With the new season of the Stranger Things show getting started on Netflix, now is a perfect time for Wizards of the Coast to release a new box set to help fans celebrate. Dungeons and Dragons Stranger Things: Welcome to the Hellfire Club ties perfectly into the show Stranger Things. This show and the box set may have been aimed at the twelve plus age group, but its nostalgia also pulls in other groups like Generation X and millennials. Welcome to the Hellfire Club is also very much like the new Heroes of the Borderlands set in that it acts as a teaching tool for Dungeons and Dragons itself.
There are well written and simple instructions entitled, “Read me first” that lay out what materials are inside this almost four-pound box of 1980’s themed materials. There is even a link to a quick start video that you can watch on your phone.
If you know people who are fans of the show Stranger Things and you want to introduce them to the game Dungeons and Dragons, this is the perfect gift. The great conceit of this set is that Season 4’s heavy-metal loving Dungeon Master, Eddie Munson (played by Joseph Quinn), has left notes for those who are reading the materials.
There is also an illustrated picture of Eddie, as the GM on both the box and the Dungeon Master’s Screen. It takes inspiration from a scene in the show where Erica Sinclair (played by Priah Ferguson) rolls a natural 20 and defeats the big bad in Eddie’s campaign. Eddie puts his hands out and bows to the players.
Erica’s Dungeons & Dragons character named Lady Applejack, who makes this heroic attack, is given a golden rod character sheet reminiscent of 1980’s Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, just like the ones from the show. This is not a bad idea if you are trying to get people who watched the show an entry to the tabletop roleplaying game. A fan of Stranger Things would certainly remember the show’s Dungeons and Dragons characters, such as the wizard Will the Wise, Nog the Dwarf, Sundar the Bold and Tayr the Paladin, and then be able to both reminisce about the show and also be in a real adventure. These characters have three sheets, one for each of the levels from one through three. This means that players don’t have to even worry about the mechanics of leveling up.
The adventures, of which there are four, start at level one, go to level two and then have two different adventures for level three. All through these adventures are little notes, inside an illustration that looks like either a torn piece of paper or the edge of a notebook. These have great bits of Eddie Munson wisdom such as “It’s not a real dungeon crawl if players can peep every tunnel under the rotted farm. Cover areas they haven’t explored…when you reveal a room with a big baddie in it, slap that Monster Token down and make a big show of it.”
There are player tokens and monster tokens that invoke miniatures for the cartoonish maps. I would have liked this product to have actual miniatures, but I imagine the already large size of this packed box didn’t have the room. The tokens work well enough and are a gateway for new players to purchase and paint their own miniatures for future games.
Justice Ramin Arman, who we’ve covered in previous projects like Quests From the Infinite Staircase, marshalled together some great talent in crafting adventures that invoke a heavy metal teenager’s game with lots of combat, clearly portrayed demonic antagonists and quirky NPCs that have over the top personalities. Listed as the lead designer, he is also double billed as being one the artists. One of the biggest illustrators brought in was Butcher Billy, who also worked on the Fourth Season of Stranger Things designing much of their promotional artwork.
In a recent statement from Hasbro, Arman praised much of his team. “For the product’s art and graphic design, Kara Kenna (Franchise Creative Director, D&D), Kate Irwin (Principal Art Director, D&D), and Trish Yochum (Principal Graphic Designer, D&D) were instrumental in driving this sense of faux-stalgia. Opening the box feels like traveling back in time.”
Making the gameplay easier are spell cards, monster cards and magic item cards. There is even a pad of combat tracker note sheets you can write on. All these things reduce the cognitive load that is put on a new player or a dungeon master learning how to run a game.
Wizards of the Coast sent us a review copy of this multifaceted product. I appreciated how it took the TV show’s adventure within an adventure format and ran with it. Much like Shakespeare using the play within a play, as in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the characters in Stranger Things play a Dungeons and Dragons game that mirrors the dangers they face in their lives on the show.
This product is a must-have for fans of Stranger Things, and especially for those who want to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons, just like in the show.