The Wilderness booklet provides a crucial chunk of the Exploration pillar in the D&D Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set

The Wilderness is one of three adventure booklets in the D&D Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set. Between The Keep on the Borderlands and Caves of Chaos, the Wilderness is the connective tissue in this level 1-3 adventure. 

There's less than three miles between civilization and unmitigated evil, and a 10-foot-wide dirt trail goes past both. At only 15 pages, the Wilderness is the shortest of the three booklets, but its inclusion is of vital importance to worldbuilding. Without asking your players to traverse the (admittedly short) path between the Keep and the Caves, the map would simply feel like a fast-travel selection screen between point A and B.

But with the Wilderness, this particular world for the Heroes of the Borderlands adventure goes from being a mashup of one-shot adventures to one contiguous world. Even if that world is only a few miles square.

The Dungeon Master can decide where, exactly, to kick off the adventure. Do you use a classic D&D trope by having all your players meet in a tavern? Then start off with the Keep on the Borderlands booklet. Do you begin—boom—starting right in front of the first dungeon entrance and start rolling for initiative as soon as possible? Then start with the Caves of Chaos booklet (I did). 

But if you want your players to be immediately off-balance and with nowhere safe to turn, let the Wilderness be their starting point. With no place for a Long Rest to lay their weary heads, it's fight-or-flight time from the get-go. 

The Wilderness is made up of the aforementioned Trail. Said Trail will take them quickly and quietly (for the most part) to that other Point A and Point B that I mentioned earlier. But what happens if they step off that Trail? 

Difficult Terrain, first off. That's what happens. Without a smooth, hard-packed trail underfoot, you're now only traveling at half-speed to the further corners of the Wilderness map. It's not a huge map. There's nothing insurmountable about it. But you don't have to travel far past a city limit sign before the Wilderness gets wild and wooly. 

What the Wilderness booklet teaches a new DM:

• Don't sweat travel distances too much
• Don't be afraid to reuse maps
• Don't shy away from random tables

Regarding travel distances, the most you need to worry about is that the Wilderness is about two miles east to west, and about three miles north to south. Six square miles is completely manageable. It also ensures your players don't ever get so far away from homebase (the Keep) that they can't make it back by nightfall. 

Regarding reusable maps, there are four correlating to the four major locations in the Wilderness: the Trail, the Woods, the Fens (marshlands), and the Tamarack Stand (pine trees with fall colors). On those four maps, a couple different encounters can happen, so they're not one-and-done like the Caves of Chaos maps.

Your players may balk if they see the exact same squiggle of Trail, or the same marshy islands for the second time. But that's ok. We're all using our imaginations here in this game called D&D. Pretend it's a different stretch of trail. Pretend it's a different set of dry islands in the middle of the wetlands. Or use the uncanny situation to your advantage as a Dungeon Master: Why yes, this is the exact same bend in the road where you last ran into the [fill in the blank]. Or: Of course, it had to be the exact same spot where you lost a boot in the mud the last time you were ambushed here.

And random tables are a DM's best friend. You're not beholden to exactly what you rolled up on any one random table. You can just select what you want from the list rather than rolling dice to see what randomly emerges on the map. Or the random table perhaps only serves as a guideline. You rolled up Goblins, but maybe it's time for a Brass Wyrmling dragon instead. Let random tables inspire you more than restrict you.

Random encounters get a bad rap with some D&D groups. And that's fine! If you decide they're not for you, because they feel like filler or they distract from the adventure's mainline story, by all means, ignore random encounters.

But don't knock it till you try it (as us kids used to say in the '90s). Random encounters in the Wilderness may feel too side-quest-like if you're on a focused mission to knock out the Caves of Chaos and nothing else.

Those random encounters remind players that the Wilderness is not a safe place to be—at least it's unadvisable to just loiter in the woods. It helps players build an appreciation for those beacons of civilization out there in the wild—beacons like the Keep on the Borderlands. 

So, while it's the thinnest of the three adventure booklets, the Wilderness is the glue that holds this starter-set adventure together. It lets players know that adventures and locations can be episodic in nature, but still provide a throughline of travel and adventure between.

The new D&D Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set (secretly trying to be a board game) releases September 16 in stores and on D&D Beyond online.