D&D 5E Quest From The Infinite Staircase Adventures Revealed

Roll20 has today revealed some information about July's Dungeons & Dragons release, Quests from the Infinite Staircase.

The Infinite Staircase spirals in a dreamlike expanse, with doors leading to fantastic realms. It's home to the noble genie Nafas, who hears wishes made throughout the multiverse and recruits heroes to fulfill them. These pleas summon adventurers to lost caverns suffused with planar energy, fairytale gardens in the Feywild, futuristic spaceships, and other wondrous locales.

This anthology weaves together six classic DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® adventures while updating them for the game's fifth edition. You can run these quests individually or as a campaign that takes characters from level 1 to level 13.

This book includes the following adventures:

• Beyond the Crystal Cave™
• Expedition to the Barrier Peaks™
• Pharaoh™
• The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth™
• The Lost City™
• When a Star Falls™

These are all adventures from previous editions of D&D (in much the same way as Ghosts of Saltmarsh was). All of them are AD&D (1E) adventures except for The Lost City, which was a Basic D&D adventure.

EN World member @pukunui provided a quick summary of each:

For those like myself who are unfamiliar with (some of) these adventures, here are summaries based on info from wikipedia:

Beyond the Crystal Cave: An AD&D 1e adventure set in Greyhawk which sees the PCs hired to save a couple who eloped and fled into the Cave of Echoes. The PCs must resolve the secret of the cave to reach a magical garden where it is always summer. The adventure is noteworthy for rewarding players for resolving encounters non-violently.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks: An AD&D 1e adventure written by Gary Gygax himself. In this adventure, the PCs explore a mysterious spaceship that crashed in Greyhawk's Barrier Peaks mountain range. The ship is filled with robots, laser guns, power armor, and all manner of strange creatures (including vegepygmies and a froghemoth). The adventure also involves collecting colored access cards to open restricted areas and the like.

Pharaoh: An AD&D 1e adventure written by the Hickmans of Ravenloft and Dragonlance fame. This one sees the PCs exiled into a desert after being falsely accused of a crime. They end up encountering the spirit of a dead Egyptian-style pharaoh who implores them to break into his supposedly thief-proof pyramid tomb and steal some things that will enable him to find eternal rest or something.

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth: Another of Gary Gygax's AD&D 1e Greyhawk modules. This one sees the PCs as treasure hunters seeking the wealth of the archmage Iggwilv. During their search, they encounter a vampire.

The Lost City: This is a Basic D&D adventure written by Tom Moldvay. The PCs get lost in a sandstorm and discover the lost city of Cynidicea, where the inhabitants are degenerate drug addicts. The PCs explore a pyramid and fight an evil monster.

When a Star Falls: An AD&D 1e module in which the PCs search for a fallen star in the moors. They encounter svirfneblin and derro as they seek to give the star to its rightful owner.

 

[Aellic Mornbringer]

Interesting. Both Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and The Lost City were covered by Goodman Games in the OAR series a few years ago. If I recall, the OAR series were adventures that Wizards had no intention of doing anything with (at least at that time). Now I'll be curious to do a side-by-side comparison of the 5E conversions here with Goodman Games' versions.

I had Beyond the Crystal Cave gifted to me when I first learned about the game, many decades ago. I always found it an interesting read but not really the type of adventure I'd play in, back then at least. I think in theory you can get by with only having to fight in the first and last encounters.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

These are all of a higher average quality, IMO, than the adventures in Tales from the Yawning Portal and are justly all well-remembered.

Crystal Cave is definitely an adventure that was way ahead of its time, but certainly fits in well with today's gamers. It'd be a nice diversion for a Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign, and I expect the area beyond the titular Crystal Cave is probably a domain of delight in this edition.

The Lost City, in its original version, has a lot of lightly detailed areas intended for the DM to fill in, so WotC has some interesting choices to make there. I suspect they may just update the previously detailed areas and just leave passageways off to other areas for the DM to either fill in for themselves or to seal off with cave ins. The OAR version of this -- out of print and increasingly hard to get -- is excellent, by the way.

The Barrier Peaks maps are very large. A few years ago, @Dyson Logos did updated maps that are more compact and, IMO, are probably the better way to go nowadays. It would be cool -- but surprising -- if WotC went with updated maps for this adventure. I'd bet on them just redrawing the original ones, based on what they did in Yawning Portal. This was also an OAR adventure and a fun book to hunt down, as it's much more comprehensive than this one, which is in an anthology, can possibly be.

I do hope they do more than the very light conversions done for Yawning Portal this time around.

I don't see any obvious signs of this being a "planar" anthology, any more than Yawning Portal was a "tavern" anthology. The genie and the Infinite Staircase are likely just a framing device to help connect the adventures for groups that want to run all of them as a campaign. As I recall, though, Crystal Cave and Lost City were for similar or identical level ranges, so I'd expect one of them to get changed in this edition.

 

[DaveMage]

Yeah, that's an odd choice to re-do the Goodman ones.

 

[JohnnyZemo]

I'm a little disappointed that they're doing Pharaoh without doing the other two adventures in the Desert of Desolation series. And man, if you're going to do Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, why not go ahead and do Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun? Yeah, I know, space is limited. I guess they wanted to do an assortment of stuff, rather than a couple of mini-campaigns.

I'm a little surprised that ten years into 5E we haven't seen any love for Vault of the Drow, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, or even Ghost Tower of Inverness.

I'm still waiting for the announcement that as part of the 50th anniversary, they're reprinting the first 25 modules in a high-end boxed set or somesuch. There's a lot of love for those early adventures (and a lot of older gamers with disposable income).

 

[LordEntrails]

Barrier Peaks, now I can say I will be buying this. I hope it lives up to what I remember!
(Probably not, because my memory is certainly tainted by the fondness and ignorance of youth!)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm a little disappointed that they're doing Pharaoh without doing the other two adventures in the Desert of Desolation series.

When Ghosts of Saltmarsh came out, I was sure we would see the Desert of Desolation get the same treatment, with additional pharaonic and desert-based adventures from Dungeon magazine to flesh out the book. It seems like a slam-dunk to me.

I'm still waiting for the announcement that as part of the 50th anniversary, they're reprinting the first 25 modules in a high-end boxed set or somesuch.

We're going to have to wait another 10 years for a new tell-all book to explain WotC's pretty surprising handling of the 50th anniversary, I'm afraid.

 

[Parmandur]

Interesting. Both Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and The Lost City were covered by Goodman Games in the OAR series a few years ago. If I recall, the OAR series were adventures that Wizards had no intention of doing anything with (at least at that time). Now I'll be curious to do a side-by-side comparison of the 5E conversions here with Goodman Games' versions.

I had Beyond the Crystal Cave gifted to me when I first learned about the game, many decades ago. I always found it an interesting read but not really the type of adventure I'd play in, back then at least. I think in theory you can get by with only having to fight in the first and last encounters.

The OAR books have been out of print for about a year, and it seems that WotC vecamw interested in the subject matter.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

When a Star Falls: An AD&D 1e module in which the PCs search for a fallen star in the moors. They encounter svirfneblin and derro as they seek to give the star to its rightful owner.

I've always liked the idea of a rivalry between these two, like the tero and dero in the original Shaver Mystery.

 

[Aellic Mornbringer]

The OAR books have been out of print for about a year, and it seems that WotC vecamw interested in the subject matter.

Yeah, I hadn't realized OAR #1-6 had gone out of print. Shoot, GG just shipped out #7 The Dark Tower. Seeing these two titles included in Infinite Staircase probably explains at least somewhat why that particular licensing agreement came to end when it did and GG pivoted to non-WotC adventures for OAR #7 and #8.