Redesigning Sunless Citadel.

[the_david]

I really like the theme of Sunless Citadel, but a lot of it seems somewhat off. I'm gonna list a couple of things that seem wrong, how I plan to fix them, and silently hope somebody wants to add some of his or her advice to my ideas.
If you live in the Netherlands and know a player/GM called David, please stop reading now. If you've never played the Sunless Citadel and the other adventures of that series but you do want to play them you may want to stop reading too.

The citadel without a city. As wikipedia put it "A citadel is the core fortified area of a city or town". The adventure never mentions ruins of a city, so I'll have to add them myself.

The proximity of the Kobolds and the Goblins. I know it's a dungeon crawl, but they could have killed each other many times before the players even find the citadel. I'll put the Kobolds on the other side of the ruined city. Possibly in a temple of Ashardalon, or maybe some other kind of fortified structure.

The general design of the citadel. There's so much wrong with this. I'll probably use the moathouse from the Village of Hommlet instead. The entrance to the moathouse will be guarded by the 2 goblins from area 32. There's a chance that they are sleeping or skipping guard duty though.

Meepo, area 15. Instead of placing him at the entrance for both the Kobold and Goblin lairs he'll be tied to some kind of pillar as his punishment. The kobolds build a pit trap around the pillar.

The Mephit, area 14. Replace the rusted barrel with 2 magical fountains, much like the ones in area 26 and 29. One of them is placed in the ruined city and functioning like it should. Activating it produces water as a create water spell. The other one is broken and located in the courtyard of the citadel. If you activate it, a small water elemental comes out and starts attacking everything in sight.

The Dragonpriest, area 12. This is gonna be a horribly mutated half-dragon alchemist. He tried to turn himself into a dragon, but failed. This is also one of the areas that don't make sense. I'll relocate it to underneath the temple of Ashardalon along with area 7 and 27 as a catacomb that probably leads to the citadel. I'll add some fresh Kobold Zombies that were locked in to avoid a Zombie plague. There might be a secret exit to the city too. The prisoners from area 18 will be held here too.

Erky Timbers, area 34. Most Golarion Gnomes would have faded away into nothingness if they were kept inside a prisoncell for a year. He could have been part of the group of missing adventurers though. In that case I'd advice you to let him fade away till he's middleaged. I'll use the Greyhawk-lite setting though, because it works better with the last 2 adventures. Place this area in the dungeon underneath the citadel.

Sir Braford and Sharwyn, area 56. Don't let them die if the players kill the Gulthias tree. They can make excellent recurring bad guys. Sharwyn should be a Sorceress with the Verdant bloodline.

Calcryx, area 37. This would be a tiny CR2 dragon in Pathfinder. (It was a CR1 in 3.0) I don't like weak tiny dragons. I might use a Tatzlwyrm instead. Then again, I also don't like weak medium sized dragons. A dragon should be at least large size, and it shouldn't be weaker than say a bear or a tiger. I don't really know what to do with this.

[Almagesto]

Redesigning the entire map may be ok, just don't go overboard. Yes, a citadel is just that, but maybe the rest of the city disappeared with the great battle that created the ravine. Do change the layout of the dungeon.

About critters: I always had the feeling designers just crammed as many low CR monsters and traps into the dungeon as they could, without much consideration for whether they actually made any sense. My opinion: completely scratch the goblins. Make it a temple complex devoted to dragons. Take away Jot and change the wyrmiint encounter for a middle boss.

If you want to make the other party recurring villains, maybe change the nature of the tree? Dunno... Pretty late and I'm running out of Mountain Dew.

Hope this helps.

[Coidzor]

Definitely would expand the No-Man's Land with traps. It'd also explain why the party doesn't run into as much kobold fiendishness going in, because they've been focusing their efforts on defense.

I'd make it so that either the disruption of the previous adventuring party or a recent earthquake are what allowed the goblins their opening to attack and take the dragon in order to bring the kobolds back to the bargaining table or what have you.

Given the placement of the Sunless Citadel, you don't need to have a whole lot of city ruins. Some stuff heavily weathered up above the ravine, maybe a lonely building improbably surviving jutting out of the ravine wall(possibly incorporated into how the goblins traveled to and from the dungeon or the previous adventuring party entered at least), a few mostly unrecognizable structures they pass during the descent and before they enter the dungeon proper.

You certainly could expand a city pre-dungeon as much as you wanted though. Perhaps that's where the goblin tribe's noncombatants relocated after the emergence of the kobolds made the citadel itself into contested territory and they didn't want to live in the Gulthias tree layer for various reasons.

Perhaps they could have a sort of semi-barricade, semi-palisade set up and players that weren't immediately trying to kill a bunch of gobbo and hobbo women and children and the guards set up to defend them might find out a little bit about how disruptive to the dungeon ecosystem the party of adventurers before them had been and offering passage in exchange for helping them oust the kobolds or something.

Competing offers for access to the only way to the lower level which is under Goblinoid control might be an interesting angle, actually. The Goblins offer it in exchange for helping drive off the Kobolds and may or may not be planning to just stab the party in the back as soon as they've helped them deal with the Kobold problem(or maybe they think the Druid will appreciate some live adventurers or could use being shaken out of his comfort zone and taking their acting as a buffer for him for granted) and the Kobolds don't particularly care about the party going any lower, they just want their dragon back and to make a place for themselves to live in a trap-infested dragon-ruin like any proper kobold might desire to do.

Let the party's prejudices play out and see whether they can stand Kobolds or the Goblins they're partially investigating less as influenced by your wording an disseminating of information reveal to them that they'll *need* to get to that lower level to find out what happened to the previous group and only by going through Goblin Town can they get to it. And they don't want to try to brute force their way through by fighting both kobolds and goblins directly due to numbers and positioning.