Heroes of the Borderlands is so on brand its tavern serves ale in mugs with a D&D logo

Keep on the Borderlands is one of three adventure booklets making up the Dungeons & Dragons Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set. Its organization is impeccable. Starting with approaching the outer gatehouse, winding its way through locations and services in the outer bailey, then to the inner gatehouse, taking you into the inner bailey, and finally to the fortress.

The outer bailey (think of it as a courtyard within a walled castle) houses every service a party of low-level party members could hope for—minus the hubbub of big urban cities. It's focused. It's perfect. It comes with everything from a barn to a bank, from a tavern to a temple.

Each structure gets one page. The Tavern, for example. Next to the header is a number corresponding to the structure on the map of the Keep. Next is a What You Need to Play callout box. This will list one or two NPC cards that come in the boxed set. Some even have a handout. The Tavern is called the Drunken Dragon. (I bet someone in the writers' room wanted to call it the Drunk & Dragon—D&D for short. The artwork on the page even shows a tavern stein with a gold dragon twisted into an ampersand.)

Then comes a little boxed text to read aloud to your players. Nothing wild. Nothing too long. Just some lite descriptive elements and perhaps a word from the character on the NPC card.

Then come the structure's features. A quick line or two about the Tavern Features, in this case. The taproom, the kitchen, and even an empty stage just begging to be filled with a player ready to break out of their shell.

Tavern Services come next. It mentions food and drink, which are listed in the separate menu handout in the box. There's even the ability to solicit rumors—with a random table to roll or select from—and even how much it would cost to buy the house a round.

Brilliantly, each structure also come with a quest. It's not a big quest. Big quests are for the Caves of Chaos and the Wilderness adventure booklets. But the quests in the Keep on the Borderlands booklet will help around the place and, generally, put you in good stead with the local populace. There are rewards in the form of gold and/or favors. But these aren't big enough adventures, per se, to level up your characters. For that, you will indeed have to venture out beyond the keep's walls.

While the Heroes of the Borderlands is (helpfully) broken out into three booklets, all three make up a D&D 5th Edition remake of the 1980's adventure The Keep on the Borderlands. It's a classic, written by one of the founders of D&D, Gary Gygax. This is the first time I'm encountering any version of this old school adventure, however. And the fact that a form of it is included in a starter set—40 years later—is testament to how enduring the principles behind OG D&D really are.

This is a wonderful starter set. You get an impossible amount of tokens and cards and maps and booklets for the $50 asking price. And it's the first starter set that's given me the confidence to make the leap from dungeon mastering online to DM'ing in person. It's just that good. The D&D Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set launches September 16.