Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel's creator was inspired by the solarpunk and hopepunk movements, but what even are those?

Read the transcript and get more from the show:

https://scintilla.studio/monster-solarpunk-journeysthroughtheradiantcitadel

Get stat blocks, bonus content, and other monstrous perks: www.patreon.com/scintillastudio

Join the conversation: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter

Meet my guests:

David Somerville, author, Planegea: https://www.twitter.com/Planegea

Mike Rugnetta & Taylor Moore: twitter.com/funcityventures

Kierán Suckling, Executive Director and Founder of the Center for Biological Diversity

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/

Tierra Curry, Senior Scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity

https://twitter.com/TierraMussel

Music credits:

"Limousine" by Jason Shaw

"Extinction Theme" by Alex Monroe

D&D's newest adventure book

Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel

is an original solar punk spectacular

wrapped around a fossil monster.

This is Making a Monster, the bite-sized

podcast where we investigate the

monsters in D&D and other tabletop

RPGs, and discover how they work,

why they work and what they mean.

I'm Lucas Zellers.

Wizards of the Coast will be releasing its

newest adventure module "Journeys Through

the Radiant Citadel" in June of this year.

It's an anthology set in a multiversal

hub city adrift in the Ethereal plane.

There is a monster at the heart of

Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, or

"Citadel" as we'll call it for the rest

of this episode, whose fossilized remains

form the basis of the city's architecture.

Moreover, the monster is one of

an extinct species lost to time.

I've been using D&D to tell the stories

of extinct animals since about January

2021, so you might guess why I think

this adventure is the most exciting

thing Wizards has yet produced for

fifth edition, but there's more.

Ajit George, one of the Citadel's

project leads, tweeted that the

project is inspired by the hopepunk

and solarpunk movements in its

optimistic vision of a community

collaborating to overcome long odds.

It's exactly what real life solarpunks

like the ones I'm partnering with

through Book of Extinction are doing in

the present to make a brighter future.

So in this episode, let's look at what

Citadel is, what solarpunk is and how

it relates to other punk genres like

cyberpunk or stonepunk, and why it

matters for the future of the worlds

we play in and the one we live in now.

Part the first, a diamond city.

Citadel is a collection of 13

short standalone D&D adventures

set in the radiant Citadel, a

multiversal hub city floating

adrift deep in D&D's ethereal plane.

The heart of the Citadel is a

massive gemstone called the Auroral

Diamond, a beacon of life in the

gray, endless expanse of ether.

The fossilized body of a seemingly-extinct

creature wrapped around that diamond

formed the foundation of the city's rock

cut architecture when 27 civilizations

from all over the multi-verse

built the city in the distant past.

250 years ago, descendants of 15 of those

civilizations re-established the city

Orbiting the Citadel are 15 smaller

crystals called Concord Jewels.

Each of those gems is connected to the

material plane, the world as we know

it in which adventures begin, and each

serves as a gateway to one of 15 of

the Citadel's founding civilizations.

If you're keeping up with the

math, that means 12 of them are

now missing doorways to anywhere.

Citadel continues.

Some recent design trends from Wizards.

It's an anthology adventure,

like Candlekeep Mysteries

Dragon Heist.

It's also the next in a growing line

of multiversal adventures that runs all

the way back to the city of Sigil, the

multiversal hub from the much beloved

second edition Planescape setting.

And by the way, Planescape is the

same setting that gave us the D'vati,,

the only player race option that

lets you play two characters at once.

So check out my interview with the

2E and 5E creators of the d'vati

if you want to learn more about

second edition or Planescape.

Those missing 12 Concord jewels are

deliberate opportunities for DMs to

connect the Radiant Citadel to other

adventures or their own homebrew worlds.

By contrast, this adventure is

a first for Wizards of the Coast

in a couple of important ways.

And believe it or not, an extinct

behemoth isn't even the most exciting one.

First, the setting is entirely original.

The Radiant Citadel isn't a glow up

or a rewrite from earlier editions.

It was made from whole cloth

by the book's creative team.

Second, the book deliberately steps

away from gritty, crime-ridden cities

like Waterdeep and Sigil to present

an optimistic view of society working

together, what Ajit calls hopepunk.

Third, the book was written

entirely by people of color.

16 black and brown writers created the

book, including Iranian-American Justice

Arman, who you might recognize from

our season one episode on The Bagger

and who recently announced his hiring

as a Senior Game Designer at Wizards.

Each of the book's 13 adventure writers

drew on their own lived experience,

and three of these adventures have been

previewed ahead of the book's release.

"Salted Legacy" throws gamers into a

generational feud between two rival

vendor families after a series of

vandalisms and thefts begin to appear.

According to writer, Surena Marie,

who is also the Product Marketing

Manager for Critical Role.

It's written from Marie's experience

as a first-generation Thai American

watching different vendors try to cherish

their own traditions while competing

in a new cultural and business context.

It's a low-stakes drama played for

comedy, very reminiscent of the narrative

Blood in the

Banquet Hall from my very first episode.

The bustling night market where

"Salted Legacy" takes place is now

the cover of the adventure book.

The next adventure "Written in Blood"

brings players to a location as

sprawling as the Dessarin Valley called

God's Breath, an homage to the black

experience in the Southern United States.

Writer Erin Roberts, a contributor to the

Pathfinder and Starfinder lines at Paizo,

was inspired by her great-uncle's book

Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi.

Her adventure centers on a ritual of

oral history called the Awakening Song.

Finally, Justice Arman's adventure

"Shadow of the Sun" presents the

isolated city state Akharin Sangar,

ruled by Atash, a benevolent but

dogmatic angel whose subjects have mixed

feelings about his totalitarian rule.

Atash's story and design draw from the

10th-century work of Persian poetry

Shahnameh, or The Book of Kings.

The complicated relationship

Sangarians have with outsiders, full

of misconceptions and stereotypes, is

part of the Iranian experience Justice

wanted to explore with his adventure.

All of these adventures picture the way

in which culture and storytelling work

together to create the societies we build.

For Ajit and the rest of the Citadel team,

that picture is a discal agrihood, where

crime and rebellious nihilism are replaced

with community and radical optimism.

And that peculiarly green radical

optimism already has a name, solarpunk.

sticking it to the man.

"Punk" means a lot of different

things to a lot of people.

So it's important to

be clear on the suffix.

You might remember that conversation

with David Somerville, author of the

Planegea campaign setting with Atlas

Games about his idea of stonepunk.

I recently

was super lucky enough to read

Neuromancer for the first time.

And that book is brilliant and it

took me a minute to get into it.

And then when I did, I was just in it.

And that's punk.

I mean, cyber punk was like,

fight the man, be a punk.

Like it actually had that

like punk anti-authoritarian

aesthetic, anti commercialism,

like rage against the machine.

And that was a real thing.

And both of those words were meaningful.

"Cyber" was meaningful and "punk"

was meaningful and it meant the

mashing up of these two things.

I feel like in geek culture, "punk" has

become a shorthand for this thing, but

a lot of it and sort of exaggerated.

So we're going to take whatever comes

before -punk and crank it to 11 and

build all of our assumptions around that.

So if you have "piratepunk", it

just means it's very pirates.

And if you have, you know, whatever

steampunk, it's very steam and it

means that all the aesthetics are going

to be exaggerated and intensified.

I think it implies like a less safe world.

Like, I think whenever you have

"-punk" on there, there's sort of an

implication that, that those extremes

are going to cause a lot of tension.

Of the litany of literary "punk"

genres, "cyberpunk" is probably the

most famous, buoyed by movies like

The Matrix, Akira, and Bladerunner.

Maybe the best cyberpunk property I

can point you to with this show is

Fun City, the actual play Shadowrun

podcast that wrapped up my discussion

of monsters and villainy with GMs.

For the Fun City creative team, cyberpunk

is a grim vision of the near future.

Our version of Shadowrun,

in the world we play in, is very much

a, an answer to the question of if,

if technology got better with things

still be bad, you know, like, yes.

Yes.

And the answer, and we

play in the world of yes, but how, yes?

That's, that's the, in

what specific manner?

In a lot of Shadowrun

games, you see the same attitude

develop, which is I'm a, I'm a player,

character living in a dystopia.

The corporations control everything.

It's very hard to get by.

You have to do whatever you look

out for number one, you do whatever

you can to like, make sure that

you survive by hook or by crook,

or literally just, just by crook.

And so what you get is you get a lot

of games that I have described as

The Game," and

that people just wash their hands of any

moral consideration because they have to

do whatever they have to do to survive.

It doesn't matter what

it is that they're doing.

Like the world is bad.

And so they have to be bad in

the world because that's the

only way that you make it.

I think that reflects the

difficulty for current futurists

under 30, it's easy to feel like

there's no future left to imagine.

For those born after America's so-called

"greatest generation", as though the

best opportunities for innovation and

exploration have already passed us by.

In his book, Ghosts of My Life:

Writings on Depression, Hauntology,

and Lost Futures, cultural theorist

Mark Fisher, put it this way:

"The slow cancellation of the

future has been accompanied by a

deflation of expectations . . . the

feeling of belatedness, of

living after the gold rush, is as

omnipresent as it is disavowed."

Solarpunk rejects this

ominous ennui entirely.

According to a 2014 manifesto on the

genre by a writer calling themselves

Hieroglyph, "Solarpunk draws on the

ideal of Jefferson's yeoman farmer,

Gandhi's ideal of swadeshi and the

subsequent Salt March, and countless

other traditions of innovative descent."

In other words, we are not satisfied

with the world we've been given and

we'll do whatever it takes to change it.

Probably something clever with reclaimed

wood and leftover railroad spikes.

The Radiant Citadel itself is inspired

by Indian rock-cut architecture, a

practice as old as the third century

BC, where structures are created by

carving them out of solid natural

rock - or in this case, petrified bone.

Comic artist CJ Bell wrote in The Tree

of Liberty, "This is a green pepper.

It costs 75 cents at the grocery store.

Inside the pepper are enough seeds to make

hundreds, even thousands more peppers.

In a world where nothing comes

free and it's profitable to control

what people copy and create,

gardening is a revolutionary act."

In other words, you have to

keep the punk in solarpunk.

a solar future.

Despite being speculative or

future fiction, "punk" genres are

often transparently about now.

The radical optimism in the future

solarpunk envisions isn't possible

without radical change in the present.

For the past year, I've been telling

the stories of extinct animals in

the medium of Dungeons and Dragons.

And through that project, I've gotten to

meet some real life solarpunks who are

working to make that radical change happen

at the Center for Biological Diversity.

My name is Kierán

Suckling and I am the executive director

and founder of the Center for Biological

Diversity, which is a endangered species

protection group that mostly works, here

in the U.S., but also internationally.

And we try to save all species

great and small from, from

butterflies and insects to polar

bears and wolves, keep them alive.

Rarely do my guests

have a Wikipedia page.

There is a quote in here from The

New Yorker that describes you as a

trickster, philosopher, publicity

hound, master strategist, and

unapologetic pain in the ass.

Uh, how do you respond to that?

I would think that's

a pretty accurate description, uh, at

least of what I attempt to be at least.

Um, and, and, and that's what's

needed, to save species from extinction

and to be a successful activists,

uh, you gotta be a trickster.

You gotta figure out all the

different angles you can take you.

You've also got to realize at some

level, this is all street theater,

whether you're in the court or in a

scientific paper or in a protest, it's

all finally human theater and you have

to sort of keep that, that in mind.

Uh, and certainly I started this while

working on my PhD in philosophy, uh,

and to this day am motivated, uh, by

the philosophical issues around, uh,

extinction, animality, our relationship

with other, other earthlings.

Cause we're just one and we're just one

of the earthlings, and everything we

do, whether it's some formal-looking

law or scientific study or playing

Dungeons and Dragons, these are all at

the end of the day, ways of interacting

with this living planet that we live

on and in some way recognizing and

exploring the insane diversity of

animal life on this living planet.

And that's what we're all

doing in one way or another.

I think we forget that.

And it's, it's good to step back

and realize that's what's going on.

The solarpunks Kierán has

gathered at the Center come from a

variety of backgrounds, some with the

kind of tragic backstory that would be

right at home on a D&D character sheet.

This is Tierra Curry, Senior Scientist,

director of the Center's Saving

Life on Earth campaign, and science

consultant for Book of Extinction.

You've heard her voice already a couple

of times, but this is a piece of an

interview that I haven't released yet.

Tell me why you decided to choose a

career in conservation in the first place.

I grew up in the

mountains of Southeastern Kentucky,

which are absolutely beautiful.

There's so many birds and frogs and snakes

and lizards and trees and fireflies.

I had played outside all the

time when I would get grounded.

I wouldn't be allowed to go outside.

I'd have to like sit inside and watch TV.

So I just soaked it up and I feel like

it became part of me, the beauty of

the mountains and all the wildlife.

And then the coal companies came

and strip mine the mountain behind

my house and in front of my house.

And so these places that I knew

so well where I had grown up just

playing and roaming were reduced

to bare dirt and they caused the

streams to start running polluted.

They polluted my well water.

And I, even as a kid, I

was like, this is wrong.

You can't just take a mountain

and reduce it to rubble.

And so I, from a really young age, I just

had the sense that that had to change and

that I wanted to do something about it.

And ironically, I decided not to

go to law school because I didn't

want to be inside all the time.

I was like, I want to be outside.

I don't want to be inside.

So I'm going to go into biology instead.

And as I started taking environmental

science classes, extinction is the

issue that resonated with me the most.

I think it's the ultimate injustice.

It's so unfair.

That the plants and animals that

we happen to like be here with that

were driving them off the planet.

I don't think that's right.

And so that's where I drew my line

in the sand and said, I want a

job that focuses on extinction.

And I didn't know how I

was going to find that.

I was taking an environmental science

class and my professor talked about the

center for biological diversity and was

talking about how they were opposing

the construction of an elementary

school in Arizona because the cactus

region is pygmy owl lived there.

And I was like, oh my goodness,

that people are going to hate them

because like an elementary school

is not a popular thing to oppose.

And I've never heard of a cactus for

regional pygmy owl, but whoever these

people are, that's what I want to do.

I want to be the person that's

like, no, the owl lives here.

Put your school somewhere else.

So I, I went back to grad school.

I wrote in my grad school

essay that I wanted to work at

the center when I graduated.

And then when I saw a job come

up at the center, I wrote a cover

letter that basically said, pick me.

I went to grad school so I

could work for you someday.

We've talked about mining

companies, we've talked about city

planners, and it's very easy to

cast certain people or industries as

the villains of the piece in this.

You know, I think heroic fantasy, really,

especially heroic fantasy and Dungeons

and Dragons being the, its example,

we're very used to telling that story of

like, this is the good guy with a sword,

and this is the big, scary monster.

And we know what's going to happen here.

But in real life, it's very difficult

to say that even if it is a mining

company or, or a city planner or, uh,

ingoing development of, of houses,

that those are the big, scary monsters.

How do you reconcile that?

How are you able to talk about people

who have goals and values that, that

conflict with the preservation of

endangered species, even in places

like plain city and still talk about

them as like people who have worthwhile

goals and are trying to solve problems?

Yeah.

So humanity at large is like the big,

scary monster that's driving extinction.

You don't have to point your finger

to one faction, you know, human,

the causes of extinction are CHIPPO:

climate change, habitat loss,

invasive species, pollution, human

population growth, and overutilization.

So those are the drivers of extinction

and humans, there's just so many

of us now that literally the fate

of all wildlife is in our hands.

So I don't want to point

fingers at one camp of villains.

It's, it's all of us, it's all of our

responsibility, but there are so many

ways that we could do things differently.

There's just so much inertia and funding

to keep doing things the same way.

And literally it's as

suicidal war against nature.

As the UN secretary general just

said, kicking off the convention

on biological diversity meetings

like that opening statement of

the global biodiversity meetings.

So as we have to end our

suicidal war against nature.

And that that is so true.

And so all of us, we need to just

stop and reset and think about

how do I build a smarter city?

How do I reduce runoff into the Creek?

What are the better ways to

deal with sewer pollution?

Like we don't have to use the answers

that people came up with in the

forties, fifties, or even eighties.

There's so many like smart taking

people and so much technology.

And so many people who want to

make a difference that there

are solutions to these problems.

We just have the inertia and funding

factor of industry right now.

As for the mining companies, the

fossil fuel industry is one industry.

I'm not letting off the hook.

We have to get off fossil fuels.

Like we are all going to die.

If we don't get off fossil

fuels and that's just a reality.

And so that whole industry needs to

change gears and we need to develop

alternate sources of energy and, and work

on just transitions to agree in economy.

So that communities in Appalachia

who were getting revenue from coal

mining, aren't left high and dry.

And there's, there's a lot of

funding going into economic

revitalization to those communities.

So I'm not saying leave

people high and drive it.

I'm saying we have to be smarter.

Like we have to be smarter.

And we can, like, we have the solutions

that we need to end extinction

and preserve a livable climate,

but political inertia and where

the money is, is preventing that.

And so.

Most people wouldn't fall in the bad guys,

but there are a handful of incredibly rich

people who I will put solidly in the bad

guy category and say your money is not

as important as the survival of humanity.

And we have to do things differently.

The Internet's collective

solarpunk readers agree with Tierra,

if we can judge by the top all-time

posts on Reddit, R slash solar punk.

100 companies are responsible for 71%

of global greenhouse gas emissions.

That's from a 2015 report by the watchdog

charity Carbon Disclosure Project.

The report concluded that of the estimated

greenhouse gas emissions from human

activity, excluding certain sources

like agricultural methane between 1988

and 2015, 71 originated from 100 fossil

fuel producers, including Exxon Mobile,

Shell, BHP Billiton, and Gazprom.

This includes the emissions released

when the fossil fuels they sold were

subsequently used by their customers.

I don't think it's an exaggeration

to say that Book of Extinction is a

part of toppling that global system.

It's a monster manual of anthropogenic

extinctions, a bestiary of animals lost to

CHIPPO in the accelerating mass extinction

crisis of the so-called Anthropocene.

By supporting the solarpunk antagonism

of the Center's legal and artistic

activism and echoing the hopepunk

aesthetic of Wizards of the Coast's

latest adventure module, Book of

Extinction makes D&D a part of the

solution by doing what D&D does best:

telling stories envisioning a world

where those lost animals could live on.

At its core, that is

the vision of solarpunk.

A future that embodies the best

a

post-scarcity, post-hierarchy,

post-capitalistic world where humanity

sees itself as part of nature and

clean energy replaces fossil fuel.

It's the vision of the future

shared by almost every young female

protagonist in a Ghibli movie.

And if you want to get on board,

here are three ways you can do it

without maybe flying to cities in the

sky or resurrecting ancient relics.

First, when you talk about Journey

Through the Radiant Citadel on social

media, use the hashtag solarpunk.

Solarpunk at the moment sort of seems like

cyberpunk's less cool art nouveau cousin,

and that seems a shame to me for a genre

with so much potential and beauty in it.

As an audience, let's take the

opportunity to connect the two

conversations and elevate them both.

Second, when you talk about Citadel in

person mentioned this podcast so far, it

seems to be the only article exploring

the connection with solarpunk in depth.

If there is another, please let me know,

I'd love to read it, but again, this

may be the most important connection we

can make and I don't want to miss it.

Thirdly, check out the Book of

Extinction preview on DriveThruRPG

or at scintilla.studio/extinction.

It's three extinct animals resurrected

the passenger pigeon,

the thylacine and the great auk,

table-ready with stat blocks and lore

alongside the stranger-than-fiction

true stories of how they went extinct.

You can pay what you want for it

and every penny we earn from the

preview will go to support the Center

for Biological Diversity's work

litigating and advocating on behalf

of endangered species and habitat.

That kind of radical hope becomes

a beacon, just like the Auroral

Diamond spinning through the

depths of the Ethereal plane.

And if it's bright enough, we'll

gather around it and future

civilizations will build a beautiful

city on the bones we leave behind.

Thanks for listening to Making a Monster.