We visited a D&D cafe transforming nightlife in an unloved corner of Elephant and Castle. Can Matt Kenyon slay the goblins facing hospitality?
Burrowed within an almost cartoonishly dodgy corner of Elephant and Castle is a nerd’s nirvana. Finance bros sweep in from the Square Mile to swap gilets for broadswords and elven ears. I was invited to RPG Taverns for a tie-up event to promote the new season of Netflix hit Stranger Things. What I found was a hospitality business that looks to be beating the current market funk.
I was greeted at the threshold of RPG Taverns by Shaan Jivan and Kenny Ho, two of the company’s four founders, alongside two journalists from trade publications. More specifically, tabletop gaming trade publications. I gulped: I would be role playing alongside serious pros.
Kenny, a fashion consultant in his day job, explained that the team has developed not only a space, but a fully-realised world of fantasy lore written by the team to bring their games to life. The venue is converted from an escape room into a labyrinth of game rooms decked out in different styles. One is a verdant mushroom kingdom, others are grungier and more gothic. I was in a 1980s kid’s bedroom in the style of Stranger Things.
It’s all built around table-top role playing games, which you can jump into as an individual slotted into a motley crew or book out a room for an existing group. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the game with the most name recognition. For the uninitiated – which I firmly was – it’s a turn-based game where your progression and capabilities in combat are determined by your prowess with a handful of many-sided dice. It is also surprisingly camp, but more on this in a moment.
You’re each represented by pieces on a board and led by a ‘dungeon master’ who directs the action and voices the monsters, foes and other strangers you meet along the way. That night, we had a volunteer called Phil to guide us. He is one of around 30, which the venue has on rota to allow for week-round gameplay across multiple rooms.
A Stranger Things-themed room at D&D specialist RPG Taverns
Though its founders appeared at times to be in a world of their own, the business case for RPG Taverns is grounded in cold, hard reality. Lambeth’s leading dungeon crawling consortium is turning over between £15,000 and £35,000 a month. And that’s after less than two years on the market.
Shaan, who works in finance, says business is booming because they’re “offering something different”. People come to RPG Taverns “to connect, not just to drink”. Though, with drinks orders on demand by WhatsApp to your games table, the two are not mutually exclusive.
In language that sounded more like that of a fintech boss than the co-founder of a tabletop gaming venue, Kenny says: “When you’re building something like this, you don’t ever fully switch off.” He insisted the founders, who all have full-time jobs, are periodically rotated out and given time to have a break.
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When I was asked to introduce my character – Sundar the Bold, a human knight with an elaborate knot of statistics – I knew that this couldn’t be done with any detached irony. With the eyes of the group trained upon me, I strained to drop my inhibitions and introduce the swashbuckling Sundar.
The group included a sorcerer, a noblewoman and a paladin (a soldier with some magical abilities). These personas are no joke. Kenny, who wasn’t playing in my game, told me about one of his in-game characters: Black Widow, a fantasy temptress who, like her arachnid namesakes, quite literally devours her husbands.
The D&D crowd is not what I’d expected: that hyper-focussed, slightly inaccessible kind of man. While this was perhaps once the case, today it’s more metropolitan graduates, with the gameplay an avenue to explore theatrical pursuits, rather than just rack up experience points.
D&D has a surprising ability to bring people together
Neither Shaan nor Kenny had done theatre at school. In fact, Shaan was big into rowing when he was a student (the two hobbies require similar time commitment and statistical geekery). He told me he thinks he “lost a lot of his nerdiness at uni”. But, back in the shires living with his parents during the pandemic, he – like the three other founders – discovered Dungeons and Dragons online.
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A whispering goblin in a bush, voiced musically by Phil, coaxed our gang of travellers out west towards a sprawling underground dungeon. A cluster of warlocks voiced, of course, by Phil, told us that we would have to face down against a room replete with “hyenoid” monsters.
As the newest and least courageous of the group, I was thrust first into the monsters’ lair. Combat might be a combination of dice rolls and shuffling pieces around a board, but it was genuinely tense. I botched a roll, and Lady Applejack, played by one of our crew, was slaughtered. Suddenly, the stakes felt very real.
A character who I think was called Nork (but, after three Stranger Things cocktails, I suppose I’ll never know for sure) handed me a token, which by some contrivance of the rules meant I could roll again. It was a second chance, and a perfect roll – a twenty on the most geometrically complex of the omni-dice. The room erupted. I was urged to mime the action of slicing through the three hyenoid monsters. I had tears in my eyes.
It’s not the first time that I’ve been the least informed person in the room, but I have rarely had so much fun whilst being so baffled. The evening of D&D had spiralled into a dungeon-slinking, cross-dressing odyssey of the imagination. It was 10pm and the games were finished, the bar had cleared and punters had gone home. An early night, but yet, few bars in London feel quite so secure in their future.