Mail Room: Dark Places & Demogorgons (OSE)

I guess the official Stranger Things crossover products for D&D are sort of a nostalgia and "fandom product" for the TV show? For my money, why not play a rules that actually existed in the 1980s, and as the high school kids who could actually be in the show?

5E is not what they were playing in the show, nor is the modern version anything like what we played in the 1980s. If we had 5E in the 1980s we would have called it "a kids game" and "too easy." The word for it would be "lame" and we would have seen all today's censorship and revisionism as "our parents writing the game for us."

We were Gen X. Go figure.

We mowed the lawn and let ourselves in when we came home from school. We cooked our own meals because mom worked. We were self-sustaining survivalists in the Cold War nuclear age, but we still have the best music.

Dark Places & Demogorgons came out with Old School Essentials compatible version of the game, and this is amazing. You could play this as its normal self, a sort of  "small town beset by strange monsters" game, or you could go whole hog, grab a copy of the OSE books, and have the kids actually venture forth in a real OSE world, adventure there, and then have to come back home for homework and dinner.

You could play the "D&D cartoon" style game with this, and have the players keep their 1980s classes, yet venture into a complete fantasy milieu. The entire story could be about the small town becoming a "nexus between worlds, and more do a Lion Witch and Wardrobe and Narnia campaign with these books as your starting point, and OSE serving as the "extra world."

This is the ultimate "1980s" expansion for Old School Essentials ever written. This also captures the spirit and feeling of the TV show and much of the 1980s nostalgia perfectly, riffing on TV, movies, and trends of the time. As a jaded Gen X'er - I approve of this game, and it is the best way to try to communicate to today's players what that time was really like.

Nobody had a cell phone in their pocket, you had to find a phone at someone's house, a pay phone, or as a business to use theirs to make a call. If nobody was home, nobody answered. Lines could be disconnected. Phones could be unplugged. There was no "commercial internet" only small, independent, in someone's basement text-mode BBS software you could dial into with a modem and a Commodore 64 (welcome back). You had to save programs on tape or 5 1/4" floppies (170K of storage, and up to 144 files). Printers were tractor feed dot matrix. It was Unix and not Linux, and that was only for mainframes and corporate systems. We had the VCR and video stores.

Nerds were NOT cool.

If you just want supplementary lore for Stranger Things, stick to the official D&D books.

If you want to actually play a game set in the 1980s just like the TV show, get these books. They are a bit pricey these days, but well worth it as the premier books in the genre, and ones that put in the work and let you play as iconic teens from the 1980s in a fantasy and horror setting.