Preview: On Traveling ‘Quests From The Infinite Staircase’ And Finding It Is Accessible For All

Welcome to the table,

For the majority of my time at the gaming table, I have been behind the storyteller’s screen. When the rest of the group wants to go on an adventure, they all seem so excited about trying out characters and I enjoy building worlds and mechanics. So, the role of the Storyteller falls to me almost naturally. Normally, I run homebrewed adventures with elements of the lore from the Forgotten Realms tucked in. On occasion, I’ve run a handful of classics that are a ton of fun like Ravenloft and The Lost City. I’m even currently so smitten with the new Vecna: Eve of Ruin that I’m plotting a two-month break from my players’ weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign to run them through it; I love so many of the things it does so very right.

Running games is just what I do. It’s my favorite part of the hobby.

I also enjoy sinking into a good character and diving into an adventure every now and again. So when I was asked if I wanted to roll up to the table and play with a few folks as part of a preview table for the upcoming Quests from the Infinite Staircase — run by none other than the wildly talented Game Designer Makenzie De Armas herself — I said yes with absolute quickness.

We were asked to create an 11th-level character and told we would be playing through a section of one of the adventures that will be included in the upcoming anthology of adventures. I quickly built an 11th-level Hobgoblin Rogue/Thief named Gil Stonefoot.

Normally, I build using traditional methods of rolling four D6 and dropping the lowest number to get my ability score and then filling out a printed character sheet, but I had been wanting to see what D&D Beyond had to offer as far as their character-building tools went and I can tell you flat out I was not disappointed in the slightest. I purchase all my books in physical editions but the ease with which everything flowed through the character creation interface seriously made a good argument for owning the books in both digital and physical form. I’ve been playing D&D for as long as I can remember and what they have managed to do with D&D Beyond is pretty stellar. I’m such a fan, in fact, that I have started talking to my weekly table about us converting from the current VTT we are using to D&D Beyond just based on how much I like what they have done with the place.

While I was made aware of the character level I would need to show up with — and that we would be playing something from the upcoming Quest from the Infinite Staircase — I was not told which of the six remastered adventures I would be taking part in. I knew going in the possibilities were coming from When a Star Falls, Beyond the Crystal Cave, and Pharaoh, of which I have only played small parts. There was also a possibility I would get to play through updated versions of The Lost City, The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and the Expeditions to the Barrier Peaks, of which I was very familiar.

Any of them would have been wonderful, but I really wanted a chance to head back to the Barrier Peaks as my best friend (and NYT best-selling author who I like to shamelessly plug because the man is so wildly talented and, outside my wife, probably the closest thing I have to family), Cullen Bunn, and I send pictures of the Froghemoth to each other regularly and have for over a decade at this point.

So, to my delight, when we showed up to the virtual meeting and were told by the Wizards of the Coast team that we would be playing Barrier Peaks, the already excellent day of TTRPG fun just kept getting better and better.

Out of the gate, we got to explore the D&D Beyond Maps system. It is still in development, but everything I saw has so many quality-of-life improvements over other platforms I have used that I will be dedicating a future feature just to that aspect of the experience because … WOW!

The maps from Quests from the Infinite Staircase have come so far from the originals. Each of the offerings we saw had brilliantly designed map borders, elevating the feeling of this strange starship buried under mountains of rubble we were exploring. The updated art assets that had been loaded into the virtual tabletop were gorgeous and full of life, but still felt really cohesive and unified across the unfolding narrative.

Our Storyteller for the game, the aforementioned Makenzie De Armas, works full-time as a Game Designer for the D&D Studio at Wizards of the Coast and also serves as the Education and Advocacy Lead for the Disability Community of Wizards.

As a disabled game designer, player, and someone who brought a disabled character to play in this adventure, it was fantastic to sit at a table with someone who valued diversity not as a checked box, but as part of the human conversation and something to be considered at all levels of the hobby. I don’t often get a chance to sit at tables with people like Makenzie. Not only did she run a fun and thrilling adventure — full of robots, fungus folk, and an artificial intelligence with questionable motives — but she also never once made the experience feel token-istic or out of place, allowing for me to use a designed adaptive mobility aid I made by cobbling together already existing D&D 5e items. The inclusivity was so heartening.

I’ve spent my entire life using D&D to ensure that everyone feels welcomed at the table and, for once, it felt like I was being met with that same energy from one of the very designers helming the world’s greatest role-playing game. You read about moments like this, but seldom get to experience them in real life.

Now, when I tell you that this adventure has been updated, I don’t just mean mechanically. You see the classic AD&D adventure blurring the lines of high fantasy and science fiction by bringing in androids, spacecraft, alien lifeforms, and a mysterious virus. The updated version does this as well, but it feels so much bigger and full of roleplaying and combat opportunities.

We played for three or four hours and it honestly felt like what we saw at the table represented just a glimpse of what is available. If I run this at my weekly table, I could fill months of real-world time with adventure just based on this single story. Let that sink in when you think about how Quests from the Infinite Staircase contains six adventures and — at least with my players — this could easily fill a year or more of game time.

On a very personal note, when I was a kid, one of my favorite takeaways from the original adventure was the anti-gravity belt we found on our playthrough. In real life, I was a kid who could not get around without the use of crutches or a wheelchair, and on the off-chance I played a player character, I was always kinda stuck playing able-bodied adventurers. It was the anti-gravity belt that really planted the seed for me that if I wanted to, I could play a hero who felt a little more representative of myself. The belt was not labeled as an accessibility aid, but it got the wheels turning. After home-brewing a magical power source so I was not stuck finding someone who could make power discs that were in the crashed spaceship, this adventure became yet another flagstone in the ever-growing path of play equality that TTRPG represented in my life.

When we wrapped our adventure, I asked Makenzie if the anti-grav belt was in this updated adventure and she informed me that not only was it in there, but that she had worked on it herself.

In that moment, as she smiled and was just as excited to answer “yes” as I was to ask “is there…?”, I could see back through the sands of time to the hopeful grin on the dirty face of that bullied little disabled kid who felt so unwanted by family and community as he sat in the back of a comic shop surrounded by the elder nerds trying to learn more about this hobby that would become his solace in this life. In that moment, I was once more assured that I had not wavered and was exactly where I needed to be.

There are few moments in your life that you can look back along the chain of events that created you and see your childhood self smiling at you, proud of the adult you have become.

And then she said we could go fight the frogmouth. And we did … it was every bit as rad as I wanted it to be!

Quests from the Infinite Staircase, from all I have been able to experience at this point, is exactly what I wanted from an anthology of classic adventures. It feels nostalgic while being new and fresh. From everything I have seen, it is being guided by progressive minds who value everyone at the table and who have worked to ensure that this hobby so many of us have loved all of our lives is just as welcoming to us as it is to the newcomers who also desire to experience why this is such a huge part of our culture.

I love D&D. I love making 3rd party content for it as a Game Director. I love designing accessibility tools to make sure everyone feels welcomed, and I love exploring the ever-growing landscape of the fantastical worlds I know better than the inaccessible public parks and sports stadiums that surround me most days. The Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Krynn … those are my home. And after what I have recently seen, I feel like not only are they still amazing places to bring my friends back to, but that I’m welcome there with open arms.

Until next time, you can pre-order Quests from the Infinite Staircase at the link, and I’ll see you at the table.