The Scarlet Citadel is located not far from the small town of Redtower, which serves as a handy home base for the adventurers as they explore the deadly dungeon. But unlike the Scarlet Citadel itself, this settlement is not yet on the amazing online Midgard map. So where exactly is the village located?
Redtower is described as being “located on a tributary of the Templine River in southern Magdar between Peltzenheim and Schio.” The tributary flows from the southwest to the northeast. This seems odd at first, as the Templine River itself flows from east to west before heading south and emptying into the Middle Sea at Triolo. But rivers do strange things, so it’s not hard to imagine a tributary that flows northeast for a few miles before turning south to join the main river.
We also learn on p. 25 of Scarlet Citadel that a road leads southeast of town to the ruined castle deeper within the woods. I wanted Redtower to be a day’s travel from the Scarlet Citadel, so in my campaign I initially placed the village a mile or so south of the junction on the road between Schio and Peltzenheim, approximately 20 miles northwest of the dungeon.
UPDATE: After reading some of the comments on this post, I went with a distance of 15 miles or 5 hours walk from the Scarlet Citadel. This has worked really well. The characters can leave Redtower in the morning and arrive at the Citadel in the early afternoon, but can’t get back to the town before nightfall so have to spend at least one night in the ruins or the dungeon.
Here’s a map showing Redtower’s location and the river tributary in my game. Let me know what you think in the comments!
If you’d like to keep up to date with my Scarlet Citadel campaign and other posts, please do join my mailing list – there’s a sign up form on the home page.
Discover more from Richard Green | Game Designer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Richard Green | Game Designer 
Reasoning that Redtower is or was the support village for the Citadel, we opted to put it a bit closer. About a 2 hour walk or 5 miles allows it have played that role, but not be so close as to intrude on the privacy of the former occupants.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep, that makes sense – someone else on FB said the same thing. I might move Redtower a bit closer to the Scarlet Citadel, maybe so it’s 15 miles away, but I don’t want to make it too easy for the characters to get back to the relative safety of the town.
LikeLike
I’m thinking shorter too. 6 mile, difficult terrain, the old road has slipped and overgrown with many confusing side-paths and tracks. This will allow for a random encounter pg28 to and from. With the mists and briars even druids and rangers may find it changeable. None of them in my party, a priest of Hecate, a paladin of Hecate and a draconic soul sorcerer , all humans. Maybe the alseid druids at E2 could give them a boon at some time to travel safely a few times.
Struggling to work out the ecology of the Trollkin raiders at level 3 , do they raid elsewhere far away? They’re not on the encounter table, and strong enough to take on Redtower. I think my answer for a lot of the holes will be: leylines and shadow roads!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thats great, thanks for the placement as I was looking at the map trying to locate Red Tower myself
LikeLike
Glad it helped! Enjoy the campaign!
LikeLike
Recently played this dungeon. Ended up 75,000 years in the future as a pet.
The 5 hours was good from my perspective as a player. As you said, we could get there and get into the dungeon, but it required us to figure out what we were doing at the end of the run. Do we rest in the dungeon (hahaha) or do we rest outside away from the entrance.
Getting in and out was a constant problem we had to deal with.
Also, because we get there with daylight left to spare, we never felt like just camping outside and going down early. We generally went directly in so we were at our strongest.
Anyways, just wanted to say, from a player’s perspective, 5 hours was good.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cheers! Did you manage to get back from the far future or is your character still there to this day?
LikeLike
Nope! Forever a pet. Honestly, for my character, probably not the worst result, being made a pet.
Someone else got flung 5,000 years. Three other people died. We were well warned. =) I have a feeling most of the others didn’t really understand what that meant. But no, we never recovered. The group I’m playing with wants to do something less “stressful” but two of us are hoping the DM puts together another group to finish off the dungeon because it was what I was looking for.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow! Hope you get to have another go at the dungeon – we had a great time playing it!
LikeLike