The D20 Trademark License means that Wizards of the Coast has to compete with John Tynes, Chris Pramas, John Nephew, and a half dozen design studios. Can they do it? Of course they can.

Review Originally Published December 29th, 2000

Writing a low-level adventure for D&D is a thankless and difficult task: The most interesting monsters in the game don’t become available until the characters start hitting the mid-range levels. The challenges you do concoct must be kept simple. Nor can you effectively spice things up with intrigue, because low-level characters are assumed to be low on society’s totem pole.

With The Sunless Citadel, however, Bruce Cordell has put together an extremely impressive introductory package for WotC’s first generic module for the third edition game. Not only has he taken the usual suspects of goblins and kobolds and done something interesting with them, he’s also designed a dynamic environment with the assumption that the PCs will be gaining experience and power as they go. The result is something I haven’t really seen since the heyday of the 1st edition classics: A module with some real heft to it – with a lot of potential to leave your play group with epic stories. And, unlike its 1st edition predecessors, The Sunless Citadel doesn’t suffer from an unbelievable scenario and nonexistent plotting – quite the contrary.

The fact that Cordell has pulled this off in 32 pages designed for 1st level characters is extremely impressive.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Sunless Citadel. Players who may end up playing in this module are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.

The structure which is now known as the Sunless Citadel was a “once-proud fortress that fell into the earth in an age long past”. Three important things have occurred in the long years which have passed since: First, a vampire was killed deep in the core of the citadel. The stake which pierced his heart was green, however, and took root. The tree which grew – known as the Gulthias Tree – is a thing of unspeakable evil. Twice each year the Gulthias Tree gives forth a single fruit: At Midsummer a ruby-red apple capable of granting health, vigor, and life; at Midwinter an albino apple which takes the same. There is a catch to this, however: The seeds of either fruit, if planted, will grow into a tree – which will then transform itself into a hideous and mischievous creature known as a twig blight. The Gulthias Tree is currently tended by an evil druid by the name of Belak, who has hatched a plan to infect the world with these twig blights.

Second, the citadel became the home of a roving goblin tribe – who have allied with Belak (largely because Belak and the strange Gulthias Tree frighten them).

Third, and most recently, a group of kobolds – seeking to worship the dragon gods of the citadel, have also moved in (coming into conflict with the goblins). The kobolds brought with them a young dragon hatchling (showing the flexibility of the third edition – allowing even first level characters to effectively tangle with dragons) – who has recently been kidnapped by the goblins.

The module is location-based: The PCs need to move through the sections of the dungeon controlled by the kobolds, then the goblins, and finally into the lower levels which are dominated by the Gulthias Tree. There is also a section of the citadel which has remained sealed since it sunk beneath the earth – giving a total of four different adventuring environments for the PCs. (There is also an entrance to the Underdark, which can be used at the GM’s discretion.) However, the module also has its dynamic components: For example, if the PCs keep their heads about them they can negotiate with the kobolds and use them as allies to punch through the goblin-controlled territory.

Cordell also does a nice job of planting a couple of seeds (pardon the pun) for future adventures: For example, the twig blights which have been released on the surface are still running around – and the PCs may end up running into them again.

WEAKNESSES

All right, I think the case has been sufficiently made for why you should pick up The Sunless Citadel, so let me now spend a couple of quick minutes analyzing its faults:

First, the adventuring hooks are fairly weak. The only one with real potential, in my opinion, involves the heroes being hired to discover what happened to another adventuring party which disappeared after going out to the Citadel (this is developed nicely in the module itself – the only weakness being that there’s really no explanation for why this other adventuring party decided to head to the Citadel in the first place).

Second, there’s no EL chart for this adventure. Dungeon Magazine has them. The third party developers have them. One should be here – particularly considering the probable desire for DMs to do on-the-fly adjustments to EL levels.

Third, there’s one whopping inconsistency at the adventure’s conclusion: Two of the missing adventurers have been captured by Belak, who has used the Gulthias Tree to transform them into helpless supplicants. The primary adventure text claims that, if the Gulthias Tree is cut down, the supplicants will become mindless and bestial. A sidebar specifically designed to explain the supplicants, however, claims that, if the Gulthias Tree is cut down, the supplicants will immediately die.

Fourth, Cordell does a really excellent job of making the Sunless Citadel a dungeon that makes sense… almost. There are a couple of key flaws here, both of which involve the goblins: First, it makes sense for Belak to be here (this is where the Gulthias Tree is). It also makes sense for the kobolds to be here (they’re worshipping the dragon idols of the Citadel). Unfortunately, the goblins aren’t given a similarly compelling reason for deciding to live here: Why don’t they go up to the surface and farm the vast expanses of empty land which the adventure text tells us surround the citadel?

The other key flaw is far more disturbing to the adventure’s essential structure: Belak uses the goblins to sell the magical fruit of the Gulthias Tree to the nearby villagers (who plant the fruit, furthering the spread of the twig blights across the surface world). Unfortunately, Cordell has designed a dungeon in which the goblins have been completely cut off from the surface world by the kobolds. Whoops.

The only other major problem I have with The Sunless Citadel is this: Dungeon Magazine has a lower price, more pages, and higher production values. Something doesn’t quite add up there.

But my rave review of Dungeon is for another time. Suffice it to say, for now, that The Sunless Citadel is a bargain at ten bucks: Although its only thirty-two pages long, there’s enough material here to fuel your game for at least two weeks and possibly as much as month. Great stuff.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Title: The Sunless Citadel
Authors: Bruce R. Cordell
Company: Wizards of the Coast
Line: Dungeons & Dragons
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 0-7869-1640-0
Production Code: TSR11640
Pages: 32

Phew! Thank goodness this module has such great plotting, right? (Oof.)

As I’ve mentioned in a few previous commentary on these older reviews, Justin the Younger was still operating under the Plot is Adventure/Adventure is Plot paradigm even as I was beginning to figure out the pitfalls of that paradigm. This sometimes produced cringe-worthy results; sometimes just ones that are a little incoherent to my modern eyes.

Also feels like I was aggressively nitpicky in trying to find “weaknesses” in the module. The only criticism I actually have of the module today is that its dungeon design is a little over-linear, but fortunately it’s not particularly difficult to xander it up. The truth is my esteem for The Sunless Citadel has only grown over the years: I’ve run it three or four times now, and almost certainly will again. The lore is cool, the factions compelling, the upper level fun to explore, and the lower level creepy as hell.

The Sunless Citadel is also the birthplace of the twig blights. And I love those little bastards.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Ten years ago I wrote Xandering the Dungeon, a detailed look at the differences between linear and non-linear dungeons. In this essay I briefly used what I dubbed Melan diagrams — a technique created in 2006 by Melan for a thread on ENWorld where he discussed “map flow and old school game design.”

These diagrams are, unfortunately, not immediately intuitive to everyone looking at them, and because I used the diagrams in Xandering the Dungeon, I’m frequently asked how they’re supposed to “work.” In fact, I’ve been asked that question three different times in the last week… which brings us to today’s post.

You can see an example of what a Melan diagram looks like at the top of this post. It depicts the first level of The Sunless Citadel, designed by Bruce Cordell with original cartography by Todd Gamble. (Today, though, I’ll be using Mike Schley’s version of the map from Tales From the Yawning Portal.)

So… what’s the point of this thing? Well, as Melan said in his original post:

[They are] a graphical method which “distills” the dungeon into a kind of decision tree or flowchart by stripping away “noise.” On the resulting image, meandering corridors and even smaller room complexes are turned into straight lines. Although the image doesn’t create an “accurate” representation of the dungeon map, and is by no means a “scientific” depiction, it demonstrates what kind of [navigational] decisions the players can make while moving through the dungeon.

By getting rid of the “noise” you can boil a dungeon down to its essential structure. They also allow you to compare the structures of different dungeons at a glance.

It’s fairly important to note that you don’t actually use Melan diagrams for designing dungeons. They are an analytical tool, not a design tool: You use them to look at something which has already been created, not to create it in the first place.

But if you’re looking at a diagram what does it actually mean? How is the noise being stripped out and what does that tell you? How are you supposed to interpret the diagram? Or make one for yourself?

STRAIGHTEN THE LINE

The first principle of making a Melan diagram is to eliminate all the irrelevant twists-and-turns on the map. For example, consider this path through the Sunless Citadel:

It looks really interesting, right? All kinds of turns. You went through multiple doors. You even reversed direction a couple of times!

But as far as the Melan diagram is concerned, this is a straight line: Following a corridor when it makes a turn isn’t a meaningful navigational choice. Same thing for going through a door if there’s no other exit from the room.

FORK THE PATH

“But wait a minute!” you say. “In following this path the PCs did make choices! For example, in that first circular room the PCs had the choice of two different doors!”

You’re absolutely right! This is exactly what a Melan diagram is interested in looking at. On this little chunk of the Sunless Citadel, there are two forking paths:

And so, on a Melan diagram, this section would look like this:

The black path is depicted as a straight line and the alternate paths are shown in red. (Melan diagrams typically aren’t color-coded like this since all paths are equally valid. We’re using the colors here for clarity.)

The length of each branch of the diagram, it should be noted, is roughly proportional to its length in the dungeon. (I don’t carefully measure this or anything, but you could if you wanted to.) In this case I’m showing them proportional per the section of map we’re looking at. (As we’ll see in a moment, these particular spurs are actually much longer.)

ELIMINATE SIDE CHAMBERS

“Wait another minute!” you cry. “I can see other doors that you’re ignoring!”

The second principle of a Melan diagram is that we are going to eliminate all paths that are only one chamber deep.

So we could take this chunk of dungeon:

And draw a diagram like this:

But the reason we don’t do this is because such a diagram becomes meaninglessly noisy. Furthermore, these side chambers largely don’t represent meaningful navigational choices on the macro-level of the entire dungeon: You might choose to bypass such doors, but if you open one of them the only “choice” is to go back to the path you were already following.

Note that you can actually see this when looking at the diagram: It’s immediately apparent that all those little spurs don’t really “go” anywhere.

(You can argue that the same thing is technically true of longer sidetracks, but in practice these longer paths tend to be more meaningful to the overall structure of a dungeon and the experience of playing it. With that being said, there’s nothing magically relevant about one room vs. two rooms and in larger dungeons you may find different thresholds for what constitutes a “meaningful sidetrack” to be useful.)

You’ll similarly want to eliminate very short dead end hallways if they exist.

DIAGRAMMATIC TURNS

“Hey! What’s with that turn in your diagram? I thought you said we weren’t mapping that sort of thing!”

That’s true. In practice, however, Melan diagrams will introduce superfluous ninety-degree turns in order to keep the diagrams relatively compact or to conveniently make room for other paths.

So if you see a turn on a Melan diagram that doesn’t have a second path branching from it, you’ll know that it’s purely cosmetic. It doesn’t actually reflect a “turn” in the dungeon; and, although the turn in our current example sort of resembles a turn in the dungeon itself, such turns on the diagram may be present even when there are no turns in the corresponding dungeon tunnel.

ELIMINATE FAKE LOOPS

Dungeon paths will, of course, form loops. In fact, a well-designed, xandered dungeon will probably feature LOTS of loops. Ignoring routes that branch off from the loop for the moment, here’s one from the Sunless Citadel:

On the Melan diagram, it would look like this:

But what about this loop?

Well, on a Melan diagram this would actually be depicted as a straight line. To understand why, let’s start by eliminating the side chambers:

Viewed like this, you can clearly see that this is not a true navigational loop: It’s a fake fork. The navigational “choice” is a false one. After eliminating the side chambers, both paths lead immediately to the exact same place.

SECRET PATHS

When a path like this one goes through a secret door, this is indicated with a dotted line on the Melan diagram:

(Note that the other secret doors are not represented here because they lead to side chambers, which are eliminated regardless.)

An area is ONLY depicted as secret on the Melan diagram if the ONLY way of reaching that area is secret. However, even a secret door that leads directly from one “public” area to another would still be shown on the diagram as a short dotted line. (The secret path exists and is significant, even if the “length” of the path is only the width of the secret door itself, so to speak.)

LEVEL CONNECTIONS

The last functional element of a Melan diagram are the connections between levels. When a path goes from one level of the dungeon to another (by stair, elevator, sloping ramp, teleporter, or whatever), this is indicated by a break in the line with terminating lines on either side:

OTHER ELEMENTS

Melan diagrams may also include labels (e.g., “Goblins” or “Secret Lab” or “Teleportation Trap”). These are technically non-functional parts of the diagram, but can be useful to help readers orient themselves.

Some Melan diagrams of long, linear dungeons will be split into multiple columns, with the connection between the columns being indicated by a dotted line with an arrow.  (This is sometimes confused for a secret door, but it’s really just a tool for keeping the diagram relatively compact.)

CONCLUSION

If you’re reading this and still scratching your head over what the point of any of this stuff is supposed to be or what relevance the elements depicted by a Melan diagram are supposed to have, I’m going to do a full loop here and refer you back to Xandering the Dungeon, which is designed as an introduction to the sort of basic dungeon design techniques that the diagrams are designed to demonstrate.

Back to Xandering the Dungeon

Adversary Roster from Infinity: Quantronic Heat

Adversary rosters are one of the essential tools in my GM’s kit. In 2016, I wrote that I considered them my greatest “secret weapon”:

They allow me to run dynamic scenarios of considerable complexity on battlefields that can easily sprawl across a dozen areas with a relative simplicity which still leaves me with enough brainpower to manage varied stat blocks and clever tactics […] permanently disrupting the staid rhythms of “kick in the door” dungeoncrawling in your campaign. Adversary rosters are also a great way for running stealth missions, heists, and covert ops.

Of course, I have no interest in actually keeping them secret. Since writing that essay in 2016, I’ve introduced them to an even larger audience through my remixes of Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus; taught them as an essential tool in the Infinity Roleplaying Game core rulebook; and used them prominently in Over the Edge: Welcome to the Island.

I’d first mentioned the concept of the adversary roster here on the Alexandrian all the way back in 2011, referring to them as a “monster roster” and using G1 Against the Giants as an example of how they could be used. But by that point I’d already been using them for years.

While discussing this history with Robb Minneman on Patreon, I ended up delving into my old game notes in an effort to figure out when I’d first used an adversary roster: I knew that Against the Giants had actually been one of the earliest rosters I’d developed (which is one of the reasons I’d used it as the example in my 2011 post). And I also remembered using them in Forge of Fury around the same time.

As I sifted through my notes, though, I discovered (or, I guess, re-discovered) a far more nuanced development process. Adversary rosters are, in many ways, such a simple concept that one might think they would have sprung full-blown from the brow of Zeus. That was even more-or-less how I remembered it happening, but it wasn’t true.

So I thought it might be interesting to take a detailed look at the actual development process to see how this concept evolved.

THREE DAYS TO KILL

Around 2000-02 I was running (or attempting to run) three D&D 3^rd Edition campaigns:

• The Quest of the Seals was a fetch-quest campaign using a mixture of original and published adventures. I launched the campaign with John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill (Atlas Games).
• Freeport was a heavily modified version of Chris Pramas’ Freeport Trilogy (Green Ronin), placed at the northern tip of the Teeth of Light (a chain of islands in my home campaign setting) and studded with some island-hopping adventures.
• The War of the Giants, was a campaign I wanted to run that would start with G1 Against the Giants, but rather than transitioning to drow-related shenanigans, it would have instead escalated into a full-scale humans vs. giants war on the northern frontiers. (This never really got off the ground and didn’t progress beyond Against the Giants).

If you’re familiar with the history of D&D, then you’ll know that Three Days to Kill and Death in Freeport were the first two third-party adventures published for 3^rd Edition, both being released on the exact same day the Player’s Handbook was released. It’s not really a coincidence that my first two full-fledged 3^rd Edition campaigns launched with those scenarios: I’d scooped them up at Gen Con 2000.

In terms of how adversary rosters developed, The Quest of the Seals was the most important of these campaigns.

I’ve talked previously about how John Tynes, in Three Days to Kill, boils down the essential elements of a raid-type scenario. As noted in that discussion, part of a raid-type scenario is that “the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.” This is what that looked like in Three Days to Kill:

Now, this is not an adversary roster. But what it does do is separate the bad guys from the room key and, once again, emphasize that they’re going to be actively moving around the place.

When I prepped the adventure, I created a cheat sheet for the villa:

You can see that this is also not an adversary roster: It’s just a brief summary of the information from the module. When I ran the adventure, though, I really liked this: I liked the dynamic foes. And I liked having this information all on a cheat sheet that I could easily reference.

THE SUNLESS CITADEL

Three Days to Kill ends with someone (probably the PCs) accidentally opening a portal to Hell. For the purposes of my campaign, I basically upped the ante on this. As I noted in the campaign journal:

Behind you, the Blood Temple crouches upon the side of the mountain, pulsing and screaming into the night. A fiendish red light floods the heavens, obscuring the pale stars which shine down upon your retreating forms. The maw of Hell has been opened, and if there is a power which can shut it… you do not know what it might be.

The Quest of the Seals was, in fact, a quest for the three seals required to shut the portal to Hell: I placed one in The Sunless Citadel, another in the Forge of Fury, and the third in a homebrew module called the Monastery of Light. I then positioned these locations at opposite ends of my campaign world, so that the PCs would have to criss-cross the map on their epic journey.

But I digress. The important bit is that the next adventure on the docket was The Sunless Citadel.

And in my prep notes for The Sunless Citadel there’s this page:

Now, this looks a lot like an adversary roster. But this is only partly true. Do you see the entries for “Total Kobolds” and “Total Goblins”? That’s because this was actually a worksheet for tracking casualties.

See, The Sunless Citadel is occupied by a clan of kobolds and a clan of goblins at war with each other. As written, this conflict is kind of a cold war (with the kobolds occupying one set of rooms and the goblins occupying a different set of rooms). But I wanted to make this an ACTIVE conflict, with the goblins and kobolds actively feuding, raiding, and fighting. The casualty sheet was designed so that I could track this in real time.

This becomes even clearer with some stuff I designed for the group’s second session in the Citadel. The PCs had allied with the kobolds and fallen asleep in a side chamber. I decided to launch the second session with them being awakened by a major goblin raid on the kobolds.

I actually prepped the outcome of the entire fight if the PCs didn’t get involved. This was sort of like prepping a scenario timeline, but mostly misguided because it continued far past the point where the PCs were likely to intervene and change everything. (On the other hand, it was really four separate timelines — one for each room which had been assaulted — so this was mitigated somewhat: If the PCs intervened in Area 15, for example, I could use the timeline to easily keep track of what was happening in other rooms. Looking back with 20+ years of experience with 3^rd Edition, though, it would have made a lot more sense to reduce the number of rounds involved here by at least a third.)

In concert with this timeline, I also had a more specific casualty tracker:

In practice, that cheat sheet listing the locations of every goblin and kobold in the place did result in me beginning to haltingly use it like a proto-adversary roster (moving goblins and kobolds around to reinforce various areas), but the concept hadn’t fully gelled yet.

THE DEPTHS OF RAGE

As the PCs left The Sunless Citadel and headed west towards The Forge of Fury, one of the adventures they had along the road was “Depths of Rage,” a scenario from Dungeon Magazine #83 by J.D. Wiker that I combined with some material from Carl Sargent’s Night Below campaign.

Wiker’s “Depths of Rage” is a really cool scenario where the PCs delve into a goblin lair and then, when they’re at the deepest point of the dungeon, an earthquake hits and causes large parts of the dungeon to collapse. Now, with the dungeon completely transformed, the PCs need to crawl back out!

So this is a really cool, dynamic dungeon where the key entries and monster locations shift pre- and post-quake.

Night Below, on the other hand, includes notes in its key about how the monsters will dynamically react to the PCs’ presence and attempt to alert monsters in other locations (and also how the current location will be different if they have been previously alerted). For example

5. Thief Guards

[…]

If the wyvern watch at area 4 goes off, alerting them to the presence of intruders, Tinsley slips away towards area 10 to alert the fighter guards in the lower caverns (area 12), while Caswell hides behind one of the many columnar rocks.

I kind of combined these two ideas in an effort to make the dungeon even more dynamic and reactive. What I ended up with was an adversary cheat sheet that looked like this:

Which was… interesting.

No, not really. I mean, it worked. The adventure was great. But trying to program my prep notes like a computer game was a terrible idea — pure contingency prep instead of tool prep.

The last thing I prepped as part of this adventure, though, was a tracking sheet. Basically just a list of every area in the scenario so that I could actively track which goblins were where as a result of the various Alerts being triggered:

When I’d filled out this tracking sheet, what I had, of course, was something that looked a lot like the proto-adversary roster from The Sunless Citadel (i.e., Area 16 – 4 goblins), with the key difference being that this had been specifically developed to move the goblins around.

You’ll also notice that I had chunked the dungeon into sections: the Western Caves and the Eastern Caves. This was a natural division in Wiker’s design of the caverns, and breaking the goblin forces into these two separate chunks I kept each chunk to a manageable level of complexity.

THE FORGE OF FURY

Which brings us, finally, to my prep notes for a radically expanded Forge of Fury. It’s here that all of these ideas gel into the adversary roster. It looked like this:

Following in the footsteps of the goblins & kobolds of The Sunless Citadel and the east & west caves of “Depths of Rage,” you can see that I’ve chunked Forge of Fury into factions. This, obviously, is the adrak faction.

You can see that I’m still including a separate list of everyone in the faction. I did this for the purpose of tracking casualties, just as I had done in the previous two adventures. (Shortly thereafter I realized I could just track casualties directly on the area roster so that I wasn’t trying to do double-entry bookkeeping in the middle of a session.)

You might also note that I was indexing by AREA instead of by ACTION GROUP. (Compare to the roster from Quantronic Heat at the beginning of this article.) This is really a legacy of how the adversary roster evolved out of a traditional dungeon key (i.e., I’m literally going through the module and listing all the monsters in Area 15, then all the monsters in Area 16, etc.) and it persisted in my notes for many years even when I wasn’t adapting published adventures.

Reviewing my other campaign notes, it looks like I made the swap around 2009, probably as part of the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

(Why is the swap important? Conceptually it puts the focus on the adversaries you’re actively playing rather than the area they’re currently in. More importantly it makes it A LOT easier to use advanced techniques like variable areas, patrols, and the like. It also makes doing roster updates easier. See Art of the Key – Part 4: Adversary Rosters.)

In any case, the pay-off for these adversary rosters in Forge of Fury was immediate and spectacular at the table: Things kicked off with a truly epic siege as the PCs sought to break through the goblin defenses at the Mountain Door. After getting through the door itself, the PCs were able to strategically test the goblin defenses, while the goblins were able to move their reinforcements around.

Later, the PCs became trapped in the depths of the dungeon, cut off by the movement of enemy troops on the levels above them. You can read the conclusion of those adventures in Tales from the Table: In the Depths of Khunbaral.

The whole thing remains one of the coolest and most memorable dungeon adventures I’ve ever run, and the experience immediately cemented the adversary roster as a technique for creating awesome games. Having run hundreds of sessions since then using adversary rosters, I have only become more convinced that this is the case.

If you’d be interested in playing in a forum-based D&D adventure run by me, you should pop over to Basketweavers vs. The Sunless Citadel on theRPGSite and sign up. It’s first come, first serve. I’m hoping for a frequent updates schedule, so please be prepared to commit at least daily attention to the thread.

Fair warning, though: This is a bit of an odd bird. The run-thru is being motivated by a poster on theRPGSite named Mr. GC who is arguing vociferously that “basketweavers” — i.e., non-optimized characters — cannot play D&D. The opposing contention is that it’s absolutely trivial for non-optimized characters to play D&D, particularly if they’re adventuring in an open sandbox that allows them to select the challenges they want to face at any given moment.

In order to simulate that scenario, we’ll be using a very strange set of character creation guidelines set by Mr. GC for creating a party of “basketweavers” and then assuming that this particular party of “basketweavers” has selected The Sunless Citadel for their next adventure.

The particular version of The Sunless Citadel I’ll be using will be slightly modified from the original. But if you are familiar with the scenario, you may want to sit this one out.