Some of the best adventures released for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition can be found in Wizards of the Coast’s popular anthologies, including Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, Keys from the Golden Vault, and my personal favorite, Candlekeep Mysteries. But D&D’s decade-long renaissance has also given us loads of classic adventures revised for new audiences, including the legendary Tomb of Horrors. This summer, fans will be given access to another new set of historic modules called Quests from the Infinite Staircase, which is full to bursting with some of the seminal role-playing game’s weirdest encounters.
To learn more about the significance of this new anthology, Polygon sat down with two D&D historians to pick their brains about what’s inside.
Asked to pick his favorite module from the book, Stu Horvath, founder and publisher of Unwinnable and the author of Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership, was definitive in his choice.
“Easily When a Star Falls, UK4,” he said in a recent interview. “It has the best setup and introduction of any Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time.”
[Ed. note: What follows will spoil elements of Quests from the Infinite Staircase, an anthology of adventures, some of which are nearly 50 years old.]
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Written by Graeme Morris, who worked on Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Mystara, and Star Frontiers, among other legacy settings, it begins with a confrontation with an obscure creature from the lore of D&D known as the obliviax, a moss creature that hasn’t been revised since 4th edition.
“It’s this living moss that eats people’s memories,” Horvath said. “The first encounter in When a Star Falls is the party encounters and kills an obliviax, and then it transfers its most recent memories in the form of this weird montage illustration, and a list of impressions that you read to the players. Basically that’s the impetus for the quest, because it ate the last guy and you get his memories. It’s so weird and bizarre, but no one had ever done anything that strange before, and it uses a really interesting monster that you can only find in Dungeons & Dragons.”
Like all of the adventures included in Quests from the Infinite Staircase, you can still find the original When a Star Falls for sale as a PDF or softcover book at The Dungeon Master’s Guild.
Bestselling author Jon Peterson (Heroes’ Feast, Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977) likewise has a soft spot for original D&D publisher TSR’s U.K.-based authors. He called out Beyond the Crystal Cave as well as The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth for special recognition, but the big draw to him is the late Jim Ward’s Expeditions to the Barrier Peaks.
“Barrier Peaks goes back [to] 1976, where it was the tournament at the second Origins convention that [D&D co-creator Gary] Gygax ran,” he said. “It incorporated material that […] Ward had been developing for his game, Metamorphosis Alpha, that was focused on colony ships.”
Also known as “generation ships,” these were vessels common in popular science fiction at the time. The idea was that these massive spaceships would need to travel so far that multiple generations of people could be raised on them over the course of the journey. It’s a trope now common in franchises like Fallout, as well as the popular Apple TV Plus show Silo.
“The notion that one of those might crash in the world of Greyhawk,” Peterson said, “[becoming] buried half underground, [would] be something of a dungeon, something of a labyrinth, a place you can go through and pillage the rooms and come up with all kinds of weird implements that you might not see elsewhere, I think is pretty cool.”
Being a colony ship, Peterson said, the interior included a vast agrarian space meant to grow food for colonists during the long journey. All that biological material made a great setting for weird mutations, specifically one monster called “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing.”
“[It’s this] little bunny that’s sitting on a stump,” Peterson said. “Look at the cute little bunny that’s sitting on a stump! Then it turns out the entire bunny and stump is part of this larger organism that, as you approach it in an attempt to interact with the bunny, will get you.”
Quests from the Infinite Staircase is available for pre-order now on the Wizards of the Coast website, where it includes additional digital content and a two-week digital early release window for $69.99. You can also pre-order it from your friendly local game store, or pick it up online at retailers like Amazon for less. It’s designed for characters from level 1 up to level 13, and the retail release is set for July 16.
