How to Use Honor Among Thieves Characters Properly in Your Next D&D Campaign
If you’re among the many fantasy fans smitten with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves , you now have an easy way to bring movie characters and magical items into your very own D&D campaign. Wizards of the Coast released movie-accurate character stat blocks. magic items and a set of digital dice for use in D&D Beyond . But should you?
How to Download Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Content
If you have a D&D Beyond account, you can get the content of the movie by clicking on this link and then clicking “login to apply”. From there visit your compendium and you should find everything ready to go. (If you don’t already have a D&D Beyond account, you can get one for free .)
The download includes stat blocks for Ajin, Dorik, Holga Kilgore, Simon Aimar, Xenc Yendar, Forge Fitzwilliam, and Sophina herself. Each of them has unique special abilities and characteristics that you will recognize from the movie. The magical items include the Helm of Separation, the Staff of the Back and forth, and three other mystical artifacts from the film. The dice skin is pretty cool too if you like digital dice rolls.
How to use Honor Among Thieves content without breaking the game
It’s one thing to have all the information you need to add these characters and items to your game, but actually using them effectively is a lot more complicated than just loading up some stats. These characters work so well in the film because so many creative professionals have spent millions of dollars and countless hours fine-tuning every aspect of the cinematic experience. Each part of the film is designed to fit together, so if you pick a piece and stick it into your current campaign, it probably won’t work.
As written, these are powerful high-level characters, so if the movie inspired you to gather friends for your first D&D adventure, I would leave all the characters in the movie as quest givers or cameos rather than “join the party” NPCs. If you don’t nerf her a lot, then if Doric joins a group to bypass low level dungeons, it will break most games, and pitting a lower level group against Sophina will wipe everyone off the table.
More importantly, why would you want your D&D game to follow a storyline created by Hollywood writers? Instead, make your quest about the characters you and your friends have come up with. Encouraging reckless, ridiculous creativity is the best thing about any RPG. Besides, it’s just dice rolls and fancy math.
How to turn Honor Among Thieves NPCs into playable characters
If someone at your table is a big fan of the movie and wants to be Forge Fitzwilliam and not just meet him, it shouldn’t be hard to convert all those NPCs to playable characters – most of the information is already there and filling in. the rest will be easy. But keep balance in mind, both in fights and within the group, and nerf when necessary. Usually you want everyone at the table to be roughly equal in strength. At its best, a D&D game is an experiment in ensemble storytelling in which everyone can express themselves. You don’t want your session to turn into “The Amazing Adventures of That Movie Guy (and His Friends)”.
Better yet, instead of playing as a character from this movie (or any movie), consider paying homage: if you like Edgin Darvis, by all means roll the bard, but make him yours bard. They may be a bit like Darvis, but they will ultimately be shaped by you, the situations in your game world, and your awfully low dice rolls.
The same basic principles apply to magical items: all of these downloadable artifacts are extremely powerful, potentially game-breaking gear, perfect for certain use in the movie, but probably not made for the world you’re creating. I wouldn’t throw a Helm of Disjunction or Horn of Death Calling into a low level campaign unless “weakies with bazookas” isn’t the vibe you’re aiming for. Maybe keep them as a reward “at the end of the module” or as an Thing that the Big Bad Evil Guy owns that allows him to rule the village.