The new Stranger Things show had to break all the rules (with help from D&D)

The final episode of Stranger Things aired on Dec. 31, 2025, but series creators Ross and Matt Duffer have been dreaming up ways to continue the show’s legacy with spinoffs since the end of season 2. Well good news to anyone looking to return to Hawkins ASAP: You should mark your calendars for April 23, when the animated midquel Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85 drops on Netflix.

“The Duffer brothers were just really excited about the idea of continuing their adventures as kids,” Tales from ‘85 showrunner Eric Robles told Polygon in a video call. “We’re offering an opportunity to hang out with your best friends and just go on these adventures.”

Robles met with the Duffers for the first time while Stranger Things season 4 was in post-production. He said what was meant to be a half-hour meeting stretched to 90 minutes as the Duffers got so excited about the project that they were late to their post session.

“We were kind of like a bunch of kids in a room saying Hey, wouldn’t this be cool? There’s this period between seasons 2 and 3 that we would love to just play with and make that our own sandbox.” Robles says. “We ended up just kind of geeking out over that and started growing that.”

Because production for the two series was happening in parallel, the Duffers wanted to make sure that Tales from ‘85 didn’t interfere with what they were already working on. That meant Robles and his writers had to invent a new mythology. They wound up combining existing elements of the Upside Down and Hawkins Lab to come up with a mutating plant monster that attacks the denizens of Hawkins in multiple forms.

“If we would’ve just had the Demogorgons and those creatures from the Upside Down, we probably would’ve interfered with some Vecna action and some Mindflayer stuff, and I think that would’ve muddied the water too much,” Robles says. “Instead, we decided to create our own version, opening up a whole new way of telling these kinds of creature stories with our own science.”

New creatures of course require new names. Dustin (Braxton Quinney) turns to the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual for inspiration, but he also pulls out a copy of the tabletop role-playing game’s post-apocalyptic sibling Gamma World, which has a lot more to say about mutants. Robles doesn’t have much TTRPG experience of his own, so he turned to his head writer Caitlin Schneiderhan, who wrote for Stranger Things in seasons 4 and 5.

“She brought a lot of that knowledge to the table and would be, Hey, this is what we would do in the live action series,” Robles said. “That’s how we started putting the pieces together.”

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 premieres on Netflix on April 23.