Scenario hooks in published adventures are often underwhelming. That’s because the designers have no way of knowing what’s happening in your campaign. But you do! ENnie Award-winning RPG designer Justin Alexander reveals the secrets of weaving your adventures together by planning and retrofitting your hooks.
MORE ABOUT SCENARIO HOOKS
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ORCHIDS OF THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN (Terry H. Romero): I actually quite like this scenario, and I’d like you to keep that in mind while I discuss its two major problems. (Then we’ll cycle back around to the good stuff.)
First, there’s a trend I’ve seen in Wizards of the Coast adventures — particularly in their anthologies — of designing a scenario hook that offers an intriguing enigma for curious players to investigate, but then immediately having an NPC show up who barges in, orders the PCs to investigate it, and gives them a specific checklist of tasks to complete. Frequently, this NPC will also just immediately explain the enigma, robbing the adventure of any sense of discovery, but nevertheless leaving the busy work.
“Look, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you,” the DM says. “I think you’re all idiots and incapable of taking any action unless someone is literally holding you hand. Hang on a sec, let me wipe the drool off your chins.”
In the case of “Orchids of the Invisible Mountain,” it feels particularly weird because the strange enigma is literally an NPC ordering the PCs to do a thing. And then another NPC shows up so that they, too, can order the PCs to do the exact same thing.
It’s like you’re stuck in some kind of middle-management hell.
The second problem with “Orchids of the Invisible Mountain” is what I refer to as scale mismatch.
“Orchids” wants to be an epic fantasy quest. It wants the vast scope and epoch-shattering consequences of The Lord of the Rings as the PCs journey forth on a grand expedition across many worlds, interacting with legendary characters and god-like beings.
But, on the other hand, it’s fifteen pages long.
It’s basically impossible for adventures like this to achieve their lofty goals, and so they end up feeling hollow and forced. You can’t squeeze Frodo’s journey to Mordor into a one-shot and expect it to have the same weight.
(There’s also a sad little bit where the text basically says, “If the PCs have plane shift, of course, they can just skip most of this adventure.” This feels like somebody in the development process realized there was a calibration problem between what the adventure expected and what 14th-level characters are actually capable of, but it was too late to actually fix it. You can see a similar calibration problem near the beginning of the adventure, where the text confidently states that the PCs will have no way of stopping a barn fire.)
You can see a dramatic example of this scale problem in action with this map of “mountain” which is… what? About a hundred feet across?
Having said all that, the reason I’m rather fond of “Orchids” is that it’s actually remarkably effective at evoking the epic scale it’s grasping for. Far more so than any similar module I’ve seen. It achieves this primarily by just daring to dream vividly, conjuring forth dream-hazed visions that are startlingly memorable by virtue of being both unique and drawn in specific detail.
“Orchids” will take you:
Along the way they’ll meet:
There’s nothing generic here. It’s all fantastical and wonderful and strikingly imaginative, hampered only by the necessity of its just-in-time-exposition: The PCs need to go to the Dawn Mother, and so now we’ll tell them about the Dawn Mother for the first time.
“Orchids of the Invisible Mountain” would be much more powerful if the seeds of its lore were planted much earlier in your campaign. (It’s just so much cooler if the players have known about the legends of the Dawn Mother for a long time, and now they get to actually meet her!) Planting those seeds would mean doing a lot of groundwork.
But “Orchids” just might be worth it.
Grade: C+
CONCLUSION
As with my review of Candlekeep Mysteries, what I’m looking for in an anthology is not necessarily a home run with every entry. I’m much more interested in how much good stuff the anthology offers me. It’s fairly easy to just ignore the stuff that doesn’t work.
Bearing that in mind, let’s take a peek at the hit rate for Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel:
Salted Legacy C+
Written in Blood A
The Fiend of Hollow Mine C+
Wages of Vice D
Sins of Our Elders C-
Gold for Fools and Princes F
Trail of Destruction D-
In the Mists of Manivarsha C
Between Tangled Roots B
Shadow of the Sun F
The Nightsea's Succor B+
Buried Dynasty F
Orchids of the Invisible Mountain C+
Anything with an A or B grade is an adventure I would definitely run. Stuff with a C grade I’m more skeptical of, but are likely salvageable if you particularly like the concept or content.
So of the thirteen adventures we have:
It’s clear from these numbers that this is a weaker anthology than Candlekeep Mysteries (which scored 8/4/5 on this metric). But this is a pretty good showing for an anthology like this, and when you combine it with the gazetteer for the Radiant Citadel itself — which I simply adore — I can easily recommend Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel as a solid value.
Style: 4
Substance: 3
Project Lead: Ajit A. George, F. Wesley Schneider
Writing: Justice Ramin Arman, Domnique Dickey, Ajit A. George, Basheer Ghouse, Alastor Guzman, D. Fox Harrell, T.K. Johnson, Felice Tzehuei Kuan, Surena Marie, Mimi Mondal, Mario Ortegón, Miyuki Jane Pinkcard, Pam Punzalan, Erin Roberts, Terry H. Romero, Stephanie Yoon
Rules Development: Jeremy Crawford, Makenzie De Armas, Ben Petrisor, Taymoor Rehman
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224
FURTHER READING
Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: A List of Names
Review: Candlekeep Mysteries
SHADOW OF THE SUN (Justice Raman Arman): Fifty years ago the city-state of Akharin Sangar came under the despotic rule of an archangel named Atash. He enforces an intolerant code of absolutist religious laws (which are every bit as bad as you might imagine them to be). Various rebel groups are working to free the city from Atash’s tyrannical rule, but their efforts are ruthlessly quashed by a secret police of religious zealots known as the Brightguard which the despot angel has empowered to replace the former legal apparatus.
Reading that introduction you might be thinking, “Oh! Sweet! Let’s bring down the tyrant!”
But that’s not what “Shadow of the Sun” is about.
“Shadow of the Sun” is about how Blue Lives Matter.
Ostensibly, the adventure is framed so that the PCs can choose between working with the Brightguard or working with the rebels. But that’s not entirely accurate: There are two different rebel groups. The first is the Ashen Heirs, who do things like stage protests and disrupt capitalism. The other is the Silent Roar, who are very concerned that the uppity Ashen Heirs will ruin their big plans of doing nothing. And then the Silent Roar’s worst nightmare happens! Their leader is mistakenly associated with the uppity Ashen Heirs and is arrested! Oh no!
So the Silent Roar wants the PCs to crush the Ashen Heirs so that their leader can be freed from being wrongfully imprisoned by the religious zealots. And the religious zealots want the PCs to crush the Ashen Heirs because otherwise Atash will be “forced” to “cancel the celebrations and impose martial law.”
If the PCs are maybe a little hesitant about all this, they’re told to go check out the Ruz Bazaar, where members of the Ashen Heirs are once again disrupting capitalism and proving that they’re really bad people because they’re (checks notes)… breaking into a smuggler’s shop to free a slave?
Once the PCs have crushed the Ashen Heirs, the Brightguard naturally says, “Good work! Now, let’s move on to crushing the Silent Roar.” It’s at this point that the PCs have a choice to either continue working with the gestapo or not.
The adventure has an EXTREMELY linear plot to follow, though, so the choice has little impact on what happens next. You can tell which option Arman assumes the PCs will take, though, because it’s the only one that makes any logical sense.
The conclusion of the adventure has a quote that neatly sums up its structural issues:
Regardless of the characters’ allegiance, their actions and the fallout of Afsoun’s detainment or escape have broad implications for Akharin Sangar. The Silent Roar’s resistance efforts increase in either case, causing the organization to become the Brightguard’s greatest rival.
There’s a cool flying carpet chase in the middle of all this, but everything else is a mess, and the, “Let’s all join and/or collaborate with the gestapo!” framing is beyond tasteless. I find it hard to believe it’s what Arman intended, but it’s what’s on the page. As someone who lived just three blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered, I may be biased, but I cannot imagine any version of reality where I would want to see this scenario brought to the table as written.
Grade: F
THE NIGHTSEA’S SUCCOR (D. Fox Harrell): “The Nightsea’s Succor” is another adventure that positions the PCs between Authority/Tradition and Rebellion/Reinvention, and it’s somewhat stunning how much more effective it is.
Long ago the nation of Djaynai was plagued by reavers known as the Vultures. My personal touchstones for this are Viking raiders and the Bronze Age deprecations of the Sea Peoples: Cities were looted and burned. Thousands of Djaynaians were taken as captives and loaded onto ships to become slaves.
A couple key things happened during this time. First, some of the Djaynaian captives staged a revolt and leapt off the reaver ships rather than remain slaves. As they plunged into the ocean, powerful sorcerers among them used the sorcerous secrets of their civilization to weave a powerful rite which transformed some of them into merpeople known as the chil-liren. The descendents of the chil-liren formed the underwater city-state of Jayna.
Second, in order to protect those same sorcerous secrets – known as the Blackmist Way and the Blackthrone Arts – they were loaded into a ship and sent away to a place of safety. Unfortunately, the ship was attacked and sank. The legacy of the Djaynaian people was lost.
Cue the beginning of the adventure, when some ghosts from the shipwreck cast detect player characters and give them the information they need to find the shipwreck and the lost arts that lie within it.
This immediately puts the PCs in the crosshairs: They’re contacted by Atiba-Pa, the regent of Djaynai, who wants to use the recovered lore to restore Djaynai to its lost Golden Age. But they’re also contacted by the Night Revelers, a group of counter-culture revolutionaries who would prefer to use the lore to reinvent the Djaynai and forge something new and unshackled from the legacy of the past.
Following the clues given to them by the ghosts, the PCs eventually end up in Jayna. And here, too, they’re torn between different political ideologies: On the one hand, those who want to stay separate from Djaynai and would keep the lore secret. On the other hand, those who believe the Janyans need to forge their own future. Once again, the legacy of the lost lore of ancient Djaynai is crucial.
Things wrap up with a short dungeon crawl through the ancient shipwreck (which is also an underwater library? the lore gets a little confused here) and then the PC have some tough choices to make.
What elevates “The Nightsea’s Succor” is that Harrell crafts a meaningful and nuanced dilemma. There are a few things that make this work.
First, it feels like a legitimate choice. There’s enough nuance depicted in all of the political and cultural factions that the PCs should be able to see both the potential good and the potential bad in each one.
Second, having two different rivalries on separate axes that are nevertheless connected to each other is, frankly, inspired. Introducing them at different times is also crucial here: Even if, due to their own opinions and predilections, the PCs find it easy to choose between A or B, the introduction of C or D as an intersecting issue and choice will force them to re-analyze the “easy” choice they made earlier. Even if they ultimately don’t change their minds, it’s kept the core philosophical debate an active part of the adventure.
Third, the choice feels truly meaningful. It doesn’t seem as if the world will radically change overnight as a result of what the PCs choose, but there will be definite consequences that affect both the PCs personally and society as a whole.
In short, “The Nightsea’s Succor” is really nice. In structure it is quite simple, but the cultural crux adds considerable depth and every scene is studded with lush detail.
Grade: B+
Prep Notes: The problem with using a ghost as your scenario hook is that it just takes one impetuous PC to say, “Ah! Ghosts!” and use turn undead to leave you without a scenario. Not necessarily a problem, but a good idea to be aware of the possibilitiy.
BURIED DYNASTY (Felice Tzehuei Kuan): This adventure has a really cool premise. The White Jade Emperor of Great Xing has lived for centuries due to a customized potion of longevity created using a secret recipe. Unfortunately, the rare ingredients used for the Emperor’s potion have run out. Without the potion, the Emperor will die and the effect on Grand Xing is likely to be cataclysmic. Grand Secretary Wei Feng Ying, therefore, is desperately trying to locate a new source, and she hires the PCs to help her.
Unfortunately, everything else in the adventure is utter nonsense.
Wei doesn’t want the PCs to know what she’s actually looking for, fearing chaos if the imminent death of the Emperor were to leak out. So they’re actually just assigned to guard Wei’s personal agent, a scholar named Lu Zhong Yin. Zhong Yin is under strict orders not to tell the PCs anything and his character description explicitly says, “I’ll follow any order from my commanders.” But he just tells the PCs anyway.
They don’t find the missing ingredient, but they DO find three unused doses of the potion of longevity itself.
But now the PCs know too much! So Wei, who is observing them through a crystal ball, decides this is the perfect moment to betray them and orders a court mage to collapse the entrance to the ruin. (You might think it would make more sense to have them bring back the potions of longevity and then betray them. But no.) The author has also cleverly established that teleportation and planar travel are both blocked in the ruins.
OH MY GOD! THERE’S NO WAY OUT!
… is what the PCs would say if they weren’t 13th-level characters with probably a dozen different ways of trivially escaping.
Left with “no other option,” the PCs then make telepathic contact with Wei who says, “Oh no! Let me help!” She then opens a one-way magical portal that the PCs can use to escape!
(…wait, wasn’t teleportation magic blocked down here? Yes, but it’s okay because there’s a loophole! But can’t the PCs just use the same loophole and avoid all this nonsense? Yes, but they presumably won’t because by this time the rails should be obvious!)
But this is a trick! Wei has actually teleported them into a trap! A hologram of Wei appears and she says, “I’m sorry to inform you that I’m betraying you because there’s a vague possibility you might know some of my secrets. My only choice is to teleport you into a room directly next to my uber-secret alchemy laboratory filled with all the secrets you shouldn’t know. Your deaths are assured, for in this room I have arranged for you to fight a level-appropriate Easy encounter.”
So the PCs trivially escape the “death trap” and then proceed through an entire linear dungeon. In the last room of the dungeon, they find a gold dragon who has been captured and shackled by Wei’s secret cabal of imperial alchemists. If they free the dragon, he thanks them, and then goes scurrying up the Exit Tunnel.
The PCs, of course, can follow the dragon along a perfectly straight tunnel with no turn-offs before arriving at a hatch. If they open the hatch and crawl through it, they emerge directly in the center of the stage at the Pear Garden Imperial Opera in the middle of a performance being attended by the Emperor himself!
…
The layers of stupidity here are truly staggering.
First: Where the fuck did the dragon go?
The adventure actually goes out of its way to confirm that the dragon definitely went through this very same hatch in the center of the stage, but apparently without any member of the cast or audience noticing.
Second: Let me get this straight. Wei built her secret alchemy laboratory directly below the Imperial Opera? And the only way into or out of this laboratory is through a trapdoor in the center of the stage?
…
Anyway.
We have now reached the conclusion of the adventure, in which the Emperor demands to know, “What is the meaning of all this?!”
The PCs can now tell the Emperor their story, but he will only believe them if they have three out of four pieces of “evidence.” At this point, the adventure copy-pastes from the worst school of Sierra adventure game design. Did you randomly decide to pick up a gold dragon scale from Area S4? You didn’t? You lose!
(If only the Emperor had seen the Huge gold dragon who came through here not thirty seconds ago! Too bad. Sucks to be you!)
If the PCs did collect the three random items, then the Emperor believes them and Wei ends up confessing everything — the missing ingredient, the lack of longevity potions, the Emperor’s eminent death — in front of the entire audience of the Imperial Opera.
The Emperor will then invite the PCs to a private audience where he pays them hush money in exchange for promising “not to speak of what they have learned about Dragon’s Blessing and his eventual death.” Because if they were to, for example, tell an entire opera house full of people about that, it would be bad.
And on that final note of abject stupidity, this adventure mercifully comes to an end.
Grade: F
TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION (Alastor Guzman): Powerful fire elementals known as tlexolotls slumber deep beneath the surface of Tletepec. Above them rise volcanoes, their smoke and eruptions reflecting the uneasy dreams of the fiery gods below. Now Izel, one of the tlexolotls, has awoken and seeks to similarly awake his brethren, leading to massive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes which are racking the region.
This is a cool concept. Unfortunately, I find the adventure to be fairly baffling.
First, the adventure obviously revolves around erupting volcanoes. The PCs travel along ash-choked roads, crisscrossing the region alternately trying to figure out what’s happening and delivering offerings to the volcano gods. Given this concept, there are two things that would be super useful to include on the map: The roads and the names of the volcanoes.
On the actual map, unfortunately, there are no roads. (Oof.) Most of the volcanoes are also not labeled, although what appears to be a single volcano is labeled the “Onyx Volcanoes” (sic) and another set of volcanoes is labeled the “Twin Gods Volcanoes.” There are actually four volcanoes near this latter label, but I’m pretty sure I know which two were meant to be the Twin Gods. Also the “Twin Gods” are, as far as I can tell, never identified. It’s possible they’re supposed to be the “two lovers” mentioned in the Legends of Tletepec? But the lovers aren’t given names, either.
This ties into a general cosmological confusion which is the other major liability of the scenario: The tlexolotls are the volcanoes, but no one in the area believes that the tlexolotls actually exist. Instead, they believe that there are unnamed(?) gods inside each volcano. The local religion (or possibly multiple religions?) offers sacrifices to keep the gods placated, but the sacrifices are actually going to the tlexolotl and placating them instead.
This is a needless layer of confusion that doesn’t have any real impact on the scenario. There’s something potentially interesting about the PCs revealing that “your gods are actually not gods,” they’re just semi-mindless beasts who, if not kept fed, periodically
“emerge in a rage, rampaging forth” to “gorge themselves on massive amounts of animal and plant life … until its belly is full,” except:
So it’s all kind of a big ol’ mess. This is also reflected in the central thru-line of the adventure, which is all over the place, but mostly revolves around the idea that Ameyali, a local religious(?) leader, is trying to deliver a shipment of offerings to the Gate of Illumination so that they can be given up to the gods and placate their fury. This is a problem, though, because Izel has dispatched his salamander minions to intercept the offerings and bring them to… the Gate of Illumination.
It feels like the adventure is missing a location (possibly due to word count?): Structurally it really needs the offerings to be going to Location X and then being redirected to the Gate of Illumination (where Izel is). There’s even a fire giant wandering around the area who will helpfully tell the PCs that:
Salamanders and fire snakes serve this tlexolotl. They have been stealing offerings meant for the gods and carrying them back to [the Gate of Illumination].
But instead the whole logical backbone of the adventure is broken.
There are some potentially big, interesting ideas here, but as written these are not coherently developed. Furthermore, it’s very hard for me to imagine running the adventure as written without it being a painful experience at the table.
Grade: D-
Prep Notes: The key to sorting this adventure out would be to clearly add the concept that every volcano in the region has its own shrine. (This concept is present in the adventure as written, it’s just completely obfuscated from the players.) The local cities are trying to send offerings to the shrines, but the salamanders and other servants of Izel keep intercepting them and taking them to the Gate of Illumination (the shrine at Jademount, which is the volcano formed around Izel).
(You could probably run with the idea that each shrine is referred to as a “Gate,” and create unique philosophical identities for each Gate.)
Having done this, there will still be some pretty drastic rehab required to beat the rest of the scenario into a coherent structure that will make sense to the players in any way other than “the NPCs told us to go there, so we went there.” But it would, I think, ultimately be salvageable.
IN THE MISTS OF MANIVARSHA (Mimi Mondal): Okay, good news! The festivals are back!
This time it’s the Shankha Trials, a vaguely defined athletics-and-art competition that dates back to the dawn of Shankhabhumi’s history. When the first human settlers arrived in Dishahara Bay, they discovered a land dominated by countless water spirits known as riverines. Each riverine is a guardian of a waterway, and the constant struggle for dominance among the riverines had turned this place into a hopeless maze of marshland.
The elven leader of the settlers, Kubjhatika, killed a giant mollusk and carved its shell into a beautiful work of art. She “offered it in tribute to the riverines, appealing to them for refuge amid the unforgiving lands,” and the “four greatest riverines — Adirohit, Iravati, Mehul, and Joltara – each wished to claim the Riverine’s Shankha.” Kubjhatika proposed the creation of the Shankha Trials to determine how the Riverine’s Shankha would circulate between the riverines. The riverines, in return, each raised up a large area of dry land where the people of Shankhabhumi could build their cities. These four cities became the major centers of civilization here, each supported by their patron riverine.
Five hundred years ago, however, catastrophe struck. At the conclusion of the Shankha Trials that year, a huge tidal wave swept down the Adirohit River and wiped out the city of Manivarsha. The riverine Adhirohit then vanished and its river dried up. The few surviving members of the Manivarshan people were scattered as refugees among the other three cities, but (apparently at least) remain a distinct cultural group in their diaspora and continue competing in the Shankha Trials.
The PCs are in attendance this year when an artist-athlete named Amanisha becomes the first Manivarshan to win the Shankha Trials since the catastrophe. The moment that happens, another tidal wave — considerably smaller — comes sweeping down the Iravati River. It simultaneously wreaks vast destruction, but also very specifically seeks out Amanisha and the Riverine’s Shankha and sweeps them upriver.
This whole concept, however, will naturally lead you to peruse the map of Shankhabhumi with a particular focus on the riverways. Then you’ll rub your eyes and look again. And then eventually you’ll give up because these rivers do not make sense. And that’s even before you get to the weird mismatches between map and text, like the Tinjhorna riverine who hopes to “one day be a mighty river,” but which, according to the map, is already the second longest river in the region.
(If you want a head canon, I recommend leaning into the fact that all these rivers are semi-sentient elemental gods and assume that they can just arbitrarily flow however they want to.)
The fact that the rivers don’t seem to make any sense is particularly unfortunate because the entire structure of the adventure is: Sail a boat upriver looking for where the tidal wave took Amanisha and the Riverine’s Shankha.
(Isn’t the Riverine’s Shankha like the most important political and religious artifact in their entire civilization? Yes. Does it seem likely that local leaders would mount an expedition to retrieve it? Yes. Are they going to do that? Absolutely not. They will send the PCs and nobody else. They will not pay for the PCs to rent a boat.)
Because the rivers don’t make any sense, the PCs can’t just sail upriver. Instead, they have to be supplied with a chain of NPCs who sequentially tell them where to go. That’s unfortunate, but ultimately this boils down to a sequence of river encounters, and these are mostly well done culminating in a conclusion that mostly makes sense if you don’t look at it too closely.
Grade: C
BETWEEN TANGLED ROOTS (Pam Punzalan): The shining star of “Between Tangled Roots” is the setting of Dayawlongon, a vast archipelago of islands linked by the awe-inspiring skybridges built in ages lost by the bakunawa dragons. That single, grand image captures the imagination.
The adventure begins with the PCs approaching the city of Kalapang when it’s attacked by a bakunawa which has been corrupted by evil spirits. The adventure confidently declares that “no matter what methods the characters use to reach Kalapang, the bakunawa has already departed by the time they reach town”… apparently forgetting that these are 10th level characters and it’s more than plausible that they could just dimension door straight into the attack.
Either way, the PCs are coming to Kalapang to meet with a binukot storyteller named Nimuel. In fact, they’ve been summoned by Nimuel so that she can introduce them to Lungtian, a dryad who was once friends with the bakunawa and believes its actions are due to its lair on the island of Lambakluha being corrupted.
This, of course, cues a road trip across the skybridges and then a journey across the haunted isle of Lambakluha. Along the way they’ll meet fellow travelers and, naturally, face uncanny dangers. When they reach the baknuawa’s lair, they’ll have the opportunity to either cleanse the corruption eating at the dragon’s heart or slay the dragon. Either way, the threat is ended.
“Between Tangled Roots” is just a rock solid adventure. The concept is simple, but has some nice thematic twists. The characters are varied and interesting to roleplay. The haunted isle is creepy.
Grade: B
Prep Notes: One thing to note is that the journey across Lambakluha requires rolling at least eight times on a random encounter table that only has five entries on it (and one of those including rolling again for another encounter). You should probably flesh that out a bit.
WAGES OF VICE (T.K. Johnson) struggles quite a bit with continuity problems and fragility, with the former also contributing quite a bit to the latter.
There are two major continuity glitches. First, it’s fairly clear that the original premise of the adventure was changed at the eleventh hour. As published, the premise of the adventure is that five years ago the Kings of Coin — who rule the city-state of Zinda — made a deal with a witch named Proud Edun. The witch would use her magic to create the jeli flower, a crop with fantastic commercial value which would make Zinda (and, more importantly, the Kings of Coin) fabulously rich.
In return, the Kings of Coin agreed that their firstborn children would all serve as Proud Edun’s apprentices, learning her magical arts. But Myx Nargis Ruba, one of the Kings of Coin, said, “Hey. What if, instead of doing that, we just murder her?”
And the other Kings of Coin agreed and Proud Edun was murdered.
But there’s enough references scattered around the adventure, that it’s clear the original version of this backstory was that Proud Edun was promised the souls of the children. (If I had to make a wild guess, I would guess this was changed because it was too similar to the premise for “The Fiend of Hollow Mine.”) The problems this creates, however, are mostly ignorable.
The other major continuity glitch, though, is more fundamental. The premise of the adventure is that Proud Edun’s daughter, Kala Mabarin, has shown up to claim revenge by killing the kids who were supposed to be apprenticed to her mother. After the first murder, though, reality in the adventure just kind of bifurcates.
In one half of the adventure, Madame Samira Arah — the newest member of the Kings of Coin who (a) doesn’t know about the original double-cross of Proud Edun and (b) is the commanding officer of the Silent Verse, which is the Kings of Coin’s police force — has warned the Kings of Coin of the danger posed by Kala Mabarin and ordered all of their kids into protective custody.
In the other half of the adventure, however, nobody has warned the Kings of Coin and their kids are just wandering around, attending official functions, and getting openly targeted by Kala Mabarin.
This state of affairs just kind of randomly switches back and forth, depending on whichever scene the PCs happen to be in at the moment. It’s incredibly disorienting and fairly fundamental to the scenario, making it one of those crux points where I find players start checking out because the game world stops feeling real to them.
This is compounded because the core structure of the scenario is simultaneously arbitrary, unintuitive, and deprotagonizing.
The basic hook is that the PCs arrive in Zinda to attend — and I know this is going to shock you — a festival. As soon as they arrive at the festival, which is called the March of Vice, they stumble upon the corpse of Jacopo, Kala’s second target and first victim. They get sucked up into the investigation when Madame Samira arrives on the scene and says, “Outsiders? Sounds useful for a case that reeks of powerful conspiracies.”
I love Madame Samira. She’s a fantastic character. I think she’s the major saving grace of the entire adventure. She is simultaneously outsider and insider, and the more she learns about what 
really happened, the more she’s like, “Blackmail over all my political rivals? How fascinating. Tell me more.”
Samira’s own conflict between what’s right and what’s useful adds a delightfully independent vector of ethical haze to a scenario that’s already dripping with moral gray.
From this point, the “investigation” (which can only be loosely described as such) follows a linear path:
… and this is weird, because he doesn’t actually know that. He has no information identifying the killer as Kala or linking Kala to Proud Edun. (That doesn’t happen until later in the scene and only if (a) the PCs took prisoners and (b) they succeed on a skill check.)
In any case…
Ultimately, “Wages of Vice” is juggling some really interesting ideas, but doesn’t really manage to pull it off, in my opinion.
Grade: D
Prep Notes: If you’re running this adventure, I recommend prepping a list of the Kings of Coin and their kids. “Okay, so who are the kids being threatened?” is a question the players are very likely to ask. The adventure has this information, but it’s scattered across the text in a very unuseful way.
SINS OF OUR ELDERS (Stephanie Yoon) sees the PCs leave the wine festival in Zinda so that they can head over to the springtime festival of Dan-Nal in Yeonido.
The core cool of Yeonido are the gwishin. Derived from Korean mythology, the dead in Yeonido often rise as undead spirits with unfinished business. This often includes fulfilling unfulfilled duty or correcting imbalance or injustice.
I really love Yoon’s decision to make the gwishin a central pillar of Yeonido as a setting — a haunted city that seeks to draw a veil over their unquiet spirits while discretely making right what they can and appeasing what they cannot. You can frame up an entire campaign with this concept: ghost-hunters settling sins-made-manifest. Virtually any adventure you can imagine can be hung from gwishin hooks with a uniquely supernatural flair: one part Perry Mason, one part Cold Case, one part The Ring.
“Sins of Our Elders” is, of course, itself based around a gwishin mystery. Long ago, the magistrate Dae Won-Ha spent decades doing ??? that resulted in prosperity for Yeonido, but her work was constantly being undermined by Young-Gi, the younger brother of Queen Young-Soo. Young-Gi’s efforts failed, and Won-Ha became a hero of the common people, but also Young-Gi succeeded and Won-Ha became a figure of infamy. Also Young-Gi arranged it so that the credit for whatever it was Won-Ha had done was given to Queen Young-soo. This all happened so long ago that the infamous(?) Won-Ha has passed from living memory, and also so recently that Young-Gi and other people who knew her personally are still alive.
Ten years ago, Queen Young-Soo died and Won-Ha’s gwishin appeared. The PCs need to figure out who the gwishin is, why she’s pissed off, and how she can be appeased.
The core problems of “Sins of Our Elders” mostly have their root in this backstory. It’s vague at best and seemingly contradictory more often than not. The problem is that it’s incredibly difficult to 
design a coherent mystery when the solution to the mystery hasn’t been defined. It’s like a murder mystery where the solution is “somebody was killed somewhere with some sort of weapon.” You can’t really build clues to reveal the truth if there’s no truth to be revealed, and so “Sins of Our Elders” continually struggles to provide clear clues for Won-Ha’s true legacy because “she did good stuff” doesn’t give you any sort of concrete revelation.
You can see another example of this vague backstory infecting the adventure in the hook. Dae Won-Ha has been taking her revenge on Yeonido in the form of a magical fog. The fog descends on an area, robbing the people there of their memory while Won-Ha wreaks havoc and destruction and terror. Then the people sort of “wake up” in the aftermath, ignorant of everything they did (and that happened in the fog).
This curse is beautifully thematic: The Yeonidons don’t even realize what’s happening to them. It’s a curse of forgetfulness as vengeance for being forgotten.
So, as I mentioned before, this has been going on for ten years when the PCs arrive in Yeonido. The fog doesn’t affect outsiders, so the PCs immediately realize that something weird is—
Hold up.
It’s been ten years and no outsiders have come to Yeonido and noticed the fog in all that time?
At the other end of the adventure, the conclusion is also fatally flawed by the lack of a clear foundation.
Logically, “Sins” is an adventure that would end with the PCs discovering the true story of Dae Won-Ha and then taking action to make sure the truth is known. But there isn’t a true story to discover, so there’s nothing for the PCs to reveal. This forces a conclusion which can be roughly summarized as, “Jeez, Won-Ha. You’re really overreacting. Yes, the Queen and her brother conspired to rewrite the history books and make you look like a villain, but we found a teacup you signed that was gathering dust on a shelf and a couple other trinkets, so it’s not like you’re completely forgotten.”
And then Won-Ha is like, “Yes. You’re right. As long as that teacup is gathering dust, I can rest easy in my grave.”
I really want to like “Sins of Our Elders” because there’s some really cool potential in it, but it just doesn’t quite hold together for me.
I would give the adventure itself a D, but the raw potential of the Yeonido setting gazetteer pulls the whole package up into the C-range.
Grade: C-
Prep Notes: What “Sins of Our Elders” desperately craves is a specificity. A specific truth that happened. A specific lie that was told. One way to achieve that is to make Won-Ha a martyr. This gives you a specific event — the martyrdom — that can be clearly stolen from her.
For a full dose of irony, what if she perished trying to get rid of a powerful gwishin that threatened Yeonida?
Perhaps this could be the gwishin of a dragon, whose grievance with the city was connected to the environmental damage wrought by Yeonido’s expansion. Dae Won-Ha had done much to right those wrongs and bring balance back to the community, but only by offering herself could she quiet this final threat.
This adds a thematic level to the adventure: Dae Won-Ha offered herself to restore balance.
Queen Young-Soo’s version was that she went out into the forest and slew the spirit, setting a tone of violence and conquest which still informs the Tiger District’s expansion into the forest land.
The Truth and Reconciliation at the conclusion of the adventure isn’t just about who gets credit; it’s about understanding the true moral of the story.
If you’re revising the adventure in this way, it shouldn’t be too difficult to bake your new revelation lists into many of the scenes framed in the published adventure. You might also want to change the central structure from “an NPC tells the PCs where they should go to investigate” to a district-based urbancrawl with a handful of sub-revelations (e.g., “Who’s this Young-Gi guy we keep hearing about?”)
GOLD FOR FOOLS AND PRINCES (Dominique Dickey) features the most adorable of the Gygaxian “I think the PCs have too much treasure” metal-eaters — aurumvoraxii.
The adventure is set in the Sensa Empire, where generations ago the aurumvoraxii were hunted to extinction. This has allowed the gold mines of the empire to prosper.
Enter two princes: Prince Kirina and Prince Simbon, both of whom are vying to be named the heir to the imperial throne. Prince Kirina has hatched a scheme which involves triggering a cave-in in the mines while simultaneously summoning aurumvoraxii. After secretly creating the crisis, he’ll head down into the mines and heroically solve it, improving his reputation generally and, most specifically, with the powerful Aurum Guild who oversees the mines. Kirina is, of course, quite unhappy when both Prince Simbon and the PCs stick their noses into the situation.
This is a strong premise for an adventure. The problem, unfortunately, is that it’s executed as a nonsense railroad:
If I were to write an essay on how to design a mystery scenario (and I have), this would be pretty much exactly how I would tell you to NOT do it.
“Gold” requires:
All of which ultimately unlocks a semi-hilarious interaction with Prince Kirina where the PCs make a DC 14 Charisma check to convince him to confess to high treason in front of a huge crowd of people.
There are some ideas here which are potentially interesting, but they’re inchoate to the point where there’s nothing really worth salvaging, in my opinion.
Grade: F
Prep Notes: “Gold for Fools and Princes” is the first adventure in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel to not feature a festival. But you should totally add one.
The premise of the adventure requires the essential bit of exposition that the aurumvoraxes were wiped out by Emperor Kassa, allowing the gold mines of the Sensa Empire to prosper. But, as written, there’s no way for the PCs to know that until after they’ve identified the aurumvoraxes. So the core revelation of, “Oh no! They’re back!” is handed off to an NPC.
But if you add a Festival of Gold, staged by the Aurum Guild to celebrate the anniversary of Emperor Kassa eradicating the aurumvoraxes, you can slip that bit of exposition in (along with a bunch of other stuff about the importance of the Guild and the mines).
Beyond that, if I were running “Gold,” I would probably strip it down to its core:
- Get rid of the Machiavellian stuff.
- Cave-in opened up a cave that had hibernating aurumvoraxii.
- The two princes are competing for glory, providing a cool roleplaying crux against the challenge of the dungeon.
But to really make it sing, you’ll probably also want to redesign the dungeon to feature encounters that could play strongly into this dynamic. (At a minimum, I’d want the princes to be able to meaningfully split up instead of being stuck on a linear path.)
