Dungeons & Dragons Buyer's Guide

Starter Sets

If you have never played a pen-and-paper roleplaying game before or if your budget is limited, there are two starter sets to choose from:

• Dungeons & Dragons: Essential Kit (2019)
• Dungeons & Dragons: Starter Set - Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (2022)

Both sets contain dice, simplified rules, an adventure, and everything you need to start playing D&D with one to five other friends. The adventure found inside is different in each box so some game masters end up buying both.

Core Rulebooks

If you are serious about playing D&D, you can skip the starter sets and purchase the three core rulebooks:

• The Dungeon & Dragons: Player’s Handbook cotains the rules to create heroes. Choose your race, class, background, equipment, special abilities, and spells. The most important game rules like ability checks, combat, rest, and magic are also covered.
• The Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide is intended for the game master only. It is full of advices on how to run a campaign (a series of adventures) and has rules about magic items, non-player characters, diseases, environments and all.
• The Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual is the ultimate collection of baddies to challenge the heroes. You will find the statistics of goblins, doppelgangers, beholders, and other strange creatures ordered from A to Z.

Adventures

If you have the core rulebooks, you can use your imagination to create an adventure. That said, writing your own storyline, drawing your own maps, creating treasures, monsters, and traps can be very time consuming. If you don’t have the leisure to do so, buying a ready-made adventure written by professionals is the way to go.

Be careful and remember to check the level required to play an adventure! Some are meant for experienced heroes only. For example, Dungeons & Dragons: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is designed for adventurers of level 1 to 5 while Dungeons & Dragons: Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is for heroes of level 5 to 20.

Below are a few examples. Click here to see all D&D adventure books.

Sourcebooks

Need more monsters? More magic items? More information about the geography and politic of the D&D universe? That’s what sourcebooks are for. They contain a goldmine of information but generally don’t include any story for the heroes to play.

Below are a few examples. Click here to see all D&D sourcebooks.

Accessories

Accessories such as tiles for tactical combat and screens with useful tables are not essential, but they make your life easier as a Dungeon Master.

Don’t forget that you will also need a few polyhedral dice sets! D&D uses the traditional six-sided dice, but also dice of various shapes like the twenty-sided dice. Having one set per player is strongly recommended.

Miniatures

Everybody likes a few combat scenes to spice things up and nothing beats miniatures to bring the action to life! Wizkids Games offer three product lines for D&D miniatures:

• Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures are affordable and ready to paint minis.
• Icons of the Realms are pre-painted miniatures. They often come in boosters with an element of randomness.
• Frameworks are highly detailed miniatures that also come with optional parts but they require assembly and are unpainted.

Terrain

You can use your miniatures on a simple grid mat but you can also add an extra wow by using 3D terrain such as buildings and dungeon walls. If you want to impress your players, consider these two product lines:

• Warlock Tiles are used to recreate dungeons, towns, caves, and sewers. Pieces are prepainted, made of plastic, and connected to each other by clips.
• Battle Systems have whole buildings made of colored printed cardboard. They look super realistic and are great for photoshoot.