DungeonsDragons: Honor Among Thieves is an exciting and colorful fantasy movie based on the world's most popular tabletop RPG. Countless elements from the original Dungeons & Dragons game carried over into Honor Among Thieves, such as familiar settings like Icewind Dale, cool magical spells, and most of all, the savage monsters.
At least eleven Dungeons & Dragons monsters made an appearance in Honor Among Thieves; some were directly lifted from their stat blocks, while others were a more creative interpretation of how these fantasy creatures operate. That's part of the fun of D&D: Honor Among Thieves, giving players a fresh look at monsters like intellect devourers and gelatinous cubes, making the movie that much more unpredictable.
Mimics are insidious shapeshifters that pose as ordinary objects to lure unsuspecting prey into getting closer, only for the fanged mimic to attack with its trademark tongue. One mimic appeared in Honor Among Thieves, posing as one of several treasure chests found in the combat colosseum's maze.
The other treasure chests were real, and each had one weapon inside to give the hapless contestants a fighting chance, but Holga the barbarian wasn't so lucky. She stumbled right into a barbarian's trap, only for an ally to cut the mimic's tongue in half to buy Holga time to escape.
Rust monsters made a cameo in D&D: Honor Among Thieves, briefly appearing in Neverwinter as the characters walked along a cramped side street. The two rust monsters were fighting over a metal object because metal is their primary food source.
Rust monsters will corrode metal armor and weapons and turn those items to rust, then eat them. This makes rust monsters the bane of any blacksmith or armorer who takes pride in their inventory, with dwarves in particular despising rust monsters as their bane.
The Yuan-Ti race only appeared briefly in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, but sharp-eyed moviegoers will recognize these serpentine people for what they are. In D&D lore, the Yuan-Ti race took shape long ago when a certain civilization worshiped snakes and thus became more like them.
Yuan-Ti now controls a vast and wealthy empire, and they can shapeshift between human and snake forms or any combination thereof. Some are basic warriors with swords and poison attacks, while others are huge taskmasters who can constrict and crush their foes with their scaly bodies.
An adult black dragon appeared during a flashback in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and it wreaked havoc on its enemies with its signature acid breath attack. Fortunately, Edgin the bard and his friends didn't face a black dragon, or their adventure would come to a grisly end.
Instead, Edgin merely heard tales of a black dragon's power from the corpses of warriors who died fighting in that battle a century ago. In that flashback, the dragon attacked its enemies with near-impunity, casually soaring over the battlefield and vaporizing everyone with its breath attacks with each pass.
Gelatinous cubes may sound like a silly monster, but for many adventuring parties, they are actually quite dangerous foes to face in the cramped confines of a dungeon. They will absorb and digest a living victim, leaving only the victim's armor, weapons, and other possessions floating in its clear body.
A gelatinous cube appeared as a monster hazard in Honor Among Thieves, but Edgin's team used it well. The party willingly dove into the cube to avoid the displacer beast; then Doric used Wildshape to escape the cube and get everyone back out before they were dissolved alive.
An owlbear is exactly that: a combination of a bear's burly body and an owl's feathery, beaked head. These wild animals are notoriously aggressive and difficult to tame, but one of them appeared in Honor Among Thieves when Doric, the tiefling druid, morphed into such a creature.
Ordinarily, druids cannot turn into owlbears in the tabletop game, but for convenience's sake, Honor Among Thieves allowed Doric to transform into this powerful creature so she could contribute more to combat. In that form, she helped the team defeat the Red Wizard, personally pummeling that villain like the Hulk vs. Loki in The Avengers.
A giant spider briefly appeared in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves during the sequence where Edgin's party followed Xenk Yendar, the paladin, into a remote forest to find an entrance to the Underdark. Fortunately for them, the giant spider didn't attack, and the party stayed clear of its webs.
Giant spiders aren't evil; they're natural predators who need to eat. Still, these huge arachnids show no mercy to anyone caught in their web, and characters like Edgin and Simon would struggle to break free if they got entangled in such webbing.
During the climax of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Edgin, and his friends get captured and are forced to navigate a maze in the colosseum, fighting for their lives against various monsters. The main threat was a panther-like creature called a displacer beast, a six-legged terror with unusual abilities.
Typically found in the Feywild, displacer beasts are predators who displace light to confuse their enemies, then attack from unexpected angles. Honor Among Thieves made this clear when the displacer beast repeatedly made illusory doubles of itself to confuse its victims before attacking.
Golems made of flesh, clay, stone, and iron tend to resemble humanoids, but in Honor Among Thieves, the Red Wizard used a spell to animate a dragon statue to turn it into a new kind of stone golem. This beast was a serious threat to Edgin's party in that street fight, though it was vanquished in the end.
Whether they look human or like a dragon, stone golems are durable and persistent foes who can shrug off many attacks and spells to wear down their enemies over time. They can even use the Slow ability to limit their enemies' options and get the upper hand.
When Edgin's party arrived in the expansive Underdark, they came across a small but dangerous monster type, the intellect devourer. These creatures are oversized brains walking on four legs, attracted to intelligent and powerful minds. For humor's sake, the movie's intellect devourers ignored Edgin's party, a silent but snide comment about the party's general intelligence.
Edgin was fortunate that the intellect devourers didn't attack, because they are dangerous to most adventurers. These creatures will attack an enemy's mental functions directly and stun them, then drag their hapless victims back to a mind flayer's lair to finish them off.
Themberchaud is a large red dragon found in Dungeons & Dragons lore, spending much of his time in the cramped Underdark rather than roaming the open skies like most other dragons. Themberchaud was the boss battle of the Underdark sequence in Honor Among Thieves, which was equally amusing and terrifying.
Themberchaud may be rather rotund compared to most dragons, to the point he couldn't even fly. However, Themberchaud was a devastating opponent for Edgin's party, coming scarily close to devouring them alive in his maw. In the end, Edgin's team escaped Themberchaud's wrath when they broke free of a cave and swam to safety.
A monster is a type of fictional creature found in horror, fantasy, science fiction, folklore, mythology and religion. Monsters are very often depicted as dangerous and aggressive, with a strange or grotesque appearance that causes terror and fear, often in humans. Monsters usually resemble bizarre, deformed, otherworldly and/or mutated animals or entirely unique creatures of varying sizes, but may also take a human form, such as mutants, ghosts, spirits, zombies, or cannibals, among other things. They may or may not have supernatural powers, but are usually capable of killing or causing some form of destruction, threatening the social or moral order of the human world in the process.
Animal monsters are outside the moral order, but sometimes have their origin in some human violation of the moral law (e.g. in the Greek myth, Minos does not sacrifice to Poseidon the white bull which the god sent him, so as punishment Poseidon makes Minos' wife, Pasipha, fall in love with the bull. She copulates with the beast, and gives birth to the man with a bull's head, the Minotaur). Human monsters are those who by birth were never fully human (Medusa and her Gorgon sisters) or who through some supernatural or unnatural act lost their humanity (werewolves, Frankenstein's monster), and so who can no longer, or who never could, follow the moral law of human society.
Monsters may also be depicted as misunderstood and friendly creatures who frighten individuals away without wanting to, or may be so large, strong and clumsy that they cause unintentional damage or death. Some monsters in fiction are depicted as mischievous and boisterous but not necessarily threatening (such as a sly goblin), while others may be docile but prone to becoming angry or hungry, thus needing to be tamed and taught to resist savage urges, or killed if they cannot be handled or controlled successfully.
Monsters pre-date written history, and the academic study of the particular cultural notions expressed in a society's ideas of monsters is known as monstrophy.[1] Monsters have appeared in literature and in feature-length films. Well-known monsters in fiction include Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, werewolves, vampires, demons, mummies, and zombies.
In the words of Tina Marie Boyer, assistant professor of medieval German literature at Wake Forest University, "monsters do not emerge out of a cultural void; they have a literary and cultural heritage".[3]
In the religious context of ancient Greeks and Romans, monsters were seen as signs of "divine displeasure", and it was thought that birth defects were especially ominous, being "an unnatural event" or "a malfunctioning of nature".[4]
Monsters are not necessarily abominations however. The Roman historian Suetonius, for instance, describes a snake's absence of legs or a bird's ability to fly as monstrous, as both are "against nature".[5] Nonetheless, the negative connotations of the word quickly established themselves, and by the playwright and philosopher Seneca's time, the word had extended into its philosophical meaning, "a visual and horrific revelation of the truth".[6]
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