It’s a busy evening at TPK Brewing, which sits in a cottage at the top of SE Hawthorne Boulevard. Patrons sip pints, snack on rice bowls, and roll colorful dice, the plastic polyhedrons click-clacking across wooden tables. At a table strewn with papers and mechanical pencils, a group suddenly goes tense, focused. One player rolls a die and announces a “natural 20.” The rest erupt into cheers. 

The source of all this excitement? Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D. Developed in the early 1970s, D&D is widely considered the original tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), and it remains the most popular system out of countless others. Once niche and even scorned, the hobby has taken off in recent years (see: Stranger Things). So have opportunities to get involved, as groups move from basements to tables at game shops, cafés, and bars. 

TPK, a combo brewery and gaming space that opened in 2023, eases entry for newcomers and provides a soft landing for the socially rusty. “Especially coming out of the pandemic, we had a lot of people in their mid-30s [who] were like, ‘I have no way to connect with anyone,’” says Elliott Kaplan, TPK’s CEO and one of its three founders. “Well, we’ll throw you at a table. All the social interactions will be overseen by a GM.”

That’s Game Master for the noobs, the arbiter of rules and the narrative guide in a TTRPG. Part improvisational storytelling and part structured game, TTRPGs gather parties of two to eight to craft elaborate, ephemeral tales. While D&D draws from mythology and fantasy, other games center mystery-solving teens, space-faring scientists, or street-racing raccoons. A session typically lasts a few hours; players describe their character’s actions using outlined rules, and dice dictate the consequences (the most brutal of which is the death of all player characters: a Total Party Kill, the eponymous TPK). String together sessions and you have a campaign that can last weeks, months, or much longer—I once ran a weekly game for four years, the characters growing from humble adventurers to dragon-slaying champions. We still reminisce over funny and triumphant moments. Trying to describe them to others is as tedious as relating a dream. 

TPK was born from a desire to facilitate that kind of communal hallucination. Kaplan teamed with longtime tablemate and brewer Jess Hardie, bringing on game designer Dana Ebert as a co-owner. In addition to offering GM services and table rentals, TPK has an in-house campaign, written by Ebert, that’s been running since the bar opened. (It opens to newcomers every “chapter,” a quarterly occurrence that coincides with seasonal beer releases.) Groups meet twice per month, led by a stable of paid GMs. Kaplan says most of the players in the campaign—about 160 in total—had never touched D&D before coming to TPK.

Even more accessible is a series called Drop-In Dungeons, which pops up at TPK and other venues, including Evasion Brewing and Gift Public House. There are no sign-ups or fees, just a monthly schedule announced online and GMs providing everything a player needs. Organizer Stephen Couchman sees it as a zero-commitment way for newbies to dip a toe and for veterans to have fun without feeling obligated to return week after week. “You show up, you sit down, you roll dice,” he says. 

Also proliferating: indie TTRPG conventions, largely grassroots affairs run by passionate folks like Chase Reinhart, who manages PDX OSR Mini Con, and Brad Kerr, who helps run Between Two Cons and cohosts a TTRPG podcast, Between Two Cairns. Gaming groups become a “second family to a lot of people,” says Reinhart. TPK’s Ebert echoes the sentiment: “I’ve had players that say that they were planning to move away, but they stayed in Portland because they made so many friends here.” It’s true what they say, then: Those who slay together, stay together.