Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax wrote the 1979 module The Keep on the Borderlands as a gateway to the tabletop role-playing game for players and dungeon masters who might be intimidated by poring over the game’s thick books. Wizards of the Coast has revived the adventure with the Heroes of the Borderlands starter set, which releases on Sept. 16, packing the box with high-quality components to appeal to board game players while simplifying the rules in ways that even veteran players might want to consider.
While previous D&D starter sets have enabled quick play by giving players fully pregenerated character sheets, Heroes of the Borderlands offers the chance to choose their class, species, and background. D&D’s four classic classes each have their own playmat with ability modifiers, saving throws, skills, attacks, hit points and initiative precalculated along with explanation of key class features.
D&D’s 2024 ruleset ties ability score bonuses to your choice of background, but the starter set removes the need to optimize your picks. There are suggested combos of species and backgrounds for each class, like halfling criminal for rogue, but you could just as easily be an elf soldier if you want darkvision and a damage reroll. This method gives new players the excitement of crafting a character without much of the work. It also puts the game in line with new fantasy TTRPGs like Draw Steel! and Daggerheart that have fully divorced stats from character options to remove traps that will make your character much less effective, and just let you play what looks fun.
The starter set also simplifies the 2024 ruleset’s weapon mastery rules, which give classes that don’t cast spells extra abilities when attacking based on what weapon they’re using. The Player’s Handbook specifies that fighters get mastery in three types of weapons at level one and rogues get two, gaining more as they level. Characters also have the ability to swap their choices after a long rest. Heroes of the Borderlands just gives those classes mastery with whatever they’re wielding at the time.
This is such a simple change that doesn’t make these classes meaningfully more powerful. Sure it means the rogue has an extra mastery at level one, but that mostly translates to them being slightly better at swapping between melee and range. It also means if the players find a magic weapon when exploring, the fighter doesn’t have to wait a day to unlock its full potential. Seeing how little this alteration impacts balance makes weapon mastery’s progression feel like pointless math.
Heroes of the Borderlands makes the play experience highly tactile while removing the need to write and erase numbers on your sheet by using tokens to represent hit points and gold pieces. It also introduces the concept of power tokens to represent all limited resources, from spell slots to a fighter’s second wind, with the sheet explaining what tokens to replace on a short or long rest. Spellcasters still have more options, represented by a deck of spell cards, but power tokens are a clever way to smooth out the differences between classes and make the mechanics easier for new players to grasp.
This is D&D’s biggest and most expensive starter set to date, priced at $49.99 compared to the 2022 Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter set which sold for $19.99, and it’s packed with high-quality components. While the detailed maps for the Keep on the Borderlands and the monster- and cultist-infested Caves of Chaos will mostly be useful for this campaign, there are seven double-sided maps that can easily be utilized for a wide variety of dungeon and wilderness encounters. The monster, player, trap, and treasure tokens are just as versatile.
Gygax’s The Keep on the Borderlands didn’t name any of the NPCs in the fortress. Heroes on the Borderlands gives them lots of personality through character cards with highly detailed pictures, suggestions for the dungeon master on how to roleplay them, and rumors that they can provide PCs about the keep, the Caves of Chaos, and the wilderness in between. But the richness of the components doesn’t translate to the adventure itself, which both misses easy opportunities to add depth and doesn’t give new DMs the resources to expand on plots players might want to pursue.
The keep provides players with both an introduction to the rules and a safe place to rest and roleplay between adventures. It’s packed with little quests like rounding up lost goats and dealing with a rogue ooze. But aside from the rumors NPCs can provide, there’s almost nothing that connects it to the other zones aside from a single quest to map the wilderness.
This would be so easy to remedy. Explore the Caves of Chaos, and you can find a captive dwarf. Why not give her a connection to someone at the keep who can encourage PCs to search for her? There’s a gentleman thief operating in the woods, and while you might hear about him from the captain of the guard, there’s no bounty for bringing him to justice. A group of bugbears are planning an invasion of the keep, but there’s no suggestions for how sharing information about their schemes might be received by the keep’s leaders. Instead of detailing heroic quests, the keep booklet spends too much time explaining how PCs can earn gold by doing chores.
The original campaign had a priest from the keep who would join your party and then betray you to the cult. That presumably was viewed as too mean a twist, but it leaves the connection between both locations very vague. You can interrupt an occult ritual in the wilderness, but if you fail to act, all that happens is a statue is destroyed. Did the statue do anything? The book doesn’t say. It feels like it would be so easy to provide either some minor reward for interrupting this ritual or make the future encounter with the cultists slightly harder if they weren’t stopped.
The wilderness and Caves of Chaos are packed with little encounters ranging from the very basic, like fighting off some bloodsucking stirges, to silly vignettes like crashing a goblin birthday party. Most feel neat and self-contained, but others are so vague that they might prove a problem for a new DM with curious players. There’s a hilarious encounter involving a group of kobolds trying to appease a baby dragon that hatched from an egg they stole, and the PCs can persuade the kobolds to return it to its mother. But there’s no suggestions for what to do if the PCs make the obvious choice of wanting to tag along and meet the mom.
Creativity is a huge part of successfully running D&D, but it’s not something that Heroes on the Borderlands meaningfully emphasizes aside from a single line at the very end of the Keep of the Borderlands adventure booklet encouraging DMs to use the set to tell stories of their own. The set creates a detailed sandbox with clear boundaries, which will certainly work for some groups, but I can easily see both players and DMs getting frustrated when they hit those borders. The original Keep on the Borderlands also expected DMs to fill in many blanks themselves, but the elaborate props this set provides might make it even more intimidating for DMs (especially novices) to make up their own characters or locations.
It’s a tough balancing act for a game that emphasizes player choice from the very first moments of crafting a character to advancement, with each player getting to pick from two subclasses when they hit level three. Simplifying the mechanics of D&D makes Heroes of the Borderlands an easy introduction to TTRPGs, but DMs will also need to learn that players will always surprise them. Props are great, but once you’ve built a bit of confidence with the mechanics, you might have even more fun by setting them aside and going off script.
Heroes on the Borderlands is available to preorder for $49.99 through D&D Beyond. A digital version is $14.99 and both can be combined for $54.99. The set will be released on Sept. 16.
