Confusion on the Sunless Citadel

[werescythe]

So I've been looking at Tales of the Yawning Portal and it talks about the players being lowered into the well. That is fine and all but what gets confusing is when you read the first adventure the Sunless Citadel and it talks about the Citadel and Oakhurst being located in a ravine.

So does the first mission not take place in the Yawning Portal (down in the well), or is all of this underground and just worded in a confusing manner?

[Speely]

AFAIK, it has nothing to do with the well. It's a ravine leading down into ruins. The well is another deal entirely, leading to somewhere else entirely.

That's how our DM introduced it, anyway. I've not peeked at any of the content myself, since I am just a player and I wanted it to be a surprise.

Please someone correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I took away.

Edit: We traveled a decent distance from the well before we descended. Seemed very separate both in distance and content.

[leogobsin]

None of the adventures in TftYP are actually set underneath the Yawning Portal tavern by default. The idea behind Yawning Portal as a connection for the adventures in the book is that the players hear about the adventures from people in the Yawning Portal, or something similar.

[Armored Walrus]

The Well is in the actual Yawning Portal - which is a tavern in which travelers tell tales of dungeons they've conquered in the past. None of the adventures actually start there. None of them are even in that same town. It's just fictional positioning to tie all the adventures together - adventures that, for the most part, have nothing to do with each other, but are rather a sort of "greatest hits" album of past D&D dungeon crawl adventure modules.

[werescythe]

None of the adventures in TftYP are actually set underneath the Yawning Portal tavern by default. The idea behind Yawning Portal as a connection for the adventures in the book is that the players hear about the adventures from people in the Yawning Portal, or something similar.

Wow, it feels kind of misleading. :smallfrown:

[leogobsin]

Wow, it feels kind of misleading. :smallfrown:

Yeah it's... more than a little weird. I think Yawning Portal is a really neat book, I love the concept of a "Best Of" collection of adventures but it feels like the attempts to offer some connective tissue ends up more confusing than anything.

That said, with a little bit of reworking to the background info on Sunless Citadel it would probably be totally reasonable to have the well in Yawning Portal leads to Sunless Citadel.

[Armored Walrus]

Wow, it feels kind of misleading. :smallfrown:

I don't know, having read the book, I thought it was pretty clear exactly what is going on. Sunless Citadel starts at the Ol' Boar Inn, in an entirely different town.

[werescythe]

I don't know, having read the book, I thought it was pretty clear exactly what is going on. Sunless Citadel starts at the Ol' Boar Inn, in an entirely different town.

Well, when I read the introduction I was under the impression that we would be going into the Well. Now I've received several comments saying that none of the adventures take us there.

Seems pretty misleading to me (especially with one of the new adventures in the fall, being confirmed to take us there).


Yeah it's... more than a little weird. I think Yawning Portal is a really neat book, I love the concept of a "Best Of" collection of adventures but it feels like the attempts to offer some connective tissue ends up more confusing than anything.

That said, with a little bit of reworking to the background info on Sunless Citadel it would probably be totally reasonable to have the well in Yawning Portal leads to Sunless Citadel.

That would be interesting. I would love to see how that would work if anyone figured out how to do it.

[Speely]

I don't know, having read the book, I thought it was pretty clear exactly what is going on. Sunless Citadel starts at the Ol' Boar Inn, in an entirely different town.

This is what I took away from it even having not read the book. Then again, my DM is very good at providing relevant information. Even a first-time player in our group got it. That said, I can see how ambiguous language could obfuscate the narrative here. YP is a fairly content-dense thing.

[Armored Walrus]

Well, when I read the introduction I was under the impression that we would be going into the Well. Now I've received several comments saying that none of the adventures take us there.

Seems pretty misleading to me (especially with one of the new adventures in the fall, being confirmed to take us there).


The new adventure does (the one being released in November). These don't. It's explicitly spelled out in the first two pages of the book. But fortunately, you've got three months to work your way through some of these adventures and then you can head down the Well in November to see what's down there.

[Armored Walrus]

That said, with a little bit of reworking to the background info on Sunless Citadel it would probably be totally reasonable to have the well in Yawning Portal leads to Sunless Citadel.

You could do that but then it might be difficult to explain why the Dungeon of the Mad Mage is in the same place if you run it later. ;P

I have seen folks post about making a campaign out of TftYP by using the concept that the characters are retired, and in the Yawning Portal recounting their great deeds, and each dungeon adventure is a flashback to those deeds from their past.

[ImproperJustice]

I maybbe off base, but *minor spoilers*

We gained access to the lower level of the citadel via climbing down a well found within the actual dungeon.
It made sense, as it was part of the fresh water resovoir for the original citadel.

Could that be the issue?

[werescythe]

I have seen folks post about making a campaign out of TftYP by using the concept that the characters are retired, and in the Yawning Portal recounting their great deeds, and each dungeon adventure is a flashback to those deeds from their past.

So am I not supposed to have an NPC just send them on these adventures? :smalleek:

[leogobsin]

So am I not supposed to have an NPC just send them on these adventures? :smalleek:

The thing is, Yawning Portal isn't a campaign the way say, Hoard of the Dragon Queen is. It's a collection of basically unrelated adventures, how you want to connect them together (or even if you connect them at all) is totally up to you.

[Armored Walrus]

So am I not supposed to have an NPC just send them on these adventures? :smalleek:

You can. That's one option, they can hear about all these different dungeons while hanging out in the Yawning Portal. Page 5 of TftYP (section on Creating a Campaign) describes a little of how that would work. But you don't have to do it that way. Each individual adventure also has a section that gives you hooks you can use to start the adventure. Sunless Citadel itself provides one hook for Forge of Fury (the Dwarven scroll case) I'm just sharing how others have posted that they used the Yawning Portal as a framing device.

Personally, I didn't use that tavern at all, and just dropped (a heavily edited version of) Sunless Citadel into what I was already doing, in a made-up town. I've never run the rest of the dungeons, but probably will steal portions of many of them at later points in my campaign.

[Foxhound438]

So am I not supposed to have an NPC just send them on these adventures? :smalleek:

That's what I do when I run stuff out of this book. More or less I bought it so I could have something to run fun one-shots out of if ever people wanted to play a quick game or two, and so it's kind of turned into an "on when we need it" long game where the same NPC is giving random adventurers leads to "practically unguarded loot", and from there my parties wiped a couple of times in sunless citadel (owing to the fact that it starts at level 1), and there developed this fun meta-narrative of this guy sending unsuspecting adventurers to their deaths in these locations so he can sell their starting gear for menial profit.