I got to put a handful of these adventures to the test so I feel fit to review this one now. Originally picked up with some keeness in anticipation of a planar adventure anthology - something that was going to deliver adventures in places that felt different. The premise was we get a bunch of adventures that happen in different cultures. In-world these are different realms that are connected to the central Radiant Citadel but the adventures and their settings could be accessed in other ways.
I like that this anthology gave us some interesting new options - both places and stand alone adventures that can be dropped into a planehopping campaign. I like the potential in the book for these adventures to break up other adventure arcs or to offer settings to arrive in that feel a bit different. General reception from among the games group I play at has been positive enough; it does not have the gold star reputation of Candlekeep but there are good adventures in here.
We get good variety of different places that could be encountered in one book - the next nearest alternative that I can think of would be to scour a whole bunch of different settings and pull an adventure out for them. If your players are embarking on an old school Sliders-style world-a-week campaign then this is a great resource to meet that 'what is different about this place' demand without killing yourself assimilating setting books.
I grabbed it when it came out because I was really pepped for cool, transplanar travel to places that are genuinely different and a breath of fresh air. I liked the pitch WotC gave of "we've tapped a bunch of people who are coming from different cultural backgrounds, to give you something different" - I thought, cool something unusual, I'm here for that.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
2 pages Welcome to the Radiant Citadel
12 pages of the Radiant Citadel
204 pages covering 13 adventures
3 pages of Beyond the Radiant Citadel
For the frame - the Radiant Citadel itself; the intro has guidance to the book layout - meaning of layout features, etc - a roster of the adventures with level range and brief descriptions and advice on portraying other cultures sensitively.
And then I got my hands on it and found the Radiant Citadel itself is grand but another Starbase 101 type thing, super-cosmpolitan, mercantile outpost like most of our core city options. It would not be out of place in Traveller and so on, feeling somewhat sci-fi dressed up in fantasy clothes. The aesthetic is quite cool, the various gemstone creatures and the actual flickers of a culture that comes through. But just flickers and not enough to make it clear how does it feel different day to day from any other standard D&D city. I might have liked more powder-keg potential.
The actual transplanar travel is like elevators, basically. You get in, they go bing, and they get you to the place you're going to and that's it. I might have gone with something more Cubic Gate-like for that but this is workable.
Then as you get to the individual adventures. All draw on different cultural backgrounds and the artwork brings that through clearly. Once it gets washed through the lens of D&D, there is a bit of reversion to the standard D&D world and structures with questing and settlements and ancestor spirits and things that we have come across before. Their cultural resonance get a little bit bleached out. The exhortion to avoid sterotyping from the intro advice gets some additional practical help with advice for setting each adventure and flagging the locations in each of the worlds which speak to those cultures. It is still tricky to bring across the culture on the pages during the adventure while your standard 5e party is tearing up the landscape but one can only do so much.
I managed to get a couple of these adventurers to table and they are good. I got in Written in Blood and Wages of Vice, prepped The Fiend of Hollow Mine, Sins of Our Elders and Gold for Fools and Princes. They are nice adventurers and serve as a good tour of different regions.
Written in Blood is a good horror adventure, nice and scary. I was hugely amused, my players were deeply suspicious, chased off all the NPCs, didn't want to interact with them at all, and ended up wandering through a spooky blighted land with no guides. They only interacted with the things that they ran into until they eventually rescued an NPC and decide to trust and talk to him.
The strength of all of these, I feel, is having the types of adventures happen in the appropriate places, playing to the cultures and climate. Joe and Jane standard 5e adventurers can walk into any of these and have fun, you are not getting any of the culture shock that should come with the fish out of water of encountering a completely new culture. These are all people, and since langauge doesn't matter in D&D, an outsider can mesh with these places readily.
The transplanar Radiant Citadel bit feels like a bit of a damp squib, not really earning its keep beyond being a fast-travel node between elements of a campaign. The different worlds are not so different that they feel like new worlds. They all have 1.0 gravity, the air is the same, there are trees and birds and everything like that, it's just the culture is slightly different.
I feel this should have been positioned more as a tour-the-world of known worlds - the corresponding culturally-matched locations on each of the major campaign worlds are noted in each of the adventures - Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, etc. I feel leaning into this as a tour of the Forgotten Realms might have had a bit more resonance because otherwise each of these is a single window on a place we never return to which is feels somewhat curtailed.
But to wrap up this is a set of adventures with a good reputation among the gang of DMs at our open games. One of the very high-tempo DMs has a lot of good things to say about them and has put most of them through the wringer - some with mods, most without which is high praise from them. So these have been battle-tested at my local game society and people have gotten a lot of hours out - I would say the only two WotC anthologies more used are Candlekeep and Tales from the Yawning Portal. Setting aside the planar nexus, I have gotten good mileage out of it myself.
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