With 50 years of games, stories and ideas to explore, it should come as no surprise that the Wizards of the Coast, the people behind Dungeons & Dragons, occasionally have a rummage through their back catalogue. Quests from the Infinite Staircase takes six classic adventures from D&D’s history, giving them a fresh coat of paint and clearer direction.
The book is very much a nostalgia fest; even the name is a shout-out to the old Planescape anthology Tales From The Infinite Staircase, though none of the adventures in that book appear here. Our framing device for these adventures is the titular Infinite Staircase, an Escher-esque trans-dimensional space full of stairs that hang impossibly in space and lead to various places and moments in time. The powerful djinni Nafas, a noble being who is also a genius storyteller, lives in this place. In terms of the game, this character exists to help move characters to the various adventures in the book, but it’s helpful to think of him as something akin to The Watcher from What If or the Crypt Keeper. He’s a djinn in charge of his own fate, and he’s only going to grant you wishes if you have a good story to tell.
The book re-imagines six adventures, first published in the 1970s or 1980s. The first adventure, The Lost City, is a pure call to nostalgia as it originally appeared in a 1982 D&D Basic Set, the first adventure many gamers played. As such, this new take on an old story still works; the core ‘my first adventure’ moments are kept, so players learn about dungeon crawling, traps, talking rather than fighting through encounters, and so on. It’s a ziggurat quest and a fun one at that.
Next up is When a Star Falls, a creepy low-level adventure filled with memory-eating monsters and dodgy prophecy. It’s one of the adventures written by the UK-based team, which had a reputation for being slightly odd. It’s also one of those adventures many young Dungeon Masters took apart for all its ideas, and as such, tends to get mistaken for other stories, so it’s nice to see the original presented here. The third adventure is Beyond The Crystal, another UK-made scenario that remixes Romeo and Juliet. This has been remixed as a feywild, focusing more on interaction and problem-solving. Beyond The Crystal was very much before its time 40-odd years ago, but it’s perfect for modern D&D now.
Pharaoh is a comprehensive update of the original 1982 Tracy & Laura Hickman classic adventure module. This ghost story and pyramid exploration adventure was regarded as top-tier at the time, but gamers have moved on since then. This is a welcome and timely update.
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth is an early example of a mega-dungeon crawl, written by Gary Gygax himself. It’s big, it’s fun, and it’s almost pure spooky horror silliness in places. It’s nice to have it updated so a new generation of players can survive a wall made out of corpses only to get eaten by something far worse. Will your players succeed and gain the Witch Queen’s greatest prize? Probably not, but it’s fun to try.
Finally, we get the historic Expedition to Barrier Peaks. This is where fantasy heroes explore a weird dungeon that turns out to be a crashed starship and almost suffocate putting on the ‘fancy armour’ (a space suit) or get eaten by bunny-themed monsters. It’s a classic for a reason, and it still holds up with this more intelligently thought-out version of the adventure.
Overall, this is a lovely blast from the past. Worth it for the bestiary of monsters alone, Quests from the Infinite Staircase takes classic stories into the modern day in the best possible way.
