First Impressions - D&D 5e Essentials Kit

This time, it's a White Dragon!

TL;DR: this is the one to buy the kid who has read up on D&D and wants to get into it. AKA me in 1983. At £20 (street), it fills a great niche between the £90 for the core D&D rules and the £15 for Starter Set. You get a lot for your money.

I picked up the D&D Essentials Kit when it was announced, and I'm glad I did. It comes in a similar box the Starter Kit, but this one is full of material. It reminds me very much of the Holmes Basic D&D kit that I started with many years ago, except that it has dice, not chits.

This is a full game; unlike the Starter Kit, the Essentials Kit includes character generation rules. The core rules are 64 pages long, full colour and perfect bound; a cut down from the Player's Handbook. You can play one of four races (dwarf, halfling, elf, human) and one of five classes (bard, cleric, fighter, rogue, wizard) and the rules cover up to 6th level. So it's covering a similar span to the Starter Kit in character development, except you get blank character sheets here. The number of available backgrounds is cut down to five. The back of the book has a summary of the conditions. There are new rules for sidekicks, effectively henchpeople for when you have a solo player or a low number of characters. There's no index but a comprehensive table of contents.

Two books and much nicer dice.

The second book in the box is also 64 pages long and is the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign. More on the contents later. I've covered both books with library grade slip-on covers, but I do that with most roleplaying books.

Small but effective DM screen.

We also have a better set of polyhedral dice, and a small but surprisingly useful DM's screen. It's flimsy compared the official screen but will be fine if it lives in the box. We've also got loads of cards.

Lots of cards, but it's self-assembly.

The cards come on punched sheets so you need to separate them, and also assemble the deck box for them. There are cards for sidekicks to hire, for the conditions a character suffers (so you can hand it to them), reference cards for combat, initiative order cards and magic item cards. Finally, there are quest cards tied to the quests in the campaign.

The final item in the box is a sheet with codes to unlock the campaign on dndbeyond.com; this also unlocks additional content to allow you to take the game beyond 6th level with more adventures. There's a code to purchase the full Player's Handbook digitally for 50% less (so $15).

The 'Dragon of Icespire Peak' campaign shares the same base as 'Lost Mines of Phandelver' in the Starter Kit, set as it is around the town on Phandalin on the Sword Coast and deals with the consequences of the arrival of a dragon in the region. It opens with guidance on character generation and how to use sidekicks and discusses the adventure structures used and how to approach them. The whole set up is very reminiscent of a MMORPG; sometimes it made me thing of my lost hours playing 'Torchlight' on the Mac. You start off with three quests available which the townmaster will pay for adventurers ad ne'er-do-wells to complete. When you complete two, you unlock an additional three quests. When you unlock two of the next set, you unlock a final three sets of quests. Working through these should mean that the characters have a fighting chance to deal with the White Dragon at the heart of the adventure. The scenarios can also point you at each other encounters and adventures. There are fourteen different locations detailed. The dragon's lair is not a quest that is handed out; the players can decide if they want to hunt the beast out. 

Each location has a map for the DM, but no player maps (not even digitally). There’s a large separate colour map of the Sword Coast and Phandalin. The locations have short descriptions and there is not much scope for waffle and unnecessary text. Tactics and responses from the opposition are covered. The level of guidance is lower than that given with the Starter Set's campaign, but it's a definite step up from B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. The campaign will reveal itself as the players explore the frontier region.

You could easily integrate the campaigns from the Starter Set and Essentials Kit together, and it would be pretty awesome to do so.

This is a fantastic introductory set; it retails for £5 more than the Starter Set and it feels so much more value for money. As a starting DM, I'd want this set, not the Starter Set, because it is more flexible and has everything I'd need; a decent number of dice, screen, cards, much more comprehensive rules. You could use this set with one of the core adventure books if you wanted to. This is the set to give to a kid who wants to get into D&D and has read a bit about it. This is Basic D&D for the new millennium.

That said, the voice and arc of the 'Lost Mines of Phandelver' is stronger than the 'Dragon of Icespire Peak'. That's because Icespire is a true sandbox with points of interest and the journey to the conclusion of the campaign is far more player-led than Phandelver. I'd want to use both sets together though. 

Highly recommended.