The Sunless Citadel Series Introduction

1. Introduction
2. Experience points and character levels
3. The main villain and his undead tree
4. Secondary villains and the introductions thereof
5. Why people play games
6. Character Hooks
7. Rescue Mission
8. Mysterious magic fruit
9. Phobias that characters might want cured
10. Other mental illnesses that characters might want cured
11. Having your skin replaced with a slimy membrane
12. Reversing a botched transformation into a snake
13. Character Hooks (tying it all together)
14. Rumors heard in Oakhurst
15. Standard Operating Procedure for traveling to the dungeon
16. Introducing the plot-relevant marauding monsters
17. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey
18. Finally reaching the ravine
19. Foreshadowing on the lip of the ravine
20. The first encounter

The third edition of Dungeons & Dragons was published August 1, 2000.
That same day, an adventure was published to introduce the new edition.
That adventure was The Burning Plague, published for free online to accompany the rulebooks. (This seems like a better arrangement than including an adventure in a boxed set with the rulebooks, honestly.) It was perfectly serviceable but somewhat bland and quickly forgotten.
The adventure really meant to ring in the new edition had a more hand-holding, even handing players pregenerated characters to try out. I’m referring, of course, to the Cave of Shadow, which was much more bland than The Burning Plague.
The Sunless Citadel had more staying power.

Several more online adventures were published before the year was out, including The Vessel of Stars, a highly imaginative module with a lot of original ideas, many of them goofy. But more importantly for our purposes, two actually saw print: The Sunless Citadel and The Forge of Fury. Both proved popular enough to be updated to Fifth Edition. (Not Fourth Edition, because Fourth Edition was a radically different game and any adventure that was good in Third Edition would never have worked in Fourth.)

The proximate inspiration for this series is Eleven-Foot Pole’s analysis of Keep on the Shadowfell and Thunderspire Labyrinth.

I have said already that Keep on the Shadowfell is a bad module and I’m probably going to say it a bunch more before I am through.

http://elevenfootpole.blogspot.com/2009/01/bad-module.html

But in contrast to Keep on the Shadowfell, I actually think The Sunless Citadel is a good module. In fact, I think it’s the best adventure for new players ever published.

That’s damning with some pretty faint praise, of course. In my opinion, the overall state of published modules is really surprisingly bad. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem — not a lot of people buy them, so not a lot of effort goes into them, so not a lot of people buy them, and eventually you fish one out of the three-dollar bargain bin along with all the other black-and-white paperbacks nobody wanted.
Maybe the real underlying problem is too many auteur DMs who think running someone else’s adventure is beneath their dignity. Maybe the original problem was simply a lack of good published modules, so that DMs don’t think much of them. But whatever the case, The Sunless Citadel stands out as the best of the lot.

…every adventure I read always has massive problems. This one doesn’t.

stevelabny

When I have criticism — and I do have quite a bit of it — bear in mind that, at the end of the day, this is still a good module, significantly better than most. Your standard grab-bag dungeon crawl with a bunch of random monsters to fight can’t be criticized because there’s no there there. The Sunless Citadel can be criticized precisely because it has a solid foundation.

The Sunless Citadel has five basic elements:

1. Exotic wild animals infest the area around the dungeon and will attack the unwary.
2. The Citadel itself, a once-proud shattered fortress. Everything that can be safely looted already has been, leaving only what can be unsafely looted. The Citadel enters the adventure in the form of off-the-main-track locked rooms where the dead do not lie quiet, and bound demons who are dangerous to those who disturb them.
3. The goblins, the vagabonds and thieves who already looted everything that could be safely looted. The goblins are initially the main antagonist, but the players’ war of attrition against the goblins is unexpectedly derailed by the appearance of:
4. The kobolds, cultists who would see this Citadel restored to its former glory. The players can choose to deal with the kobolds peaceably, or not.
5. The final element rears its head only after the goblins are dealt with. Relatively mundane (for a fantasy world) phosphorescent fungus gives way to a tunnel laced with glowing purple vines (that’s…weird…) gives way to a full-on Laboratory of Horrors. The players must brave its depths to find and defeat its mad architect before his creations overrun the world.

Also, there’s magical healing fruit. I don’t include this in the main summary because it’s very much an Excuse Plot. It’s a good Excuse Plot, strongly suggesting creating characters with motivations to take advantage of it, and saying the Big Bad’s monsters are grown from the seeds of this fruit, so that the tree must be destroyed despite the fantastical benefits, dovetails nicely with the horror flavor of the end of the adventure. But the fruit itself isn’t central to the adventure; what the players might want it for is outside the scope of the module.

I’m going to quote liberally from Twenty-Sided Tale’s statement of philosophy on “the writer”:

I deliberately avoided looking at the credits during the writing of this series[Not totally successful, mind you. Partway through writing this series I stumbled on a few names I recognized. Still, I did what I could to keep “the writer” as abstract as possible.], so I didn’t know which (if any) writing staff or creative leads this game might share with the previous entries. As in my previous write-ups, we’re going to pretend that this story is the work of some singular unnamed writer. I find this makes it easier for the analysis to feel detached instead of coming off like an angry hit-piece.

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=44329

This should probably go without saying, but this entire series will be riddled with spoilers.