Starter Sets are vital for the growth of the tabletop roleplaying hobby. It’s a truism; every designer knows it, every producer, line manager, creative director… everyone involved in the tabletop industry knows exactly how essential an easy route into RPGs is. Because, as everyone in the industry also knows, getting into RPGs can be truly difficult—and, historically, we’ve not made it easy. 

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t deliberate. You’ll rarely find a hobby community so overwhelmingly delighted at the idea of teaching new people how to join in. People love teaching their friends, family, and co-workers how to build a character, and get started. But that’s the nub of the issue. Roleplaying is best taught by an experienced player. RPGs tend to be a social and experiential hobby, and that means they are best learned in a social and experiential atmosphere. Or, perhaps I should be clearer, they are best first encountered in such an atmosphere. 

How many roleplayers were introduced by an older sibling, a parent, a friend, or a teacher? It’s the ideal way to learn, because, opening up a core rulebook with no idea what you’re doing beyond ‘I’ve heard this is a cool hobby’ is a pretty sure way to find yourself utterly baffled. 

Starter Sets aim to be the way past this bafflement, giving a new player the tools to teach their friends, bringing a whole group into the hobby in one, handily packaged, swoop. Too often though Starter Sets assume a familiarity with parts of running and playing RPGs which leave newbies totally confused or scared or even embarrassed.

For instance, one of the big areas of concern and uncertainty I’ve seen new players talking, or GM’d for them is: how do you talk at the table? Should you talk as your character—that is, in the first person? Or about your character—in the third person? It’s such a central aspect of RPGs, but so little explained in Starter Sets, or Core Books. And it should be. Starter Sets have been, up until now, pretty good at explaining rules to new players. But less so at communicating the experience, and the hobby, to them. 

So that’s what Steamforged Games is attempting to change in our collaboration with Kobold Press. We love Kobold Press as a company (and I love them as an individual gamer—Courts of the Shadow Fey is, in my humble opinion, one of the best fantasy campaigns ever written, check it out), and when we approached them about a possible collaboration we already knew we wanted to offer to produce a Starter Set with and for them.

Helping new gamers start roleplaying is a genuine passion for Steamforged Games. It’s something we’re always talking about, it’s the presiding inspiration behind Epic Encounters, it’s one of the reasons Animal Adventures exists—we want to make gaming more open, and easier to learn if you’re not fortunate enough to be shown how it works, if you don’t have an experienced Game Master to show you how to get started… this set teaches you how to become one. 

That’s the design ethos we’ve sought to inject into every component of the Tales of the Valiant Starter Set. The first book you’ll read isn’t a whole host of game rules or baffling terminology. It’s a conversational introduction to what a game of Tales of the Valiant is going to be like. It’s intentionally about how you spend time at the table, how you interact with the GM and other players, and about what to expect from an RPG. It’s intended to be a reassuring guide through all the natural anxieties potentially preventing people from picking up their first d20.

Now, once we’ve helped players understand what it is an RPG is, and how they’re going to play it, then we can get into more traditional Starter Set fare. One of the best elements of the first RPG product I ever bought—the orange-boxed 3rd edition D&D starter set—was how its adventures were structured. It started with an incredibly basic situation—your characters go into a room and fight a goblin—and grew increasingly complex, adding in new rules step-by-step. This is something we’ve emulated, working with the very talented Oliver Darkshire (novelist, and game designer) to produce five adventures. These start with a solo adventure, designed for novice GMs to get a hang of the rules and the rhythms of gameplay (and we should doff our caps to Chaosium who were, to my knowledge, the first company to include a solo adventure in their superlative Starter Sets) before trying to teach it to others.

The rest of the adventures take the gorgeous four character miniatures provided in the box through a series of classic fantasy roleplaying situations. There are wizards to rescue, trolls to talk round, and wraiths to consign to the grave… but with each new quest, more rules are added, incrementally, to ensure neither a novice GM or a new player is overwhelmed by the complexity of the rules or the variety of choices.

This deliberate focus on the gradual introduction of options and complexity is also reflected in the way characters are built. We’re taking the iconic characters from Tales of the Valiant and breaking them down, showing players how levelling up works, and enabling them to understand how to build a character. 

Of course, there’s also a rules reference book—so players can always check anything they need to, and when they’re ready for the detail, it’s waiting for them. And Tales of the Valiant is such a strong system that there always is more to discover, and more to understand. When players are finished with the Tales of the Valiant Starter Set they should be ready to pick up the full books Kobold Press have already had to reprint and get stuck in.

The fundamental aim of any Starter Set is to teach players the rules of a game. We’re hoping, by combining the experience and expertise of Steamforged Games and Kobold Press we can leave a player eager to do more—to understand the game more deeply, to build and explore worlds, and to create dozens of characters to explore them. That’s the experience we want players to have. To close the lid on the Tales of the Valiant Starter Set and to be eager to plunge both into Tales of the Valiant and into the RPG hobby as a whole.