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

[Dire Bare]

Not really. I'm an optimist. But that was crazy. A set designed to match exactly what happened almost four years ago is not great timing, even in the most optimistic interpretation that anyone can reasonably make.

Dude. Relax.

D&D played the biggest role in Season 4 with Eddie and the Hellfire Club. It makes a lot of sense for a D&D boxed set to focus on. This boxed set isn't a promo for Season 5, it's a tie-in to the series overall, timed to take advantage of the hype for the last season.

We'll have to wait and see, but it's also possible that the kids playing D&D isn't a huge part of Season 5.

 

[bedir than]

Not really. I'm an optimist. But that was crazy. A set designed to match exactly what happened almost four years ago is not great timing, even in the most optimistic interpretation that anyone can reasonably make.

The set isn't about what happened four years ago.

It's what happened after that

 

[Desdichado]

Dude. Relax.

When I'm perfectly relaxed and someone says to me "Dude. Relax." that's a guaranteed formula to make me not relaxed.

 

[Dire Bare]

A pre-order link is now available on D&D Beyond:

Stranger Things Welcome to the Hellfire Club Ultimate Bundle - Shop D&D Beyond

Stranger Things meets Dungeons & Dragons in this board game bundle featuring Hellfire Club founder Eddie Munson’s lost adventures.

marketplace.dndbeyond.com

 

[Dire Bare]

The set isn't about what happened four years ago.

It's what happened after that

Kinda. It doesn't cover what happened to the kids and the town of Hawkins, but it gives us Eddie's "lost" adventures he would have run the Hellfire Club players through . . . had events gone differently.

 

[bedir than]

Kinda. It doesn't cover what happened to the kids and the town of Hawkins, but it gives us Eddie's "lost" adventures he would have run the Hellfire Club players through . . . had events gone differently.

It's definitely not about what happened in Season 4.
And the characters are the D&D characters in the show, not the D&D players in the show as some are insisting.

 

[Burnside]

Half-hearted D&D Beyond material released after the movie was already out is not a meaningful tie-in.

A starter set set in one or more of the areas the movie was set in would be a tie-in. A Neverwinter sourcebook that includes Forge and other characters is a tie-in. Featuring the DADHAT characters in Golden Vault would be a tie-in.

"Hey, people are asking why we aren't talking about the movie on D&D Beyond, someone knock out some NPC stat blocks that suggest we may not have actually seen the movie in 10 minutes and post them" isn't a meaningful tie-in.

WotC doesn't like doing tie-ins for some reason. Well, the probably now-former staff didn't. And I can't imagine they'll ever explain why or that anyone other than me would ask them. But they clearly didn't want to do them.

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. One of the adventures in the book is a prison break set in Revel's End (the Icewind Dale prison from the movie). That adventure was also offered as a free preview product on DNDBeyond.

The problem there was the adventure was arguably the weakest one in the (generally very good) book. Also, the presentation of Revel's End in Keys from the Golden Vault and Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is quite different from how it's depicted in the movie. In the movie it looks like a frigid labor camp where you might have a psychotic orc cellmate. In the books, it's more like one of those Scandinavian wellness retreat prisons where the cells are superior to any apartment I lived in in New York.

 

[Mistwell]

My daughter is a Stranger Things fanatic. We've been to a Finn Wolfhard concert together, where we also met McKenna Grace, and had tickets to a Maya Hawk concert, and met Grace Van Dien who played Crissy. This might be the very thing to convince her to play D&D (the first crossover RPG didn't do it, though she did buy it).

 

[Weiley31]

the first four seasons of the show.

the first four seasons of the game.

I cant wait for the ending scene of the whole series to be a plot twist that reveals that the ENTIRE series of Stranger Things was just one long DND campaign that one of the main characters,as an adult, was just making up on the spot with his kids.

 

[Burnside]

I cant wait for the ending scene of the whole series to be a plot twist that reveals that the ENTIRE series of Stranger Things was just one long DND campaign that one of the main characters as an adult was just making up on the spot with his kids.

I wanted Honor Among Thieves to have an epilogue scene where we learned that Chris Pine was a D&D character and the player was Patton Oswalt.