“The Endless Stair,” a Basic Dungeons & Dragons adventure module from 1987 that represented the first published roleplaying game book from Forgotten Realms campaign setting creator Ed Greenwood, is now available again in physical form as a print-on-demand softcover color book in addition to a PDF version.
Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms would go on to be one of the most popular fantasy campaign worlds for D&D, where it still flourishes even in the game’s 5th Edition era nearly 15 years later as a setting for tabletop adventures, novels, comic books and video games.
As gaming historian Shannon Appelcline notes on the product’s entry at the Dungeon Masters Guild storefront, “The Endless Stair” adventure would feature many similarities to the Realms, although it actually is set in a competing campaign setting, Mystara, then the default world for Basic D&D.
“The Endless Stair” was published just a month before the first official Forgotten Realms products, Douglas Niles’ novel Darkwalker on Moonshae and the “Desert of Desolation” D&D adventure. The Ed Greenwood boxed Forgotten Realms Campaign Set came out two months later, Appelcline notes.
The historian said this adventure was intended to teach Ed Greenwood — who had written for Dragon magazine as far back as 1979 — how to write “book-length” RPG publications like “The Endless Stair.”
Another recent Basic D&D addition to the marketplace, but PDF-only, is AC5 D&D Player Character Record Sheets. If you need the rules to play Basic D&D, they’re available in many forms, including PDF or a softcover print-on-demand version of the old-school, once-hardcover D&D Rules Cyclopedia, or the once-boxed Player’s Manual and DM’s Rulebook as PDFs.
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