D&D's October Product Revealed to Be Stranger Things Tie-In

[Plaguescarred]

This tie-in product offer interesting potential. It's advertised as a boardgame with 4 adventures so i don't know how 5E friendly this will be.

 

[Vael]

I run the Chris Pine MTG card as the Commander of one of my fav EDH decks.

I'd normally pass on box sets like this, but I am impressed with the retro vibe and the amount of stuff in the box. I'm in for tokens and cards and such.

 

[Dire Bare]

This tie-in product offer interesting potential. It's advertised as a boardgame with 4 adventures so i don't know how 5E friendly this will be.

The "board game" language is being used for both this Stranger Things set and the new Starter Set as well. I'm not worried. It's just a way to describe all the doo-dads that come with the rules and adventures.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You'll be forgiven for having forgotten this, but Keys from the Golden Vault was promoted as a tie-in product at the time of the movie's release, and the book released I believe 2-3 weeks before the movie.

For a very loose version of the word "promoted."

A meaningful tie-in isn't one where, if you've already bought the product, you discover something that ties it to something else. That's an Easter egg.

A meaningful tie-in is when you leave the theater having seen DADHAT, wander into Barnes & Noble, and there's a big cardboard standee that WotC has released that features the DADHAT characters (and if they didn't have the rights to use the actors' appearances in promotional materials, as some people wanted to argue, that's a huge screw-up on their part), with books that say on the cover (stickers on shrinkwrap) "LOVE THE MOVIE? NOW PLAY THE GAME!"

None of this is a strange or alien concept and Hasbro, which oversaw a sourcebook that went along with the My Little Pony movie for Tails of Equestria, certainly knows how it works. That we didn't see anything like this from WotC for DADHAT was a choice.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This tie-in product offer interesting potential. It's advertised as a boardgame with 4 adventures so i don't know how 5E friendly this will be.

They're using the term board game for the Borderlands boxed set, too. (That one, of course, has more obvious board game elements.) I suspect this is just their marketing approach for now.

 

[Flying Toaster]

It is certainly strange that Wizards had a themed starter set for Rick & Morty but not for the movie or BG3.

 

[Flying Toaster]

Going completely original is a risk. Eberron is one of my favorites, but I rarely see it played compared to FR. Then again, "original thought/product" is subjective and vague. I might be thinking WotC should make a their own 5e Sci-Fi setting when others think the original idea should be another mega dungeon.

Paizo is certainly doing this with Starfinder. I do wonder how many people are actually playing that game though. For whatever reason science fiction RPGs have always been a niche within a niche.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Paizo is certainly doing this with Starfinder. I do wonder how many people are actually playing that game though. For whatever reason science fiction RPGs have always been a niche within a niche.

The trouble with Starfinder is is isn't SF, it's fantasy in space.

Traveller was pretty big in the early 80s. I think being featured regularly in White Dwarf helped a lot.

 

[Burnside]

They're using the term board game for the Borderlands boxed set, too. (That one, of course, has more obvious board game elements.) I suspect this is just their marketing approach for now.

They use “board game” so pervasively in the Stranger Things set’s marketing copy in the DNDBeyond marketplace description that at first I honestly wasn’t totally sure it was actually D&D adventures.

 

[Flying Toaster]

The trouble with Starfinder is is isn't SF, it's fantasy in space.

Traveller was pretty big in the early 80s. I think being featured regularly in White Dwarf helped a lot.

There are definitely people who don’t want magic spells on their alien planets or laser rifles in their fantasy kingdoms. Pathfinder’s Golarion is already a kitchen sink setting with a steampunk gunfighter town (Alkenstar) on the same continent as African jungles (Mwangi) and an Egyptian pyramid land (Osirion), so Paizo must have figured that their customers are fine with crossing the usual genre boundaries.

Back in the 80’s Dragon magazine used to have a fair amount of advertising for Traveller and even some articles, before it became a house organ for AD&D.