“Quests From the Infinite Staircase” has six reimagined classic Dungeons and Dragons adventures for Fifth Edition that are accessed via an overarching cosmic staircase overseen by a benevolent noble genie named Nafas. The genie Nafas is a well-constructed NPC that could act as either the crossing guard for a party of adventurers that walk his Infinite Staircase, or a patron that pushes the party into a series of adventures.
The book is built for levels one to 13 and harkens back to some of the best adventures published in 1980s. We at Game Industry News were given a review copy by Wizards of the Coast. The Lead Designer is Justice Ramin Arman. He previously was the lead designer for the amazing “Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse” released last year.
Like he did with Planescape, Arman mined the cosmic multiverse of Dungeons and Dragons in digging up six great gems and then set them in a crown of his own creation, the Infinite Staircase. This staircase is connected to the Censer of Dreams, the home of Nafas who waits to hear the grand stories of adventurers from every realm. His home on the staircase is neutral ground for everyone who behaves themselves and is well thought out and poetic in its description. Adventurers can witness celestials and demons conversing in its breezy hallways, plus many other creatures from the multiverse that the stairs connect.
The art is varied and the colors well mixed on the page. Each adventure seems to have its own style and color palette. As with most of the recent Wizards of the Coast offerings, there are two covers, and I prefer the alternate one. The purple-hued Nafas with the floating staircase behind him invokes adventure and power. The maps are more than serviceable, they are each a piece of art. I would have wished that they had a tear-away with this book as the art is definitely wall hanging material.
The six classic adventures are: Tom Moldvay’s 1982 “The Lost City,” the TSR UK division’s 1984 module “When a Star Falls,” the Romeo and Juliet inspired “Beyond the Crystal Cave,” the Egyptian themed dungeon crawl “Pharoh” and the legendary “Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.” The crowning offering of these classic adventures is the science fiction themed “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.”
I don’t want to spoil the book for those who want to run the adventures, or for a player who is about to be sent up the staircase, so I’ll focus on two adventures found within: “Beyond the Crystal Cave” and “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.”
“Beyond the Crystal Cave” uses themes of romantic love. It is fey-themed and introduces a great NPC called the Gardener. Characters must use their emotional intelligence as well as their tactical insight to be successful.
“Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” is a 1980 adventure module written by Gary Gygax himself for Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition (Advanced Dungeon and Dragons) and is unabashedly a science fiction adventure where a spaceship has crashed inside a fantasy world. Many fantasy worlds portray elaborate gear trains and attach a fantasy power source. If you look at the Dungeons and Dragons setting Ebberon or constructs like Warforged and Modrons, they all have science fiction elements that are converted to science fantasy. “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” helped to make all that possible.
It showed how open early Dungeons and Dragons adventures were to borrow the tropes and flavors of almost any genre and put them before their customers without apology. Examples of this are the Greyhawk hero-deity Murlynd who walked around with six-shooters and a cowboy hat and artifacts like the Machine of Lum the Mad or The Mighty Servant of Leuk-O. I should add that “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” was also a marketing tool for Gary Gygax to highlight TSR’s science fiction game Metamorphosis Alpha.
So, if you are looking for a series of small, separate Dungeons and Dragons adventures, then “Quests From the Infinite Staircase” is your book. If you are looking for a campaign book that cajoles the player characters into a long-term commitment of time, this is not it. This collection rewards players who crave a variety of taste and many plots, rather than one overarching one.
This was a really interesting way to present a collection of classic Dungeons and Dragons modules linked by an equally interesting dimension of infinite stairways. Personally, I plan to use the NPC Nafas in an upcoming Dungeons and Dragons one shot too. He’s the perfect advocate for adventure as he and his realm literally touch every single world, campaign setting and plane of existence.