The Lost City is a dungeon crawl for lower-level characters included in the collection of beloved adventures, Quests from the Infinite Staircase. If your table is unfamiliar with dungeon delving, The Lost City is a great place to start!

Players will find a seemingly-abandoned ziggurat in the middle of the desert, but will come to discover that this isolated structure sits atop a buried city where an evil cult grows in power. The Lost City presents players with a dungeon full of competing factions and dynamic social histories. The party will have to decide which factions to befriend and which, if any, to smite.

Below, we’ll review the adventure’s premise, its dangers, how to get your players to the ziggurat, and what loot they might find there.

Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Lost City. If you want to experience this adventure for the first time as a player, you’ll want to turn back now!

• The Lost City Adventure Overview
• Monster of the Week: Cultists
• The Lost City Adventure Hooks
• Pockets Full of Gemstones

The Lost City Adventure Overview

Artist: Jaqueline Florencio

Character level: 1 – If the table is using story-based level advancement, players reach level 4 by the adventure’s conclusion.

Location: A partially-buried ziggurat in the desert.

Themes: Corruption, Intrigue, Isolation, Hope

Adventure Premise

In this adventure, the party will come across a ziggurat being unearthed by shifting dunes. Though they don’t know it yet, the players have stumbled upon the ancient and once-powerful city of Cynidicea. Once players enter the ziggurat, they will find that although the city was buried, it was not wholly abandoned or destroyed. Centuries ago, when the city suffered a devastating calamity, surviving Cynidiceans scrambled underground, where many remain.

The ziggurat is a five-floor dungeon where players will face classic dangers like traps, mimics, and Undead. As they descend deeper, they’ll learn the story of Cynidicea and discover why a step pyramid is half-buried in the middle of the desert.

Faction Politics

The ziggurat is inhabited by three factions looking to restore Cynidicea to its former status. Each faction is dedicated to one of the city’s old gods: Gorm (storms, justice, war), Usamigaras (magic, trickery, thievery), and Madarua (death, birth, seasons). These groups share a common enemy, the Cult of Zargon, but they clash too frequently to form a united front.

Players can meet, join, or fight any of these factions as they explore the ziggurat. Membership has its bonuses: Each faction provides some equipment, an Uncommon magic item, information, and a safe place to rest. Keep in mind that joining one group might make it more difficult to convince the other groups to help you, provide you with information, or give you supplies.

Silver Tongue or Steel Blade?

Danger lurks in the ziggurat’s dark corridors, but not everything will require your sword.

When you open a door and find a hungry giant lizard or ghoul lunging for you, you can rest easy knowing that negotiation was not an option. But plenty of the ziggurat’s inhabitants are simply people. They may be strange and erratic in an "Oh, this person wearing a dog mask thinks they have lycanthropy" sort of way, but they’re people nonetheless.

A character with solid Charisma or proficiency in Persuasion or Deception will have plenty of opportunities to use their skills to avoid combat or outwit an NPC. Many of the adventure's potential combat encounters also have the potential to be useful conversations, gambling games, or even shared dreams.

DM’s First Dungeon Crawl

The Lost City, first published in 1982, was originally written to be a sort of training exercise for budding Dungeon Masters. It provided DMs with fully fleshed-out upper floors for the ziggurat but left DMs to create the lower floors themselves. Though this updated version of the adventure provides all five floors in full, it is still an excellent "first dungeon crawl" for a DM. It’s got all of the classics—traps, secret doors, treasure, monsters—but each encounter is simple, straightforward, and easy to run.

Although this updated version of The Lost City doesn’t leave the DM to create dungeon floors all on their own, it does provide optional opportunities to extend the party’s adventure. After they’ve concluded the main quest, players can choose to continue delving underground to the dungeon’s sixth floor, where they’ll find better treasure, increasingly dangerous enemies, and even Zargon himself. (Though they might want to wait until they’re at a much higher level before facing down the Elder Evil!)

Monster of the Week: Cultists

The cultists in this adventure have dedicated their lives and souls to an ancient abomination named Zargon. Zargon provides his followers with enough power to control the remaining Cynidiceans in exchange for regular live sacrifices.

DMs and players should remember that cultists of an Elder Evil like Zargon are deeply fanatical and dangerously determined. They will gladly fight to the death or sacrifice themselves for their dark lord. DMs should run cultists from the Cult of Zargon as ruthless, cruel, and unwilling to compromise. Players trying to Intimidate these cultists will likely find that they fear their own patron more than they fear your blade.

Cult Fanatic

The cult fanatic is a leader among cultists who has been bestowed with limited magical power in exchange for their loyalty to Zargon. Keep an eye out for their spells. If the fanatic is hidden, they may cast Inflict Wounds, but, otherwise, they can cast Spiritual Weapon on the first turn in combat. They can use their concentration to help an ally with Shield of Faith or paralyze an opponent with Hold Person. If they manage to render an opponent Paralyzed, expect any other cultists to swarm the vulnerable target.

The Lost City Adventure Hooks

If the promise of treasure alone isn’t enough to entice your players, here are some alternatives to catch your party’s interest:

Nafas the Noble Genie

Quests from the Infinite Staircase introduces the noble genie and optional group patron Nafas, which makes it easy to get your adventuring party to the ziggurat. Nafas resides in the Infinite Staircase, an interstitial dimension that players can use to travel from one realm to another.

Nafas hears a wish from the far-flung reaches of the universe. The people of Cynidicea call out to the cosmos, begging for a new fate and a restoration to glory. Nafas wishes to know how the remaining citizens of the fallen city are faring, and what befell them. If the party accepts the task, Nafas sends them to discover what happened to this city and whether they can be saved.

Anthropological Expedition

If you aren’t using Nafas, Quests from the Infinite Staircase provides some alternative hooks to get your party on board.

Your players might be motivated by discovery or by studying archeology, or they have a patron who is. After the dunes shifted and storms swept through the desert, rumors of an unearthed civilization began to spread to the scholarly community. The party can be hired to investigate the ruins and report back to an academic NPC.

A Growing Evil

If a player’s character is religious, they may be called to the ziggurat to investigate the Cult of Zargon. To the outside world, this cult probably has not been heard of in centuries; your temple or god may have hoped that the Cult of Zargon had been destroyed when Cynidicea was buried. As evil stirs in the desert, gods and religious orders may send heroes and adventurers to keep a lid on the cult’s activities.

Pockets Full of Gemstones

The Lost City is full of treasure. Players can find dozens of gems and quite a lot of cash (mostly gold and silver), especially if they search thoroughly and keep an eye out for secret passageways. After the gems, the most lucrative item you can collect will be masks. All Cynidiceans, whether in a faction or not, wear a stylized mask, most of which are worth 10-25 GP apiece! And though you certainly can acquire these through conflict, you can also simply find them in a chest or on a fallen adventurer who visited this ziggurat before you.

In a lower-level adventure like this one, magic items and Potions of Healing will be harder to come by, but there are a small handful scattered throughout the ziggurat. Depending on where they explore and who they befriend, players might find items like a Wand of Secrets, Javelin of Lightning, or a spell scroll.

Preorder Quests from the Infinite Staircase Today!

In just a few short weeks, the door to the Infinite Staircase will open. Jump into some of D&D’s most beloved adventures and see what all the fuss was about—or bask in nostalgia as you relive stories you haven’t seen in years.

Preorder your digital or physical copy of Quests from the Infinite Staircase from the D&D Beyond marketplace today. You can also bundle the two for a discount!

Damen Cook (@damen_joseph) is a lifelong fantasy reader, writer, and gamer. If he woke up tomorrow in Faerûn, he would bolt through the nearest fey crossing and drink from every stream and eat fruit from every tree in the Feywild until he found that sweet, sweet wild magic.