One of the best things about Dungeons & Dragons is grouping up with your friends to tell a story together. While getting new friends acquainted with the game doesn’t require much, a few supplies – and a lot of learning – are necessary. From rulebooks to character sheets and dice, the Dungeons & Dragons starter set has long been a way to quickly get a new group set up for their first D&D adventure. With the revised 2024 ruleset for D&D 5e, it’s no surprise that fans will be getting a brand-new Starter Set in 2025, following the release of the Monster Manual that completes the revised rules. However, the contents of that set just might surprise you.
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The new Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set will be called Heroes of the Borderlands, a name that will be slightly familiar to long-term fans. This follow-up takes place in the same setting as the Keep on the Borderlands adventure, but reimaged for the current system. The new starter set to release on September 16th, 2025 and it will mix things up from what fans may expect from a starter set.
The current starter set players can purchase features a few basic components. It includes an adventure booklet, a condensed rulebook for players at 1st-3rd levels, ready-to-play character sheets, and 6 of the required polyhedral dice. For players hoping to sit down and get familiar with the basics of playing D&D, this is everything you need. Dice to roll, a character to play, and a basic overview of the rules of the game. Plus, an adventure to work through. Ideally, the group will have one experienced player to run the adventure as the DM, and you’re off to the races. This isn’t quite what the new, 2025 Dungeons & Dragons starter set will look like.
Updated Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set Creates a More Tactile Experience
We recently had the opportunity to learn a bit more about what this newly re-imagined Starter Set will look like. The main takeaway is that the included elements will create a more tangible, tactile experience for players. Much of D&D is theater of the mind, and this can make it challenging for new players to grasp nebulous concepts like character creation, spells, and equipment. The Starter Set aims to address this barrier to entry with physical components like tiles, cards, and tokens.
In the Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set, you won’t find the usual pre-generated character sheets. Instead, players will create their own characters for the adventure – but with a newly imagined character creation method. The player characters will be generated using a tile system that lets everyone at the table select and combine different elements to craft their own personalized character. The goal here is to make character creation less time consuming than the traditional method, but to let players have some ownership of their character, which isn’t always the case with a pre-gen.
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Character creation isn’t the only thing that will get a physical representation in the upcoming Starter Set. It will also include spell cards to help casters keep track of their abilities and equipment cards to more easily get a handle on weapons, armor, and more. There will also be tokens to aid in the tracking of other elements.
From how it was described, the impression is a sort of Dungeons & Dragons board game hybrid that takes the rules of the game and turns them into pieces that players can interact with. In theory, this will make it easier for new players to get a grasp on the many moving parts of a D&D adventure. It’s also likely to be more friendly for younger players, who are accustomed to having a visual to go along with most anything these days. While it’s certainly a new approach to gameplay, the 2025 Starter Set is certainly an intriguing new angle on the D&D onboarding process.
