Behind the staid public rooms of an old world gentlemen's club operates a more mysterious organization: The Explorers Guild, a clandestine group of adventurers who bravely journey to those places in which light gives way to shadow and reason is usurped by myth. The secrets they seek are hidden in mountain ranges and lost in deserts, buried in the ocean floor and lodged deep in polar ice. Set against the backdrop of World War I, with Western Civilization on the edge of calamity, A Passage to Shambhala concerns the Guild's quest to find the golden city of Buddhist myth.