by Ed Fortune
With the release of the fantasy heist movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves just around the corner, it should come as a surprise to no one that the good folk at Wizards of The Coast have produced a book full of adventures dedicated to the idea of a heist.
Heists are not a new idea for Dungeons & Dragons; a standard D&D party of a bard, a fighter, a magic user and a rogue maps almost directly onto the heist crew trope of mastermind, muscle, conman and safe-cracker. It’s just nice to have a book stuffed with ideas to run these sort of games.
Keys From The Golden Vault is an anthology adventure book, similar in style to Journey’s Through The Radiant Citadel or Candlekeep Mysteries. Those two books had adventures themed around a specific location, but in this new book, it’s an organisation called the Golden Vault. This conspiracy of thieves, rogues, scholars and specialists has a more ‘Mission Impossible’ vibe than an actual criminal group. They’re rumoured to be masterminded by some Gold Dragons, and the idea that a bunch of ancient monsters are hiring ‘diamond in the rough’ style heroes to steal dangerous artefacts from the vaults of the evil and unjust is certainly a fun one.
We, of course, get rules for a handler and a rival team of crooks to make things spicy. You don’t have to use this part of the adventure, but they are a fun faction. One of the nice little ideas is that if you work for the Vault, you get a magical music box, which only opens when you use a key provided by your handler, and of course, this relates to the details of your mission. The key vanishes once used; very Mission: Impossible. Notes are provided for not using the Golden Vault and for integrating these stories into ongoing campaigns, which is nice. Sometimes you just want to run a heist rather than a campaign.
We get 13 adventures in total, and it opens with a corker; the players have to steal an ‘ancient stone’ from a museum which is actually the egg of a horrible monster that’s about to hatch. High security, fund-raising galas and magically animated exhibits await in this superbly paced opening act. Other stories include robbing a casino, a jailbreak, rescue missions, art theft, fabulous parties and so on.
Our favourite is Affair on the Concordant Express, a mystery story set on a magical dimension-hopping train. Given that the party are decidedly dodgy (especially if you’ve been running these in order), the closed confines of a train make this into a fantastic Agatha Christie-style story. It’s also clearly a bit of a dry-run for the forthcoming Planescape expansion for fifth edition D&D.
We understand the book is available in multiple covers, and we have been led to believe it’s printed to Wizards of The Coast, usually very high standard, however, for this review, we only had access to a digital copy. The art is very good, and the layout on DnDBeyond is superb, as always. Digital versions are great, especially when running a game over Zoom or similar services. Hardbacks are nice, though, so if you’re an old-school Dungeon Master, pick one up from your friendly local games shop.
The most remarkable achievement of this collection is that every single adventure hits the mark. Ran as a campaign, it might be a little lacking as it only runs to level eleven, but the last story is called Fire and Darkness, so if your party has made it this far, the campaign may come to a natural close anyway.
A recommended set of stories, likely to delight D&D players and a fantastic aid for busy Dungeon Masters.
