Let’s face it, starting a Dungeons & Dragons campaign is hard work. You need to gather your party, find a date when everyone can meet, secure a location, and haul your materials there, although something is usually forgotten. After all that, you may still be only a quarter of the way to playing. Setting up a campaign takes maximum effort, and that takes time away from adventuring.
To help friends meet and play together without the preparation, Resolution Games and Wizards of the Coast have brought Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked to VR headsets. The game lets fans grab their rig and go instead of travelling with a library of materials. Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked focuses on the most compelling parts of adventuring in the continent of Faerûn, allowing players to spend their time in-game on the adventurer’s path while leaving setup behind.
VR games are only as good as their tutorials, and Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked delivers. After launching Battlemarked and reaching the title screen, the player is brought directly into a tutorial that doubles as a board game already filled with pieces. The narrator’s voice guides the player like something lifted from storybook pages.
“Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked feels like pure adventure.”
Moe Rock is deployed as the resident Dungeon Master, and her calm, soothing delivery is built for storytelling a grand adventure or guiding players through a tutorial. Fans of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dungeons & Dragons understand the importance of a well-narrated journey, and Resolution Games succeeds. Rock, for lack of better words, rocks. Her voice work carries the adventures of Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked with finesse and fills the most important role in D&D with confidence.
The tutorial teaches the basics of board games and introduces players to party management. By turning over your right hand, you can see all the skill cards available to your character, and by activating your character portrait, you can check each hero and their status. These small information dumps act as character sheet summaries, and players can still access the full sheet whenever they choose.
By grabbing both sides of the game board with the Meta controllers, I was able to zoom in and out of the battlefield to plan strategies. You can spot explosive barrels, brittle walls and other environmental weaknesses to gain an advantage. After a few short, scripted fights with goblins, I rescued two party members from goblin jail and made my way to the tutorial’s exit.
Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked gives players access to two campaigns at launch, with more coming soon, including one-shot campaigns that can be completed in a single sitting. The game also includes several menu options to adjust. There is a full, although limited, character creator that lets players craft their own version of one of the six launch classes. While the creator functions mainly as a way to paint your character’s board-piece miniature, it is a welcome feature in a title that often places you in one of six fixed personalities.
Players can step into the roles of Bolthrax the Dragonborn paladin, Ash the tiefling rogue, Jessix the human ranger, Tibby the halfling sorcerer, Tharok the dwarf fighter and Lyria the elf bard. In character creation, you can even name each character as you choose, letting me paint my version of the Dragonborn paladin in fresh copper with magma-red eyes. Although the creator is limited, finishing your miniature still feels like crafting something truly your own.
The D&D veteran community will know exactly what the launch races and classes can do, but Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked does a superb job of bringing newcomers up to speed by explaining what players need to know at any given moment. Resolution Games could have overloaded players with a dull lecture on the importance of Dragonborn clans and how different scale colours grant different breath-related abilities. Instead, the game presents brief summaries that don’t split the experience into half-explanation and half-adventure. Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked feels like pure adventure, which is a smart choice for a board game that already features natural pauses.
Of the first two campaigns launched with Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, I jumped into Embers of Chaos. To keep the tabletop spirit alive, Demeo includes a hardcover representation of the campaign, as if the player is pulling a tome from a dusty bookshelf. Rather than framing the experience like Baldur’s Gate 3, where the player embodies the character, Resolution Games makes it feel as if you are a party member at the table, with the campaign placed before you on a digitized version of the tabletop. In the background sits a cozy living room with bookshelves that Embers of Chaos could have been lifted from, making Battlemarked feel like you’re at a real table rather than wearing a headset.
Embers of Chaos begins by dropping your selected party into the thick of Neverwinter Woods. As a fairly seasoned player, Neverwinter Woods is a special location for me, and seeing it represented on the tabletop feels like meeting an online friend in person for the first time. After entering the Woods, your party — mine included a paladin, bard, ranger and rogue — encounters fleeing warriors escaping the scene of an ambushed noble. The retreating group turns out to be the noble’s security detail, and through a shaky voice, one of them asks for your party’s help.
Once you agree, a swarm of goblins rushes in, including a particularly nasty wolf rider. Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked draws clear inspiration from strategy titles like Fire Emblem and allows you to survey the entire battlefield for opportunities. You can highlight an enemy miniature and press the trigger to lift it from the tabletop for inspection, much like asking a friend if you can examine a piece. Each miniature is carefully crafted with detail comparable to high-quality physical versions. On this screen, players can view enemy character sheets, and instead of consulting the Dungeon Master, you can review the information yourself and make informed decisions.
“Every screen in Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked feels lived-in and serves a purpose.”
These decisions allow Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked to behave like a video game designed to look like a tabletop rather than the other way around, and it works seamlessly. After blasting the goblins with a Dragonborn’s poison breath and igniting it with Fire Arrows, the host of enemies turned into a charred speed bump. It turns out our noble ally is Lord Elmer Babris, a politician responsible for maintaining peace between the elves of the Emerald Enclave and Neverwinter.
Right on cue, one such elf, Sonsha Fellwater, appears and thanks our party for helping Lord Babris, who is eager to keep us on as his new security. Our group then heads to the Emerald Tavern in druid territory to catch its breath. Each screen in Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked feels lived-in and serves a purpose. Every NPC around the tavern offers hints about the state of the world in Embers of Chaos, and it becomes clear the Emerald Enclave is less than enthusiastic that Lord Babris had his title restored after the death of Neverwinter’s former ruler. Babris himself is reluctant to discuss the fragile peace talks while in elven territory, so he objects to continuing the conversation inside the Emerald Tavern and instead suggests Thundertree, a small town under Neverwinter’s control.
To avoid major spoilers, Embers of Chaos is packed with political intrigue, crowds of goblins and a heavy-handed bartender who can give you something that literally turns your characters upside down if you ask for it. Fully voiced and often hilarious NPCs populate the Emerald Tavern, and some even provide side quests. From tracking down lost items to giving a hungry kobold syrup for his pancakes, very little is off limits in Battlemarked.
“This is Dungeon Master excellence.”
While adventuring through Embers of Chaos, I cast my Meta Quest 3S to a PC and TV, letting a couple of friends join me in person through conversation. While the headset user has the best experience, this is still great fun and a clever way to involve everyone at the table without needing more than one headset. You can also sync a wireless Xbox or PS5 controller to the headset and pass it around so each person can take their turn with the controls. A party of many is far stronger than one alone.
Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked does many things well, but its strongest feature may be how easy it is to jump in and start playing without any knowledge of Faerûn’s major figures. Both newcomers and veterans can sit at the table as equals and adventure together through Resolution Games’ well-crafted narrative without momentum-breaking explanations. Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked leans into video game progression and often answers players’ questions before they are asked. This is Dungeon Master excellence.
Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked works so well that it raises the question of why it hasn’t been done before in such a streamlined form. Inserting the player as a tabletop gamer in a digital living room is a bold choice that delivers maximum immersion, and everything beneath the title screen in Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked shines brighter because of it.
Fans can jump into the two launch campaigns immediately and get a taste of adventure without preparing lengthy character sheets or doing research, and that alone feels like sorcery. Moe Rock handles Dungeon Master duties like a seasoned veteran, offering a voice built for narration that guides the party from location to location with ease. The NPCs feel believable, and Resolution Games’ focus on giving each campaign as much character as possible pays off, lending every figure a distinct voice and letting Faerûn come to life in VR. Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked gives adventurers everything they need to dive into one or two campaigns without leaving anything behind.
