Dungeons and Dragons’ latest starter set, known as Heroes of the Borderlands aims to make TTRPGs more accessible by making it more like a board game.
Heroes of the Borderlands is Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to convert its popular TTRPG into an easy-to-pick-up board game that is reportedly accessible to anyone who wishes to give it a try.
The Story of Heroes Of The Borderlands
The game centers on three booklets, or ‘regions’ set in a generic fantasy region with setting-neutral titles like the “Borderlands” and the “Cult of Chaos.” It’s a world that you could theoretically fit into just about any fantasy setting, and requires little to no lore knowledge to experience.
- The Wilderness captures the ‘randomness’ of your typical journey in a fantasy TTRPG, where players wander the forests, jungles, and trails in search of their next adventure. They’ll fight bandits, discover strange hermits, and stalk strange creatures through the woods.
- The Keep on the Borderlands is the ‘social’ setting, where players will meet a variety of NPCs and get a chance to drink, cavort, sneak around, and sell their goods. They’ll get opportunities to out criminals, discover strange creatures hiding in plain sight, and maybe even attend a ball.
- The Caves of Chaos is the ‘dungeon’ section of the experience, where players will delve into the caverns and ruins of the region and discover kobolds, goblins, ogres, and perhaps a chance to stop the Cult of Chaos.
Each of the booklets contains multiple encounters that players can experience asynchronously. While there are ‘tutorial’ encounters available to each booklet for DMs to practice, the majority of the content is 2-3 page experiences that a DM can pick up and run without any complicated planning. For example (minor spoilers), the first cavern within the Caves of Chaos has players run into kobolds who are deciding what to do with a red dragon wyrmling. The first encounter in the Wilderness has players run into a possible bandit attack. They’re short, simple encounters that are extremely simple when it comes to storytelling and priorities.
Each booklet can be run in its entirety, or players can jump between them as their DM sees fit. There are story threads that will resonate through some of the experiences that a DM could draw on. For example, some items that were reported stolen in one of the Keep plotlines appear in a Cave of Chaos encounter. Some NPCs and rumors might reference other content in the game. It’s an attempt to create a sandbox where players can dance around freely.
Heroes As a Board Game
What makes Heroes of the Borderlands stand out in comparison to past starter sets is how tactile it is as a game. There’s a sort of ‘philosophical shift’ in gameplay and game design that Heroes of the Borderlands embraces with character creation. While past Starter Sets were intended to be a taste test to draw players into longer campaigns and playing more, Heroes strives to make everything feel self-contained.
For example, the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide is never required for telling the story. All of the rules are contained in a single booklet, and all of the spells, items, classes, and species are represented through cards. This allows a player to choose the appropriate cards, place them on their “class board” (a tool that organizes your spells, species, items and weapons in a very board-game-y manner), and come up with a name or a backstory for your character. Heroes simplifies this process down by only having four of the character classes, four species, and multiple backgrounds. All classes have preset stats to simplify the process but also come with guidance for character creation (an elf sage is the best wizard, a criminal halfling is the best rogue, etc.)
Spells, hit points, and gold are also tracked through cardboard tokens. Players can keep their items and cards together for future encounters, or they can choose to return them to the deck and make an entirely new character in the next session.
The DM has similarly supportive tools available to them. NPCs are represented in cards that define both their personality and rumors they might have. Monsters have detailed stat blocks and new art that can be easily referenced in the midst of combat.
I was able to run through one session as a player and one session as a DM. As a veteran, I found the system and experience to be straightforward to pick up. As a new DM, the book helps players see their options and provides recommendations on how to engage with a scenario effectively. For example, a scene involving a confrontation with a thief in one of the encounters involves options for deception, persuasion, or intimidation.
The stories are barebones by their very nature, although there are recommendations for how to roleplay as certain characters. A new DM can, in theory, use this guidance to run things entirely as it is written, while a veteran could turn all of these story threads into a compelling story with threads throughout. I’ve little doubt that some experienced GMs will be eager to take this story and make it their own.
The one aspect of the game that I found to be the biggest struggle is leveling up. The game only goes from levels 1 to 3, providing only two of the four subclasses to each class that the 2024 Player’s Handbook came with. This design was chosen to simplify gameplay design, lead designer Justice Ramin Arman told The Fandomentals. New players have their decisions simplified in the process, keeping character creation down to the simplest experiences possible. While this is excellent for shorter storytelling, it makes converting Heroes into a longer-term campaign significantly harder. However, this seems to be contrary to the designers’ interest. They want these stories and threads to be unconnected and turned around into play on a whim, in the same way that someone might play a narrative-heavy game like House on Haunted Hill without connecting stories between playthroughs.
The self-contained nature might also confuse players in the future. For example, the game swaps out terms. A “spell slot” is considered a “power token” within the game, which may make translating someone who’s only played Heroes of the Borderlands to a full TTRPG experience harder.
Is Heroes of the Borderlands Worth Your Time?
Heroes of the Borderlands is an interesting experiment for Wizards of the Coast, almost seeming like an attempt to attract a new audience by turning the book-heavy TTRPG hobby into a more board game-like experience. That has increased the product’s expensiveness but made it easier to just ‘pick up and play’, something that many people might appreciate, as life makes committing to 3-4 hour sessions regularly harder and harder. It doesn’t offer the tools to get into the more complicated forms of play, but it is a good taste test for newer players to try DMing and playing at some point in their life. Whether that translates into memorable play or experiences will depend entirely on your table.
Disclosure: Wizards of the Coast provided a copy of Heroes of the Borderlands for The Fandomentals to review.
Images Courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
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