[ ] My Top Tips for Running Scarlet Citadel

1. Make sure to include and solidify your own story, drivers, and motivations for the characters to go down there. My own driver focused on the Wyrdweaver and the twisting of the ley-lines with four MacGuffins held by the four villains.
2. Make the operations of the four main villains clear and escalating so there’s a sense of urgency.
3. Note all of the locations that connect vertically. The vertical nature of the Citadel can get confusing but is also really cool.
4. Focus on the dynamics of the the dungeon’s denizens. As the characters change things, they should see the results of those changes. (Loki-possessed Bjrynyar taking over Redtower, all of level 2 being taken over by the super-ooze version of Danaska Maksilov).
5. It works really well on a virtual tabletop. I used the maps with Owlbear and they were a big hit and really easy to use. This adventure is clearly built around the maps.

[ ] Overall, I can’t recommend Scarlet Citadel.

1. It’s too wordy. Too many notes! Very hard to reference during the game itself. Some single rooms have two or three pages of text to parse.
2. There’s no clear motivation to engage with the Citadel or its denizens. You have to bring your own drivers, motivations, and storylines to the campaign.

Both of the above required a lot of continual work to get the adventure to play out. We had fun, but there are better designed campaign adventures to focus on.

[ ] Good things about Scarlet Citadel

1. Beautiful and VTT-usable maps.
2. Even though it’s a big kilo-dungeon, it never got boring or stale.
3. The evolution of the Citadel as the characters engage with it is a lot of fun.
4. It had a lot of fun lore with things like Black River and the twisting of the ley-lines.

[ ] How my campaign ended.

1. The characters dealt with the crazy door mechanics in the howling halls. Players noted the old-school feel of tying ropes, messing with levers, and dealing with a huge vacuum sucking anything into annihilation.
2. Multi-phase battle with the sphere itself. Phase 1 were a handful of Fragrites, phase 2 was Gellart the Gruesome, phase 3 was the voidcaller. Gellart got killed by a wild charge of the Wand of Wonder that opened a portal to the shadow realm where the pit fiend, Kaluga, was compelled to offer a service to the characters. That service was caving in Gellart’s head with a big flaming mace. The guardian ceased to move as soon as Gellart was destroyed.
3. Skrink grabbed the third icosahedron which Gellart had taken from the Spiders of Leng and hurled himself into the void which then collapsed on itself.
4. One year later montages:
   1. Malarky sought the twisted lore of the Spiders of Leng to try to find Skrink again.
   2. Dorn accepted his fate and traveled along the black river with Mall Charon to his afterlife.
   3. Mez realized that every body has a story to tell and its about the preparation of one’s body that matters but sharing those stories including Dorns.
   4. Garble established a new supercolony of mushrooms along the restored black river down beneath the Scarlet Citadel.
   5. Skrink is gone…having vanished into the hole in the world (or is he???).