Sunless Citadel Dungeon Master Guide

In this series we're doing Dungeon Master prep for an adventure, specifically The Sunless Citadel. Written by Bruce Cordell, The Sunless Citadel is a great Dungeon and Dragons adventure built to take characters from level 1 through level 3. I'm focused in on the version for fifth edition, 5E, that comes from the book: Tales from the Yawning Portal. I just did a quickish overview on the whole thing in the last post, spoiler alert: I think it's great and wish they made more anthologies like this instead of cranking out big ass mega adventures. Speaking of spoilers, this series is intended for Dungeon Masters, so if you are going to be a player in this adventure skip this one. D&D is not the kind of game where getting a walk through is going to give you a better experience. OK, Dms only? Let's go.

The Sunless Citadel was one of the first adventures for D&D third edition, kind of the introduction to the whole system. I hesitate to call something from the year 2000 “classic” or “old school” because that makes me want to throw up, so let's just say that this has some different sensibilities compared to stuff built in the 5E era. And that's not a euphemism for 'it's problematic” by the way. Other adventures in Yawning Portal certainly have their questionable elements, for sure, and I bet if you looked hard enough you could find something to take issue with here. #notallgoblins. But what I mean is that there are some elements that are going to feel pretty different as the Dungeon Master and as a player, compared to other starter adventurers like Lost Mine of Phandelver or Dragon of Icespire Peak. One of the first things the party is going to come across is a door there's no way they're going to get open. Then the first monster they find that isn't a rat or dead is going to be weeping pathetically in a corner. But I'm getting ahead of myself. There's a lot of concepts in this adventure. A lot of them are good, some of them not so much, and we're going to try to learn from all of them. Let's start at the beginning. Let's start with the why.

I really like the set up for this adventure. Specifically the plot hooks. Like I said in the last one, I'd skip the whole hearing a story in the Yawning Portal angle, but there are two really strong calls to adventure provided here that should keep our players pushing through to the end of the adventure. And that's important in something that's probably going to take several sessions to complete. Some groups do it in a couple sessions, but some groups are closer to twenty. We were in the middle there. My game nights are maybe shorter than some people's, clocking in at maybe three hours max and that's counting chatting and catching up before we really dive in. We're maybe 60/40 combat to RP, though that can fluctuate a lot and we won't touch the dice for several sessions at time. When I ran this, not counting my homebrewed high jinks and overland travel encounters, this was probably five, maybe six sessions worth of material all told. So if your group is anything like mine, even if you don't add anything on to this, you're going to want to have a good answer ready when a month after you started the adventure somebody at your table asks: why are we doing this again?

That's lesson number one here: the longer the adventure, the deeper we want to sink the hook. I just wrote a one shot and I decided “things are weird plus this guy is going to give you gold” was enough to get the players moving. They came to play a game after all, players do need to bring their own buy-in and go adventuring. But the longer and more complex things get, the more we should provide them with a meaningful reason to not wander off and do something else in the middle of a campaign arc. So we get two really good hooks here, and one so-so vanilla one.

The so-so one is “you heard about this place, go explore it and get that treasure and XP.” And that's not a bad motivation honestly, I love a character who is down to go adventuring because they're a freaking adventurer. Players, please make more of those. But that is very generic and it can be applied to almost every adventure. The other two are more specific and maybe more interesting.

My favorite one is the Rescue Mission. A noblewoman has hired the party to go find her son and daughter. A common trope, right? Except these aren't just some wayward commoners who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were adventurers, just like our heroes. A fighter and a wizard, brother and sister combo, went down into the Sunless Citadel with a rogue and a paladin who had a dope magic sword, (another little hook in there,) about a month ago. And now they're presumed dead or captured. I love this for a few reasons. First, it's kind of a four in one, five in one if we count the magic item, and the adventure leaves a trail of breadcrumbs about this ill-fated party for our heroes to uncover, from the jump to the final reveal. It keeps reminding the players of the mission and drawing them further into the dungeon and the story.

But the other thing it does is plant a big red flag in front of the players, a flashing danger sign. Here is a group just like yours and it sure looks like they got got. Heroes die down here. 5E is way less deadly than it's predecessors but death is still a big factor in D&D. That sets it apart from other kinds of games. That is especially true at these lower levels, and while I don't advocate trying to kill level one characters, especially with brand new players, it could very easily happen down here. And if we progress to the Forge of Fury and the rest of the book after this one I can almost guarantee people are going to die. So I like driving home the idea of the PCs mortality early and often. This does a great job of that, and I would stress it to your players when you're running this. “Hey, they kind of looked like you actually.”

Also worth noting is that our noblewoman, Kerowyn Hucrele, is paying 125 gold to each character for each signet ring, and 250 gold each if they bring the siblings back alive. That's a lot of money at level one, or three even! With four in the party and max success, that's 2,000 gp. This also adds a sense of urgency to the whole thing. If they die before we get there it will cost us 1,000 gp, let's hustle and try to find them alive. Another clever detail is that the Dame Hucrele is also the proprietor of the town's general store. It is always good to stack functions with your NPCs. First of all, it gives you fewer people to keep track of and differentiate, which can be super helpful. But maybe more importantly it will up the interaction and significance of those NPCs. You want her to run a line of credit for the PCs so they can gear up and then take it out of the back end, go for it.

The other hook here is a little more complex, which can be a mixed bag but I think this is good. It's a pretty compelling story, if a little fairy tale, and it does get at the heart of what's really going on down in the Sunless Citadel. Every summer solstice, these goblins show up in town with a single magical apple that has incredible healing properties. This has been going on for over a decade and the villagers are no dummies, they've tried to save the seeds and grow their own magic apple trees. But once the trees reach about two feet tall, poof, they disappear. The villagers assume those sneaky goblins are coming by in the night and stealing the plants to keep their monopoly on the magic healing apples.

For the right kind of character the mysterious weirdness of these facts is enough to get them going. Whether we lean into the idea that goblins are filthy, detestable dummies or treat them as any other humanoids, the question is: what exactly is going on here? But there's another hook in this story that will not only get the PCs exploring, but keep them coming back again and again: they want that magic apple for reasons. Someone they know is cursed, diseased, dying, and they're here to find the means to save them. Now that's a compelling why.

We get the additional little gem in the rumors list that occasionally these goblins also show up in winter with a snow white apple, (get it?) which is incredibly poisonous. That adds a nice little poetic balance to the story here, and for the right kind of character, (or maybe the wrong kind of character,) this might be the strongest incentive to get to the bottom of the Sunless Citadel.

Using this cyclical apple element has the added benefit of incorporating the seasons into your game. That can help lend gravitas and verisimilitude, and other big literary words to your game, (which I'm partial to,) but it's also very practical to anchor your game in time. It's easy to concretely root your stories location and map it out, but if you're not careful the time element can get very wishy-washy and you might look back at with a bunch of levels and adventures behind the party and realize it's only been a couple weeks. Especially in an Open Table or West March style game, but even in your more typical single group set up, tracking time is worth the effort. And in my experience it is way easier and more relatable to say, “yeah, that was the middle of summer and now the leaves are changing colors,” than to track tendays on some fantasy calendar. Though that's cool too if you enjoy it, go for it. I particularly think having holidays is great worldbuilding. But we just intuitively understand seasons and it's the right level of focus for me usually.

OK, so those are the plot hooks, don't underestimate how important they are to get started, and how happy you'll be in a few sessions that you took the time to focus in on them and give at least one to each player character. Maybe weave them into their backstories at character creation or hand them out at session zero. Also, feel free to cook up others or more if it makes sense for your table. Hooray plot hooks!

The other thing to prepare before we really dive into the adventure is our starting town. We get the village of Oakhurst, in the barest of detail. We get the mayor in the village hall, our noblewoman quest giver at the general store, a cleric in a shrine, a jail with a watch, a blacksmith, and of course a tavern. The most important information comes in the rumor table where we get little clues about the twig blights, the druid, the dragon cult, all the backstory elements. Now, I think this place is boring on purpose, the designers don't want the party hanging out in Oakhurst, this is just a launch pad. But if you run a very social game and your players can spend a whole session shopping you might want to beef up this location.

We actually do get a map of the village and a tiny bit more detail in the original adventure, as well as a map of the region. I definitely don't think you need this and beyond different art, which you can probably find online, picking up the 3E module won't add much that isn't in the 5E version. But if you're a completest or maybe want to compare and contrast so you can try your hand at converting other old modules, it is available on the DMsGuild as a PDF if you want to pick it up.

We get advice on where to place the village in different settings, so in Forgotten Realms you can have it be near Thundertree and Mount Hotenow caused the Sunken Citadel to Sink. But the fact that Oakhurst is basically just a list of names actually makes it flexible enough that if you wanted to you could just merge this into a different starting town and no one would be the wiser. You could easily just use Phandolin, Secomber, or your own location here. The only NPC that's specific to this story and not generic is Kerowyn Hurcele, so I would keep her. But otherwise go nuts, or just enjoy the simplicity of Oakhurst and add details on the fly as you need them. Or, here's a great idea, use your player characters' backstories to help flesh this place out. Give them a reason to care.

So that's our basic set up work and where I'd start my prep. Focus in on those plot hooks, get a stating town prepared, and we're ready to have us an adventure. I'm cutting this one short, not that this was short exactly, but I'm going to put the backstory and more spoiler filled prep in the next article, just in case there are still players among us. (I see you.) So up next we're really going to really get into it my Dungeon Masters, and head out to the Sunless Citadel proper. I'll see you there.

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