D&D: Best low-level adventures in Keys From The Golden Vault

These quests in Keys From The Golden Vault are ideal for new groups of adventurers.
A dwarven prisoner in Dungeons & Dragons Keys From The Golden Vault
Image Via Wizards Of The Coast

Dungeons & Dragons is letting players live out their Ocean’s Eleven fantasies in Keys From The Golden Vault, an adventure anthology centered around different heists. These adventures are intended to be one-shot experiences, and they all vary in challenge and tone, with some low-level quests better suited for different groups than others. It should be mentioned beforehand that there won’t be any spoilers for the content of these adventures outside of a general overview of their premise.

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The Stygian Gambit is great for roleplayers

Adventurers playing a card game in Dungeons & Dragons
Image Via Wizards Of The Coast

Keys From The Golden Vault is all about heists, but those who have seen heist movies know it’s not all about stealthily sneaking into facilities and knocking out guards with karate chops to the back of the neck. Many of these movies involve confident tricksters who persuade, deceive, and seduce people in the hope of extracting information, using the power of their personality to accomplish more than using a weapon to threaten someone.

D&D has many charismatic character classes and archetypes that would work well in a roleplaying adventure. The best low-level option for this in Keys From The Golden Vault is The Stygian Gambit, which is intended for a party of level two characters. In The Stygian Gambit, the players enter a casino and steal the contents of the owner’s vault. This will give them plenty of chances to interact with the patrons, play gambling minigames, and uncover the secrets of the casino’s defenses through the power of conversation and trickery.

Reach For The Stars is an ideal Halloween adventure

A Dungeons & Dragons rogue sneaking into mansion.
Image Via Wizards Of The Coast

The D&D multiverse is home to many Lovecraftian horrors who reside in the darkest parts of the multiverse and bring chaos wherever they go. In Keys From The Golden Vault, a level three adventure called Reach For The Stars allows players to get up close and personal with the denizens of the Far Realm, as they are tasked with breaking into a mansion and stealing a book containing rituals for summoning eldritch creatures. Unfortunately for the party, the information in the book has already been used…

Related: D&D: How to run Keys from the Golden Vault as a campaign

D&D often struggles with horror-themed adventures, as the game is a power fantasy where mighty adventurers use exceptional abilities and spells to battle the forces of evil. Reach For The Stars puts these heroes into a Resident Evil-style story, where they must explore a haunted mansion and avoid the supernatural guardians and traps that roam its corridors. This gives DMs an excellent opportunity to build suspense and inflict fear in the players’ hearts as they cannot talk their way out of their predicament and must hide or face the horrors around every corner.

The Murkmire Malevolence is a perfect one-shot for conventions

A Dungeons & Dragons bard escaping a tower in Keys From The Golden Vault
Image Via Wizards Of The Coast

The great thing about D&D adventure anthologies, like Candlekeep Mysteries or Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel, is that they provide the ideal material for running one-shot D&D games at conventions. These allow new players to experience the game in a public environment without the stress of needing to form a group and commit to a schedule.

Keys From The Golden Vault has lots of adventures that can be used to introduce new players to D&D, but the best one is the level one Murkmire Malevolonce adventure, which involves breaking into a museum and stealing a mysterious egg before it hatches. This ticking clock aspect of the adventure means that the DM has the perfect excuse to keep things moving, which is great in instances where the group has a limited play window.

The concept of Murkmire Malevolonce is easy to grasp, and players can quickly be brought up to speed on what they need to do, while the adventure caters to several different playstyles. In Murkmire Malevolonce, the players can use stealth, roleplaying, combat, or a mixture of all three to achieve their goals, giving a great taster for D&D’s different playstyles.


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Scott Baird
Scott has been writing for Gamepur since 2023, having been a former contributor to websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, Screen Rant, The Gamer, and TopTenz. A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started as a film student before moving into journalism. Scott covers Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy, Pokémon, and MTG. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.