A Beginners Guide to Dungeons & Dragons - Product Edition

If you’ve never played a tabletop RPG before it can be a daunting experience buying what you need to get started, Hobby Lords have a fantastic range of D&D products available to help you get started on your first adventure!

A Beginners Guide to Dungeons & Dragons - Product Edition

If you’ve never played a tabletop RPG before it can be a daunting experience buying what you need to get started. Bri wrote a fantastic article last year about creating characters in 5e and the basic mechanics you need to know. Here I want to explore some of the products she recommended a bit further. Hobby Lords have a fantastic range of D&D products available to help you get started on your first adventure and I’m going to help you decide where to begin whether you’re a Player or a DM trying 5e.

 

Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set:

This adventure in a box is best for players and DM’s who just want to get in and play. The Starter Set contains a 64-page adventure book with all the information your DM needs to help you on your quest, a 32-page rulebook for everybody to learn the basics of playing levels 1-5 and 5 pre-generated Characters with Character sheets! Also containing 6 dice - this is where unless you’re willing to share between the group you may want to get a set of dice for each player - but more on that later.

 

The adventure Dragons of Stormwreck Isle takes place on its namesake, Stormwreck Isle, a mysterious island filled with ancient ruins, dangerous creatures, and hidden treasures. Your party is tasked with investigating the island, uncovering its secrets, and ultimately facing off against a powerful dragon. There are a bunch of exciting locations to visit during this campaign and a great range of different enemies to face in battle with the pre-made characters for this adventure created to help you succeed right through to level 5.

 

Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit:

The Essentials Kit would be your next upgrade point from the Starter Set or a good place to start if you’ve played before but need an easy refresh on the game. This set has everything you need to teach players to create their own Characters levels 1-6, a 64-page introductory adventure and the introduction of Sidekick rules, a double-sided poster than be used as a game map, a 4 panel folding Dungeon Master’s screen, 6 blank character sheets, 11 dice and 81 cards describing items and other D&D game elements to help you further your knowledge while playing.

 

The adventure contained in this kit, Dragon of Icepsire Peak, takes place in the small town of Phandalin, located in the Forgotten Realms setting, just north of the Sword Mountains. The town is under threat from a band of orcs and a young white dragon named Cryovain. The players must take on various quests to protect the town and confront the dragon. This adventure sees your party travel to various locations, allows you to recruit sidekicks and a job-posting mechanic which means your party will be receiving their quests from a job-posting board allowing you the freedom to choose your next adventure rather than following a linear storyline.

 

Additional Books:

The 2024 Players Handbook contains the most up to date information you need to create characters and select spells compiled from the past 10 years. With twelve classes, 48 subclasses and 10 races, this book is formatted in a way to make character creation and levelling up a breeze. This handbook also contains almost 400 spells and new weapon masteries to really customise your combat.

 

The 2024 Monster Manual is a great addition to any DM’s arsenal, especially if you are looking at creating your own campaign or want to add your own fights to a pre-existing campaign. This version of the manual releases next month and is available for pre-order on our website. It contains over 500 Monsters with over 75 brand new ones to choose from and 40+ versatile humanoid stat blocks to give you greater flexibility when populating your adventure with NPCs.

 

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is essential for DMs no matter your experience level. It contains real-world examples of pitfalls you may run into and suggestions on how you can handle them, 15 ready-to-use maps for your own homebrew campaigns, a campaign setting that you can use for building your own adventure, more than 300 new and improved treasures and magical items and much much more!

 

Additional accessories:

As mentioned earlier in this article, I highly recommend every player having their own set of 7 dice. Some dice will be used more than others like your D20 so sometimes it pays to have more than 1, check out our Sirius Dice sets as a great starting point - they give you an additional D20.

 

Once your group feels comfortable in the basics we have a great range of official Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Books that allow you to explore the vast world of D&D from Baldur’s Gate to Ravnica! If you want to take it to the next level make sure you check out our range of miniatures as well, we sell painted and unpainted minis depending how quickly you'd like to use them. Make sure you talk to your nearest Hobby Lords store to see if they have any upcoming adventures planned or they can point you in the right direction for getting started on your own.

 

Emma McDonald

High-Elf Rogue

Head of Marketing

Hobby Lords