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Keys from the Golden Vault is an adventure for thieves who find neither a casino, prison, nor museum too dangerous. This new D&D adventure book from Wizards was originally published in English in 2023 and has been available in German since this year. We’ve tested it for you and want to share our opinion here and give some tips for Dungeon Masters. You can buy it among other places here 🛒.
Spoiler Warning & Disclaimer: I will be discussing the contents of the book here, so if you still want to play it and aren’t a DM, you probably shouldn’t read this article! We received a review copy from Wizards of the Coast for this review. This doesn’t influence our opinion and we are not being paid for this article.
What’s it about?
So what is “Keys from the Golden Vault” actually about? It’s a relatively loose collection of thirteen different adventures for various levels where the party normally breaks into somewhere to complete their mission. You can play all these adventures one after another, more on that later, and thereby use the book as a campaign, or use individual missions to incorporate into your game or play as one-shots.
We tested the mission “Prisoner 13” for you to get a good impression. For this we used Roll20 and played in our new Discord. If you’d like to test a module with us sometime, feel free to join!
The Golden Vault – The Book as a Campaign
The Golden Vault is a secret organization that can be used as a connecting thread if you want to play the book as a campaign. The party will then receive assignments from the organization. In the book it’s rather pacifistic and it can happen, for example, that the party receives lesser rewards if they use unnecessary violence to achieve their goals. As a DM you can decide for yourself how much you want to incorporate the Golden Vault or whether you leave it out completely.
For each mission there’s the possibility to incorporate a rival group that then tries to achieve the same goal in parallel. This way you can make even an otherwise successful heist exciting and build in an element of time pressure, which prevents players from just spending hours hatching the “perfect” plan. For our test I left out the Golden Vault and also the rivals since it was just a one-shot.
Prisoner 13
Prisoner 13 is the adventure we tested for this review. It’s a mission for level 4 characters where they need to break into the prison “Revel’s End,” known from the D&D movie, to obtain information from an inmate. They have the opportunity to pose as prison staff to gain access and make contact with the eponymous Prisoner 13. They must try to attract as little attention as possible while also devising a plan to obtain the information. The adventure is roughly divided into three sections:
- The Planning: The party is hired by a dwarven leader to obtain the key to a vault containing a stolen treasure. He gives them a magical map of the prison with which they can now work out a plan. He also provides them access by being able to smuggle them in either as a guard or cook.
- Making Contact: The party must coordinate while staying undercover in their respective roles to make contact with the prisoner. They can notice that the key is actually a tattoo. When they suggest freeing her, she shows little enthusiasm and the players must find a way to obtain the key from her, though she proves willing to make a trade. The characters are supposed to bring her a book from the warden’s office that contains all information about the other inmates at Revel’s End.
- Resolution: Whether through trade or violence, the players can obtain the key. As long as they remain unnoticed, they’ll be picked up by a ship and can free the treasure. Otherwise, it can still come to an escape or a fight with an overwhelming force of guards.
My Opinion on the Adventure
The prison setting was really interesting and promising, but for me it was too underdeveloped. There was no information except “there are meals three times a day” and simple descriptions for rooms. If I were to run the adventure again, I would take some time to plan some “events” that suddenly change the situation like an escape attempt or the visit of an important envoy. Without these events, the players just had to wait a lot to gather the information they needed to implement their plan.
I think “Prisoner 13” is a good foundation for an adventure but definitely still needs some adaptation to make it really good. Especially for newer DMs it can be difficult to do something like this during the session, so prepare a bit! As inspiration, maybe Jailhouse Boogie from Hauke and the Rocket Beans could serve.
I also asked the players to give feedback and will add that as a comment under this article.
Conclusion on Keys from the Golden Vault
The quality of the book is very good, like other Dungeons and Dragons books. There are many beautiful artworks for the missions, though personally some 3D style images caught my attention that didn’t quite hit my taste and that I hadn’t seen in any D&D book before. The German translation is mediocre, as is unfortunately the case with many of the adventures. But I’m also generally, as described in this article, more of a fan of the English versions since many terms in my opinion simply sound less good (Schlussmitlustig as a name for a maximum security prison!).
Overall I’m quite satisfied with the book and will definitely incorporate some of the other missions into my campaigns or play them as one-shots. Both the colorful mix of settings and the relatively simple possibility to adapt them are good reasons for me to buy Keys from the Golden Vault 🛒. However, it must be clear that you still need to put some work into preparation and the adventures might not be so easy to play completely out-of-the-box. Additionally, I’ll probably reach for an English version rather than use the German book.
Cover image: Cover of the book Keys from the Golden Vault by Wizards of the Coast
