The Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set is a great little box of delights!

Welcome to D&D! The Box…

…is beautiful. It features the same Larry Elmore art that featured on the last edition of the Basic Red box (Mentzer edition) from the 80′s and scores a direct hit to the nostalgia part of our gamer lizard brains.

It contains softcovers Player's and Dungeon Master's Booklets, a sheet of 2-sided counters (PCs and monsters, including 2 dragons and a Gelatinous Cube) printed on thick cardboard, a set of opaque, white-inked black polyhedral dice, a foldup battlemap, 4 blank simplified character sheets and several sheets of punch-out power cards made of thin cardboard.

The Solo Game

The box expects one player, presumably a kid who got the box as a gift or an adult curious about the game, to create their first D&D PC through reading a “choose your own path” adventure. The booklet guides the reader to make a few fundamental set of choices that will lead to a completed character:

* Class: Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric
* Race: Elf, Dwarf, Human, Halfling
* A preferred power (or two)
* The PC's Skill Set

Lets be clear here, as I know this will anger many who clamour for "Basic D&D 2.0″, the starter is what is says on the box, a starter set. It is a complete game, but not a complete game system. Beyond picking among 4 basic classes and the same number of races, a handful of powers and skills, character generation is arguably anaemic (but better than the previous 4e starter set). The task resolution systems (skills/combat) are also simplified while still being very much 4e.

I'd suggest parents playing with pre-tweens to make the PC beforehand (with input from your child) and start the solo game with a fully fleshed out PC and ignore the char-gen parts.

Once Nico got to choose the spells (mostly fire-based, as can be expected from a geeky 8 y.o.) and fought against the goblins in their lair, things picked up for him and he loved casting Burning Hands over much of the map.

There are three maps supplied: a previously published “monsters lair” from D&D miniatures, along with “'The crossroads” from the same starter set and an exclusive dungeon map made of tiles reproduced on a full-sized battle map.

Once the lone player has played through the first Player's playbook, he/she has 2 quests, a basic grasp of the game and a guide to teach it to up to four others (which implies photocopying the power cards if you want to allow multiple players to pick the same classes). The Full Starter Game

That's where the second book, the Dungeon Master's, comes in. It presents the game's rules, in a simplified form (ex: gone are some conditions like restricted) and with a lot less skill/combat options (ex: no rule 42 charts, no traps, no alternative combat moves like Bull Rush and no skill challenge rules). It also includes a fully fleshed out dungeon adventure covering about 10 encounters featuring goblins, kobolds, drakes, a dragon.

Finally a D&D starter where there is both a dungeon & a dragon in its prepared material!

The book included tips and tricks to run games and does a very decent job to explain what the DM's responsi­bilities are. After the adventure, the book provides rules to level up all classes to level 2 (with appropriate power cards). It also describes how to create further basic adventures, including a decent bestiary and dungeon design advice, that can bring PC to the cusp of level 3, including a little DC chart, a list of lvl 2 Treasure parcels and a 2 page gazetteer on the Nentir Vale region, the core D&D 4e setting.

To summarize, the new Red Box is a low cost starter set that introduces players to the D&D 4e game. The game delivers a 4e-lite experience that most likely should succeed in teasing those interested by the game's structure of play. It is very much 4e with many of the fiddly bits removed.

Oh and there's a bonus solo adventure you can download by entering a code on the Wizards of the Coast website before the end of the year. That's a nice little bonus.

It's a pretty good set. There are a few bits that are difficult to follow, which I ended up asking about at rpg.stackexchan­ge.com

Finally I managed to find one of these! I love it, even though I've been playing DND for years, this will be a good introduction for others!