the amulet on the shark in the first place:

A druid of Jigow cast animal friendship on the shark earlier today and tied the Emerald Eye around its body, then made a speedy getaway.

So… no dead shark?

No thrashing.

No thrashing, no pillar collapse.

No pillar collapse, no glowy light.

No glowy light, the campaign doesn’t happen.

Oof.

Okay, let’s move forward to the next day. There are four scenarios:

PCs have the Jewel, the Rivals are Indifferent. The Rivals decide to just follow the PCs. (We’ll come back to this.)

PCs have the Jewel, the Rivals are Friendly. The Rivals offer to join the PCs (and, as mentioned before, the rivalry breaks and GMPC problems start).

PCs have the Jewel, the Rivals are Hostile. In this case, the Rivals try to steal the Jewel. First, as mentioned earlier, this probably means that the Rivals are now dead and the rivalry is over. More than that, the railroad is frequently driven by the Rivals showing up by surprise and forcing the plot forward: So whether they’re working with the PCs or they’re dead, the railroad breaks multiple times over.

Second, their plan for stealing the Jewel is also hilarious:

The rivals’ plan is to gather outside the inn where the characters are staying. One rival then sneaks into the characters’ room at the inn and searches for the jewel. If the thief doesn’t return after an hour, the rivals travel to the Emerald Loop Caravan Shop (described later in this chapter) and wait up to seven days for their mission companion.

Uhh…

Maggie: So the plan was for Galsariad to sneak in and grab the Jewel?

Ayo: Yup.

Maggie: And then he comes right back?

Ayo: Yup.

Maggie: And he hasn’t come back.

Ayo: Yup.

Irvan: What should we do?

Ayo: Let’s leave town and wait at a rest stop for a week. See if he shows up.

…

Anyway.

The Rivals have the Jewel. This is, as both we and Call of the Netherdeep have established, quite likely. And if it happens, the railroad junction is almost unimaginably bad:

You’re eating breakfast at the Unbroken Tusk while locals chat around you. Through the cacophony, one voice catches your attention.

“Rumor has it they’re going to Rosohna to sell it. Elder Ushru met them and everything, kept whispering while pointing at a huge, shiny amulet on the table. He was talking about ‘destiny’ and other heroic-like words. I think they were the group who won the grand finale yesterday. The amulet looked plenty magical, but even if it isn’t, it’d be worth a fortune. Yeah, they’re traveling down the Emerald Loop today.”

[…]

People are saying that the jewel would sell for over 1,000 gold pieces — maybe twice that if it’s magical, and twice that again if the sellers were to make the long, oversea journey to a trade hub like the desert metropolis of Ank’Harel.

Nothing is forcing the characters to chase down the rivals, but the thought of losing out on such a prize is enough to motivate most adventurers.

That’s it. That’s the hook: Chase the Rivals down and rob them.

“The thought of losing out on such a prize is enough to motivate most adventurers.”

That’s not adventurers. You’re thinking of criminals.

And not even very smart criminals. There’s gotta be easier marks for 1,000 gp than five well-equipped adventurers who already beat you once.

Even if the players do hear these rumors and leap straight to, “Oh, man! We definitely gotta rob those people!” Call of the Netherdeep forgets to include a mechanism for telling them that they’re supposed to go to Bazzoxan.

Sure, they might interrogate the Rivals before/after robbing them. Or maybe they follow them all the way to Bazzoxan before robbing them.

But if not, the entire adventure is literally scripted to derail.

EVERYTHING FAILS TOGETHER

Sadly, the whole campaign is like this. Every transition is a broken, ill-conceived railroad.

One I want to call particular attention to, however, is the transition from Bazzoxan to Ank’Harel, because I think it reveals the fundamental misstep of Call of the Netherdeep here.

To briefly review, the core structure here is:

• The PCs meet one or more of the three researchers in Bazzoxan.
• They go into Betrayers’ Rise.
• They follow one of the researchers back to Bazzoxan, where they join that researcher’s faction.

This seems pretty straightforward, right?

But every step of the way, Call of the Netherdeep transforms this into a tortured disaster.

First, the campaign hides the researchers so that the PCs have to jump through weird, arbitrary, unlabeled hoops to meet them.

The first option is:

• The PCs randomly wander over to the crematorium.
• They decide to stay and help dispose of corpses.
• A researcher named Prolix shows up.

If the PCs don’t go to the crematorium? The campaign breaks. If they don’t help dispose of the corpses? The campaign breaks.

The second option is:

• The PCs eventually wander into the inn.
• Among a number of other patrons, there’s a tiefling in the common room.
• If they don’t talk to the tiefling, the adventure specifically says the tiefling will ignore them.
• If they do talk to the tiefling (who is named Question), they need to mention the Jewel of the Three Prayers.
• If they mention the Jewel, then the third researcher (Aloysia), who has been eavesdropping on this conversation, will be like, “Hey! I’m the NPC who tells you what to do next!”

Don’t randomly talk to the tiefling? The campaign breaks. Don’t decide to spontaneously mention the Jewel (which you could very easily have decided is something you shouldn’t be flashing around) during this specific conversation? The campaign breaks.

This is, to put it politely, a very convoluted path. It’s really unclear to me why they’re locked the plot behind these deliberately obfuscated checkpoints.

To put it less politely, this is video game writing. And, sure, in a video game you can expect the players to keep clicking on NPCs in the tavern until they click on the right tiefling. But it doesn’t translate to the table top at all. There is no display of patrons for the players to click on.

But we’re not done yet.

Aloysia then proposes that she and the PCs should work together. Of course, as we’ve established, the campaign then just assumes the PCs will not accept her offer and pretends it never happened.

The campaign is simultaneously pretending that there’s no way the PCs are working with the Rivals, either. This is important, because, at the end of Betrayers’ Rise, the designers frame up a heavily railroaded “gotcha!” scene where Aloysia, accompanied by the Rivals, shows up and steals the Jewel.

This forced fight (which can’t happen at all if any of these convoluted preconditions is not met), ends with one of two scripted outcomes.

If Aloysia wins, she cracks a teleportation tablet, creating a teleportation circle to Ank’Harel, and announces that the Rivals should follow her. The PCs theoretically have the opportunity to follow her here, but since they’re presumably dead or unconscious, this is unlikely.

If Aloysia loses, she runs away and casts earthquake, triggering a cave-in that blocks the PCs from pursuing her. She then fumbles through her bag and — hilariously — drops two teleportation tablets on the ground while trying to activate a third.

The PCs can then spend 10-20 hours digging their way out, find the teleportation tablets, think to themselves, “This definitely isn’t a trap,” and then use them to follow her.

Now, once the PCs get to Ank’Harel, the book acts as if the PCs are equally likely to join each of the three factions. But that’s not really the case, is it? First, Aloysia has just tried to rob them (and possibly kill them). Remember the Unforgivable Sin of stealing the PCs’ shit? Yeah.

Second, the only way for the PCs to join Aloysia’s faction — the Consortium — is if they raced after her, jumped through the teleportation circle moments after she went through, immediately forgave her for everything, and then signed up on the spot.

I mean… C’mon. Even if the adventure wasn’t doing everything in its power to stop the PCs from doing that, it’s not exactly a plausible outcome, right? “Hey, person who just tried to kill us! We are interested in your ideas and would like to hear more! Do you have a pamphlet or anything we could look over?”

It seems fairly likely to me that all of this would have made a lot more sense earlier in development: You have dynamic, interesting Rivals. The researchers in Bazzoxan would have had clear, ruidium-focused agendas. This would allow the players to make meaningful choices about which faction’s agenda they agree with, and these choices could have been contrasted against the choices of the Rivals, driving the action forward through Bazzoxan and into Ank’Harel.

If the book just presented these as toys for the DM to actively play with, it’s a robust situation rich with possibility.

But then somebody decided that they needed to write a railroad that forces Aloysia to be a maniacal, monologuing villain.

And the whole thing falls apart into nonsense.

The researchers get hidden behind scripted cut scenes in Bazzoxan. The adventure wants to hide what the researchers know (so that there can be Startling Revelations™ in Ank’Harel), so the PCs aren’t given the information to make meaningful choices. Aloysia gets railroaded off the table as a viable ally.

No clear stakes? The choice of researcher becomes arbitrary.

No true choice in researchers? The faction recruitment in Ank’Harel breaks.

All of these threads — all of these broken techniques based on the fundamental flaw of believing that railroading is the only way to link an adventure together — are woven together here. The result is muddy, confusing, difficult to use, and, more often than not, completely broken in actual practice.

It’s easy to look at a moment like this and say, “Well, the writers can’t possibly account for every possibility!”

And you’d be right.

Which is why Call of the Netherdeep SHOULD be focusing on giving the DM — who CAN account for what the group has done — the tools to do so, rather than hamstringing them with unusable scripts.

FACTION MISSIONS

In addition to the shortcomings of Netherdeep’s connective tissue, we now need to talk about the faction missions in Ank’Harel.

Like the faction missions in Dragon Heist, these are very barebones in their presentation.

Unlike the faction missions in Dragon Heist, these aren’t designed to be run as contrapuntal story beats while other stuff is happening. They’re just a linear string of events. So the barebones approach here mostly just means that this phase of the campaign feels incomplete.

The other problem with the faction missions is that… well, they’re pretty bad.

For example, there’s a mission where someone is trying to frame one of the PCs’ friends for stealing a ring by planting it in his pocket. So the PCs mount an investigation to clear their friend’s name.

They find two pieces of evidence:

1. An Insight check reveals that someone has a “guarded expression.”
2. This same person, a researcher in the ruidium-infested ruins of Cael Morrow, has a ruidium infection.

The adventure then confidently announces: “The characters can present their findings to Headmaster Gryz Alakritos.”

…

WHAT findings?

Bizarrely, their NPC friend, whose name they “cleared,” then gives them the ring as a reward.

The stolen ring.

That isn’t his.

Because that was the whole premise of the entire scenario.

The next faction mission features the PCs needing to track down a double agent. This one wraps up when the PCs find two pieces of evidence:

1. An Insight check reveals the agent’s “true intentions and affiliation.”
2. This same person, a researcher in the ruidium-infested ruins of Cael Morrow, has a ruidium infection.

And if you’re thinking, “Justin, you just said that.”

Yes.

Yes, I did.

It’s the exact same setup.

And the conclusion is, once again, “Proof?! Sir, I made an INSIGHT check!”

Add to this the aforementioned problem of multiple faction missions being set in the ruins of Cael Morrow, despite Cael Morrow being too small to support multiple faction missions.

Basically, the faction missions are really bad.

Fortunately, they’re also pointless: The idea is that you have to do these faction missions in order to gain access to Cael Morrow. But it turns out that the impregnable security on the Cael Morrow site consists of… a handful of CR 1 guards who might summon five CR 3 guards if they get a chance.

CONCLUSION

I’ve spent the last couple of sections really breaking down the problems with Call of the Netherdeep, so as we wrap up, I want to mention a few more things that I really like about the book.

First, the monster design is fantastic. Look at this aboleth spawn, it oozes creepiness:

And look at this sword wraith:

Just incredible concepts wedded to fantastic art. In fact, as you’ve seen throughout this review, the art team for Call of the Netherdeep is simply superb from one end of the book to the other.

Speaking of the visual design, I also want to mention the ruidium-inspired design of the book. At the beginning of the campaign, the occasional page will have have a ruidium-veined edge treatment. Over the course of the book, however, these veins grow, until the ruidium appears to be literally taking over the tome.

I don’t know if that’s the work of Senior Graphic Designer Trish Yochum or Graphic Designer Matt Cole, or both, but bravo. Excellent work.

In closing, as I look over the totality of Call of the Netherdeep, I see some familiar themes and elements:

• Faction missions from Dragon Heist
• Corrupting crystals from Legacy of the Crystal Shard
• A three-stage god fight like the one found in Rime of the Frostmaiden
• Deep-diving memory visions to redeem a divinity from Descent Into Avernus

But the synthesis works here. In fact, in all but one case (the faction missions), I think you can safely argue that each individual element works better in Call of the Netherdeep than in its antecedents.

I think there are, as we have seen, some serious issues with structure and logic that will make this campaign much harder to run effectively than it should be. Ultimately, whether you decide to answer the Call of the Netherdeep or not is largely going to depend on whether you think it’s worth the salvage effort to rebuild the core structure of the campaign into something that makes sense.

The things to focus on, I think, are:

• Those excellent dungeons that form big, meaty pillars to build your campaign around.
• The fundamental excellence of the Rivals once your strip away the badly scripted sequences.
• The beautiful and enigmatic lore of Alyxion the Apotheon, which — if properly structured — will draw the players deep into a tragic story of epic proportions and then empower them to provide its conclusion.

Despite my reservations, I recommend Call of the Netherdeep. With a manageable amount of work, I think you’ll find something truly special for you and your players to enjoy.

Style: 5
Substance: 3

Project Leads: James J. Haeck, Matthew Mercer, Christopher Perkins
Writers: James J. Haeck, Makenzie De Armas, LaTia Jacquise, Cassandra Khaw, Sadie Lowry
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224

FURTHER READING
Call of the Netherdeep: Running Betrayers’ Rise
Call of the Netherdeep: Running the Rivals
Remixing Call of the Netherdeep
How to Remix an Adventure

Go to Part 1

THE DUNGEONS

Call of the Netherdeep is studded with a sequence of really cool dungeons:

• Emerald Grotto
• Betrayers’ Rise
• Cael Morrow
• The Netherdeep

Emerald Grotto is the launch point of the campaign. It’s a pretty basic cave design, but the underwater setting gives it some nice flavor. The forked design is also used to structurally highlight the relationship between the PCs and the Rivals.

Betrayers’ Rise is you standard “cyst of evil” affair, but the devil is in the details here. (Pun intended.) The map is lightly xandered, giving the PCs some nice strategic control in their exploration, and the key is drenched in gothic atmosphere.

Cael Morrow is a sunken city. Or, more accurately, a small part of this city. This is probably the weakest of the dungeons, but is still quite good. The back half opens up, allowing for a more freeform exploration of the ruins, and the key is once again excellent in its specific detail.

The Netherdeep is the big finale of the campaign, an extrusion of the Apotheon’s subconscious mind and memory. And, not to sound like a broken record, once again the map is great and the key richly detailed.

Here’s a good example of how great these dungeon keys are:

R2. HALL OF HOLES

The walls of this hallway are covered with carvings that depict a great battle involving mortals, celestials, and fiends. A faint whistling noise emerges from the walls, sounding almost like snoring.

A character who succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (History) check recognizes the wall carvings depict the Battle of the Barbed Fields. This fight was a climactic battle of the Calamity, in which the devotees of the Prime Deities broke through the garrison at the Betrayers’ Rise and reached the walls of Ghor Dranas. Prominently depicted in one scene is a proud, melancholy warrior with curly hair carrying a spear and shield. By his side are two figures; a white-haired girl no more than twelve years old, and a young adult woman with hair that flows behind her, turning into a road upon which countless soldiers march. A character who makes a successful DC 10 Intelligence (Religion) check realizes that the latter two are common depictions of the gods Sehanine the Moon Weaver and Avandra the Change Bringer.

There are several things to note here.

First, the boxed text invokes multiple senses, not just sight.

Second, you see generic “there are pretty pictures on the wall” or “there are some statues here” in dungeon keys all the time, but the writer here has taken the effort to get specific with the art: The hall isn’t just covered in carvings; it’s covered in these specific carvings depicting this specific thing.

Third, this effect is enhanced with multiple skill checks allowing one or more PCs to dive even deeper into the lore. This turns the lore into a reward, giving real meaning to the PCs’ abilities and also likely investing the players more deeply in what their abilities have revealed.

In a single room, this attention to detail is nice. Over the course of the entire campaign, it elevates the entire experience. This is the practical method by which the world of Exandria is brought to vivid life in Call of the Netherdeep.

When it comes to the dungeons, however, I do have a quibble.

Taken on their own merits, Betrayers’ Rise and Cael Morrow are both really good dungeons. The problem is that the dungeons are too small for the lore surrounding them.

Betrayers’ Rise, for example, is presented as a sort of Moria or Undermountain: A vast underground complex with depths unexplored and perhaps unexplorable, out of which demons of the Abyss emerge to threaten the town above. But the actual dungeon found in Call of Netherdeep is teeny-tiny, consisting of just sixteen rooms.

To address the mismatch, the writers kind of toss out the idea that “the characters experience a particular version” of Betrayers’ Rise, and that others experience “different configurations” of the dungeon. They also provide “Betrayers’ Rise Encounters” (p. 63) that can be used as inspiration to “expand” the Rise. But ultimately you’re selling one experience and then delivering another.

Betrayers’ Rise does, ultimately, work as presented, even if it’s not ideal. More problematic is Cael Morrow: Here again, the lore treats the drowned city as a vast archaeological site… but only delivers a handful of buildings and seventeen keyed locations.

In Cael Morrow, however, this is not just an aesthetic mismatch; it’s a deeply flawed structure. The campaign is designed with the expectation that the PCs will journey down into Cael Morrow for a series of faction missions (at least three, possibly more). This makes sense if the archaeological expedition is exploring the entirety of the ruined city, but it isn’t. Cael Morrow simply isn’t large enough to support the iterative missions.

Imagine that you give the PCs a faction mission that sends them into a dungeon. And, when that mission is done, there are seven DAYS until they receive their next mission. (And then another seven days between that mission and the one after that.)

What are the PCs going to do?

Well, if they didn’t completely explore the dungeon during the first mission (and they very easily may have), they’re almost certainly going to go back and finish exploring the dungeon.

Again: It’s only seventeen rooms.

And there’s nothing else for them to do in Ank’Harel.

Because Cael Morrow’s design doesn’t match its lore, there’s just no way these faction missions can work as written.

A good chunk of Cael Morrow is also hilariously linear given the nature of these missions.

The way it works is that the Allegiance of Allsight (one of the Ank’Harel factions) has used magical keystones to create regions of the city where the water is held back, making it much easier for them to excavate these sites. In practice, what they’ve done is create a linear corridor of air about 300 feet long.

One of the Allsight faction missions involves the primary archivist, who is concerned because one of his researchers has been missing for three days and he has no idea where she might be.

Where is she?

200 feet away, straight down a linear corridor.

To be clear, the problem here is not that the excavation site is limited to only one small portion of the city. (As I mentioned before, on its own merits the design of Cael Morrow dungeon is pretty good.)

The problem is that everything in the campaign — the NPCs, the faction missions, the lore, the pacing — is pretending this isn’t the case.

Go to Part 3: This Broken Railroad