Planar travel without gates or portals, and a mystery to solve . . . Prepare your party for a lot of climbing as you journey through the Planes in search of adventures and answers. Author Cook has prepared an exotic layered quest for not only the Planescape campaign but also any other AD&D adventurers.

Tales from the Infinite Staircase is an intricate set of eight interwoven adventures written around a central mystery, adventures that can be played alone or as the components of a single journey.
This volume introduces the concept of the Infinite Staircase throughout the Planes, linking it to the independent adventure For Duty & Deity (Forgotten Realms), which may be used along with Tales for Forgotten Realms and Planescape alike. Detailed notes are provided in each book for weaving the two together, or for playing any or all of the eight adventures in Tales in any Prime Material Plane campaign. The Tales themselves run a little toward the creepy, and vary from good places for getting lost and exploring to areas for finding necessary components in solving the book's central mystery. The variety here makes possible the extraction of any one tale for individual use, or for the party to visit, leave for a game year, and come back to re-enter the mystery if desired. Characters of good alignment are guaranteed to be badly stressed out by the beings they may need to ally with and the places they must go.

Presented as a stand-alone AD&D product for any campaign as well as for Planescape, this book contains the most basic information beyond the core AD&D rulebooks to run adventures out on some of the many Planes of existence. The imaginative non-Planescape dungeon master whose gaming group is not composed of book-bound rules lawyers will be perfectly able to manage here. However, many DMs new to the Planescape may end up wanting additional background on creatures, Planes, and the structure of the Planar universe, and the Planescape Monstrous Appendix I & II books will be of the greatest help here. Other helpful books and sets to beg, buy, or borrow for use with these adventures are the Planewalker's Handbook, A Guide to the Astral Plane, Planes of Law, and Planes of Chaos. The web of connections among these eight tales is quite complex and these volumes will cut down on the amount of notetaking, bookmarking, and sheer inventing that a dungeon master may require. The amount of Planescape slang (from the city of Sigil) in this book is fortunately kept to a minimum, easing beginner traumas.

Frankly, the statistics and information Cook gives for creatures and individuals could be much more conveniently arranged. Because monsters may pop up in many tales but are only fully described in one tale, the creature information should have either been all collected in one place, or, given the size of each section, more specific cross-references beyond "see Tale 8" ought to have been included.

This adventure is intended for a party of 3rd to 5th level Planescape characters, or for higher level characters from other campaigns. Possible adjustments for difficulty level are included in this book and the independent companion piece For Duty & Deity.

On a 6-point scale, Tales from the Infinite Staircase rates 6 for ideas and 4 for ease of use, for an overall rating of 5.

--Sharon Daugherty