Whispers Across the Dunes - The Citadel Rises

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I'm really excited to announce that:

Citadel of the Sun-Kings officially launches on Kickstarter on April 21st!


I started this project almost a year ago as a personal challenge to see if I could push myself to write a dungeon on the level of those by the best authors in the OSR. From there, it morphed into over 100 pages of desert-spanning adventure!

Citadel is an adventure sandbox in the storied legacy of other hex-crawl adventures such as the classic Isle of Dread, or modern classics such as The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, The Evils of Illmire, In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe, or even the imperius Dolmenwood. In my case, I wanted to evoke a very different setting than traditional northern European forest fantasy, and eventually settled on an arid setting heavily inspired by the pre-Islamic Near East.

Beyond the walled town of Najad lies the Red Wastes: a wild region of blazing sun and shifting sands, scattered with ruins of empires long turned to dust. Within these sun-scorched lands, whispers speak of a foreboding citadel rising from the dunes: the last redoubt of the Sun-Kings, a place of treasure and terror, guarded by the remnants of elder powers.

Key Features

  • Najad: A caravan town brimming with intrigue, shifting loyalties, and dangerous opportunity.
  • The Red Wastes: A wild expanse of mythical strangeness filled with ancient beasts, roving bandits, crystalline forests, and hallowed tombs.
  • The Realm Below Night: A sunless underworld of forgotten horrors offering swift passage across the desert, assuming you survive the journey.
  • Six dungeons of various lengths and themes.
  • Over a dozen unique (and weird) pregenerated 1st-level characters, playable as PCs or hireable as retainers.
  • New magic items and monsters (of course)

Major Sources of Inspiration

  • All manner of ancient Near East mythology
  • Arabian Nights
  • The Hyborean Age stories (aka Conan) by Robert E. Howard
  • TheElric Saga by Michael Moorcock
  • The Head Lopper series by Andrew Maclean
  • Elden Ring by Fromsoft

An especially huge thanks to my sister-in-law, Areej Haq, for acting as Cultural Consultant on a book and setting to which I can claim no cultural ties. When I was writing, I really wanted to make sure that that setting and content did its best to emulate, but not offend, the amazing cultures of the people from a very distant part of the world.

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