Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set arrived in 1977 promising something simple: a way in. Before it existed, the fantasy role-playing game that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had invented three years earlier was a dense, poorly organized tangle of rules that baffled newcomers. TSR, Inc. hired an outside writer named John Eric Holmes to untangle it. What Holmes produced would become one of the best-selling entry points in the history of tabletop gaming. But the story of the Basic Set is not simply the story of a rulebook. It is the story of a lawsuit over royalties, a missing college student whose disappearance landed Dungeons & Dragons on the front pages of newspapers, and a succession of redesigns that each tried to answer the same question: who exactly is this game for?

• 2. Holmes and the First Box

  ›

  John Eric Holmes wrote the 1977 Basic Set as an introductory version of the game, drawing on concepts from the original 1974 D&D boxed set and its first supplement, Greyhawk. The rulebook was aimed at new players aged twelve and older who had no background in tabletop miniatures wargaming. It was designed to carry characters only through their first three levels, after which players were expected to move on to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which TSR was releasing that same year. Holmes had a distinct philosophy: he preferred a lighter tone with more room for personal improvisation. Gygax, who wrote the Advanced books, wanted something comprehensive enough to settle any dispute that might arise at a tournament. The two visions pulled in opposite directions, and the Basic Set occupied one end of that spectrum.

  The physical product itself came in two forms. A standalone 48-page rulebook featured artwork by David C. Sutherland III. The boxed version was packaged in a larger, more visually appealing box than the original D&D set, designed to sit on toy store shelves and reach a general public audience. That box included polyhedral dice and supplemental materials including geomorphs and lists of monsters and treasures. Games Workshop published its own British edition of the rulebook that same year, with a cover by John Blanche and interior illustrations by Fangorn.

  In 1979, a dice shortage at TSR forced the company to ship sets with two sheets of numbered cardstock chits that players could cut out and use in place of dice, along with a coupon for ordering actual dice later. Starting with the fourth printing in 1978, the supplemental map booklets were replaced by the adventure module B1 In Search of the Unknown. Printings six through eleven, covering the years 1979 through 1982, swapped that out for B2 The Keep on the Borderlands.

• 3. A Lawsuit and a Steam Tunnel

  ›

  Dave Arneson, who co-created Dungeons & Dragons with Gygax, filed suit against TSR in 1977 over how his royalties were being calculated. As writer Jon Peterson later explained in Polygon, Arneson was receiving royalties only for the D&D rulebook itself, not for the cover price of the entire Basic Set box. When Arneson sought a five percent royalty on the whole contents of the set, he was effectively claiming money that was going into Gygax's pocket. TSR responded by replacing the Dungeon Geomorphs and Monster and Treasure Assortment booklets with Mike Carr's adventure module In Search of the Unknown. Peterson noted the legal logic: now, instead of claiming money earmarked for Gygax, Arneson would be claiming money earmarked for his friend Mike Carr. Carr himself received royalties for In Search of the Unknown both when the module was sold alone and when it was packed into the Basic Set.

  Sales at this point were modest. Before September 1979, the Basic Set was selling roughly 5,000 copies a month. Then James Dallas Egbert III disappeared after entering the steam tunnel system beneath Michigan State University. News coverage speculated that a D&D obsession had driven him underground. The story gave the game what Peterson called "mainstream notoriety," and sales surged. By the end of 1979, the Basic Set was moving more than 30,000 copies per month. Gygax, watching Carr's financial success from that spike, moved to replace In Search of the Unknown with The Keep on the Borderlands, a module he had written himself.

• 4. The Red Box Revolution

  ›

  Tom Moldvay edited a major revision of the Basic Set in 1981, and the choice he made would define D&D for a generation of players. Rather than pushing the Basic Set closer to the mechanics of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Moldvay pushed it further away. Basic D&D became a distinct product line, promoted as carrying the spirit of the original game, while AD&D was presented as a mechanical advancement. The two games were no longer expected to converge.

  Moldvay's rulebook ran sixty-four pages, up from forty-eight, and wore a bright red cover with art by Erol Otus, a sharp departure from the pale blue monochrome of the Holmes booklet. The polyhedral dice came in a heat-sealed bag with a small wax crayon for coloring the numbers into the recessed faces. The book arrived pre-drilled with holes so it could be kept in a three-ring binder. The Keep on the Borderlands continued to ship with the set, and as Peterson would later observe, that pairing at the height of the D&D boom meant the module went on to sell 750,000 copies a year, becoming one of the most widely known adventures in the game's history.

  Following the Moldvay revision came a companion Expert Set, edited by Dave Cook and Steve Marsh, covering character levels four through fourteen. For the first time, the Basic game had a ladder players could climb beyond the introductory levels, all within a product line that was no longer dependent on AD&D.

• 5. Mentzer's Tutorial Turn

  ›

  Frank Mentzer took over the Basic Set in 1983, giving it a new title, Dungeons & Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules, and a new physical identity. The 1983 revision shipped in a distinctive red box with cover art by Larry Elmore. Inside were two separate books: a sixty-four page Players Manual and a forty-eight page Dungeon Masters Rulebook, along with six dice and a crayon for coloring them. Instead of an adventure module, the set included a solo adventure and a Dungeon Master introductory scenario.

  Mentzer's goal was accessibility. The rules themselves changed little from Moldvay's version, but the presentation shifted into a step-by-step tutorial format aimed at younger players. Between 1983 and 1986, he expanded this into a five-set series, each with its own color-coded box. The Expert Rules wore blue. The Companion Rules, covering levels fifteen through twenty-five, were teal. The Master Rules, covering levels twenty-six through thirty-six, were black. And the Immortals Rules, designed for characters who had transcended ordinary levels altogether, came in gold. The series gave players a path from absolute beginner to a state beyond mortality itself.

  In 1984, TSR issued the 10th Anniversary Dungeons & Dragons Collector's Set, which bundled the rulebooks from the Basic, Expert, and Companion sets together with modules including B1, B2, AC2, AC3, and M1 Blizzard Pass, along with Player Character Record Sheets and dice. Only a thousand copies were produced, sold by mail and at GenCon 17.

• 6. Cards, Black Boxes, and Closing Chapters

  ›

  In 1991, TSR released a version of the Basic Set called The New Easy-to-Master Dungeons & Dragons Game. Players nicknamed it the "black box." Designed primarily by Troy Denning, it extended the level cap to five, up from the three-level limit of every previous Basic Set version. Its most unusual feature was the Dungeon Card Learning Pack, a set of 48 cards inspired by the SRA reading program. Each card front explained a single rule element, such as hit dice, initiative rolls, or non-player characters. The back described a brief scenario illustrating that rule. The full set also contained a Dungeon Master's Screen that doubled as a folder for the cards, fold-up cardboard pawns, a color map sheet, and dice.

  TSR published the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia that same year, compiling and revising the rules from the Basic, Expert, Companion, and Master sets into a single volume, giving "black box" players a way to continue beyond fifth level.

  The last version of the Basic Set came in 1994. Edited by Doug Stewart, it was titled The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game and arrived in a tan-sided box. It replaced the tutorial cards with sidebar text woven into a single 128-page Rules and Adventure Book. The physical components had grown: six plastic miniatures for players, 24 foldable cardboard enemy standees, a poster map, a Dungeon Master's Screen, and dice. After seventeen years and five distinct editions, the Basic Set was done. Scott Taylor, writing for Black Gate in 2014, placed the Mentzer edition's Larry Elmore cover art at number two on his list of the top ten TSR cover paintings of all time.

• 7. What Critics Said

  ›

  Jon Freeman reviewed the original 1977 Holmes edition in the 1980 book The Complete Book of Wargames and described the Basic Set as "only a starter set and effectively obsolete a few weeks after you get a campaign going." He had been harsher about the original D&D set, which he called "the most illiterate display of poor grammar, misspelling, and typographical errors in all of professional wargaming." The Holmes edition, he wrote, had been written by "someone outside the TSR establishment who knew a noun from a verb, and the difference shows." His overall evaluation: "Very Good."

  Clayton Miner, reviewing the 1981 Moldvay revision in Pegasus magazine, called it "a vast improvement over the earlier version" and cited better organization and clearer rules as its main strengths. Anders Swenson and Douglas Law, writing in Different Worlds, went further, recommending the revised Basic and Expert sets over all previous editions, calling the combination "clearer, better organized, and more refined." Games magazine placed the Basic Set in its Top 100 Games lists for both 1981 and 1982.

  Doug Cowie reviewed the 1983 Mentzer revision in Imagine magazine and praised the company for finally releasing a product that explained to someone brand new to role-playing how to get started. He noted that the rules remained the same as the Moldvay version, so players with older sets could continue using them, but concluded that "Basic is a lot closer to the spirit of the original game than is the rambling, unwieldy and sometimes pompous Advanced." Ken Rolston, also reviewing the Mentzer set in Different Worlds, called it "an excellent introductory package, perfect for youths and casual beginners, good-looking, smooth-reading, right-spirited, and reasonably priced."