The Blog of Bob Rubbens
Spoiler alert for all books and modules mentioned in this post! Also, if you’re currently in the group I’m running this adventure for, maybe wait at least a few months before you read this post.
While preparing for running the Sunless Citadel (SC) adventure, I ran into the companion guide for this adventure made by MargoMods. Unfortunately, the companion guide got lost in the chaos of my preparations. I am currently not using any material from MargoMods’ companion guide in the adventure I’m running. We’re too far in now to integrate the new parts of the companion. That being said, there are two parts of the companion I want to highlight to give this companion guide the exposition it deserves. In particular, it’s attention to detail and by providing interconnected NPCs.
Small details are more fleshed out in the companion. For example, in SC a specific magical fruit plays an important role. When harvested in the summer, it heals, and when harvested in winter, it kills. When the apple pips are planted, they grow into twig blights, small bush-like monsters.
The fruit is a nice but basic part of the story. The companion takes it a step further and defines more uses for the pips: the summer and winter apples produce different blights when planted. The companion also offers ideas for when the pips are eaten by animals.
While it’s not very likely this situation might occur, it is nice to have standard extensions of the story ready to go when your players start to go off script (which will inevitably happen about 15 minutes into session 1).
SC has interesting characters and accompanying encounters, but they lack coherence. For example, there is this bugbear Balsag that stole a dragon from the kobolds and gave it to the goblins. However, why Balsag would do this is never clarified. Balsag also lives one floor below the goblins, so besides being of a related species, there is almost nothing tying Balsag to the goblin faction in the citadel. The basic option seems to be that Balsag “just” lives in the citadel, and sometimes chats with the goblins, and that’s it. While it’s not wrong, it feels like such a missed opportunity.
The companion has a different take on Balsag: he’s a local hunter who lives in the caves below the sunless citadel, and enjoys hunting with his two pet rats. Unfortunately, one of the pet rats got abducted by an evil force, and it’s up to the players to decide if they want to help him! Did I also mention he and the leader of the goblin faction don’t see eye to eye?
In general, characters and their motivations are built to be interconnected from the start in the companion. This is not only more interesting for the players, but also makes it, somehow, easier to remember. I think this might be because the characters together form a coherent whole, compared to the citadel just having a bunch of interesting but ultimately unrelated encounters and characters.
I definitely don’t think the base SC adventure is bad, but it feels
more like a thorough starter template than a vibrant and interconnected
adventure. The moment I started reading the module, I started noticing
holes in the story, some of which I started filling with
stolen my own stuff. The companion builds on top of this, and
extends the adventure to be more of a batteries-included setting. I’m
not saying you should run the companion as-is; I think it contains too
much to run accurately, especially for beginning DMS.
However, if you’re considering running SC for your group, need some good ideas to spice up SC, and/or don’t want to spend too much time filling up the holes with homebrew, I definitely recommend the companion guide as an extended starting point.
MargoMods also has a companion guide for The Forge of Fury. I haven’t looked at it yet, but I expect it’s good!
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