The triumph of nerd culture has had some big, obvious effects, with adaptations of fantasy novels, superhero comics, and video games dominating movies and TV. It’s less talked about, but it’s definitely part of the equation: the rise of geek makers. These days, it’s not enough just to draw on an intellectual property that has a devoted fandom. If the people behind the scenes aren’t fans themselves, the core audience will notice and probably riot. That’s a big part of why the movie Dungeons & Dragons: honor among thieves had to be made by people who have played D&D themselves, and who don’t do it alone know what tabletop gaming feels like, but actually concern about the.
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein – Directors of Game nightand writing partners on projects of It’s raining meatballs 2 Unpleasant Horrible bosses Unpleasant Spider Man: Coming Home — are D&D fans, and it shows Honor among thieves. The directors and co-writers (in collaboration with Michael Gilio, who also has a story credit) tell a pretty standard fantasy story, complete with an evil sorceress, a group of mismatched adventurers looking for a magical item to stop her, and along the way the required action scenes. But Honor among thieves invests heavily in the Wizards of the Coast lore and background for its setting, and in actual D&D rules for the parameters of its magic and its characters, right down to their stat blocks. Polygon sat down to talk to Daley and Goldstein about where they followed those rules, where they broke them, and why.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
D&D players will certainly notice that Honor among thieves steps outside of the game’s canon in small and important ways — the party druid, Doric (Sophia Lillis), for example, uses the standard Wild Shape power to take on animal forms, but activates it much more often than the standard twice a day the rules allow. (And also uses it to become an Owl Bear, which real players can’t do – but that’s a whole other can of worms.) The writer-directors are proud that the party wizard, Simon (Justice Smith), takes time to tune in to a magic item before using it, but the complications he encounters in the process are well beyond the limits of the game.
“We had a consultant on set who knew all those rules inside out, and she leaned in and told us, ‘Okay, for this spell you technically should this And thisGoldstein tells Polygon. “So we would try to honor those things every opportunity we had. But in the end, the movie had to come first, so if it felt like we had to choose between a line or a plot point we needed to move the action forward, we’d side with the plot.
“The inherent challenge is, how do you depict this in a cinematic way that doesn’t completely alienate non-fans or people completely unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons?” says Dale. “So it was a tightrope walk that we were always doing. That seems to work, at least for the people for whom we screened it.”
“We tried very hard to be true to [the rules]Goldstein says. “The only thing we really got rid of was rest periods, because that’s really not fun on screen.”
“But I think our use of magic will delight hardcore players,” says Daley. “We really use the components, whether material or somatic or verbal, in each of our spells. All spells are technically correct.”
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Another thing those hardcore fans might be wondering is why the merry face of the party, Chris Pine as Edgin the Bard, doesn’t use magic himself. Bards in D&D aren’t just singers, they are spellcasters with a wide range of skills. But you wouldn’t know from the movie.
“Our intention was not to overpower everyone in the party — that is, have all sorts of powers that could make the obstacles they face a lot easier,” says Daley. “We like the idea of [Justice Smith’s] As a wizard, Simon is the primary source of the kind of conventional magic you generally see portrayed on film. But I would say the magic inherent in Chris Pine’s character is his ability to persuade and charm people. And he really is a storyteller, which really suits the bard.
That said, he thinks Edgin might still remind D&D players of their tabletop experiences: “Chris’ character is really an archetype for the casual player who doesn’t necessarily do their homework when they come into a campaign,” he says . “So if you can hit people over the head with your weaponized lute, why deviate from that?”
Clerical magic is also minimized in the film – a “cleric’s token” with a spell attached is quickly mentioned, but standard healing and resurrection spells are clearly not part of this world. Again, that was a necessary story choice.
“It’s what’s different about a movie than a game, I think,” says Goldstein. “If you give too many magical skills to too many people in a movie, it becomes very difficult to keep coming up with obstacles that they can’t overcome. So the party we made we wanted to have some brute force characters we wanted our sword fighting paladin [Regé-Jean Page as Xenk] and our shape-shifting druid, but we just didn’t want spells cast right and left.
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While some viewers will likely quibble with the movie on gamer forums and Reddit, the writer-directors think they’ll ultimately be happy with the look and feel of the movie, which on screen is filled with familiar elements from the Forgotten Realms. continent Faerûn, the city of Neverwinter, and the experience of searching through it.
“What we really tried to capture was the spirit of the gameplay, where nothing goes the way you expect,” says Daley. “So we would set up something in our story that the DM would have made very meticulously for the players, and with one wrong roll of the dice, it all goes to shit and they have to find a way out. It’s unconventional.”
Goldstein and Daley’s D&D cred has one particularly great (no pun intended) piece of evidence on its side: an action scene revolving around Themberchauda fat red dragon with a long history in the D&D canon.
“We wanted to have a dragon that was of the lore, that would fit the environment in the Underdark, specifically a red dragon,” says Goldstein. “And that led us to Themberchaud. Now he is traditionally not depicted as we portray him.’
“But he’s a glutton in lore,” says Daley. “We just reinforced that feature. But the mandate for us was to portray dragons in this movie that you haven’t seen before. Whether they are the acid-spitting black dragon Rakor, which we created, or Themberchaud, which exists in lore, we really leaned into the fact that he’s not like any other dragon you’ve seen on film before. And what was so cool is that it doesn’t feel like we’re betraying the source material by having a dragon that’s so uniquely different, because D&D itself is so unique.
D&D fans accustomed to listening to live podcasts or watching game streams on Twitch and YouTube may wonder if they see some of Daley and Goldstein’s personal D&D experiences playing out in Honor among thievesthe way the Critical Role group has seen their D&D adventures unfold in the animated series The legend of Vox Machina. But for the most part, they aren’t – the directors say they didn’t want to use the creativity of others from the past to shape their work. But they did put a few favorite elements on the screen.
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“My campaigns were a hundred years ago, so I don’t remember too many details about it,” says Goldstein. “Except one lot of gelatinous cubes. And we incorporated one into the film.
“There was a platform suspended by chains in one of my campaigns,” says Daley. “I thought that was an interesting visual, so we included it on a much larger scale in the Underdark dungeon that our characters traverse.”
That said, while they don’t live the fantasy of seeing their own characters from the past come to life on screen, they do experience a different fantasy – the chance to reimagine the D&D canon, as elements they for the film appear in WOTC source material. “WOTC worked very well together and put few restrictions on us,” says Goldstein. “In fact, we were developing this prison early on — the movie starts in a prison in Icewind Dale, and there was no prison in Icewind Dale. But now there is: They put it in the modules.”
“It’s in the Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign book‘ says Dale. “They’ve been great in terms of working together. I will say that the nerd in me was probably more excited to see something we made appear in a campaign book than to even see our names on the poster for this movie.