Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk can really only be described as a book of two parts, and it’s basically impossible to review it as anything else.

The first part is more or less a reprint of Lost Mine of Phandelver, the classic adventure that went out of print in 2022 when the original 5^th Edition Starter Set was discontinued. I strongly suspect that this was the entire modus operandi for Phandelver and Below: Wizards of the Coast wanted to replace the Starter Set with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, but they knew Lost Mine of Phandelver was a great and well-loved adventure, so they wanted to find a way to keep it in print.

Unfortunately, Lost Mine of Phandelver wasn’t large enough to be its own hardcover release, and so it was grafted to The Shattered Obelisk, a Tier 2 adventure in which mind flayers search for the seven pieces of an obelisk which they can use to power a ritual which will transform the Phandelver region into… uh… let’s say an extrusion of the nightmarish Far Realm. The book is kinda vague about this, presumably because it will go to any lengths in order to railroad the PCs to ensure the pre-scripted outcome, so the specific details of what the mind flayers are trying to do doesn’t really matter.

On that note, it feels weird that “take a decent Tier 1 sandbox and then awkwardly bolt a Tier 2 railroad onto it” should be a recognizable formula from Wizards of the Coast, but I guess somebody thinks that’s a good structure for a campaign.

(It isn’t.)

And if you think that bodes ill for The Shattered Obelisk… well, strap in. Because we’ve barely gotten started.

GRAFFITI ON A MASTERPIECE

In my original review of the 2014 Starter Set, I described the original Lost Mine of Phandelver as being “the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had.”

The version of Lost Mine of Phandelver found in The Shattered Obelisk is largely identical to the original, and it therefore remains a good Tier 1 campaign… mostly. The problem is that the designers have, in fact, made a bunch of minor changes, and, as far as I can tell, every single one of them makes the adventure worse.

Imagine you’re looking at Michelangelo’s David, but somebody has decided it would look better if they spraypainted some random graffiti on it. Fundamentally, it’s still Michelangelo’s David. It’s a masterpiece. But the graffiti seems problematic, right?

For example, the original adventure hook is that the PCs have been hired by Gundren Rockseeker to escort a wagon of supplies to Phandalin while he rides ahead to begin making arrangements for his business affairs. This hook is specific, detailed, and directly tied into the first encounter that actually kickstarts the campaign: The PCs find Gundren’s dead horse on the road, realize he’s been kidnapped by goblins, and need to rescue him.

For The Shattered Obelisk, the designers decided that they should include alternative hooks. This isn’t a bad impulse, but the hooks they came up with were:

1. The PCs randomly decide to head to Phandalin because… uh… maybe they can do something there (what, exactly?) that will impress the Harpers so that they can join up.
2. The PCs decide to head to Phandalin to meet with a representative of the Order of the Gauntlet so that they can then… join up somewhere else?

The problem here is not just that these are just generic mush. (Although that is a problem.) They’re also not hooked into the actual structure of the adventure. In fact, they actively muck up the original, organic pacing of the original Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the PCs are assessed by local faction reps and offered membership based on their actions. Reversing cause and effect here isn’t a neutral change; it makes the adventure worse.

To be fair, the original Lost Mine of Phandelver never actually pays off the PCs joining one of these factions, which is too bad, but understandable because the adventure ends before that can happen (and it’s left as a seed that the DM can use to plan out their Tier 2 campaign). The Shattered Obelisk, of course, provides the Tier 2 campaign, and so it has the opportunity to actually develop and pay off the PCs’ relationships with these factions.

… an opportunity which it does not take.

This is really indicative of how half-assed these changes are, which is also evidenced by the fact that the opening boxed text of the adventure is completely unaltered and still refers exclusively to the original Rockseer adventure hook.

The immediately ensuing opening encounter, however, has also been changed: In the original adventure, the PCs discover two dead horses lying in the road. In the revised version, the two horses are still alive and just kind of wandering around the road.

Again, this seems like a minor change, but it isn’t: Dead horses send a clear message of DANGER, which is important because there are four goblins waiting to ambush characters who approach the horses. Furthermore, the tactics section for these goblins have been changed, making it much more likely that this initial encounter will result in an immediate TPK.

As I mentioned, these changes are frequent and the problems they create are pervasive, which can perhaps be best demonstrated by looking at the “foreshadowing” for the mind flayer portion of the campaign which has been introduced into Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Again, this makes sense. Obviously you’d want to foreshadow the new adventure and link it to the existing material so that the whole campaign would feel like a cohesive whole! And there are a bunch of obvious ways you could do that:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant links there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair.
• We could actually just put an obelisk fragment in the Phandelver mine itself! Finding this fragment alerts the mind flayers to the presence of a shattered obelisk in the Phandalin region, triggering the next phase of the campaign!

But the designers do none of these things. Instead, they “foreshadow” the mind flayer plot by randomly pasting psionic goblins into various encounters. These psionic goblins do things that are best described as LOL-so-random-LOL, and it’s difficult to really convey just how dumb this is. Here’s the first reference to them, which comes from questioning the Cragmaw goblins from the first encounter:

Strange Goblins. Recently, strange goblins have sometimes joined the Cragmaws in their road-ambushes, though not today. These strange goblins have elongated skulls, and glowing green energy surrounds their weapons when they attack. The Cragmaw goblins don’t know who these newcomers are; the new goblins simply cackle and leave after each attack.

None of this makes any sense. Why would you allow random people to join your ambush? More importantly, why are the psionic goblins doing this? It’s not just the Cragmaw goblins who don’t know. The designers don’t either.

Even the decision to choose psionic goblins to be the minions of the mind flayers is fraught, because — as you’ve seen — the completely unrelated bad guys in Lost Mine of Phandelver are also goblins. You could have added the word “psionic” to literally anything else in the Monster Manual and it would have been a better choice: It would have mixed things up and helped keep the campaign fresh. It also would have made things significantly less confusing for the players.

STOP HUFFING YOUR OWN HYPE

I have unfortunately learned that if Wizards’ marketing promises some big, amazing thing in their next adventure book, it’s a virtual certainty that the book itself will completely fail to deliver on that promise.

• Dragon Heist doesn’t feature a heist (and also doesn’t include the promised links to Undermountain).
• Descent Into Avernus breathlessly promised Mad Max in Hell, but then only included a couple pages about infernal war machines before immediately forgetting that they exist for the rest of the book.
• Shadows on the Dragon Queen promised full integration with Warriors of Krynn so that you could play your own PCs on the battlefields of the wargame… and then just forgot to do that.

So when the marketing for Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk promised to reveal the TRUTH ABOUT THE OBELISKS which had been seen in previous 5^th Edition adventures like Tomb of Annihilation, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden… well, you know what happened.

First, the “truth” about the obelisks is completely irrelevant to The Shattered Obelisk. In fact, I’m uncertain how the PCs could even learn the “truth.”

Second, literally nothing new is revealed about the obelisks. The four paragraphs tucked away into the “Netherese Obelisks” appendix at the back of the book are just a rewritten version of the “Secret of the Obelisks” sidebar that appeared in Rime of the Frostmaiden back in 2020.

And, ultimately, this is really unsurprising. Because the Cylons Wizards’ designers don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. “Weird obelisk” is a common genre trope, so they just coincidentally showed up as flavor text in a bunch of different adventures. Then fans noticed the “pattern” and created a Grand Conspiracy out of it. In the context of The Shattered Obelisk as a book, this doesn’t even count as a flub: The book doesn’t need or even seem to want a grand “truth about the Obelisks,” so it doesn’t matter that one isn’t included.

But Wizards needs to stop selling their books by lying about them.

And if you were planning to buy The Shattered Obelisk because you were looking forward to learning the truth about the Obelisks… well, you deserve to know that it was a lie and you won’t get it.

Go to Part 2: Obelisk Hunting

Alice is Missing is a stunningly beautiful storytelling game that delivers an utterly unique and unforgettable experience. I’ve played it twice, with different groups, and each game was profound. Every player was deeply affected, and several texted the group the next morning to say that they’d dreamed about the events of the game.

The premise of Alice is Missing is in the title: A high school student named Alice has gone missing, and the players will take on the roles of her friends as they try to figure out what happened while dealing with the emotional trauma of her disappearance.

The central conceit of the game is this: You don’t talk. Instead, all of your interactions — all of your roleplaying — takes place via text messaging.

HOW IT WORKS

You can play with three to five players and you’ll start by each selecting one of the five broad, archetypal characters provided. These are quickly fleshed out with Drives, which provide Motives (a key personality trait) and two Relationships, which you’ll assign to two different player characters. It’s a fairly quick process that creates a remarkably broad dynamic of play while keeping the structure of play focused.

Now the Facilitator will start a group text message with all participants by sending a text with their character name in it. All the other players reply by sending their character name, at which point everyone should create a contact for that number (if they don’t have one already) and change its name to the character’s name.

At this point play begins: The Facilitator will open an Alice is Missing video which provides both a soundtrack and a 90-minute timer. From this point forward, no one speaks: The Facilitator will send a message initiating the game, and then everyone will spend the next hour and a half texting.

The core mechanic of the game revolves around Clue cards. These are synced to the timer — so, for example, there’s an 80 minute clue card, a 70 minute clue card, and so forth. There are three different cards for each time interval, and these can be freely intermixed, resulting in thousands of potential game states.

Each Clue card contains a prompt for the player who draws it:

• Reveal a Suspect card. This person shows up at your door acting suspicious. What weird question about Alice do they keep asking you?
• Reveal a Location card. You dig up some weird or unexpected history about this location. What do you learn about this place that would make it the perfect spot to hide?

The player creates the answer to this question and introduces it into the group chat, pushing the narrative of the game forward.

As you can see from these examples, the game also includes Suspect cards and Location cards. These help shape the mystery of Alice’s disappearance, and a number of clever mechanics are used to make sure that the narrative in the back half of the game evolves logically and naturally from the foundation laid down in the first half of the game, even as it’s ultimately being guided by the player’s creativity.

Finally, the game provides a deck of Searching cards which are more flexible: Whenever a PC decides to go somewhere without being prompted by a Clue card, they should draw a card from the Searching deck to reveal what they discover there. (Examples include “a drop of blood in the fresh snow” and “a loaded firearm.”)

SOME GRIT IN THE GEARS

Overall, Alice is Missing does an excellent job of walking a new player through the rules. The rulebook is actually split into two parts: The first is an in-depth explanation of the rules, and the second is a Facilitator’s Guide which walks the Facilitator (most likely the game’s owner) through the exact steps they should take to explain the rules to the other players (including short scripts they should read at every step).

This is crucial to the game’s success, because if everyone at the table isn’t completely onboard with the rules, the central conceit of silent gameplay won’t work and the game will fall apart. Spenser Starke, the designer, deserves major kudos not just for a great game, but for making sure the presentation of the game was everything it needed to be.

With that being said, there are a few places where grit gets into the gears, and I’m going to point them out so that when you play Alice is Missing you can hopefully benefit from my experience and avoid them.

First, the game comes in a lovely box that suggests completeness. Unfortunately, the box is missing components. There are no character sheets, for example, and there’s also supposed to be a stack of missing person posters that isn’t in the box. These are all easily downloadable from the publisher’s website (at least for now), but these aren’t just optional supplements: The rulebook will tell you to, for example, select a missing person poster, and you won’t be able to. (So make sure you track these down ahead of time and print them out.)

Speaking of the character sheets, they’re too small. For example:

In the half-inch by three-inch space between “Charlie Barnes” and “Dakota Travis,”you’re supposed to write down their physical description, favorite class, home life, etc. plus the answer to their Background question plus more… You can’t do it. The character sheet should have been designed as a full-page sheet and probably also double-sided to work properly.

After everyone picks their characters, they’re encouraged to specify their character’s pronouns. This is great in principle, but Alice is Missing completely flubs the execution by constantly referring to the characters by predetermined pronouns (and even baking this into the mechanics). Points for trying, but beaucoup negative points for failing. (A close edit of the rulebook to remove predetermined pronouns and, most especially, removing gendered identities from the character roles would be the minimum required to fix this. Ideally, I’d also want all the character names to be gender neutral.)

On a similar note, every character has a Secret. These are listed on the character cards, and so when the Facilitator is instructed to lay the character cards out in front of the players and have them select which characters they want to play, all of the players are going to read every single character’s Secret. The Facilitator’s script then almost immediately says, “Do not share your Secret — it should come out in play.”

This is not actually a problem: The players are not their characters, and what the rulebook means is that the answer to your Secret prompt question should not be included in your character introduction, but instead revealed during play. But every single group I’ve played this with has immediately gone, “Wait. Did we screw up? I read the Secrets!” It’s a very minor thing, but it’s a consistent irritation and it’s probably worth thinking about how you want to tweak that particular point of presentation to sidestep it.

My final critique of Alice is Missing is more significant: The rulebook sets things up so that the Facilitator is always playing the character of Charlie Barnes.

I can understand why they’ve done this. (It allows them to script specific examples into the scripts in the Facilitator’s Guide.) But it makes for a really bad experience if you’re the one who owns the game and is, therefore, always the Facilitator introducing new players to it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix this and let the Facilitator play any of the characters. (But it will require some edits to the guide and its procedures.)

WHAT MAKES IT BRILLIANT

I took the time to highlight all these little minor bits of grit in the gears of Alice is Missing because you’ll want to know about them when you play the game.

And you will want to play this game.

Because it’s brilliant.

The mechanics are elegant, easily grasped, and expertly tuned by Starke to effortlessly guide almost any group to a powerful story which is nevertheless unique every time. It’s a true exemplar of storytelling game design.

The novelty of the experience certainly helps to make it memorable, but the true brilliance of Alice is Missing is more than that. It’s a game that effortlessly immerses you in your character: The experience of play — focused through your text messaging app — is seamlessly identical to the character’s own experience.

You know how the world can sometimes sort of drop away when you get focused on your phone? Starke leverages that fugue state — everything else drops away, and the only thing you’re truly experiencing is the world of the text messages. A world where you’re not talking to your friends; you’re talking to Charlie and Dakota and Julia. (This is why it’s so important to change your contact names before playing.)

In addition, the text-based medium automatically leads the player to create the game world through a creative closure which is nigh-indistinguishable from the closure you perform every day in the real world. When Julia, for example, texts you to say, “There’s someone outside my window!” you immediately imagine that scene in exactly the same way you would if one of your actual friends texted that to you.

The power of that in a roleplaying experience really can’t be underestimated.

Either of these two things — the near-flawless mechanical design or the novel genius of the text-based roleplaying — would make the game worth checking out.

The two together?

Alice is Missing is one of the best storytelling games ever made.

Grade: A+

Designer: Spenser Starke

Publisher: Hunters Entertainment / Renegade Game Studios
Cost: $21.99
Page Count: 48
Card Count: 72

I’ve previously reviewed the D&D Starter Set (2014) and the D&D Essentials Kit (2019). Now we turn our eyes to the third major introductory boxed set for D&D 5^th Edition: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.

In 2022, the original D&D Starter Set was discontinued and replaced with D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. I suspect that, as I discussed in my review of the Essentials Kit, the primary motivation for this change remained the desire to create a new product that could be marketed to big box stores which had stopped carrying the original Starter Set: As we’ll see, very little is altered or upgraded here, and the only substantive change — replacing the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure with the new adventure Dragons of Stormwreck Isle — could hardly be motivated by a lack of faith in the original adventure material, since plans were simultaneously made to repurpose the adventure as the opening act of the Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk campaign book.

So Wizards of the Coast’s intention seems to have been a direct swap from one Starter Set to another with as little change as possible. The first question is: Was this a good idea?

Well… probably not. The Essentials Kit had already featured a bunch of substantive improvements in the 5^th Edition introductory boxed sets, all of which Stormwreck Isle rolls back:

• The dice set is incomplete.
• The booklets lack cardstock covers.
• Character creation is once again missing.

So rather than continuing to refine and improve the introductory box format, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is, prima facie, a big step backwards in a way that feels like a completely unforced error.

Unfortunately, things don’t improve once you start reading the booklets.

RULEBOOK v. RULEBOOK

In terms of basic mechanics, the Starter Set Rulebook in Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is largely identical to the one found in the original Starter Set.

A closer comparison, however, reveals that a bunch of material has been removed. Some of this is just weird, like missing gold piece costs for armor (but not for weapons). But there’s also some pretty deep cuts, like the section on adventuring gear being gutted to a tiny fraction of the equipment originally covered.

More immediately obvious is that only a fraction of the spell list from the original Starter Set has been included. Similarly, over in the adventure booklet, the bestiary has also been reduced to a fraction of its original size (and the selection is far more limited in its breadth).

I heaped praise on the original Starter Set for not being designed as a disposable product: It felt like a complete game, and (with the exception of character creation being missing) could easily support a DM who wanted to run multiple Tier 1 campaigns.

The net effect of all these degradations to the rulebook, unfortunately, means that this is NOT true of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. This is a boxed set you use once and then throw away. It’s an advertisement for a fully functional game, and you pay for the “privilege” of being told that you should have bought a different product.

So the question of whether or not Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is, in fact, a product that you should buy – whether for yourself or someone else interested in playing D&D for the first time — is going to almost entirely come down to how good the included adventure is.

DRAGONS OF STORMWRECK ISLE

SPOILERS FOR THE ADVENTURE!

Something else missing from Dragons of Stormwreck Isle are the sidekick rules from the Essentials Kit, which were super useful because they allowed first time DMs to start running the game even if they could only find one or two people interested in joining them.

Stormwreck Isle tries to plaster over this lack by simply suggesting that players could play multiple pregen characters. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it does lead to some truly terrible advice:

A player with two characters should treat one of them as their main character and the other as a sidekick, there to help out but probably not engaging in a lot of dialogue.

If you kinda squint and try to give them the benefit of the doubt, you can see the potentially good intention of making sure that a new player doesn’t feel overwhelmed trying to roleplay multiple characters. But what they actually told the player to do is dissociate from the game world and treat characters as if they were game piece tokens.

Which is… not great.

In fact, there’s a lot of “not great” when it comes to how Dragons of Stormwreck Isle instructs both players and GMs in how to play the game. One of the things that made Lost Mine of Phandelver a great introductory adventure was that it was an excellent exemplar of what D&D adventures should look like and how they should be run. Sadly, this is not the case with Stormwreck Isle.

Instead you get bad boxed text that, for example, repeatedly takes control of the PCs away from the players and turns them into puppets.

The DM is instructed to have the world level up with the PCs. (Oof.)

There’s a section of the adventure where the PCs have the opportunity to tame a trained owlbear that’s lost its owners and gone slightly feral. This is really cool! … but then the adventure says, “Oh, no! The PCs aren’t allowed to have cool things!” and goes to great lengths to erect contrived barriers to prevent the PCs from actually using their trained owlbear.

These are all terrible lessons to be teaching new DMs by both instruction and example.

Is this intentional?

Mostly not, I suspect. The adventure is simply sloppy, careless, and amateurish in its execution, and therefore sets a sloppy, careless, and bad example for the DM.

The basic structure of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle breaks down like this:

• The pregen PCs have personal goals that bring them to Stormwreck Isle, with all of them arriving on the same boat.
• They gain the patronage of Runara, a bronze dragon (appearing in human form) who runs the local monastery.
• They’re given the option of going on one of two different adventures.
• After going on the first adventure, they go on the second.
• With both adventures complete, Runara reveals herself and sends the PCs to the Clifftop Observatory, where her former apprentice (also a dragon) has turned to evil and is doing an evil ritual that the PCs need to stop.

This lacks the ambition of Lost Mine of Phandelver and feels fairly anemic by comparison, but is mostly inoffensive.

Notably, however, the reason Runara doesn’t send the PCs immediately to Clifftop Observatory (despite potentially apocalyptic stakes) is because they aren’t experienced enough and will likely die. Which is true.

… and yet one of the pregens has the personal goal of explicitly checking out the Clifftop Observatory. Which is trivial to locate and which they can just walk to at any time. The personal goal is a path straight to death.

This is just bad design. It’s setting a new DM up to fail.

The other major problem I have with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is that everything is plagued by a severe lack of basic internal logic.

To take just one example, the island has been plagued for forty years by the zombies of dead sailors who have drowned when their ships have wrecked on the reefs north of the island.

It turns out the source of the problem is a cursed locket onboard the wreck of the Compass Rose. The zombie problem can be solved if the PCs take the locket to a gravesite on the island where the lover of the young girl who cursed the locket is buried. The PCs will know to do this because they’ll find the captain’s log of the Compass Rose in the wreck, the final entry of which describes the creation of the cursed locket, the zombies rising from the dead, and then concludes with:

I am securing her talisman with this book in my chest, in the hope that someone who comes after us may end this nightmare by bringing Altheia’s talisman to her husband.

So, first off: Why not just take the locket yourself? “Lemme just write this log entry, carefully lock it up, and hope somebody stops by!”

But more importantly, Runara sends them on this quest knowing the Compass Rose is the source of the zombie problem: If the PCs ask questions about the zombies, she tells them the ship is the source of the problem and sends them to check it out.

Remember: Runara is a bronze dragon. Which means she could have easily dealt with the zombies on the Compass Rose and solved the problem literally decades ago.

Instead she’s just sat around and watched people die for no reason.

THE VERDICT

Although it superficially looks similar to the original Starter Set at first glance, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is a deeply crippled product. The bottom line is that, for as long as it remains available, the Essentials Kit is a massively superior introductory boxed set and it’s definitely the one you should buy.

This mostly leaves the question of whether or not you should buy Dragons of Stormwreck Isle in addition to the Essentials Kit, the core rulebooks, or whatever other method you choose as your introduction to D&D 5^th Edition. And that question, in my opinion, is going to depend almost entirely on the quality and utility of the adventure.

As a starter set adventure, of course, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle naturally invites direct comparison to Lost Mine of Phandelver. And, as I wrote in my review of the original D&D Starter Set, I think Lost Mine of Phandelver is the best introductory adventure D&D has ever had. So, first, a regression to the mean is perhaps inevitable. And, second, it’s pretty easy, in a direct comparison between the two, for us to be unduly harsh on Stormwreck Isle’s inadequacies.

Standing entirely on its own merits, therefore, how good is Dragons of Stormwreck Isle?

And I think the best answer I can give to that question is:

Mediocre.

The functional, but not daring, set pieces of the adventure are strung together with fraying filament, but the filament is never so rotten that it actually breaks. Its flaws, although myriad, never completely ruin the experience. This will never be a great adventure. It will rarely be a terrible one.

Overall, however, this leaves the D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle in rather rough shape: A crippleware rulebook wedded to a mediocre adventure, packaged with a barely adequate set of dice.

Perhaps the best case scenario we can hope for at this point is that, with the release of 2024 D&D (whatever we end up calling it), Wizards gets the opportunity for a do-over and will produce a new Starter Set that capitalizes on its previous successes instead of diminishing them.

Grade: C-

Rulebook Designer: Jeremy Crawford
Lead Adventure Designer: James Wyatt
Additional Adventure Design: Sydney Adams, Makenzie De Armas, Dan Dillon

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 80

Buy Now!

The original 5^th Edition D&D Starter Set was released in 2014, reaching shelves shortly before the core rulebooks.

In 2019, Wizards of the Coast released a new introductory boxed set: The D&D Essentials Kit.

Your first thought might be that they were replacing the Starter Set with a new and improved game box, but this wasn’t the case: The Starter Set remained in print and on shelves next to the Essentials Kit until early 2022, when it was replaced by the new D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.

(Along the way, Wizards also published additional starter sets featuring Stranger Things and Rick & Morty.)

So why do we have so many introductory boxed sets?

I suspect it has less to do with what’s inside the box and more to do with the box existing in the first place.

In the mass market and big box stores, entertainment products have a shelf life: If you’re successful enough to crack that market in the first place, your game will be stocked, it will sell, and then at some point the big box stores will stop stocking the game and the sales will stop. If you’re lucky, this will be based on your sales (because if you can keep selling, then you can keep selling), but more often it’s just a matter of time: Automated reorder systems will play it safe by ordering fewer copies each time; which results in fewer sales; which results in a smaller reorder or, eventually, no reorder at all.

By having multiple introductory boxed sets for sale, Wizards of the Coast pays a cost in customer confusion: Someone wanting to play D&D for the first time may become uncertain which of these nigh-identical products they should buy.

But what they gain is a new SKU; a new product code. Each time they release a new SKU, it’s a fresh opportunity for their marketing team to go back to the big box stores that have dropped the previous boxed set and get D&D back on the shelf in Target or Walmart or Barnes & Noble.

If you’re reading this review, though, you’re probably not an account manager at Walmart. (If you are, there’s a book you should definitely acquire.) You’re a gamer. Or maybe a search engine brought you here because you’re interested in becoming a D&D player.

So if you’re looking for your own introduction to D&D, is the Essentials Kit what you should pick up? Is it worth grabbing a copy if you already own the D&D Starter Set? What if you already own the core rulebooks?

This review will probably make more sense if you’re familiar with my review of the D&D Starter Set, so you might want to read that if you haven’t already. But here’s a quick overview of what I’m looking for in an introductory boxed set like the Essentials Kit:

• A meaty, full-featured version of D&D.
• An introduction for complete neophytes to roleplaying games that would not only teach them how to play, but how to be a Dungeon Master.
• A complete gaming experience, even if you never picked up the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide.

OPENING THE BOX

So let’s take a peek inside the D&D Essentials Kit.

Where the D&D Starter Set was fairly barebones, the Essentials Kit packs in a bunch of gimmicks and gewgaws to fill the box:

• The 64-page Essentials Kit Rulebook, doubling the size of the 32-page rulebook from the D&D Starter Set. (Notably absent, however, is the index that the D&D Starter Set included.)
• The 64-page Dragon of Icespire Peak, which serves as an adventure book and monster manual.
• Six blank character sheets.
• A full set of dice.
• A two-sided poster map of Phandlin and a hexmap of the surrounding area.
• A mini-DM screen.
• 108 cards on perforated sheets, including initiative cards, quest cards, an oddly arbitrary selection of NPCs, magic items, and conditions.
• A cardboard tuck box for your cards.

Notably, both the rulebook and the adventure book have been given cardstock covers, replacing the flimsy pamphlets from the D&D Starter Set with books that can actually endure some meaningful use at the table. This was a shortcoming I called out in my review of the Starter Set, and it’s great to see it improved here. Along similar lines, the dice set in the Essentials Kit is larger, including the second d20 (for advantage/disadvantage rolls) and 4d6 whose absence I’d noted.

I’d also mentioned that a poster map of the region around Phandalin would have been a great addition to the D&D Starter Set… and here it is! Including a mini-DM screen is also an inspired choice, not only giving the game a little more “table presence” when you get set up for play, but also giving the new DM a valuable cheat sheet that will help them master the game.

I’m a little more agnostic leaning towards pessimistic when it comes to the cards. There’s a mishmash of stuff here:

• Condition cards.
• Initiative count cards.
• Sidekick cards.
• Quest cards.
• Magic items.

I find the basic utility for quite a few of these cards fairly suspect, and while I respect the quixotic quest to include “value-add” components to introductory boxed sets down through the ages, I think it mostly sets up a false expectation of what you “need” to run a D&D adventure.

(You do not, in fact, need to prep quest cards or NPC cards.)

Your mileage may vary.

RULEBOOK v. RULEBOOK

Before opening the Essentials Kit box, I was actually expecting to find the exact same rulebook that Wizards of the Coast had used in the D&D Starter Set. The rules of the game, after all, hadn’t changed.

Instead, the Essentials Kit Rulebook has doubled in size, from 32 pages to 64 pages!

There are several reasons for this, but the biggest one is that the Essentials Kit Rulebook includes character creation! Which was another thing I thought was missing from the D&D Starter Kit! This is fabulous!

But there are a couple things that could have made it even better. First, the ideal introductory boxed set would include both character creation rules and pregen characters. Character creation gives you a fully functional game, while pregens let new players leap directly into the action.

Second, if you’re going to have a bunch of these introductory boxed sets in print at the same time, I’d love to see them go a little wild with the class/race selections. If the D&D Starter Set features human/dwarf/elf and fighter/cleric/rogue/wizard, I’d have loved to see the Essentials Kit feature something like dragonborn/gnome/half-orc/tiefling and druid/monk/ranger/warlock. Mix it up! Instead, the selection here is pretty tame (although they do toss bards into the mix).

Another major addition here are rules for Sidekicks. This is a very smart addition, because it lets a DM easily run the game for a single player (playing a PC plus sidekick). That’s huge for an introductory boxed set, because it makes it a lot easier for a new player looking to play D&D for the first time to start playing.

It’s interesting looking through the two rulebooks side by side and seeing how the sequencing of information shifts subtly from one to the other, but for the most part everything seems to be pretty equivalent. (With the exception of experience points, which have been removed from the Essentials Kit.)

There are a couple other bits of rules-type content that don’t technically appear in the Essentials Kit Rulebook, but which I want to comment on here: Monsters appear as an appendix in the adventure book and magic items have been moved onto the item cards.

The monsters are given better descriptions in the Essentials Kit than in the Starter Set, but I found the selection of both monsters and magic items disappointing. There’s not really a way for me to objectively demonstrate this, but looking at the Starter Set I felt like I could take the included magic items and monsters and remix them to create a bunch of different adventures. But with the Essentials Kit, I just… don’t. It feels like there’s a lack of variety, or that key niches have been left unaddressed.

So the inclusion of character creation is a major upgrade for me, but overall I think, from a mechanics standpoint, that the Essentials Kit is something of a mixed bag for me. But I think it has a slight edge over the Starter Set here.

DRAGON OF ICESPIRE PEAK

The Essentials Kit includes an all-new adventure book: Dragon of Icespire Peak.

Like the Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set, however, Dragon of Icespire Peak is set in the village of Phandalin.

In fact, at first glance, Dragons of Icespire Peak is structurally very similar to Lost Mine of Phandelver: You’ve got a bunch of individual adventures, forming a complete Tier 1 campaign. You don’t need to complete these adventures in any particular order, with the PCs being able to gather adventure hooks in the hub of Phandalin and then choose which ones they want to pursue. The whole thing ultimately culminates in a cap adventure where the PCs hunt down the titular dragon that’s plaguing the region.

So this should be just as good as Lost Mine of Phandelver, right?

… right?

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: It’s not.

Dragon of Icespire Speak gets off on the wrong foot, in my opinion, from the very beginning by giving some absolutely terrible advice to the first-time DM: Instead of reading the adventure book ahead of time, the DM is instructed to wait until the players are creating their characters and then “read ahead” to figure out how the adventure works.

(This is despite the fact that, on the same page, the DM is told that part of their role is to help the players create their characters. So… yeah. Do that and also read the adventure for the first time. At the same time.)

I think what they’re trying to do is support people who want to open the box and immediately play the game: They’d obviously have to claw out some time during the session to read the adventure, right? Realistically speaking, however, this is never going to happen: There’s a 64-page rulebook that needs to be digested before play can begin. So all you’re left with is some terrible guidance that will lead new DMs straight into an almost certainly horrific first-time experience at the gaming table.

This is particularly true because Dragon of Icespire Peak isn’t designed with a single initial scenario. Instead, the campaign begins with the PCs standing in front of a jobs board posted outside the townmaster’s hall, where they’ll immediately be able to choose between three different adventures. (Read fast, Dungeon Master!)

This jobs board is, in fact, the primary structural problem I have with Dragon of Icespire Peak. Unlike Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the adventures were all connected to each other and emerged organically from interactions with the game world, Dragon of Icespire Peak primarily delivers Quests by having the DM hand the players a Quest Card when they read the Quest on Harbin Wester’s job board.

The result is an experience which has been video-gamified.

To be clear here, I don’t have an inherent problem with using a jobs board in D&D. The problem here is the implementation.

To start with, for many of the Quests there’s no clear mechanism by which Harbin Wester could have become aware of them. In other cases, the continuity doesn’t make sense. For example, there’s one quest where the PCs are sent to check on a ranch that was attacked by orcs:

• Orcs attacked the ranch. Almost everyone there was killed.
• “Big Al” Kalazorn, the ranch owner, was captured.
• A ranch hand escaped and rode to Phandalin.
• Harbin Wester then waited ten days before sending the PCs to see if Kalazorn is still alive.

In addition to frequently not making any sense, these quests are all disconnected from the world around them. In fact, the adventure frequently seems to go out of its way to eschew these connections!

For example, there’s a wilderness encounter in which the PCs stumble across an unattended riding horse branded with BAK (for “Big Al” Kalazorn). That’s good! That’s a clue that something is wrong at Big Al’s ranch and the PCs could follow that lead and discover the adventure in a way that makes the world feel like a real place!

… except that encounter is hardcoded so that it ONLY occurs if the PCs are already on their way to the Big Al’s ranch.

This lack of continuity, context, and connection, combined with the fact they’re delivered in the most impersonal manner possible (Harbin literally hides inside his house and won’t let them in), makes all of the Quests feel like meaningless errands, something which I feel is only further emphasized by the adventure using quest-based leveling. These are not things that the players will actually care about; they are rote obligations.

A subtler difference is that Dragon of Icespire Peak’s Quests are filled with a lot of Thou Must imprecations as opposed to Lost Mine of Phandelver’s presentation of options and tacit support for open-ended play driven by the players.

On a similar note, a lot of the goals in Dragon of Icespire Peak default back to “clear the dungeon.” This, too, greatly reduces the players’ ability to creatively engage the campaign and forge their own destiny… which once again gives the sensation of trudging through obligations.

I also have a much longer list of specific concerns when it comes to the individual adventures in Dragon of Icespire Peak. Stuff like:

• There’s a 60-foot-long tunnel. If the PCs don’t declare that they’re searching for traps, the tunnel collapses when they reach the half-way point and everyone in the tunnel (which, given the length of the tunnel, is likely to be all of the PCs) is automatically buried. If you’re buried, you cannot take any actions and the only way to escape is if someone who isn’t buried helps you get out. So… yeah. That’s just an instant death trap. (And there are a bunch of other death-trap issues in this vein, like the adventure that dumps 1^st-level PCs run by neophyte players into multiple fights with ochre jellies.)
• There’s an adventure where a gnomish king has been driven insane by the knowledge that a mimic is eating his subjects. Okay… sure. But as soon as the PCs kill the mimic, the king’s insanity is instantly cured! … that is not how madness works. (Fundamental breakdowns in worldbuilding, character, and basic logic are far too frequent here.)
• That same adventure, however, has a lot of really neat ideas and interesting roleplaying opportunities. It’s fairly complicated and relatively difficult for a DM to run. Which would be okay… unless you position it so that it can be the very first adventure a brand new DM using the Essentials Kit would need to run. Which is, of course, exactly what the adventure book does. Why not scale this adventure up a couple levels so that it can come in the middle of the campaign after the DM has a bit more experience under their belt? (There’s a number of strange sequencing decisions like this.)

Dragon of Icespire Peak is, ultimately, a mediocre but passable campaign. In comparison to many other introductory adventures, it’s actually quite good. But when directly compared to Lost Mine of Phandelver — and, of course, one is more or less compelled to make that comparison — it does not fare well.

THE VERDICT

In the showdown between the D&D Starter Set and the D&D Essentials Kit, which one comes out on top?

With the D&D Starter Set out of print, of course, this is something of a moot point. The Essentials Kit wins more or less by default.

Even when both were available, however, it’s hard to pick a clear winner. I’d probably give the edge to the D&D Starter Set strictly on the strength of Lost Mine of Phandelver: In large part, and RPG lives or dies by its adventures, and Lost Mine of Phandelver is just a fundamentally better campaign.

The truth, though, is that if you were to merge these two sets together, you’d likely end up with a near-perfect starter set in the fusion: Give me the rulebook from the Essentials Kit. Give me the campaign from the Starter Set.

More than that, though, when we start talking about combining the Essentials Kit with the Starter Set, we suddenly discover that Dragon of Icespire Peak suddenly becomes vastly better simply by running it at the same time you’re running Lost Mine of Phandelver. (Which is, of course, quite trivial to do.)

Having the impersonal, decontextualized jobs board as the central pillar of your campaign is alienating and results in a shallow, forgettable, and even frustrating experience for the players. But if you take that same structure and add it as a spice to a larger campaign, suddenly it comes to life! The roots of Lost Mine of Phandelver will dig in, twining themselves around the adventures of Dragon of Icespire Peak, lending them the context and depth that they natively lack.

(I suspect this also means that the D&D Essentials Kit is a perfect companion to the Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk campaign, which remixes the material from Lost Mine of Phandelver, although I haven’t read that book yet.)

Of course, in actual practice, I’d still recommend that you’d be best served by make a number of small tweaks and modifications to contextualize, connect, and make relevant these adventures. (You could use Lost Mine of Phandelver as a model of how to do that, or check out articles like Using Revelation Lists.)

In the final analysis, the D&D Essentials Kit is a pretty solid introductory boxed set. I wish it was a little better, but I wouldn’t really hesitate giving it as a gift to someone discovering D&D for the first time. And at just $25, it’s not hard to justify grabbing a copy to supplement your Lost Mine of Phandelver, Phandelver and Below, or almost any Tier 1 campaign based out of a typical fantasy village.

Grade: B-

Rulebook Designer: Jeremy Crawford
Adventure Designer: Christopher Perkins
Additional Adventure Design: Richard Baker
Adventure Development: Ben Petrisor

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $24.95
Page Count: 128

FURTHER READING
Review: D&D Starter Set (2014)
Review: Dragons of Storm Wreck Isle (2022 Starter Set)

Buy Now!

With Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk arriving on bookshelves as we enter the twilight months of 5^th Edition in anticipation of the release of D&D 2024 / OneD&D / whatever we end up calling it, I thought it would be interesting to go all the way back to the beginning and take a peek at the D&D Starter Set first published in 2014.

But let’s start by going even further back and discussing the history of D&D introductory sets. (This is something I discuss in even more detail in Every Edition of D&D if you want to go on a real deep dive.)

D&D was originally published as a boxed set in 1974. In 1977, however, the product line bifurcated: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be published as a set of three hardcover books, while Dungeons & Dragons would be published in the boxed Basic Set. (This is why that version of the game is often called Basic D&D.)

In 1981, the Basic Set was revamped and an Expert Set was added as a supplement. In 1983, the Basic and Expert sets were revamped again, and the Companion, Master, and Immortals boxed sets were also added.

Now, here’s the key thing: Dungeons & Dragons was NOT the same game as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Basic Set (and its supplements) were a complete, stand-alone game that even had its own campaign worlds and adventures.

Starting in 1991, this changed. The Basic D&D game remained distinct from AD&D for a while longer, but its rules were compiled into the Rules Cyclopedia. Later, after Wizards of the Coast bought D&D, they would end Basic D&D and drop the “Advanced” moniker from the 3^rd Edition of AD&D (now referred to simply as D&D). A multitude of Basic Sets, Introductions, First Quests, Starter Sets, Adventure Games, and Basic Games would continue to be published as boxed sets, but there was an important difference:

They weren’t complete games.

They were pay-to-preview ads for the Player’s Handbook, and they were usually designed accordingly: You bought them. You played them once. Then you threw them in the trash, bought the core rulebooks, and never touched them again.

I’ve talked in the past about the fact that I think this killed D&D’s gateway product and did an incredible amount of harm to the entire RPG industry. Personally, in my ideal world, D&D would be a game sold in a box, and when new players asked, “What do I need to play D&D?” you’d say, “You need the big box with DUNGEONS & DRAGONS on the cover.” Simple.

Obviously, we don’t live in that world. But this should give you a barometer for what my ideal Starter Set would look like: It would be a meaty, full-featured version of D&D. It would introduce complete neophytes to roleplaying games and teach them not only how to play, but also how to be a Dungeon Master. It would give a complete gaming experience, even if you never picked up the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide.

And if you bought it, you would absolutely not feel like you paid money to have someone tell you that you should buy something else.

OPENING THE BOX

So let’s crack this thing open.

What’s actually in the D&D Starter Set box is pretty barebones:

• The 32-page Starter Set Rulebook, which gives you all the rules for the game.
• The 64-page Lost Mine of Phandelver, which serves as an adventure book, monster manual, magic item vault, and index.
• Five pregen characters sheets.
• A set of dice.

Honestly, I think this barebones approach is okay. You don’t need a fancy gizmos and gadgets to play a roleplaying game. Would a poster map of the Phandalin region (where Lost Mines of Phandelver is set) have been a nice bit of highly practical bling that might have been wonderfully intriguing to a new player? Almost certainly.

But barebones here gives you an MSRP of $20, which is an absolutely fabulous price point. That puts the Starter Set in the territory of an impulse buy, and that was often even more true in actual practice. (I got my copy for $10.)

Nevertheless, there are a couple of things I will ding here: First, the included dice set only includes one d20 and one d6, which I think is inadequate for a game that includes advantage/disadvantage and the fireball spell.

Second, the two booklets would really benefit from cardstock covers. Instead, they’re just stapled paper and very flimsy.

THE RULEBOOK

The Starter Set Rulebook is very good.

The introduction it provides to RPGs — what they are, how they’re played, etc. — is workmanlike, but solid in its execution. More importantly this is a complete and fully functional rulebook. It’s not painfully incomplete. It doesn’t constantly tease with how the real rules are in another book. It’s a rock solid volume, and you could run a complete Tier 1 campaign with this rulebook with zero difficulty.

In fact, except for one thing that we’ll get to in just a moment, you could run multiple Tier 1 campaigns.

Combined with the magic items and monsters found in the companion volume, a DM has enough material that they could comfortably create their own campaign. I could even imagine someone skipping the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, grabbing a Monster Manual to give them more options for foes, and continuing to game happily for months or years or forever.

This is, in case I’m not being clear, a really fantastic achievement.

Unfortunately, as I hinted above, there are a couple gaping holes here that, in my opinion, stop this from being a total triumph.

First, there are no rules for character creation. Instead, players will need to pick one of the five pregen characters included in the boxed set. This is the truly crippling blow, and the only thing that truly limits the Starter Set.

Second, the books do a pretty good job of orienting first-time Dungeon Masters. There’s a lot of practical advice for how they can referee the session, make rulings, set up adventure hooks, narrate the action, play the monsters, and so forth. But the major oversight is that they never actually tell the DM how to run the dungeons included in the adventure book.

D&D actually has a long history of failing to do this (the 5^th Edition core rulebooks are actually worse!), but it’s ultimately kind of amusing when you realize that the Starter Set includes multiple, detailed explanations of exactly how boxed text is supposed to be used, but nothing on how dungeons are supposed to be used.

For example, at the beginning of the adventure they tell you:

• This is boxed text. You should read it.
• Here is a list of specific things you should do; including getting a marching order so that you know where the PCs are positioned when the goblins ambush them.
• When the goblins ambush them, this is the step-by-step guide for how combat should start and what you should be doing while running the combat.
• Here are several specific ways that the PCs can track the goblins back to their lair, and here’s a walk-thru of how you can resolve each one.

This is all great. Concrete, specific advice presented in a clear and highly usable format.

But then the PCs get to the goblins’ lair and… nothing.

To be clear, they do a fantastic job of presenting the dungeon:

• General Features
• What the Goblins Know (always love this)
• Keyed map
• And, of course, the keyed entries describing each room.

Again, these are all great.

But the step-by-step instructions for how you’re actually supposed to use this material? It just… stops. The designers obviously just assume that reading text out loud requires a detailed explanation, but how you run a dungeon is just a skill that everyone is born with.

Which is, of course, really silly.

But I digress. As I mentioned, this problem is a much larger and more systemic than the D&D Starter Set. It’s just particularly sad to see the ball getting dropped in an introductory product.

QUIBBLES & NITPICKS

Two more quick nitpicks before we do a proper dive into the adventure book.

First, Wizards of the Coast is allergic to referencing page numbers and I don’t get it. The “logic,” which they’ve explained from time to time, is that they don’t want to include, for example, a specific page number in the Monster Manual because it’s possible that they’ll revise the Monster Manual and the page numbers will change.

But in the 20+ years they’ve been eschewing page numbers, and I cannot emphasize this enough, they have never done this. The first time it might happen is next year.

It’s, frankly, dumb in general because it makes their books much, much harder to use than they need to be. And in the specific case of the D&D Starter Set it’s even dumber because this is a self-contained product. If you were to some day revise the Starter Set, you could just update the page references.

But because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page numbers, brand new DMs will be cursed with needlessly flipping back and forth through the books, trying to figure out where specific sections are after the authors wave vaguely in their direction.

(I will give them partial credit for an Index that isn’t complete garbage.)

Second, the random encounter procedures for dungeons given in the Starter Set are kinda garbage. They give random encounter tables, but then instruct brand new DMs, “Make an encounter check whenever you feel like it. Or don’t. But you definitely should. But don’t make too many of them, because you’ll ruin your game. How many is too many? Eh. I dunno. You’ll figure it out. Maybe.”

I suspect this text may have originally been more closely tied to detailed dungeon procedures which were present in pre-5^th Edition D&D Next playtest material but removed from the game entirely at the eleventh hour. But this is, nonetheless, bad praxis, and even moreso in material you’re presenting to first-time DMs.

LOST MINE OF PHANDELVER

Which finally brings us to Lost Mine of Phandelver, the adventure book.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: This is good.

It’s really, really good.

I’m pretty comfortable describing Lost Mine as the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had, and I don’t think the competition is even close.

First, it’s not just an adventure. It’s an entire campaign. In just 50 pages, Lost Mine of Phandelver presents seven — seven! — different scenarios plus the lushly detailed village of Phandalin. (The other 14 pages in the booklet are devoted to the monster manual, magic item vault, and rules index.) I am completely blown away by this.

And it’s not just the amount of material presented here. This is a really good campaign, and it’s particularly excellent as an exemplar for new DMs figuring out how to make their own campaigns.

We can start by looking at the structure of the campaign:

• Lost Mine of Phandelver starts with the PCs on their way to the village of Phandalin.
• A simple ambush-based scenario hook pulls the PCs into a goblin lair called the Cragmaw Hideout. The initial encounter is a perfect kickoff for first-time players and DMs, starting with an intriguing enigma (dead horses lying in the road) before smoothly transitioning to a combat encounter featuring a simple, but meaningful tactical dilemma for the players.
• The Cragmaw dungeon itself is absolutely fantastic: It’s non-linear. It takes advantage of the third-dimension. The key is clear, clever, and features several really cool ideas (like the dams that the goblins can use to create a defensive flood). It repeatedly emphasizes the opportunity not only for combat, but also roleplaying and clever problem-solving. Everything here implicitly tells the players that their choices matter and teaches the DM how to actively respond to what the PCs are doing.
• The Cragmaw hideout also features multiple scenario hooks, giving the players several options to pursue.
• Whenever the PCs arrive in Phandalin (whether they head there immediately or after pursuing the scenario hooks from the Cragmaw hideout), the entire village is set up to deliver another half dozen or more scenario hooks to them. The result is that the players end up with an entire menu of scenario hooks to choose between, once against emphasizing that their choices matter.
• The individual scenarios are also interconnected, in a really beautiful node-based design that ultimately funnels the PCs into the campaign finale at Wave Echo Cave, which (a) has been foreshadowed since the very beginning of the campaign and (b) is another fantastic dungeon scenario with excellent non-linear design and multiple factions.

I really can’t emphasize just how great this is.

On top of this rock solid campaign frame, the individual adventures are, as I’ve already suggested, equally excellent. I’ve mentioned the strategically interesting non-linear design of the dungeons and the Three Clue Rule, but they also feature retreating foes, personalized magic items redolent with history and flavor, and a wonderfully varied cast of characters.

On top of all that, although I quibbled about the presentation of the random dungeon encounters, the random wilderness encounters are given a very effective procedure AND they’re linked to the scenarios, providing another level of interconnectivity in the campaign.

THE VERDICT

The Starter Set Rulebook is very good, but unfortunately flawed in a couple key ways.

That almost doesn’t matter, though, because I’d pay $20 for just Lost Mine of Phandelver in a heartbeat. And I’d do it even faster than that if I could.

Best introductory adventure for D&D ever published? Definitely.

Best adventure book of any kind published by Wizards of the Coast? Quite possibly.

Overall, the 1983 Basic Set probably remains the best introduction to D&D ever published. But if I’d been given Lost Mine of Phandelver when I was a first-time DM, it would have made me a much better DM than I was, and that’s something special. Even if you’re an experienced DM with years of play under your belt, it’s still a really enjoyable campaign that’s immaculate in its construction.

I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Grade: A

• Lost Mine of Phandelver: A+

Lead Designers: Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford
Design Team: Christopher Perkins, James Wyatt, Rodney Thompson, Robert J. Schwalb, Peter Lee, Steve Townshend, Bruce R. Cordell
Adventure Designers: Richard Baker, Christopher Perkins

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 96

D&D Beyond: Lost Mine of Phandelver (Free!)

FURTHER READING
Review: D&D Essentials Kit
Review: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (D&D Starter Set 2022)

Buy Now!