I’ve played tabletop role-playing games for forty years or so, but I’ve never played in a “professional” game. That changed last week when – as a guest of RPG Taverns in south London – I was given a run through one of the new adventures in “Welcome to Hellfire Club“, which is the new D&D boxed set based on the game Eddie and friends play in Stranger Things. (A play with a play, indeed.)

Impressions? Well, the folks at RPG Taverns have created a safe space for adventure – bar on the ground floor offering food and drink delivered to your gaming table, and downstairs a warren of gaming rooms, all decorated in different vibes. (The 1980s vibe in our room was particularly strong – VHS, the A-team, they even had the tape-to-tape cassette deck I owned as a teenager.) It’s not super-slick (the soundproofing is nonexistent, for example) but it’s fun, and the gaming tables have everything you might want, including large tabletop screens to project maps and other images. (Also: I didn’t pay for my VIP journalist ticket, but £15 for a 2-3 hour session seems pretty good value. My local escape room charges twice that for one hour.) They are clearly aiming to create a real sense of community, including an ongoing campaign world and a Discord server with lots of active chat in between sessions. They’re also very beginner-friendly.

Our DM Phil did a good job – friendly, good pacing, fluent with the rules, spooky voices and strong descriptions.

As for the module? It seemed to have some lovely components – maps, dice, DM screen – and trod a nice line between the retro 1980s style dungeon-crawl, and a few new and genuinely unsettling twists. It’s pretty trad, to the point of trading on nostalgia. But if you like D&D, or like Stranger Things and are D&D curious… I would recommend it. And if you’re based in London and don’t have enough sessions with a regular gaming group and want to meet new gamers in a friendly setting with a safe hands running the game, RPG Taverns is well worth a look.

(For those wanting a different kind of gaming experience, Blades in the Dark is quite a trip.)