The new D&D Stranger Things crossover is all about continuing "Eddie's legacy" with max '80s "faux-stalgia"

Dungeons & Dragons is returning to the world of Netflix's Stranger Things ahead of the show's upcoming season in a new kind of way, leaning into Joseph Quinn's popular in-canon DM and leader of the Hellfire Club Eddie Munson. One of the best tabletop RPGs is set to bring Munson's final campaign to a conclusion with a set of four adventures recreating his tabletop adventures, with plenty of Easter eggs.

Ahead of the new Stranger Things collaboration's release, GamesRadar+ caught up with D&D managing game designer Justice Arman at SDCC 2025 to talk about all things D&D, Stranger Things, and how the two are coming together for the new release. And Arman was exactly the right person to ask; he also served as lead designer on Dungeons & Dragons Stranger Things: Welcome to the Hellfire Club.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

GamesRadar+: Talk to me about Welcome to the Hellfire Club. What is it? Why is it?

Justice Arman: So this is a box set. It's our crossover with Stranger Things. It really leans into a kind of '80s faux-stalgia, is what we're calling it. This is the version of D&D that you see the people playing on the show, but updated for our modern iteration of the rules. So you can see on our character sheets, we're expressing things as you can find them in [the 2024 rules], but taking inspiration from like the original Goldenrod sheets, the kind of black-and-white art that you would find in old modules, and really trying to give fans of Stranger Things, D&D, or both, the ability to form their own Hellfire Clubs and continue Eddie's legacy.

Why now? Obviously, Dungeons and Dragons has been integral to Stranger Things since the very start.

We've been involved with them since season one. We did another set, a starter set, a while back – I think that was around season one, with hunt for the–

But pretty limited!

You get more in this. Just like we did with our starter set, we looked at the past 10 years of feedback. With this kind of pivotal moment in the Stranger Things series, we wanted to have a way for people to celebrate and, you know, in prior years, we didn't have such an awesome example of this iconic heavy metal DM that Eddie is, and obviously a very popular character – Joseph Quinn absolutely nailed it, and is going on with Fantastic Four, and it's a good time for people who are curious about D&D or just want to show the love of Stranger Things at the same time, to lean in and get everything they need.

Talk to me about the art.

So there are two really great artists. Well, there's a bunch of really great artists, but two notable ones coming over from Stranger Things. One, you can see our cover here is done by Butcher Billy. He's worked with Stranger Things for a while. He did a bunch of awesome posters for their season four, if you saw any of those. And then on the other side of this DM screen, we worked with Trevor Girard. Girard is a set designer who created the Hellfire Club logo that you see on all these iconic shirts that they're wearing in the show. He illustrated that full color, full panel DM screen.

And of course, we worked with a number of artists who typically work in black-and-white mediums to bring to life all sorts of monsters and kind of retro-ize some of them and illustrate these iconic Stranger Things monsters as well.

Now obviously this is based on the 2024 ruleset, correct?

Yes!

But in terms of bringing Stranger Things to the game design, are there any sort of tweaks, changes, or additions that are here?

We put a number of Easter eggs in this product, sprinkling nods towards all of the seasons that we've seen. You can see here we've got the map for the first map in the adventure – you see The Vanishing Gnome; it's a level one adventure that the characters are gonna get to experience first.

And you can see that the design of this map is kind of two maps in one. We've got this dungeon of shadows, and then the shadow dungeon. So the DM actually folds this map in half. The players get to experience the top, and then they kind of go to the Upside Down. You flip the entire map over, and much like Nancy when she goes to the Upside Down to find that gun in a past season, players might be able to find something in the upper dungeon and look for it again in the shadow dungeon.

How well does this play with other D&D products? Because obviously it's all, under the hood, the same rules.

You can take things from this set and you could use it just with this set, but you could also take it and save these things for future campaigns or adventures. We give you a big map of Greyhawkins, which is Eddie's imagined world where these adventures take place. So kind of the best of D&D with Greyhawk and the best of Stranger Things with Hawkins, Indiana to form that. And there are tons of Easter eggs for people to find there. They might tell their own stories, but you can take the spell cards, the magic item cards, the monster cards, any of the tokens, the dice… So much of this you can continue to use after you finish the adventures in this set.

Working on this set, what was the one thing coming in that you were like, "We gotta nail this?"

Oh my gosh. All of it? All of it. We worked with a really great team. Kara Kenna was our creative lead on this. She worked a lot with the partners over at Netflix. We actually got to travel to the set, and it actually timed with all of that weird internet outage – we were stuck in the Atlanta airport for like nine hours, and some guy started playing the banjo at one point, and a teenager explained, "This is the worst day of my life," like right around the same time. So it was really awesome.

We just really wanted it to feel authentic. And I think the thing that – you know, Kate Irwin, our art director on this set, and Trish Yochum, who did the graphic design, really just making it feel like the best of both worlds between wanting it to feel like it could live in the '80s, but also this celebrated kind of newness of our game and bridge the generations of play that you see from the show and people playing today.

What was your favorite part working on it?

I always love watching the art come alive. From the time that we write an art order to the time it kind of comes to life. Will Doyle and Stacey Allan did all of the maps, and they are big fans of retro modules, and you can see them inject the love of that into – the borders on all of these maps have lots of fun nods. I also got to work with Anthony Joyce-Rivera and Taylor Ann Navarro, two freelancers. I've known them a long time, so getting to work with them on creating these four awesome adventures that kind of take nods towards the seasons was just a delight. So I mean, I liked all of it, honestly.

Do you feel like someone needs to have watched Stranger Things to play this?

No, no. We have people on our team who got into Stranger Things as a part of doing this set. And so I think there's things to love. You might have a D&D fan who's been curious about Stranger Things, just like you might have a Stranger Things fan who's curious about D&D. So, no, you don't have to have watched Stranger Things to run this, and there's nothing in here that you have to know to watch to be in time for the fifth season. It really is a celebration of both Stranger Things and D&D.

We actually got to work with the Duffer Brothers as part of this; they're avid D&D players. You can actually see a nod towards them – one of the Easter eggs on our Greyhawkins map is "Duffer Lake." So kind of paying homage to them and the work that they've done creating such an awesome show. I really hope fans of both and either come and people who maybe have never played D&D or Stranger Things, right? Maybe pick this up, because, frankly, it looks really cool.

Favorite Stranger Things character?

[gasps in thought] Nancy. I like, I like, well, I don't know–

Not Eddie? Nancy?

Eddie, oh my gosh. Eddie's way up there. The fact that Nancy is just such a badass. But Steve, also, Steve, yeah.

They're all good!

Yeah! Yeah.

Dungeons & Dragons Stranger Things: Welcome to the Hellfire Club is set to release on October 7, 2025. It's available to pre-order now on Amazon and elsewhere. Time will tell if it ends up being included among the best D&D books.