Editing Basic Dungeons & Dragons (section)

===Basic Set===
[[Image:BasicDnDBox.jpg|thumb|Basic]]
This had everything you needed for characters level 1-3. It included a rulebook and - for Moldvay - an adventure: [[Keep on the Borderlands]]. Mentzer dumped the module and split the rulebook into a Players book and a DMs book, in parallel with AD&D. He also deliberately wrote to a (reasonably-intelligent) ten-year-old's level, structuring the Player book especially as a tutorial.

Moldvay, like Holmes, had an unfinished adventure of his own: the Haunted Keep. Top floor detailed; lower floors... narrated, in part, and then sketched in side-view.

Mentzer proposed instead an unfinished epic - a ''revenge'' story. The initial tutorial is conducted and mostly-narrated by NPC cleric waifu Aleena, hunting a magic-using bandit Bargle. Aleena goes LEEEROY on Bargle and gets needlessly killed; you then track Bargle in the solo [[Endless Quest]]-style tutorial through his dungeon. This was beneficial if you lacked players, and also inspired adventure gamebooks and invisible ink adventures like [[M1: Blizzard Pass]].[[File:Aleena-the_cleric.jpg|356px|thumb|right|Aleena, before take out by Bargle.]] The DM book proposes a three-tier dungeon in stages: level one is fully described, level two has a dungeon-map mostly without monsters, level three is totally up to the DM to map and populate with only a few pointers. This wiki author considers Mentzer to have done better at mentoring ten-year-old DMs than Moldvay did, since this author was able to script out Mentzer's dungeon and never could figure out how to do the same for Moldvay. Your mileage may vary.

Some printings had 3 hole punch in the books to allow people to keep them in a binder easily. It also included a set of [[Crayola Dice|inexpensive dice that you colored in with a crayon.]] The books only printed material relevant for characters from levels 1-3 and so were much smaller than the average RPG book. This allowed them to be sold cheaply.

Character classes - and races - were Fighter, Cleric, Magic-user, Thief, Dwarf (fighter with infra-vision and badass saving throws), Elf ([[gish|fighter/magic-user]]) or Halfling (proto-[[Ranger]]). Mentzer and his padawans will bend this.