You can easily drop these maps into your own game even if you're not running the actual adventure. The maps in Lost Mines of Phandelver fit commonly used locations in D&D games like ruined castles, thieves' guilds, dwarven mines, abandoned villages, and monster lairs. The character sheets included in the D&D Starter Set, and available online for free, are also perfect for other games since they include all of the rules you need to level from 1 to 5 right on the sheet. The rulebook includes a bunch of monsters you can use to generate your own adventure if you decide not to use Lost Mine of Phandelver, but you're missing out on an excellent introduction to D&D if you skip it. That doesn't seem like much but if you throw in some pencils and paper, you really don't need anything else to run a D&D game up to level 5. Its slim contents include a rulebook, an adventure book, five pre-generated character sheets, and a set of dice. If you're just starting out, this is a great first purchase. Let's open our book bags and take a look. Some tools, however, appear often in the bags of Dungeon Masters and it's these items that we're going to talk about today. The tools and accessories we can potentially use in our D&D games is as limitless as the stories we create. You don't buy a box that includes all of the pieces you need to run a game over and over again, although the D&D Starter Set comes close. RPGs, including D&D, aren't like other games. This article focuses on tools we use at a physical table, not digital accessories for virtual tabletop play. We're going to start with the minimum needed to play and work our way up into some of the more advanced accessories that aren't necessary, but are helpful. In this article we're going to get into the weeds of the best tools to help us run Dungeons & Dragons games. A New DM's Guide For Building Combat Encounters.A New Dungeon Master's Guide to Miniatures.Improvisation in D&D for New Dungeon Masters.Getting Started with Dungeons & Dragons.It is the third in a six-part series of articles focused on helping new D&D DMs put together and run great games. Note: This article is reposed with permission from the original posted to D&D Beyond on March 2018. New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Tools for New D&D Dungeon Masters

D&d monster sheets