D&D: ‘Keys From the Golden Vault’ – Can Heists Make Up For the OGL Debacle?
WotC’s first new book of the year comes not long after bitter controversy slammed the community. Keys from the Golden Vault is the first post-OGL release.
Keys from the Golden Vault is officially out everywhere now. Fans who preordered on D&D Beyond will have had the book two weeks earlier, but now everyone can get in on the latest release. Though, one has to wonder about the timing.
WotC has a schedule to keep; a deadline that cares about little except for global supply chain and shipping disruptions. This is all to say, the new book comes out with unfortunate timing. We’re not yet a month away from the goodwill-straining OGL fiasco that kicked off the year. With community trust in WotC at a low point, the book went up for preorder with very little fanfare.
So too, goes the release of it. No big-streamed games, no events, just a steady-as-she-goes release schedule. This is absolutely the right call if you’re going to release a book facing the backlash WotC faced. Despite their calling the community’s mass cancellations of D&D Beyond subscriptions a mere blip, more of an unflattering “misfire” than anything else, WotC clearly understands the position the community finds itself in.
Which is unfortunate for the designers and writers who worked hard on this book. To hear inside reports, there was (and may still be) a divide between leadership and the design team. This situation will doubtless impact the book’s release. But can Keys from the Golden Vault overcome its circumstance?
Time alone will tell. For now, here are our first impressions of the book.
Keys from the Golden Vault
The OGL controversy isn’t the only uphill battle facing Keys from the Golden Vault. This book is an adventure anthology of 13 different heist-themed adventures. Each one a daring attempt to steal dangerous information, magical artifacts, or some other MacGuffin, all on behalf of an organization known as the Golden Vault.
They’re like ‘what if the Harpers were also thieves?’ Their whole secret agency is designed around capturing and controlling dangerous magic. How do they do that? By sending adventurers on heists.
But D&D is a game of fantasy action. Heists aren’t necessarily its strongest suit. Not to say that you can’t, but it becomes harder to play around with tension and pacing when, “kick in the door and kill everyone” is not only a viable strategy but the one most heavily supported by the core rules of the game.
Setting up a heist means extra work. And in classic WotC fashion, a lot of that work is up to the DM. But Keys from the Golden Vault has some guidelines and principles you can see at work in its adventures.
The adventures, to their immense credit, do manage to play along with some interesting and exciting ideas.
Each one paints a vivid picture of its internal world and logic. You might have a map of patrol routes and arcane locks with magical keycards in one adventure. And a party full of hobnobbing nobles to impersonate, charm, and otherwise influence one another.
Adventures–With Style
The diversity of the adventures is perhaps the book’s strongest initial selling point. These adventures, while they all have similar goals, feel different from one another. And more importantly, they all seem to understand that to properly pull off a heist, you have to manage information.
To that end, they provide player maps and DM maps so that players can have enough information to start making their own plans. These adventures live and die by player investment. At every turn, you’ll find suggestions for what players can learn. Whether it’s an interesting fact about the MacGuffin they’re stealing or some important detail about its security.
Each adventure paints a very different picture, in some cases literally, as one adventure involves stealing a magical, sentient painting. The variety of stylish encounters and setups is sure to be entraining for the DMs. This book has a lot of that “lonely fun” where DMs, in particular, might enjoy thinking about what plans their players could get up to, and what guards and other magical security might do to stop them. Or better still, play around with the rival heist crew mechanics.
This is a great way to give the DM toys to play with. A whole party of rival thieves to outwit. Or fight!
Which they’ll need to do because ultimately these are a bunch of dungeon crawls focused on stealth. And barring one or two, the stealth elements of these are just “how far can you get before combat breaks out.”
Adventures in Need of Substance
One of the biggest shortcomings of the book is the way the tension of any of these adventures deflates once initiative gets rolled. There are systems for what happens when an adventure is on high alert, and that’s fun, no doubt. But these adventures could quickly devolve into yet another slugfest.
Two things that make heists tricky are the sudden reversals of information and the upping of stakes as things start to go wrong. But there’s none of that here. It’s work that’s up to the DM.
And while there’s a brief section on “Heist Complications,” it’s a fairly thin section. The advice consists of “put the MacGuffin in a different place” and “another rival crew is here”. To be fair, the rival crew is fairly well fleshed out. But the danger is never “you get caught” or “you fail at your objective.” Instead, it’s “the fighting starts here.”
It feels like there might have been space for more stakes or more tension, but thirteen adventures is a lot to fit into one book. And that’s where it suffers.
Each adventure struggles against its page count. This is a shame because these adventures are fun concepts that showcase the creativity of the designers. But six adventures with more pages, more space is given to flesh out the beats of each heist, with sections on what happens if the player characters are caught. Or what happens once the MacGuffin is stolen, or possible changes to the dungeon might make everything feel more dynamic.
For instance, in the Murder on the Orient Express analog, Affair on the Concordant Express, yes, there’s a murder mystery alongside the heist. But ultimately it just kind of goes nowhere. The mind flayer detective has already solved it and just “wants the players to figure it out for themselves.” There are a lot of little things like that that feel like they fall flat because they don’t have more care or time or space given to them.
WotC’s anthology adventure is more about quantity and it hurts the overall quality. These adventures could be more—but that said, if you’re looking for a folio of quick adventures, this one does more than WotC’s other entries. It always comes down to D&D doing what D&D does best. Keys from the Golden Vault provides excellent ideas but could offer more guidance and more tools for working to make D&D work outside its usual sandbox.
Happy adventuring!
