News Roundup: First Impressions of Heroes of the Borderlands

Welcome to this week’s TTRPG Insider news roundup! This week, I had the opportunity to play-test Heroes of the Borderlands, the new D&D starter set. Is it good? Bad? Also, WOTC’s John Hight confirmed plans for Baldur’s Gate 4.

Heroes of the Borderlands Translates D&D to Cardboard

I got a chance to sit down and play a 90-minute test run of the upcoming Heroes of the Borderlands D&D Starter set at GenCon with D&D managing game designer Justice Ramin Arman. Our adventuring party included one other creator and our PR contact Bob (who said it was his first time playing D&D since he was a kid).

We ran through one of the intro scenarios, which was designed to be a level-one tutorial to help encourage play in the game and show how players and DMs might run through one of the three books.

In the scenario, our party of three entered into a cave occupied by kobolds who had accidentally adopted a red dragon whelp and needed help. So our cleric (played by Bob) decided to give the dragon all of its gold, name it Brightwing, and now we would have to escort it home to its nest (and hope the dragon mother would not kill us.)

How It Felt to Play

The Starter Kit’s aesthetic feels similar to your traditional adventure and offers three different settings to play through: a swampy forest, a keep, and a series of caves. Each setting is focused on a ‘pillar’ of D&D content and contains a variety of adventures that players can play in 1-2 hours, depending on player decisions. Character creation is simplified down to four basic races, slightly more backgrounds, and lots of cardboard tokens and items to be used by a DM if they wish. WOTC did not go cheap on the amount of cardboard in the game, and it shows in the number of tokens, frames, and character sheets. It also includes several pre-printed maps, NPC cards, spell cards, magic cards, and everything you might need, so only the DM has to waste time flipping through a booklet for answers.

Each character sheet is designed more like a ‘frame’ for where to place the appropriate cards. So a player would take a class board, a race card, a background card, and the necessary items. The frame itself contains all of the guidance required to play, as well as recommended tips for what options are best for your character (elf sages are best for wizards, halfling criminals are best for rogues, etc.). The guidance and card-based mechanics make the gameplay a lot faster since you don’t have to do the math, but take on the persona of a character. You can keep playing that persona going into other adventures, or try other classes as well. It reminds me a bit of games like Gloomhaven or Kinfire Chronicles, where you choose a character and progress through the prewritten scenarios toward the end goal.

Heroes also changed a lot of the language to try to make everything self-contained. While owning something like the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide was highly recommended for running past starter sets, it’s far less necessary with this one. Instead, the tutorials are very hand-holdy in how they recommend DMs approach problems. For example, the guide listed several prewritten options for a new DM to consider or for them to recommend to players if they needed ideas for how to deal with the baby dragon; something that I thought would be a pleasant asset for those who may be nervous about play.

Gameplay still felt very similar to a traditional D&D game with a lot of rolled d20s, roleplay, and built-in maps that make exploration easier than ever. The maps are also supported by monster tokens and environment tokens, which help the DM to bring flavor to the map without revealing too many of the game’s secrets before the players discover them.

Character resources are managed through cardboard tokens as well. As a wizard, players will manage a hand of spell cards as well as power tokens that they can spend throughout the game on first-level spells. The tokens are just placed atop your ‘sheet’ frame alongside the gold tokens and hitpoint tokens.

Character progression only goes to level 3, with each class only having one of two subclasses available. This was done due to the desire to avoid making character creation too complex (since level 4 adds feats and stat upgrades, which would make the game’s resources more demanding).

A similar design process was taken with the upcoming Stranger Things tie-in, although that focuses more on dungeons.

Is Heroes of the Borderlands Worth Your Time?

My perspective on Heroes is a bit limited in scrutiny since this was a WOTC-sponsored event with one of its staff leading the game, but first impressions were generally positive. It appears easy to play and to DM, and may help get more people behind the DM screen in the process. It also makes D&D more like a board game night, in that it is a bit easier to set up, less reliant on long-term campaigns or the hard work of a GM, and players don’t have to worry too much about missing a session and suddenly skipping a big lore drop.

That resemblance to a board game may appeal to some players, and it may also seem unnecessary to others. It’s an interesting approach to try to make gameplay easier in the coming months and years.

What I want to know next is how easy it is for someone who has never played D&D to pick up and learn, whether as a DM or as a player, and if it can convert them into long-time players. Our DM was lovely, but would we have a similar experience if, say, my mother (who I’ve gotten to play D&D once in my life) picked up and ran a session? WOTC has insisted that it is easy for non-DMs to run this game.

I also want to see if the price point will significantly limit game adoption. $49.99 is a lot of money for many people. Then again, some people will pay a TON of money for the next cool board game. Will they do the same for this? We will have to wait and see.

Whether you are a game designer, a DM or just a fan, TTRPG Insider has something for you. We gather the big stories of the week, interview creators and send all the major stories straight to your inbox.

Want to beat the algorithm and see all the major stories? Make sure to subscribe!

Baldur’s Gate 4 All But Confirmed (to No One’s Surprise)

Wizards of the Coast president John Hight sat down in an interview alongside Giant Skull owner Stig Asmussen to talk with The Game Business about D&D and its upcoming projects.

“Baldur’s Gate is an incredible game. And of course, we're going to do a successor,” Hight told the interviewer. Giant Skull’s project isn’t it, however.

“We go to Stig and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience,” Hight added. “Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it’s also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games." The game will reportedly be a single-player adventure game.

Hasbro and WOTC would be fools not to try to keep making bank on Baldur’s Gate 3. The centrality of everyone’s favorite tiefling Karlach on the front of the upcoming Faerun books shows how much of a priority that will be going forward.

 But BG4 will not be as good as its predecessor because Larian Studios is not making it. I think they should hire Owlcat Studios (who make Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous), but that company already has enough on its plate with DLC for its current property and the upcoming Dark Heresy and The Expanse games that will release at a later date.

I do recommend Chase Carter of Rascal News’ commentary on it, noting how Hight seems more interested in the video game side of WOTC than tabletop or even the card game publishers (which is funny considering that MTG made WOTC serious bank in Q2 2025).

In Other News

Backerkit announced an open call for Zinetopia 2026 in Feb. 2026. Zinetopia is part of a broader push among creators in the TTRPG space to create ‘zines’, aka smaller games or supplements that can be incorporated into a game. It’s a good chance for smaller creators to spread new products, or for new folks who want to enter into creating indie TTRPGs to spend make something that is all their own.

The New Jersey Webfest nominees are here! If you’re someone who cares about who is making creative and interesting actual play content, the NJ Webfest (And other state webfests by extension) are among the programs that seem to be the most important.

The Stormlight volumes of the Cosmere TTRPG will be available in physical print form on Oct. 29. Backers should get their copies beforehand. The physical versions will be available to everyone else then.

Catalyst Game Labs is selling first edition copies of Shadowrun, its popular fantasy-meets-cyberpunk TTRPG. The game has changed a lot since this book initially came out in 1989, but longtime fans have a chance to collect their copy of the old-school TTRPG.

Other Stories of the Week

First things first, we sat down with Padraig Murphy of Cubicle 7 to talk about Warhammer: The Old World, and how it differentiates from the classic super-crunchy grimdark fantasy TTRPG.

I also got to speak with Varun Singh of the virtual tabletop Hedron about how his company is striving to help indie creators put their games online.

And that’s all for this week! Want to support reporting like this? Subscribe! Also feel free to send us tips or emails at [email protected].