The award-winning cRPG Baldur's Gate 3 couldn't possibly run on the original Nintendo Switch, as evidenced by a test made with a modded console that featured twice the amount of RAM (8GB instead of 4GB), with the game still bringing this 'Switch on steroids' on its knees. However, the Nintendo Switch 2 is a completely different beast. In some regards, it is even superior to the Xbox Series S, as Studio Wildcard's Lead Programmer just told me in an interview, and the Xbox Series S does run the game, albeit not very well. Additionally, there have been successful Switch ports […]

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When I was a university student 10 years ago (oh dear, I am getting old), I was on the committee of the adventure gaming society. We were a small, but lovable, group of geeks who gathered together every Saturday to play board games and tabletop RPGs of every persuasion. We played a lot of Fantasy Flight’s Game of Thrones board game, which is at its best and bloodiest when you can get a whole table full of players scheming and plotting together. At that time, Game of Thrones was moving towards its sixth season, all the pieces were still in motion, and advancing towards what we were all certain would be one of the greatest climaxes in television history… right?

Then, when 2016 rolled around, a new challenger arose for the crown of the best nerdy show in town: Stranger Things, which launched on Netflix on the 15^th July. With its strong emphasis on 1980s nostalgia, Stranger Things revitalised interest in everything from Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill to “New Coke” (which, despite its name, is more than a decade older than I am).

Dungeons and Dragons stood at the centre of the spotlight that Stranger Things shone on 80s pop culture. The game is a major plot point in the show, several characters play it, and the antagonists share their names with monsters and mythical figures from the Forgotten Realms.

That major public promotion did wonders for the popularity of my modestly-sized university gaming club. We saw a massive influx of new members, something I want to emphasise is unambiguously good. Gaming is a big tent, and bringing more people with diverse ranges of interests and experiences into that tent serves to make the stories that we can tell together more authentic and more interesting.

Now, as Stranger Things blazes through its final season, Wizards of the Coast has launched Welcome to the Hellfire Club, a module containing four Dungeons and Dragons adventures, designed to replicate the experience of playing alongside fictional Dungeon Master Eddie Munson from the Netflix show.

RPG Taverns invited me to play the first of these adventures, “The Vanishing Gnome.” Evidently, they still had my contact information after I included them in my piece on TTRPGs and community building.

Naturally, I was more than happy to do some dungeoneering, but there was just one issue…

I’ve never seen an episode of Stranger Things in my life.

Everything that I’ve recounted about the show so far, I know either because I have absorbed it from popular culture or I’ve been able to piece it together after some research.

I’ve played with the Stranger Things-themed Magic: The Gathering cards, and YouTube’s algorithm has popped a handful of Stranger Things shorts in front of me over the years, but when it comes to actual concrete knowledge of the show, I don’t know the Upside Down from Benny’s Burgers.

Nevertheless, I endeavoured to give it a shot anyway. Here’s what I learned.

In Pursuit of Vanishing Gnomes

On a chilly Thursday evening in mid-November, I found myself down in the Hawkins Room of RPG Taverns, which had been decked out with a broad selection of 80s paraphernalia. I had a Stranger Things-themed cocktail in one hand, a collection of colourful dice in the other, and I was ready to search for some missing gnomes.

This adventure, and I would assume the other three in this set, was clearly designed to mimic D&D as it was during its early days. While the game uses the 2024 edition of the rules (you won’t be making any fortitude saves here), tonally it harkened back to an earlier era. There wasn’t much of an emphasis on storytelling or deep characterisation; the focus was on the fundamentals of travelling into dungeons, bashing monsters, and grabbing loot.

A selection of character sheets was fanned out before my fellow adventurers. I chose to play as Nog, the dwarven cleric. Nog, and all of the other options available, are the characters played by the Stranger Things kids in their own campaign.  Having never seen the show, I didn’t have much to inform my characterisation. I knew that I was neutral good, that as a cleric, I would presumably be reasonably pious, and that I had a truly magnificent beard. This lack of knowledge was a blessing in disguise, as it gave me a blank canvas I could fill with my own vision of who Nog was. I had a great deal of fun portraying him as pretentious and smug, but ultimately well-meaning. I clashed frequently with Will the Wise, our party’s Wizard, on the issue of science vs faith, and Tayr the Paladin about which of us was truly the most devout.

There will undoubtedly be other Nogs out there who are significantly more humble and less argumentative than my portrayal, and there’s a degree of charm to that. While other groups will run characters with the same names and based on the same broad archetypes, my Nog was uniquely my own. He was a bit of a jerk, but he was my jerk.

As for the quest itself, the titular vanishing gnome gave us a literal call to adventure, inviting us to seek them out, before living up to their title and disappearing. We were off! We ventured into a nearby dungeon, beat up some spiders, entered what was very strongly implied to be the Upside Down from the show, and fought a Demogorgon (that’s the faceless fiend from Stranger Things, not the Demon Prince from the Abyss who would have completely eviscerated our poor Level One party).

The adventure was an effective tutorial on how to plunge into dungeons, from the pre-generated character sheets to the streamlined story that guided our party immediately towards the action. This box is clearly designed to show new players the ropes, and in that goal, it’s successful. Personally, I prefer roleplaying experiences that are a bit more narrative-heavy; I’m more of a fan of delving into character motivations than into dungeons. That’s just my own perspective, though, and as an introduction to D&D, the Vanishing Gnome makes the game approachable.

Maybe the Real Vanishing Gnomes Were the Friends We Made Along the Way

So despite my lack of awareness about Stranger Things, I was able to pull off a successful gnome rescue. Were there some winks, nudges, and other scraps of fan service that flew over my head due to my lack of Stranger Things knowledge? Frankly, I have no idea. There weren’t any moments where I felt out of my depth or lost, though, and I glided through the experience comfortably enough.

RPG Taverns is based at 16 Harper Road in Southwark, London, and they will be running the first two adventures from Welcome to the Hellfire Club (The Vanishing Gnome and   Scream of the Crop) from December 14th - 23rd, and then again from the 27th - 30^th.

Welcome to the Hellfire Club can also be purchased from a variety of online retailers if you’re looking to try it out at home. It’s a good welcoming point to Dungeons and Dragons for fans of Stranger Things, and if you’re not a fan, you’ll probably be able to stumble through as I did.

Remember Exodus? I'll be perfectly honest with you, I forgot it existed or assumed it had been canceled. Alas, that is not the case, and developer Hasbro has revealed that players will hear more of Matthew McConaughey's dulcet tones at The Game Awards next month. It's not nominated for the only award it's eligible for (most anticipated game), but it'll be good to see how development is progressing after prolonged radio silence. We can only assume the developers were busy traversing the stars and bending the space-time continuum to stay on track through their latest sprint.

Read the full story on PCGamesN: We're finally seeing more of Hasbro's forgotten space game, and I'm hoping it's a worthy Mass Effect challenger