One of the ongoing goals from the Wizards team over the past 11 years has been to make it easier for new players and DMs to get started. While the prior starter sets have clearly focused on that goal, the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set: Heroes on the Borderlands is clearly the next step in that progression. It’s also a heftier box set than the prior ones, packed to the top with material to get started playing as soon as possible.
Part of the reason why this box set is so much heavier lies in its label, which you may not notice if you buy in your local game store. It’s listed as a board game, but really, it’s an RPG with board game elements to make it easier for newcomers to get the hang of how to play. More on that later.
What's Inside
At the top of the box’s contents is a “Read Me First Quick Start Guide.” It starts with telling you how to unpack and sort the contents of the box, with what to set aside for the DM versus the items everyone can see. It also notes at the top that a Rules Glossary is available (it’s in the back of the Player’s Guide) and has a QR code at the bottom that takes you to an explainer video.How easy does the starter set make things? When detailing the contents of the box, after listing “Quick Start Guide” it notes “This leaflet.” (I was going to review the video and comment on its effectiveness, but I can’t. The QR code takes you to a page that says it’s too soon to access the video “Every hero knows timing is everything.”)
Next the quick start leaflet explains the roles of the players and the DM so that if it is an entirely new group, they not only know what to expect, but they can figure out who will be DM. The back of the leaflet is a legend of various components so you can identify them easily as you go through the box.
Most of the additional components simply make it easy for players to track things, like hit points or spells, or find info without having to flip through a book, like background cards, magic item cards, etc. The rest are for use with the maps to track who is where. Theater of the mind-style play is still viable according to the instructions. It’s just suggested that the visuals might be easier for newcomers getting the hang of the game.
Character Creation
Character creation is simple. Pick either a cleric, fighter, rogue or wizard. Each class gets two character boards. One board has level one info, with level two info on the back. The other board for that class has level three material with a different subclass on each side. Clerics can choose between the light domain and the life domain. Fighters can be either eldritch knights or champions. The rogue subclass choices are thief or assassin. Wizards can be abjurers or invokers.Splitting the character boards this way makes logical sense and contributes to making things easier for new players. However, it also means you can only have four players max and players can’t duplicate classes, so no parties with two fighters, etc.
The character boards are designed so that you can put cards that flesh out the characters in appropriate places for reference. This is why I consider the set to be more of an RPG with board game elements or components than a board game. It’s not like other attempts D&D has made over the years to turn D&D into a board game, like the set for the 5e version of Dragonlance where the game switched from standard RPG play to board game style for the large battles and then back to RPG.
The player then selects their Background and Species using the included cards. The Species and Background options are again streamlined to make getting started easy. Species are limited to dwarves, elves, halflings, and humans. While there’s only one card for each Background, so players shouldn’t duplicate, Species (dwarf, elf, halfling, and human) gets two cards each, one with a male figure and one with a woman. In a corner of the art side of each Species card is an image to make it easy to match with its movement and combat token.
After selecting one card of each, players, collect the components from the “What You Need to Play” section on your cards. Then select the appropriate tokens, such as hit point tokens equaling your character’s maximum hit point total. Lastly, name your character.
Other Player Resources
In addition to a Player Guide, the set comes with cards to make D&D easier, including 55 Equipment cards, and 53 Spell cards. My favorite component is the On Your Turn cards (you get four) to make it easy for people to know what to do and even plan their turns before it gets to them. Sheets of punch-out tokens (Hit Points, Player Character, Power, Gold Pieces, Gems and, for the DM’s side, 118 Terrain Tokens and 80 Monster Tokens) make it easier to track things.The set includes four small, resealable bags for the tokens that can be used one of two ways. Either you can use them to store tokens by type or you can make character bags with the tokens needed for each class. There’s still space in the tray at the bottom for monster tokens if you use the character bag approach, but then you might want to add your own bag for those to make them manageable.
If you’re using this set to introduce new people to D&D on a regular basis, such as in an after-school program, at a game store, convention, etc. the character bag method is a very good idea. It speeds things up and makes them more manageable.
DMs get their own card sets, too, starting with 20 Magic Item cards. I love Monster cards but have a small complaint with these. Art is on one side and stats on the other, but I wish they hadn’t put the name of the creatures on the art side. Maybe a DM wants players to know what something looks like without naming it right away. Sure some monsters will be obvious but for some, especially with brand-new players, it can work.
I also love, love, love NPC cards, and these are laid out well. One side has their image and name. The other side lists their species, their role/job, and which Monster Card to use for their information. A single sentence describing them follows with two traits after that. Examples of the traits are being sleepy, a role model, easily distracted, etc. with a description of the trait. Lastly, there’s a bit of dialogue to demonstrate how the NPC talks. The set includes 20 NPC cards. I’d love it if Wizards sold more NPC cards, either to go with adventure sets or misc. ones a DM could weave into their own campaign.
DMs get maps. Specifically, the set includes five full-color, full-size maps and four full-color, half-size maps, all printed on heavy, coated paper so they should stand up to wear and tear fairly well.
The set also includes some paper props for role-playing. One is a letter from the Castellan of the Keep on the Borderlands. One is a menu for the Drunken Dragon. One is a sheet of items for sale, with images of each, at the local provisioner. A similar sheet shows the armor and weapons for sale at the local trader. Lastly, a flyer with Sacred Services that are available round out the set.
My favorite component might be a small pad of Combat Tracker sheets. Wizards should sell those separately, too. And, of course, a set of 11 polyhedral dice are included. That’s one each of a d4, d8, d12, two d10s, two d20s, and four d6s.
Onward to Adventure
As the title of the set indicates, the included adventure is a 5E adaptation (for either version) of Keep on the Borderlands, from the old D&D Basic Set. KotB is frequently used to introduce new players to D&D because of certain design elements, but I think some of them work better than others.The adventure is broken into three booklets – Wilderness, Caves of Chaos, and Keep on the Borderlands. Notes to the DM say that they can be used in any order, but anyone new to D&D might best to start with the Wilderness booklet. Milestone experience is used for simplicity.
One of the design elements that make KotB good for new players is that each section demonstrates one of the pillars of D&D – exploration, combat, and social interactions. That said, combat is possible in any segment. The keep itself is designed to be a potential home base for the characters they can retreat to while exploring the Caves of Chaos. The keep also gives them a place to get services such as healing, provisioning, etc.
The caves are filled with various low-level creatures of competing factions and alliances. While the wilderness booklet is primary exploration, it also includes various encounters.
I don’t love KotB because its from an era and style of D&D where modules involved a significant DIY element. They contained settings and encounters with little to no story. The idea behind that was to give the DM complete freedom to tell their own story and recreate it as needed in the future for other adventures. NPCs weren’t even given names, so this version of KotB is already a step up from the original in my opinion.
In a starter set like this I can forgive the looser adventure outline, but don’t prefer the lack of story. Normally, I love flexibility, and I’ve written before about how I will use components from printed adventures for my own campaigns. Still, when I buy an adventure, I generally don’t want to do the work of coming up with a story, naming NPCs, etc. That’s a bit too much, and I might as well start from scratch.
Here, it’s a bit more tolerable, and I know some folks will even prefer it. My concern is that if the adventure is being run by someone brand new to D&D, that much freedom might be overwhelming. Adding a thin but serviceable plot option might have been nice that could have been used or ignored, based on the DM’s preference and confidence level.
Should You Buy It?
I really like the thought that went into this Starter Set. It was clearly focused on how to lowering the barrier to play as much as they could while keeping the feel of D&D. Many roads can lead to sitting down at a gaming table and rolling dice. Maybe a person has heard of D&D and is curious. Maybe a person has friends who play and want to see what the fuss is about. When I ran D&D Adventurers League at a local store I had a steady stream of newcomers who had watched Critical Role or another Actual Play campaign and wanted to try it.While the last group often had a better sense than the other two as to how to create a character, it still took considerable time to explain things and help them create a character (very, very few wanted to play a pre-gen). Anything that speeds up the process and lets a newcomer go from “this is what I want to play” to actually playing is win.
The Starter Set doesn’t give newcomers the full span of options a person gets from the Players Handbook but that also prevents overwhelm and analysis paralysis. The Starter Set only provides character builds up to level 3. Oddly, it doesn’t say anything about how to transition to further play. Obviously, they’ll need to start using the PHB but it’s strange that there isn’t a sentence somewhere suggesting that.
The simplified character creation here strikes a good balance between letting the player customize their character without taking a long time or forcing them to flip back and forth in a book they’re not familiar with. Sure it limits you to the four basic classes but that’s generally the case in the starter sets.
The use of cards for Backgrounds, Species, Monsters, Spells, Magic Items, and NPCs is convenient and easy. That said, I am a bit biased on that point since I’m designing a card-based RPG.
If you’ve been playing D&D for years, you don’t need this Starter Set. However, if you DM for kids or newcomers, the components in this set could be very useful as you teach them the game and get them up to speed.
If you and your group are newcomers, like some of the many people who have tried D&D after watching Actual Play videos, the D&D Starter Set: Heroes of the Borderlands is a good way to get try the game, and see if you want to delve in deeper.
The lead designer on the starter set is Justice Ramin Arman, who previously worked at Beadle & Grimm’s. This is not a luxury set like B&G produces, but it’s clear that Arman is bringing some ideas that worked there to Wizards, which is a win. Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins also worked on this set before they left the company. That’s rather bittersweet for those of us who enjoyed their work.
I really liked the way Arman and company put together the set and the thought put into it, though I have a few quibbles (like the creature names on the art side of the Monster cards). That said, I’ve never been a fan of Keep on the Borderlands or Caves of Chaos, despite the tradition of using them in the Starter Sets. I’d create a different adventure for it. That makes my overall rating: A-.
