D&D 5E February's Keys from the Golden Vault Appears on Amazon

Announced in August, along with the rest of 2023's D&D lineup, Keys from the Golden Vault -- an anthology of adventures with a 'heist' theme -- has appeared on Amazon with a release date of Frebruary 21, 2023. The entry indicates that the book is 208 pages long.

"Greetings, adventurer. You’ve snuck in and found a wondrous treasure! Keys From the Golden Vault is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure anthology with a heist at the center of every tale. Nothing else is yet known about the contents of this tome, but keep an eye on your favorite D&D news sources for your first sneak peek inside."

So far, it only has the now-familiar D&D preview image, so we should expect a cover reveal in the coming weeks.

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[Reynard]

Not to much: I think (well... hope) that both the Deck of Many Things and Planescape books are high level books: Deck of Many Things can grant people a castle, and I hope that some kind of domain system/warfare rules can be put in. So, Tier 3 adventures. And Planescape, Tier 4 adventures. Those rules and informartions can be so high level respect to base rules, that can be both usable by 5e and One D&D.

That doesn't make any sense to me. High level stuff will exacerbate small differences between 5E and 1D&D. It's like a change in angle: close to the origin it is hard to see the difference but the farther out you get the bigger to measured distance.

 

[Retreater]

5e works for heists like a procrustean bed.

 

[Reynard]

5e works for heists like a procrustean bed.

5E works fine for heists. The GM just has to understand the genre and enforce genre expectations -- and account for the "high tech" tools the PCs have in the form of magical abilities. Ultimately, hesit stories are about how everything goes terribly wrong just when it looks like the job is successful, and you can definitely do that in D&D.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This DMs Guild product basically replicates the central heist mechanic of Blades in the Dark in 5E. I've used it to run heists and it works very well. It would not shock me if WotC included a similar structure for this compilation.

But "heist" can also just mean "the heroes break into a location to steal the guarded/locked-up treasure without fighting with all of the overwhelming force in the complex," which is basically just one flavor of dungeon, which we know 5E can do.

 

[Reynard]

This DMs Guild product basically replicates the central heist mechanic of Blades in the Dark in 5E. I've used it to run heists and it works very well. It would not shock me if WotC included a similar structure for this compilation.

But "heist" can also just mean "the heroes break into a location to steal the guarded/locked-up treasure without fighting with all of the overwhelming force in the complex," which is basically just one flavor of dungeon, which we know 5E can do.

"Heist mechanics" are great but hardly necessary.

 

[sevenbastard]

I only hope the adventures are better than the last few anthology books' have been. I was really disappointed in how thin the stuff in, f'rex, Radiant Citadel was; none of the adventures felt like they had much meat on their bones to me. The recent focus on very short, done in one or two session adventures is leading to... lackluster results, at least in my opinion. Both Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Tales from the Yawning Portal managed to have meaty adventures with pretty low page counts, so it definitely can be done.

Well rewriting old 1e adventures is a sure way to get lots of meat per page. They didn't pad things with back story back in the day.

 

[darjr]

Well rewriting old 1e adventures is a sure way to get lots of meat per page. They didn't pad things with back story back in the day.

Dragonlance had whole Novels.

 

[sevenbastard]

Dragonlance had whole Novels.

Touche.

And DL1 is kind of a heist stealing the mcgruffin from the black dragon.

 

[CM]

You son of a <bleep>, I'm in.

 

[NiClerigo]

It would be interesting if not all heists involve the retrieval of valuable objects for profit's sake, and ideas on adaptation to other settings are added as well -e.g., some adventures could deal with retrieving blueprints of weapons to be manufactured by a rival nation in Eberron; recovering a holy artifact, etc.