“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” a
comedy-fantasy movie from directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein,
is a loose adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gygax
and Dave Arneson in 1974, more commonly known among fans as D&D. A social
game of chance, strategy and a kind of improvisational storytelling, D&D is
hugely complex and deeply immersive, demanding of its players an almost
scholarly commitment to learning its history, its rules and its mythology — all
of it chronicled in a series of exhaustive, encyclopedic official rule books
that are the foundation of the game.
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With so much advanced knowledge and folklore out there, it
might seem daunting as a newcomer to D&D to approach this “Dungeons &
Dragons” film. But the movie has in fact been made with novices in mind.
“The intention was for nothing in the film to have to be
explained prior to seeing it,” said Daley, who wrote the screenplay with
Goldstein and Michael Gilio, in a recent video interview. “We knew that was of
the utmost importance, so that we’re not alienating an audience that doesn’t
know D&D.” Although the film contains more than enough Easter eggs and
references to satisfy die-hard fans, “none of that is a requirement,” said
Goldstein.
“You don’t have to know how to fly an F-18 to enjoy ‘Top
Gun.’ ”
To help answer any D&D questions going into “Honor Among
Thieves,” Daley and Goldstein explained some of the movie’s more arcane nods
and allusions.
Who are the good guys and the bad guys?Broadly speaking, the film features two competing factions:
the Harpers and the Red Wizards of Thay. (For much of the running time, our
heroes are caught in the battle between them.) The Harpers are “a benevolent
faction of essentially spies, who work in conjunction with good-aligned
characters and places to help root out evil entities,” Daley said. A primary
adversary is Szass Tam, the leader of the Red Wizards, who rules as a dictator
of the nation of Thay.
What is a class, and what classes are our heroes?One of the first steps in a game of “Dungeons & Dragons”
is the choosing of a character class: It defines your identity based upon set
skills and abilities, and limits what you can and can’t do in the game.
Standard classes include monks, fighters, wizards and warlocks.
The characters in the film were written with these classes
in mind. Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard. Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) is a
barbarian. We also see sorcerers (Justice Smith’s Simon), paladins (Regé-Jean
Page’s Xenk) and a rare tiefling druid (Sophia Lillis’ Doric). Goldstein said
they wanted “a clear distinction between each of the classes that was
immediately recognizable to people who were aware of the game,” but they didn’t
want the characters describing their types out loud. “Nobody ever says, ‘I’m a
barbarian; what do you want from me?’ or anything like that.”
Who is aligned with what?One of D&D’s most enduring contributions is the idea of
alignment — a moral category determined along the axes of good versus evil and
law versus chaos. (If you have ever heard of someone being described as lawful
good or chaotic evil, that’s where it comes from.)
It’s easy enough to determine the alignment of each
character in “Honor Among Thieves,” as D&D fans will no doubt be glad to
do. But Daley said the alignments were less expressly conceived for the film
than “coincidentally obvious” based on the way all fictional characters tend to
be written.
What are all these monsters?“Honor Among Thieves” is rife with curious creatures — all taken
from the original game. Some are considered beasts, which are animals that
could exist in the real world, and others are monstrosities, which Goldstein
described as more “fantastical”.
There are Mimic Chests (huge carnivorous mouths disguised as
treasure chests) and the fan-favorite Gelatinous Cubes (more or less what they
sound like: huge cubes of goo that trap people inside).
“There are also deeper cuts, like the Intellect Devourer, a
brain-shaped creature with legs that takes control of your mind and kills you,”
Goldstein said.
And that … owl … bear … thing?Is an Owlbear, actually. It’s a big owl-bear hybrid into
which the druid, Doric, transforms a couple of times. Large and powerful, it’s
one of the film’s more striking creatures.
“The traditional Owlbear design often is more of a grizzly
bear, but we thought it would look more beautiful if it looked like a snowy
owl,” Goldstein said.
Where does the movie take place?“Honor Among Thieves” isn’t set in a generic fantasy land.
In fact, its globe-trotting adventures are situated in clearly delineated
spaces based on preexisting “Dungeons” maps and settings. “While writing the
movie, we consulted the map,” Goldstein said. “We treated it like it was a
movie about a real place with a real history.”
The film largely takes place within the Sword Coast of the
Forgotten Realms, along the western side of the continent of Faerun. We see
such cities as Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, glimpse the Arctic tundra of the
northern Icewind Dale, and much more. The filmmakers took pains to make the
geography game-accurate, being mindful of relative positions, travel times and
how different areas relate.
“If they go from Triboar to the Evermoors by horseback, we
know that it’s a certain distance and that it would be possible,” Goldstein
said.
So all of these places were already in the game?Not exactly. As the film opens, Edgin and Holga are serving a
life sentence in the remote ice prison of Revel’s End, having been busted
during a botched heist. Daley and Goldstein always knew they wanted to begin
the movie this way, but when they reached out to the game’s manufacturer,
Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), to ask if such a prison
existed in the wintry region of Icewind Dale, they were informed that none did.
Fortunately, Wizards worked their magic: A new “Dungeons”
book released in the fall of 2020, “Rime of the Frostmaiden,” added Revel’s End
and its parole board, the Absolution Council, to the official D&D canon.
“That was one of the most gratifying parts of this whole
process: seeing our names in a D&D book,” Daley said. “More so even than
seeing our names on the poster for the movie.”
What is all that weird writing?As in “Star Wars,” “Honor Among Thieves” contains no written
English. Instead, any of the script you see throughout the film is written in
Thorass, a well-known in-game “Dungeons” language with its own established
alphabet. Much as Trekkies can speak Klingon, many D&D obsessives will know
the text by sight and will no doubt be taking notes on what it means.
“It was all very deliberate,” Goldstein said. “Anything you
see in the film has meaning and can be translated.”
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