It wasn’t that many years ago that Dungeons & Dragons had been nearly left for dead.

The tabletop role-playing game had once been “one of the coolest , most meaningful fantasy brands on the planet,” said Nathan Stewart, who runs D&D at Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that makes the game . But when he was hired in 2012, he said, “it was really obvious that the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons was not ubiquitous. Everyone wasn’t loving it.”

Players from its 1970s-1990s heyday had grown up and moved on. Younger generations, embracing video games and smartphones as their escapism of choice, seemed indifferent or bored by D&D’s make-believe world of swords and sorcery, labyrinthine rules and polyhedral dice.

“My main goal was to help this glorious brand get its swagger back,” said Stewart , who grew up playing D&D and its digital relatives, like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. He joined Wizards of the Coast , based in Renton, Wash., after more than a decade working in brand marketing for such video games as Madden NFL and Backyard Sports and for companies like Xbox and Rockstar Games.