The latest Dungeons & Dragons starter set is D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle and it offers a new way to introduce players and DMs to the game. This is the ideal purchase for someone who wants to get into D&D but isn't sure where to start, as Dragons of Stormwreck Isle contains everything needed for a short D&D campaign, including a basic rulebook, so players can quickly jump into the game without needing to spend lots of time going through character creation.
The three core rulebooks of D&D 5e are considered essential purchases for any group looking into the game, which means shelling out for the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. Each player usually owns their own set of dice and will have a character sheet, assuming they aren't using D&D Beyond to track character sheets online. A lot of groups use battle maps and miniatures for their game in order to make combat easier to follow. The DM also needs a DM screen, as well as a campaign to run, assuming they aren't writing their own homebrew adventures. All of these elements combined can be costly, especially if the wannabe D&D group consists of kids who don't have the cash to throw down on books and accessories.
There are now three D&D 5e starter sets for purchase, with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle being the most recent. The people who want to try out D&D without paying lots of cash for the basics should try out one of the starter sets first, as it's the cheaper option, it provides everything needed to give players and DMs a taste for the game, and its rules and adventures are streamlined to make them as easy to run as possible. The Dragons of Stormwreck Isle boxset comes with all the items that a new group can use to experience D&D for the first time.
D&D Starter Set: Dragons Of Stormwreck Isle Is A Perfect Choice For New Players & DMs
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle comes with a Starter Set Rulebook, which is a 16-page guide that contains the absolute basic rules from the 2014 Player's Handbook. These include the rules for stats, ability checks, saving throws, combat, basic equipment, and spells. It bears mentioning that there are no character creation rules in the book. The spell section of the Starter Set Rulebook explains the functions of several of D&D's low-level spells from the Player's Handbook including bless, command, comprehend languages, cure wounds, detect magic, flaming sphere, guiding bolt, healing word, hold person invisibility, lesser restoration, light, mage armor, mage hand, magic missile, misty step, prestidigitation, protection from evil and good, ray of frost, ray of sickness, sacred flame, sanctuary, shatter, shield, shocking grasp, sleep, spiritual weapon, thaumaturgy, and thunderwave. These are the spells that the players will encounter and use in the campaign.
The campaign that players will be experiencing is the titular Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, which involves the players traveling to an island that acts as a battleground for dragons. It's set in D&D's default Forgotten Realms setting, though DMs can easily change some names around if they want to set it elsewhere. A lot of D&D books require the DM to have access to the Dungeon Master's Guide for descriptions of the magic items, as well as the Monster Manual for the monster stats, but Dragons of Stormwreck Isle has sections at the end of the book that provide stats for everything that appears in the adventure. Dragons of Stormwreck Isle should take players from level 1 to 3, so there should be a handful of sessions worth of content in the book, depending on the pace and play time of the group.
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle comes with a set of six polyhedral dice, containing a d4, a d6, a d8, a d10, a d12, and a d20. This is the absolute basic of what a group will use, though the fact that D&D players love owning dice means that most people will invest in their own set. Along with the six dice contained in the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, the average player will usually need an additional d10 (for d100 rolls, with one being tens and the other units) and an additional d20 (for advantage and disadvantage checks). The people playing arcane spellcasters will want additional d4s and d6s, while rogue players will definitely need more d6s, as these often come up in damage rolls for their special abilities.
There are some low-effort D&D builds that are easy to create, but Dragons of Stormwreck sidesteps the need for throwing together something quickly. The people who want to jump into a game without spending time in character creation can do so easily in Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, as it comes with five pre-generated characters with their own designated sheets. All the player needs to do is give their character a name and flesh out their appearance & personality, as all the mechanical game elements of the character have already been taken care of on the sheet.
The characters include a wood elf fighter who specialized in archery, a hill dwarf cleric who wields the power of the Life Domain, a halfling rogue who fights with a dagger and shortbow, a human paladin who smites enemies with a battleaxe, and a high elf wizard who wields some of D&D 5e's best 1st level wizard spells, like magic missile and sleep. One issue is that Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is meant for 2-6 players, so if there is a full allotment of players, then at least one character will need to be created, with no spare character sheets available to write them up. There are also no character creation rules available in the book to build another one. The best solution, if there are six players, is to copy one of the existing characters (like the wood elf fighter) and just have two players playing Dungeons & Dragons characters with the same abilities, but they're free to flesh out the remaining aspects.
D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is available now.