I review every TSR D&D Starter Set from the ‘90s
There were seven of them! Seven!
Astute readers will have observed that I possess strongly-held convictions on the subject of starter sets, and while my discerning gaze is mostly directed towards miniature wargames, my feelings apply equally to RPGs. Do you know who else liked starter sets? TSR in the early nineties. Between 1991 and 1995, the original publishers of Dungeons & Dragons released no less than four different products designed to ease new players into D&D, a number that almost doubles to seven if you count repacks and variants.
Contrary to more recent RPG starter sets I’ve perused, most of these products were solidly aimed at kids and sold through traditional retail channels. As I’ve discussed before, fantasy games were all the rage at the time, and I saw every one of these boxes stacked on the shelves in Toys ‘R’ Us and the like. They routinely piled up in discount stores for years after their initial release, which is how I ended up owning most of them — my mum struggled with the Herculean task of buying Christmas and birthday presents for a nerdy adolescent in the dark ages before internet shopping.
With the relentless rush of releases, it’s hard to see this array of starter products as anything but TSR frantically throwing stuff at the wall in the hope that something would stick, especially knowing that the troubled company would be bought by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. Conversely, that doesn’t mean that they were necessarily bad.
Before we go any further, I’d like to give thanks to Shannon Appelcline, whose Designers & Dragons books came up so many times while I was fact-checking my own shoddy memory for this piece that it felt unprofessional not to acknowledge them.
And now, please take my hand as I don my rose-tinted specs and wander down memory lane in search of the D&D Starter Sets of the Early to Mid 1990s!
