D&D General WotC needs to bring back Boxed Sets - pic heavy

[Micah Sweet]

I know they aren't. And no, a new starter box every couple of years isn't what I'm talking about. They mostly make adventure books with 5 pages of lore. But that stuff doesn't spark the imagination.

And yes it's a different world now. Anything you could want to know about anything is at your fingertips, but most people aren't going to buy "old" stuff with outdated lore and stats. And reading the Faerun wiki isn't going to really spark much for adventure ideas. Not to mention you are expected to print things out on your own and man I love that Drivethru RPG has old stuff but the dissescted maps you are supposed to tape together to whatever never seem to print out right size-wise.

But anyways, I wanted to point out what was IN these box sets compared to what you get now-a-days.

And yes 3rd ed didn't really have box sets. You sometimes got a separate map at the back of the book you could pull out and unfold. AD&D did this as well with some items. Now-a-days it seems you have to get Beadle and Grimms version of things to get all those tasty extras.

Anywho, lets take a look at the few I own.

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The Dragonlance Box Set "The Tales of the Lance"

My current campaign I'm running is set 6 months after the war and I have used the heck out this box set. Especially the World Map.

First we have a this great iconic art on the box cover.
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Inside we have little cardboard character chits. No minis? No problem! And some Cards for some of the iconic characters with stats for easy DM reference incase your heroes happen to stop by Solace or wander into the Qualinesti Woods or something.
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There are several Maps. One covering the world which has been fantastic for the players to plan their treks from one location to another.
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The book has all the info you need. The gods, the magic. The new races. Magic items. and LORE, so much lore.

Even a DM screen! Yeah the art is kinda... not good but hey there is a Lord Soth bi folded art work on cardboard that works just as good. Plus other pieces of Iconic Art just to get the players int he mood.
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Even better, if you have the 1E Dragonlance book, it fits in the box as well saving space on the shelf!
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Next: The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set aka The Grey Box

Would you believe that there is more to Faerun than the Sword Coast? This box is FANTASTIC. I'm currently doing a read of the 2 books inside and every single entry of towns and landmarks sparks an idea for an adventure. One book for everyone and another for DMs. Multiple Maps to give a nice visual aid to adventures planning their trips to any location! And the plastic overs are there to help with planning out how many days it would take to trek from there and back again. Random Encounters! Seriously though. The maps and especially the books make this one of my favorite box sets. I'm not kidding when I say every inch of this spark the imagination. I can't read a small blurb about an iconic location and not have an adventure idea. I highly recommend you get this one if you can.


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My most recent acquisition (ive been reading the latest Drizzt book):

The Menzoberranzan box set.

Again iconic art for the box cover. This is a box box set. They really went all out with the extras and inserts.


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3 Books inside. 2 of them are lore. The City and The Houses. Lore! The 3rd is an Adventure! and look at the covers! That old 2E art when they made Drizzt look like some old man for some reason.

So far it seems I can also fit the Drizzt's Guide to the Underdark book and map into the box as well. And once I get it the Drow of the Underdark book as well. (much like sticking the DL1E book into the 2E box set for storage help). This would make the Menzo box set the ultimate source for 2E Underdark and Drow info in one box. Add in Night Below and woo....

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Here we have pictures and stats of one of the fleshed out House of Noble Drow. Great for showing the players who they are talking to or attacking!

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And did I mention MAPS!? 4 Large maps of the city! Plus Posters! Not shown are some smaller interior maps on large cards.
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And here we have some Drizzt-isms. a fun little extra.
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So far what Ive shown are mainly Sources. Campaign areas detailed with info

Well now we have Adventure box sets:

The Ruins of Undermountain box set

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2 books. Campaign ideas if you want to add a bit of flavor instead of just "See Dungeon, get treasure". 4 dense maps. Undermountain is a lot... sort of. Most of that space is empty! The DM is expected to populate it as they see fit. And just go crazy! Halaster changes things all the time! Dungeon Ecology doesn't matter in Undermountain!

WE also have some cards with ideas for traps and encounters etc! And even some new monsters to add to the dungeon and to add into your other campaigns! Just add those 3 hole punched pages into your Monster Binder (you still have that right?)

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The Ruins of Zhentil Keep.

I recently read a 2E novel with a large Zhent presents and now I want to run a campaign that involves them! Luckily I have this box set (that I still need to read).

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From what ive glanced it not only have campian lore and info it has an adventure as well! Their lands seem well covered and again at a glance I would think each local would spark the imagination for adventures! 2E stuff was very good at that.

And of course aside from nice handy maps we have cards with more interior locations and more of those Monster Binder pages of new monsters!
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Well that all I have for box sets. Some I lucked into cheap. Some cost me about $150 (Menzo). Some like Night Below and Planescape and Dark Sun are even more expensive. And as much as I'd love to own the original boxes I'm not spending $200+, at that point I'll just get the DrivethruRPG print on demand versions even though it crams it all into one book and hacks the maps to pieces (and dont fit right when printed out IMO).

So tell me, would you rather have a hardcover book with 5 pages of lore and the rest adventure or spend the same amount of $ (or possibly a tad more for deluxe box sets like Menzo) and get a box set with soft cover booklets full of lore and adventure ideas and maybe even an actual adventure and 4 large maps and a bunch of extras?

I really wish I could get all the old box sets, they are so FUN and reusable! WotC really needs to consider brining these things back, instead of making thinner and thinner hard cover books. Make that new Adventure FEEL like an adventure with maps and pictures and handouts etc instead of just a book. I can't express how much just having a large map of Krynn open in the middle of the table adds to my weekly Dragonlance game.

Thoughts?

Those were the days. I have all the Ravenloft boxed sets, as well as the Planescape core and several others. They are among my most valued gaming possessions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Boxed sets are awesome for campaigns, providing maps and lots of goodies to use. The occasional mega-adventure can benefit from a boxed set, but they were too overdone IMO. Obviously starter sets are ideal as a boxed set. The problem with boxed sets is the profit margin is bad and they don't typically sell that well. I think 5E could have benefited by putting out boxed sets for both Eberron and Forgotten Realms, but I don't think anything else would have been worthwhile financially. None of the adventures seemed like they'd been significantly improved with a boxed set.

Boxed sets weren't financially sound back in the '90s either, but I'm very, very glad TSR made them anyway.

 

[Espadadelaaurora]

Our gaming group still makes heavy use of those boxed sets, a shame WotC hasn't updated all that content.
Personally now I prefer the slipcase format (it sits better on the shelf and the hardcovers are more durable). Only that in the case of Spelljammer 5e the page and word count should be far more higher.

 

[Orius]

Good riddance, I say.

The boxed set was the folly of Williams era TSR. They did produce some boxes before that, but the 2e era in particular saw a large proliferation of them. They weren't really that practical, and they cost more money than TSR realized over the long term. Some boxes made decent use of the format, while others just felt stuffed with filler.

Poster maps were the the biggest downside the sets, and the usual boxed set format always included posters. The posters are too big and unwieldy to use behind the DM screen and the constant folding and unfolding inflicts a lot of wear and tear on them. Worse, when the posters have collections of dungeon maps or something similar, they are all too often printed across the creases which makes them even more difficult to use.

Boxes were maybe best as a starting point for a campaign. If done well, there'd be a book for player information and at least one book for the DM. The inevitable poster might be alright to depict the whole campaign area, but the posters were usually always double sided so there'd probably be stuff badly used on the back. Some setting boxes had DM screens customized for the setting. The Dragonlance DM screen is a decent one for general use and has some tables for things like overland movement that I photocopied for regular 2e use. But otherwise, TSR would have been better off sticking with books, especially since the softbound splat format apparently made some money for them.

 

[Orius]

I wish it was the screen. As @DarkCrisis notes, the screen is under the DL Tales of the Lance book. I think the Soth's Ride in that set is a folder for holding the other pictures and handouts. I'd have to pull mine out to be sure.

Lord Soth's Charge (cropped btw) is on the reverse of a set of instructions for the Talis Cards, one of the box's gimmicks for the inevitable cardstock sheets. The cards can be used to play card games, they can be used for fortune telling as something like fictional tarot cards, and they can be used in a randon adventure generation system. The cards I think were another double sided cardstock sheet stapled inside the Lord Soth sheet.

It was also used with the character cards and folding figures with a sort of board game printed on the back of the Ansalon map. There was a hex map of Solace and the surrounding region and you were supposed to draw the cards and reference a table in the back of the rulebook to have a sort of randomly generated adventure. I don't think the box really explained very well how it was supposed to work, or at least it played weird compared to a regular D&D game.

There's another cardstock sheet that has the Death of Sturm on one side and item saving throws and structural damage charts on the other. Total filler. It looks like it was part of another double sided sheet but that half had either the characters or the Talis Cards.

The rulebook itself is pretty good, though it could have been organized better, IMO. At the very least it has all the rules for character creation for a 2e Dragonlance game, and the monster section has stats for everything important if you don't have access to MC4.

The posters are a mixed lot. There's the one with the Ansalon map on one side and the board game on the other. Then there's the tan white and black map that has a collection of maps from the Atlas of Dragonlance and DL 1, 4, 8, 12, and 14. I'm not sure what the purpose of this sheet is for, the Atlas maps aren't all useable for gaming, and the module maps are in the modules if one is running DL 1-14. The last map is mostly a collection of geomorphs compatible with the dwarf city geomorphs from DL 4 and Dwarven Kingdoms of Krynn. There's a also a small tavern map scaled for miniature use, with some extra junk pieces to fill out the poster.

The biggest problem with Tales of the Lance is that it seems to assume the user is familiar with Dragonlance. The box was my first exposure to the setting, and I wasn't sure what to do with it at all until I read the books. The rulebook and DM screen themselves are pretty good, but the rest of the box is a hodgepodge of material that feels like it was kind of randomly thrown together to fill the set.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Good riddance, I say.

The boxed set was the folly of Williams era TSR. They did produce some boxes before that, but the 2e era in particular saw a large proliferation of them. They weren't really that practical, and they cost more money than TSR realized over the long term. Some boxes made decent use of the format, while others just felt stuffed with filler.

Poster maps were the the biggest downside the sets, and the usual boxed set format always included posters. The posters are too big and unwieldy to use behind the DM screen and the constant folding and unfolding inflicts a lot of wear and tear on them. Worse, when the posters have collections of dungeon maps or something similar, they are all too often printed across the creases which makes them even more difficult to use.

Boxes were maybe best as a starting point for a campaign. If done well, there'd be a book for player information and at least one book for the DM. The inevitable poster might be alright to depict the whole campaign area, but the posters were usually always double sided so there'd probably be stuff badly used on the back. Some setting boxes had DM screens customized for the setting. The Dragonlance DM screen is a decent one for general use and has some tables for things like overland movement that I photocopied for regular 2e use. But otherwise, TSR would have been better off sticking with books, especially since the softbound splat format apparently made some money for them.

I am absolutely not looking at it from the, "what was financially best for TSR" angle. It was amazing for the consumer, and les to a greater, richer game.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I am absolutely not looking at it from the, "what was financially best for TSR" angle. It was amazing for the consumer, and les to a greater, richer game.

Yeah.

My current DL game wouldn't be near as fun without that box set and it's contents.

 

[Velderan]

Yeah.

My current DL game wouldn't be near as fun without that box set and it's contents.

The other 2 Dragonlance boxed sets are pretty good too, Dwarven Kingdoms of Krynn and Time of the Dragon. Sadly I never owned the Time of the Dragon boxed set during the 2e days and didn't get around to correcting that mistake until last summer. While I've never used it to run a campaign, it's good to read and I think if I never manage to pull off running a 2e campaign again I'd give Taladas a try using that set.

 

[Velderan]

The biggest problem with Tales of the Lance is that it seems to assume the user is familiar with Dragonlance. The box was my first exposure to the setting, and I wasn't sure what to do with it at all until I read the books. The rulebook and DM screen themselves are pretty good, but the rest of the box is a hodgepodge of material that feels like it was kind of randomly thrown together to fill the set.

That's surprising. I had read the books prior to using the boxed set, so I didn't have the same experience going in but it seemed like the amount of information in the book was more than enough for a person new to Dragonlance. Was there something in particular you remember throwing you off? I could see how the character cards might be confusing, since the cards all had different years that the NPC might be encountered at that level. Not saying you're wrong, just genuinely curious gave you that impression.

 

[Orius]

I am absolutely not looking at it from the, "what was financially best for TSR" angle. It was amazing for the consumer, and les to a greater, richer game.

I don't necessarily think it was that good for the consumer. All the bits and pieces in the boxes can get lost, there's all the problems with the posters I mentioned, and the boxes were more costly than simply printing things as a book. The creative teams certainly did good work with some of the boxes, but I think they didn't need the boxes to deliver.

That's surprising. I had read the books prior to using the boxed set, so I didn't have the same experience going in but it seemed like the amount of information in the book was more than enough for a person new to Dragonlance. Was there something in particular you remember throwing you off? I could see how the character cards might be confusing, since the cards all had different years that the NPC might be encountered at that level. Not saying you're wrong, just genuinely curious gave you that impression.

Well, that was 27-28 years ago so I don't quite remember. I don't think it the book itself that was the problem but the other bits. The collection of maps on the one sheet are kind of out of context for an unfamiliar player. The geomorphs weren't explained very well either, but I eventually figured them out. Of course they make even more sense after reading DL 4 and Dwarven Kingdoms.