Review — Wizards Of The Coast’s ‘Quests From The Infinite Staircase: The Lost City’

Welcome to the table,

One of the things I adore about Dungeons & Dragons is the versatility to tell all sorts of stories with the same players acting as the main characters of the ordeal. Your party can wander into a temple full of eldrich horrors one week, only to find themselves in the back of a tavern betting on racing snails the next.

Two months from then, when schedules align, they are riding on the backs of bulls and running from a titan-sized turtle with bubbles that pop and rain liquid death down in rainbow color clouds. Then they work through three-week-long court proceedings as they attempt to free the gnome who accidentally set the death turtle free.

The ability for storytelling opportunities is, pardon the pun, infinite, and that is one of the things I love about the newest Dungeons & Dragons book, Quests from the Infinite Staircase. It provides ample opportunity for those who don’t home brew or need a jumping-off point for adventure to explore a really beautiful cross-section of stories from the history of the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

Before we dive into this tome’s first offering, let me give you a quick rundown on what the heck the Infinite Staircase is. Located all along the spaces between spaces there is a landscape of endless steps dotted with doorways that number more than the stars in the midnight sky.

Each of these doors can take you to locations all through the multiverse and are often as varied in design as the locations they can give you access to. While the staircase twists and bends gravity seems to hold you to the steps keeping you anchored to the indestructible steps that go infinitely up and down leading you to endless adventure.

As a story device to take your players from one space to the next, it is brilliant in its simplicity and makes for a delightful mechanic to shift your game’s tone and setting, as part of a larger campaign or just a night or two adding some variety to your table.

The first adventure in Quests from the Infinite Staircase is The Lost City, a classic that has lived on my shelf for years.

The original form of this adventure dropped back in 1982 making it older than I am, a fact that will always amuse me. It was first designed by Tom Modvay who actually contributed to the original D&D Basic Set. The first TSR version was intended as kind of a primer. It did a really good job of establishing the setting and opened the table up for a party of 6 to 10 players of 3rd or lower level.

It also served as a bit of a teaching tool for newer storytellers who were getting into the hobby, providing both dungeon levels and then more open-ended areas that the storyteller could give their own spin to working out their own problem solving skills and storytelling chops.

The updated version has done away with the open-ended lower section and added a lower sixth level to the buried temple ziggurat. Both stories follow the same basic story path. Tthe party finds themselves traveling in the desert, either through traversing the Infinite Staircase or just being in the wrong place at the right time. The players stumble upon the tip of a buried ziggurat and once inside they come across three factions of a people known as the Cynidiceans.

When I was younger, the Cynidiceans felt a little more antiquated and kind of flat. Like really dedicated players all working off their own script. In a lot of ways, they were mystical cult-adjacent theater kids. Basically all you needed as a late-night breakfast chain restaurant and you would have a good chunk of the high school experience.

The newer versions of the Cynidicans keep the masks, keep the infighting, even keep the magic and the cult stuff, but the way they are presented feels so much more elevated, lived in. Rather than just being a one-for-one conversion where there was room for narrative exploration and growth, even with the notes under the art and the adventure fluff (that is the story bit of the game for my Editor) does a great job of making the whole adventure feel vast while keeping it contained in essentially a dungeon crawl.

What hit home with me is the way that the storyteller’s notes are super accessible. When you consider that both veteran and new-to-the-table storytellers are going to be using this book to provide adventures for their players you start to see how strong this book actually is.

Jeremy Crawford, Makenzie De Armas, Ron Lundeen, Carl Sibley, and the rest of the Wizards team who worked on this book should feel really proud of themselves for the way this adventure has conveyed.

The party finds themselves caught up in all the infighting and they have the opportunity to join one or more of the masked factions, while slowly uncovering the darker past that caused the whole downfall of their society in the first place. There are traps, undead, drum circles, and more and the payoff is really strong complete with a mysterious creature who is not a god but worshiped as one, slime-filled lakes, and a whole underground city.

It’s all really fun and it all really works. The expanded version of the adventure does something I’m such a fan of at the table providing personality and motivation to a higher-level creature that may or may not totally obliterate the party depending on how they and the storyteller play the encounter.

There is such a fun balance of risk and reward, and the whole thing has such a spark of wonder to it. I’ve sat with this adventure for a few weeks and can comfortably say this is a great introduction to D&D and I could easily see this being something you give someone new to the game to either explore and run so they can really get a taste of the hobby in a meaningful and impactful way.

Quests from the Infinite Staircase is clean and well shaped, and to get a little personal it feels like such a victory for the hobby and a clear indication of the path forward that Wizards is taking.

I have been enjoying this book immensely and as someone who runs his homebrew game weekly I’ve been trying to figure out how to run my players through some of these adventurers and the Infinite Staircase gives me a perfect opportunity to do just that. If you are looking for a good time at the table, this book is for sure something you need to pick up.

Until next time, Good job Wizards of the Coast. Well done. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing what is up the next flight of stairs.