First Impressions of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel

 I picked up my copy of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel today. I've been a little hesitant to grab adventure books, as I really run homebrew exclusively, and I have all these books I don't know when I'm ever going to get the chance to run.

Still, conceptually I was curious about this one.

If you haven't been reading up on it, the Radiant Citadel is a kind of adventure hub that floats within the Ethereal Plane - as far as I can tell, it's one of the very few distinct locations in the Deep Ethereal to be detailed.

Built around an enormous magical diamond, the Radiant Citadel is connected to several civilizations on different worlds - the cultures that are connected to it are not generally said to be on specific canonical settings, though there are suggestions of how they might be communities in the Forgotten Realms or Eberron, or in one case even Ravenloft (while the Dark Powers can usually keep people trapped in their realms, I could imagine that whatever force behind the Radiant Citadel might be powerful enough to force a gateway open through the Mists).

The book is then a series of adventures within these various civilizations. The book is notably inspired by and written by people of color, with worlds inspired by real-world cultures. For example, the second adventure is a Southern Gothic story with a culture inspired by the Black Diaspora in the American South (and is absolutely my kind of spooky!)

The structure and format of these adventures is not too dissimilar to Candlekeep Mysteries - the adventures would likely not take more than one or two sessions (depending heavily on how quickly your players handle combat.) The adventures are also pretty stand-alone - you can use the Radiant Citadel as a hub for a connected campaign, or you could easily run these independently or as adventures within a different campaign (I'm very tempted to make Godsbreath, the aforementioned Southern Gothic region, a Domain of Dread, as suggested as a possibility in the book).

In terms of pillageable material, there are not a ton of new monsters here - there's typically one new creature per adventure. However, each adventure ends with a Gazeteer for its setting, encouraging DMs to come up with additional adventures in those locations.

The Radiant Citadel itself has a lot of potential as an adventuring hub, too, with NPCs and organizations for your party to encounter.