The Sunless Citadel
Fan Submitted Review
The 3rd Edition game is a powerful step into the future of Dungeons & Dragons, and my gaming group and I have been playing it for going on three years. It was only recently that we actually got around to trying out The Sunless Citadel, penned by author Bruce Cordell, a writer notorious for creating well-planned, challenging, and downright deadly adventures for the second edition of D&D.;
We expected the very best. What we got was very disappointing. It's always difficult to speak at length about any adventure module without spoiling the story, so I apologize in advance for spoiling this one for those of you who might still be interested in giving it a shot.
Some of you might remember an adventure written for the Second Edition AD&D; game by Cordell called The Shattered Circle (which, incidentally, is one of his best). It seems that when Cordell wrote The Sunless Citadel, he was under some degree of pressure to bang it out and get it on the shelves, because a number of elements found in The Shattered Circle can be found, incognito, in elements of The Sunless Citadel - a blatant recycling endeavor that only works on those players who don't pay attention to the details.
Once you get past the obvious regifting of certain things, you start to focus on the content and the story, which are, for lack of a better term, terrible.
The "Sunless Citadel" itself is an ancient fortress that has fallen into a mysterious rift in the earth (hence the "Sunless" part of the name, but by all indications in the adventure, the rift is open at the top, which would hardly make it "Sunless" - a relatively trivial detail). The adventure is designed with a generic gaming world in mind (although the default Greyhawk setting pops up in the names of deities and other Greyhawk-specific details cited in the text), and the citadel itself is located on an old road that was once a popular trade route, despite the fact that it was once the headquarters of an evil red-dragon worshipping cult.
The road has fallen into disuse since the citadel's infestation (which is ambiguous at best from the very beginning), and the people of the nearby village have been tormented and manipulated by goblins - yes, goblins (did Cordell actually read the 3rd Edition Monster Manual?) - that are "selling" (read, "buy this or die") the villagers a mysterious magic fruit twice a year and forcing them to plant seeds of shrubs that, after gestating, just as mysteriously disappear in the middle of the night.
Further, the goblins that occupy the Citadel are not alone, but also share the [relatively meager] accommodations with a tribe of kobolds, and the two of them (goblins and kobolds), while currently is an uneasy stalemate, seem to make war from time to time. As if this isn't enough, the goblins have stolen a white dragon wyrmling from the kobolds that they both seem to venerate (a white dragon in a temple once devoted to red dragons? How can this be, you ask? So did I.).
And now, the ambiguous bad guy: a druid-gone-bad that now tends an unusually active garden in the suburbs of the Underdark, who also commands the goblins to do his bidding. Mental note: if you are a Dungeon Master and you run this adventure, you absolutely have to retool the druid for 3.5. Not only was the entire module written before 3.5, but more importantly, it was written before critical supplements like the The Complete Warrior and, well, the entire FRCS series of accessories. If your jacked-up Unearthed Arcana-brandishing PCs face him unmodified, they'll mow past him with an Improved Trip, a racial paragon, a charm person, and a smile.
I won't spoil it, but the ending is less than satisfying (but, in Cordell's defense, the final confrontation does have a few interesting twists).
Oh, and I forgot to mention - this adventure introduces one of the most annoying but most memorable (when properly portrayed) NPC ever written.
Now for the good stuff: Cordell writes in the requisite traps, challenges, surprises, red herrings, treasure (although it's a little thin), make-this-skill-check-or-lose-your character situations, and storyline intrigue and plot twists. He also creates new monsters as usual, and these are actually pretty lame but well-used to advance the underlying plot.
In closing, I don't recommend this adventure, but if you plan to run the whole series of stand-aloners, you might as well start here. I should mention again that there are many details that need to be converted from 3.0 to 3.5 (this isn't Cordell's fault, of course), but it's the weak story and recycled ideas that really put me off.
Roll for initiative.
Added: May 19th 2004 Reviewer: Michael A Dappolone Score: Related Link: The Sunless Citadel Product Page Hits: 676 Language: eng |