Though it sits on a busy stretch of NE Sandy Boulevard, Dark Future can be tricky to find. But I duck through the door of all-ages vegan punk/metal venue Black Water and hook a left into its adjacent record store by the same name—more specifically, the dedicated shop-within-a-shop that takes up about a third of the record store’s floor space. As doom metal grinds overhead, I dig into boxes titled “New and Newish Arrivals” before briefly skimming the vintage shelves, packed with releases from the ’90s, ’80s, and even ’70s. I’m not hunting for music: Instead, I flip through booklets from a plastic box stuffed with zines and pamphlets. I settle on 30 Days of Mörk Borg Vol. 2: On the Island of Dying Gods, an adventure “chapbook” for the Swedish black metal–inspired roleplaying game, Mörk Borg.
Dark Future may feel like your new favorite hyper-niche record store, but instead it’s the coolest place to buy (and trade in) tabletop roleplaying games I’ve ever visited in my more than 20 years in the hobby.
Buoyed by popular media like Stranger Things and the rise of platforms like Twitch—where celebrities play games of Dungeons & Dragons to audiences of thousands—RPGs have started to resemble something mainstream. For those not in the know, the format is generally four to eight people at a table using dice and rulebooks to tell stories of adventure. Usually, one is designated the “game master,” who guides the story and arbitrates rules. Goofy voices, rules arguments, and puerile humor run rampant. A single game can be finished over the course of a few hours (colloquially, a one-shot) or in weekly sessions over the course of months or even years.
Portland boasts a bevy of gaming stores, like Red Castle Games, Portland Game Shop, Board Bard Games, and Guardian Games—the latter rocks a bar, gaming tables, and a unionized staff. While any of these shops can outfit an adventuring party with all the dice, books, and miniatures they need, Dark Future offers an experience akin to record diving.
Founder Chuck Franco skips the major brands most shops heavily rely on, instead trading pre-owned vintage titles and indie games. It’s also a hub for the Old School Renaissance, or OSR, style games, which have a gameplay style similar to older versions of D&D, with fewer rules and more high-risk scenarios. So while you won’t find the glossy newest release from D&D, you can find products like horror sci-fi darling Mothership, old-school homages like Shadowdark and Dungeon Crawl Classics, and numerous games from local creators. In addition, he sells band shirts, gaming accessories like dice and miniatures, and a small collection of dungeon synth cassettes.
Franco points to the smaller scale of his shop as one reason he doesn’t need the big sellers, like the Hasbro-owned D&D. “I was able to take a bigger risk as far as taking obscure, cult, and underground indie titles more so than other retailers who have large loans and other obligations,” he says.
Franco came to the hobby like so many did. At a young age he used roleplaying books as inspiration for imaginative play with friends, rather than adhering to the rules within. But by middle and high school he was playing in games of Shadowrun (a fantasy cyberpunk pastiche) and tabletop wargames like Warhammer 40,000. Gaming often overlapped with his passion for music as he explored the industrial, goth, punk, and metal scenes. He and his partner moved to Portland from the Bay Area in 2020 to get away from the “constant struggle” of rent and cost-of-living inflation. His involvement in the music and RPG scenes made Portland a great fit. “There’s a good music community and an awesome culture that supports small businesses and creators,” Franco says. “It just seemed like the natural move.”
For years, Franco curated a collection of gaming material, often visiting indie shops while traveling the country with bands. Originally, he and his friends rented a small space on 35th and Broadway to play their tabletop games without annoying their roommates. “We thought we could have our gaming clubhouse here so nobody’s house would have to take the burden of hosting these events,” he says.
But soon he created an LLC to sell items from his collection and buy new ones, and by October 2024, Dark Future was born. Franco distinguished himself from other shops, decorating the space with dungeon art and mood lighting.
“I wanted it to have an identity, to be immersive and feel like a heavy metal dungeon, with murals of dragons and flickering lights… just the opposite of the normal retail experience,” he says. “I mean, sometimes the lighting wasn’t the most conducive, but the vibe was there.”
Dark Future didn’t spend long in that space. In spring of 2025, Black Water moved into the old Laurelwood Brewing space on Sandy, consolidating the venue with its record store, formerly located on Russell Street. The owners invited Franco to move his store into their record shop, a natural fit given Franco’s work in music, his role booking shows for Black Water, and the matching vibes of the stores. Most days you can find Franco working the desk as clerk for both Dark Future and the record store. It’s not quite the “heavy metal dungeon” of its original location, but the record store vibes add extra cool-kid points for a hobby that, until recently, was considered the nadir of nerdiness.
Dark Future arrives at a timely era of the hobby. As D&D moves into its sixth decade, the indie scene has exploded with hundreds of new titles. Brand licenses actively encourage third-party creation, which has led to the countless fan-created zines and adventures that fill Dark Future’s shelves. Other creators are self-publishing game systems, often via crowdfunding efforts. There’s an endearing DIY movement and sense of community that pervades the hobby, fueled by Discord servers, shops like Dark Future, and grassroots conventions. Drop-in games have proliferated around Portland, with dedicated venues like TPK Brewing, Mox Boarding House, and the Paladins League renting table space and hosting sessions with professional GMs. Other places provide more casual opportunities—you can drop into a game of D&D at Statera Cellars’ tasting room or grab a seat at a game of Shadowdark at Gift Public House on SE Hawthorne, for instance.
That gaming community is present at Dark Future, with groups often playing at the tables at the adjacent Black Water Bar during the day. “There’s a lot of younger folks. Then there’s the grognards [older gamers] who come in to complete their nostalgia-fueled obsession of getting all those D&D modules. Everybody’s been very supportive and I can truly say that we built a really awesome community,” says Franco.
Like a multi-phase boss fight, this isn’t even Dark Future’s final form. The team at Black Water is hard at work building out a retail space on the eastern side of the building, opening in fall. The larger space will mean an even more impressive stock, including more miniatures from Franco’s collection. And Franco says his wife is working on some “ridiculous” props for Dark Future 3.0, but is keeping the details close to the chest. “I want it to be immersive,” he says. “People will just have to wait and see, but it’ll be pretty awesome.”
Dark Future is located in Black Water Records at 5115 NE Sandy Ste A, and is open seven days a week from 11 am-7 pm. For more information, check out @thedarkfuturedungeon.