If there’s one common theme throughout the four existing seasons of Netflix’s Stranger Things, it’s the love of its creators for Dungeons & Dragons. A session of the game is one of the first things seen on the show. Names of classic creatures from the original manual are directly used. Entire plots and arcs are inspired by D&D stories and monsters. Would there even be a Stranger Things without D&D?
The wild thing is that we’ve come the point where the two properties are beginning to influence each other. Wizards of the Coast is prepping a 50-year anniversary celebration for D&D this year, probably to see if they can get everyone to forget that…..stuff that happened the year before. They’ve announced a big fat anniversary module called Vecna: Eve of Ruin, and senior designer Amanda Hamon has publicly admitted certain elements of this campaign were inspired by ST.
”I’m a fan of Stranger Things and a lot of folks on staff are fans of Stranger Things,” she confessed to IGN. “I thought that [fourth season] was really cool storytelling. I knew that audiences were familiar with Vecna. So when we were looking at characters that we wanted to use and what big, historical threats we might want to consider for this book, Vecna was really at the top for me because he had been depicted in Stranger Things in an interesting incarnation.”
“There was that foundational, very epic, very universal understanding of who Vecna is from a D&D perspective. I thought it would be very cool to bring him forward and use him in a way that hopefully will be really exciting for folks who are familiar with any version of him that they’ve come across.”
Vecna: Eve Of Ruin will be released May 31, and is just one of several anniversary releases and celebrations Wizards has planned. Revising the OGL and forcing third-party products to pay them royalties is no longer one of them.
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