The new movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Brings the popular role-playing game to life with great writing and strong production values. Michael Witwerauthor Fantasy Empire: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragonsglad D&D fans finally got the movie they deserve.
Witwer says in episode 540 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast. “I enjoyed every minute of it.”
Honor among thieves It is first and foremost a comedy. Science fiction editor John Joseph Adams says the film does a good job of replicating the improvised absurdity of a typical D&D adventure. “The movie really feels like a D&D campaign,” he says. “There’s a bunch of stuff that’s ridiculous, or that just doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way D&D is done, so it just kind of works.”
Ben Riggs, author of Dragon Slaying: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, was impressed with the amount of D&D that was included in the film. “Considering all the things this movie does, since it explains this new fantasy world, a kind of convoluted plot, and it also has to make D&D nerds happy, it does so smoothly and gracefully,” he says. “It’s never a rough patch where you’re like, ‘Okay, so now we’re getting 10 minutes of this town’s backstory.'” “
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Host David Bar-Kirtley hopes so Honor among thieves It will finally help dispel the notion that Dungeons and Dragons It’s a specialized and strange thing. “My friends and I tried to organize a D&D club at my high school, and the administration wouldn’t quite allow it, because of D&D’s supposedly nefarious influence,” he says. “So, to go from that to having such a huge blockbuster, with all these stars and everything, I really feel like we won. The nerds won.”
Listen to the full interview with Michael Witwer, John Joseph Adams, and Ben Riggs on Episode 540 of The New York Times Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some of the highlights from the discussion below.
Michael Witwer on John Francis Daley:
I knew John Francis Daley was one of the directors, and that resonated with me because Freaks and geeks It was one of my favorite shows when it was working… The entire cast are future stars, like everyone else, and John Francis Daley is the main character, Sam. And on this show, they’ve played D&D a few times – This show has a lot of D&D themes. So I knew he had a background in that, whether it was him or just his character. Since I am currently working on other D&D books, I have studied them all carefully, and one of the contributors was Icewind Dale: Rem of the Frost Maiden, which was Adventure of 2020. And I remember seeing his name on the list of contributors and thinking, What’s up? So I’m starting to realize, oh, this guy’s really interested in this, and he’s even working with Team Wizards on their Backgammon. This is a really good sign.
Ben Riggs on monster banter:
The creature design is very cool. It’s creepy. Even though it has tentacles in it, at first you crawled… I thought the way it was deployed in the maze was really cool. You’ve basically had a redshirt fight one of them first to explain the rules of a joke monster, so you can then learn the stakes when they go after Chris Pine. The writers thought about this – obviously. This is not a mistake, this is not a happy coincidence. They thought, How are we going to explain to the audience the rules of this monster to make this scene as interesting as possible? And they did it.
David Barr-Kirtley on humor:
One director said, “Ours is a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not a parody.” And I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that never Parody. I think it’s sometimes a parody. Like the part where Xenk walks straight up the rock. Come on, this is a parody… I loved the movie, and I thought it was funny, but it’s a comedy, and I’m probably disappointed on some level that we didn’t get something good and serious. Dungeons and Dragons film. I think that would be a good starting point that we hope will help make that happen, and we’ll get a serious Drizzt story or a serious Dragonlance story or something.
Michael Witwer for his novel Vivian Van Tassel and the Secret of Midnight Lake:
Gary Gygax used to hang around this abandoned sanitarium in Lake Geneva called the Oakwood Sanitarium. I started studying these sanatoria in Lake Geneva, and it turned out there were half a dozen of them around town, and I thought they were an interesting backdrop for the kind of interesting, obscure spa in southern Wisconsin where Gygax lives and does a lot of his work. It occurred to me how interesting it would be if Gary had not imagined these fantastical creatures, but had actually seen them with his own eyes. What if people were committed to these asylums because they saw “illusions” of beings in the woods that looked like bears with the face of owls, or perhaps a tiger with claws emerging from its back? I thought this was an interesting place to start, and this genre has led me a long way.
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