Review: Dungeon in a Box Q1

In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.

I opted to get the physical subscription because I wanted to truly do Tabletop Gaming with the kids. (The kids even made their own minis on Hero Forge for this campaign) As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not opposed to playing digitally with the kids. We’ve played every way from fully analog to a hybrid where I’m using the living room TV to broadcast a digital map to fully digital where we’re all playing on DndBeyond. A few days ago I posted about my frustration with digital TTRPG sourcebooks. Dungeon in a Box does exactly what I was calling for all publishers to do; in fact they actually go above and beyond. If you subscribe to the physical box not only do you get a PDF of the adventure, but you also get everything you need to use a VTT to play digitally. You get tokens for use in a VTT, JPEG maps, and digital versions of all the resources that are provided physically. Each box also comes with a PDF to convert the adventure for Pathfinder 2e and audio files to play for ambiance during the adventure. Where it makes sense they also provide a PDF of lore or a gazzeteer. They really do put out a VERY good quality product for the money (~$40/month). Also, as a bonus - you gain free access to the digital version of their Wonderous One-Shot product. (If you want physical versions of these one-shots, it’s another subscription and it seems to give you the same types of things as Dungeon in a Box, but surrounding a one-shot instead of a year-long campaign)

In the box is a booklet with the adventure, a double-sided map of the titular dungeon, some skinny minis (acrylic, color 2D miniatures - think of paper dolls made of plastic), 1 or 2 3D printed minis, and a few other things that go along with the adventure. They also usually have a least a small portion of the map that is made 3D by providing some thick, stiff paper that can be folded to create things like tables, boxes, or terrain. Again, this is a really awesome product that I definitely find to be worth the money.

There are really only two places where I find fault in the product. First, there aren’t instructions to assemble the 3D portions of the terrain. You can look on their website in the same place where you download the digital content and see a picture of what the terrain looks like asssembled, but that’s it. I wish they just had a small one-page insert telling you how to assemble the 3D components and where they go on the map. (It’s somewhat easy to guess, but just this one thing could make this a 10/10 product instead of 9/10).

What about the adventures themselves? Whether Dungeon in a Box is appropriate for your table will depend on what kind of adventure your players want. The product is what it says on the tin - it’s a dungeon in a box. If your players are into the dungeon crawling aspects of D&D then they will probably enjoy this quite a bit. Also, the current year’s adventure - Voyage of the Fallen Star - involves island hopping through the islands to the west of Greenwold (this company’s main country - equivalent to D&D’s Forgotten Realms. Last year’s Dungeon in a Box also took place in Greenwold). So if your players enjoy new areas every adventure and (so far) not circling back to previous areas - they will also enjoy this. Of course, nothing stops you from roleplaying the characters going back to previous islands or even all the way back to Greenwold. But the campaign revolves around beating your rivals to collect star fragments at all these islands. Narratively, it wouldn’t make sense to give your rivals a chance to beat you to the next star fragment. But you do you. I certainly have played my fair share of video games where fate of the world hangs in the balance, but the game is perfectly fine letting you do a bunch of fetch quests while the comet continues heading towards the planet. (Never arriving until you’re ready)

As a DM, I find that the books are well-written. They provide a lot of background on each island, the NPCs, and the enemies. They also provide gameplay mechanics in areas where the official D&D rules are lacking - for example they have a well-defined system for sailing ships and for ship combat. There are lots of good random encounter tables with very well-written encounters. Many of the encounters include information that moves the story forward. They also have a meta-story involving the ghost of an adventurer that is providing an extra layer of fun for the table. I think they are good for a DM with SOME experience (I’ve been doing it for about a year) because there is a decent amount of assumed knowledge and the DM has to fill in some of the greater description of what’s going on outside the dungeons. This is probably obvious to any experienced DMs, but you need the official D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual in addition to Dungeon in a Box’s adventure booklets. While the book provides stat blocks for at least one unique monster and one unique enemy per booklet, most of the monsters are either directly taken from the Monster Manual or say “use the panther stat block with the following modifications”. With their customer monsters I’ve both added these stat blocks into DnDBeyond to use their enounter builder and run things manually. Either way works just fine.

At first, my players (my kids) weren’t enjoying the adventures as much. They’re not heavily into the dungeon part of dungeons and dragons. While they aren’t huge on roleplay slowing things down (we blazed through Humblewood in just a few months. Meanwhile on the Hit Point Press Discord someone said it took them 3 years to finish the campaign), at first the dungeon of the month seemed to be too little story for them. But things seem to have hit their stride with the third adventure. They really had a good time with it (I think partially because I made an effort as the DM to slow things down a bit and provide more characterization to the NPCs they met). It may just be that this adventure takes time to hit its stride. In another few months I’ll do a Q2 mini-review and see how the kids are doing with the campaign.

In the end, I give Dungeon in a Box a hearty recommendation. If you’re not quite ready to homebrew, but want a unique adventure provided monthly (along with minis and maps you don’t have to mannually create) you can’t really do any better in the 5e world (D&D, Tales of the Valiant) than Dungeon in a Box. As I said, Dungeon in a Box does provide materals for Pathfinder Conversion, but Pathfinder, as I mentioned in another blog post, does have their equivalent straight from Paizo in Pathfinder Adventure Paths which may or may not be better since it comes straight from the source.

• Dungeon-in-a-Box
• D&D
• DnD
• 5e
• Pathfinder