Film / Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Who needs heroes when you have thieves?

"Truth be told, we helped the wrong person steal the wrong thing. We didn't mean to unleash the greatest evil the world has ever known. But we're gonna fix it."

— Edgin Darvis

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a 2023 action/fantasy/heist comedy film based upon the immensely popular tabletop RPG. The film is directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (Game Night, Vacation), and stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Regé-Jean Page, Sophia Lillis, and Hugh Grant.

The film takes place in a separate continuity from the previous three films based off the game. Set in the world of the Forgotten Realms campaign, its plot concerns a Caper Crew led by the bard Edgin (Pine) who finds himself jailed with the party's barbarian Holga (Rodriguez) during a heist on the behalf of the mysterious wizard Sofina (Daisy Head). Two years later, Edgin and Holga escape prison and find that fellow party member Forge Fitzwilliam (Grant) has become the Lord of Neverwinter and is in possession of both Edgin's daughter (Chloe Coleman) and a magical tablet that was the subject of the crew's previous heist. Now Edgin and Holga must assemble a new crew to take back the tablet and Edgin's daughter... and unravel a scheme that puts all the land in grave peril.

IDW published a Prequel comic book Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves – The Feast of the Moon in February, 2023. Prequel novels include Jaleigh Johnson's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter, focused on the period between Zia's death and Edgin's arrest, and E. K. Johnston's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Druid's Call, focused on Doric's backstory.

The film was released on March 31, 2023, following a premiere at the South By Southwest film festival and a special screening for Amazon Prime members on March 19th. A television spin-off helmed by Rawson Marshall Thurber is also in development.

Previews: Trailer, Behind the scenes featurette, Trailer 2, IGN clip, Meet The Creatures, International Trailer

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves provides examples of:

Tropes A–M

• 1-Dimensional Thinking: Averted; in the Underdark, when Themberchaud smashes against one of the gigantic chains holding up the platform, this dislodges it from the ceiling and it starts crashing to the ground below link by link, threatening to fall on Simon and Doric who begin to run away, but they soon enough swerve to the side and avoid being crushed.
• Abandonment-Induced Animosity: Forge convinced Kira that Edgin left her to go treasure hunting and was arrested for it. Hence, when Edgin finally reunites with her after two years, she's fairly cold to him. It's only after she learns the truth that she finally warms up to her father again.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • The Legend of Drizzt depicts Lord Neverember as a pompous, spiteful Jerkass who has a nasty political feud going on with the dwarves of Delzoun. The film's version of Neverember readily agrees to and makes peace with Doric and the rest of the Emerald Enclave and is implied to have been a goody-two-shoes prior to his coma, something the book version of Neverember would probably never do.
  • The Harpers are general do-gooders in the movie who are implied to be mostly effective; in the games and other media, more than a few members turned out to be dogmatic, Lawful Stupid, racist pricks (though this is a borderline example, as plenty of Harpers are every bit as good as portrayed here).
• Adaptational Wimp: Given the abilities we see the characters display and how they use them, they all (with the odd exception of Edgin) have to be around level ten. As such they should have access to a whole host of other abilities and powers that never show up. This is basically because a party powerful enough to be interesting on screen is also powerful enough to utterly de-rail a typical movie plot and be incredibly expensive to film. Edgin is the exception because he never actually shows any of his bardic magic or combat ability on screen. Instead, there are hints that he's specialized in being an inspirational bard with spells that can have effects like what we've seen on screen but which wouldn't be highly visible. Even so, he's hit with the wimp stick, too, because a mid-level bard should be a thorough-going badass. If their official stat blocks are good indications, they're all 16th-18th level (out of 20, except for Xenk (19) and Sofina (21)), meaning they should be way, way more powerful than they are, and any one of them should be capable of wiping the floor with a roomful of mooks.
• Adaptation Deviation:
  • Two key moments in the plot rest on the Time Stop spell immobilizing people in a room-sized bubble, once for several minutes (or longer), with an effect that sets in gradually over a few seconds. In the tabletop game, Time Stop happens instantly, affects everything in a 1000-foot radius, and only lasts for at most 1 minute of subjective time for the caster. The spell in the movie is a much closer fit for Mass Hold Person, but of course that name would be gibberish to a general audience.
  • Most fantasy races are represented very faithfully to the lore of the games, but one exception are halflings; rather than resembling naturally short humans with stocky proportions, they instead feature the same natural body composition of humans, but scaled down by about half.^note This is more accurate to their depictions in Third and Fourth Editions, but not to either Fifth Edition or anything that came earlier.
  • Most of the characters are members of a recognizable character class, but that class's abilities are significantly reduced to avoid making each powerset too complex. For example, Edgin, Doric, and Xenk are never implied to even be capable of casting spells, abilities that all their classes have in-game (Druids even get spellcasting at an earlier level than Doric's signature Wild Shape ability).
• Aerith and Bob: The setting's names range from made-up fantasy names (Marlamin, Dralas), to English words that aren't normally used as names (Forge, Doric), to names that are a letter or two off from common names (Holga, Sofina, Edgin, Jarnathan, Zia, Xenk), to mundane names that would not be out of place today (Kira, Simon).
• Alien Sky: A shot of the night sky shows the moon Selûne followed by the asteroid cluster known as the Tears of Selûne.
• All for Nothing:
  • At the pardon hearing at the beginning, Edgin stalls the council for time by telling his backstory so a councilman named Jarnathan could arrive. When he does finally show up, Edgin and Holga attack him, throw him out a window and force him to fly them out to freedom...moments after their pardon was granted. Not only did they miss their chance to leave prison legitimately and safely, their pardon is revoked, they become fugitives, Kira is disillusioned by them lying about the circumstances of their escape and Forge gets them arrested.
  • The entire second act revolves around getting and using the Helm of Disjunction. Simon finally manages to master it and break into the vault... only to discover it's completely empty; Forge put it all on an outbound ship. The Helm isn't used again for the rest of the film.
• All There in the Manual: Wizards of the Coast released NPC character sheets for the main cast of the movie (Edgin's party plus both Sofina and Forge), including listing all of their abilities and stats. Interestingly, as well as accurately listing several of the spells used by the characters in the film (as well as confirming that the giant magic hands spells used by both Sofina and Simon were Bigby's Hand), it actually does a good job of explaining away some of the party's deviations from their class rules by simply listing them as abilities their characters uniquely have. Such as:
  • Edgin's lute is specified to be reinforced and usable as a weapon, explaining his use of it as such without breaking the lute. Also, while it does list spells he can perform (something he never visibly did in the film), only two are spells that would be visibly obvious (Message and Disguise Self) while his other spells (Friends, Charm Person, and Suggestion) are all Verbal spells that don't have a physical indication of their casting, and are routed essentially in being really convincing (Friends grants the caster advantage on persuasion during the conversation, for instance), and none of his spells are combat-oriented, making it entirely possible he was casting spells the entire film, just only out-of-combat and during conversation.^note Notably, Friends and Charm Person have the effect that, once the spell is over, the affected target will become hostile towards you, which is reflected in the film; after convincing the party to go along with his insane scheme, they do at one point snap and turn on him for wasting their time on an adventure to the Underdark that was seemingly All for Nothing.
  • Doric's Wild Shape rules specify that, in addition to the usual use of turning into a beast, she's also able to use it to turn into an Owlbear as a unique trait. Additionally, she is listed as being able to use Wild Shape five times a day, over double the amount a regular Druid can; she still utilised it more times than this in the film, but it does make special mention that she can still Wild Shape while already in a form (something that the official rules-as-written does not specify for Druids, though it has been officially ruled as possible by Mike Mearls), and she only reverted to her true form twice during the montage where she showcased her abilities, so it's possible to handwave that they were ruling that changing from one animal to another while in Wild Shape didn't require expending one of her uses of it.^note This does go against Mearls' official ruling on how Wild Shape works, but is not specified for Doric on her list.
  • Holga's actions list her as capable of three attacks per action, on top of also having a bonus action of being able to shove an opponent five feet away. Like Doric, she still seems to break this a little in the film as she still makes more than 3/4 attacks without her opponents landing any, but as we see her opponents running to her and trying to attack it's possible they just failed to hit her (she has an AC of 15, which isn't bad; standard guard stats in D&D only give them +3 to hit, so looked at in game terms, they'd still have to attack higher-than-average to land a hit on her).
• Almost Dead Guy: Zia, Edgin's fridged wife, is killed by Thayan wizards in the backstory, but lives long enough to point out where she hid their daughter, Kira, when Edgin arrives.
• Always a Bigger Fish: The Thayan assassins confront the party in the Underdark, only to disturb Themberchaud, an obese red dragon who lairs there, who eats them before going on a rampage against the party.
• Amicable Exes: Upon returning to her husband Marlamin's home to pick up extra gear, Holga finds that he had remarried during her two years in prison for a gentler barbarian who loves home over adventure. Nevertheless, he still graciously tells her that she was his best friend, and wishes that she finds true happiness and a family of her own. Though sadness for what could have been clearly lingers, Holga and Marlamin at least part on a handshake of warm friendship.
• Anti-Hero Team: The central party is, as the title states, a band of thieves, and Edgin and Holga start their adventure in prison. They are not evil or malicious and have a code of ethics to only steal from rich people, but their motivations are mostly self-serving until the third act.
• Apathetic Citizens: At the climax, most of the citizens of Neverwinter have gathered to watch the High Sun Games and are told to remain in their seats for something good. Not one of them appears to run away when tendrils of eldritch darkness start streaking down from the sky and an ominous red cloud starts billowing from the center; it takes a hot air balloon spewing treasure from the sky to whip them into a frenzy and get them to leave.
• The Archmage:
  • While neither of them appear in the flesh, Elminster Aumar is named as being one of Simon's ancestors, while Mordenkainen from Greyhawk is named as the creator of the arcane seal locking the treasure room of Castle Never as well as that of the Helm of Disjunction. They are two of the most powerful wizards ever.
  • Szazz Tam is generally considered the most powerful lich (undead wizard) in the world, and one of the most powerful wizards in general. His only significant drawback being that he only has power within the nation of Thay.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: A non-sexual version — after being told that intellect devourers attack the highly intelligent, an entire pack of them just walk right past the party without noticing them. Edgin mentions that he can't help but feel hurt.
• Armor Is Useless: Double-subverted; various foot soldiers are shown to be heavily armored, and other than a character with a magical flaming sword, nobody even attempts to stab or slash them with blades. However, because medieval armor aren't as padded or safe as, say, modern football helmets, they're still vulnerable to sheer blunt force. The armor ends up being useful against sharp objects and other presumed minor threats like fire and regular thieves/villagers, not so much against a raging barbarian with Super-Strength.
• Arrowgram: Discussed; after their escape from the guards, Holga suggests shooting an arrow with a message into Kira's room to explain that Forge had been lying to her about her dad. Edgin shoots down the suggestion, though, not wanting to risk wounding Kira with an arrow.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Edwin and Holga face the probation board for the crimes of "grand larceny and skullduggery".
• Asshole Victim: Ultimately, the only victims of Sofina's Beckoning Death spell are the rich elites who came to the High Sun Games to callously bet on the lives of the contestants... and also the servants attending them, as well as possibly the adventuring party in the cage below where the elites were staying at.
• Bag of Holding: Simon has the Trope Namer and uses it to store most of his magic items.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In the opening, Edgin is confident that he and Holga will get out of prison because a judge named Jarnathan will be at their clemency hearing, and keeps trying to slow down proceedings to make sure Jarnathan has time to arrive, implying that he's sure to support them... Nope. When he shows up and is revealed to be an Aarakocra, Ed busts out their escape plan where he and Holga to grab Jarnathan and jump out the window, counting on Jarnathan to fly them to safety.
  • A Brick Joke variation of above happens at the end — Forge, having been apprehended and now being tried for his crimes, pulls the exact same sob-story tactic — and promptly gets shut down before he gets past his childhood. He then also attempts to grab Jarnathan (who's on time and present this time around) and glide out of the window, which would set up a great Sequel Hook... if the Council hadn't learned from its first mistake and bricked up the window.
  • When Simon takes Edgin and Holga to meet Doric, they approach the trial of a druid about to be sentenced to death by Forge's guards for defying his propaganda, with Edgin assuming said druid is Doric. Instead, one of the guards' horses promptly morphs into an Owlbear and delivers a Curb-Stomp Battle to the guards before transforming back into her Tiefling form, knocking out the last guard with her slingshot and rescuing the druid on horseback. Guess which one is Doric.
• Bait-and-Switch Compassion: When Edgin is at Sofina and Forge's mercy, Forge confides in him that he doesn't want to see him die... which is why he's going to leave the room.
• Bathos:
  • The barbarian cemetery scene has a rather creepy atmosphere and setup involving the party resurrecting several corpses for interrogation... which quickly becomes comedic due to the fickle nature of their Speak with Dead spell that forces them to repeat the process several times, as well as the various stories of the barbarians who died in battle through abrupt or flat-out undignified circumstances.
  • The entire encounter with Themberchaud manages to be both terrifying and ridiculous on the simple fact that this giant dragon happens to be incredibly obese, providing an Indy Escape that involves the heroes running from both its deadly fire breath and its barrel-rolling across the ground.
• Beast Man: Aarakocra (bird), Dragonborn (dragon), and Tabaxi (cat) all appear during the movie.
• Being Good Sucks: Edgin in his time as a Harper felt this. Sure, he helps arrest a lot of cut-purses and worse scumbags, but he was annoyed about his family living in what he felt was poverty and he felt the need to correct it somehow, leading to eventual tragedy.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Sofina, who wants to expand the Thayan Empire into the Sword Coast, and Forge Fitzwilliam, who is happy to help Sofina so he can steal all of Neverwinter's treasure and keep Kira for himself.
• Big "NO!":
  • Forge's reaction when he sees that all his stolen treasure is falling through a Hither-Thither portal pasted across the mouth of a hot-air balloon bearing his face to spill across the city.
  • Sofina gets three in rapid succession when she sees that the party has emptied the stadium she was going to use to trap the population of Neverwinter so that they could be killed and then revived as zombies, utterly ruining her plan.
• Bittersweet Ending: Edgin uses the tablet to revive Holga who was fatally wounded in the battle, leaving it useless and now he cannot revive his wife, but he does accept she is gone, and earns his daughter's forgiveness. While the team is declared heroes by the old Lord of Neverwinter, and Forge is sent to prison for his crimes, Szass Tam is still out there and remains a threat to Neverwinter.
• Black Comedy: Most of the cemetery scene, which involves awakening dead barbarians from their eternal slumber and having them recall their untimely demises in a past battle, is made absolutely hilarious despite the apparently grim matter. First with the party messing up the questions asked through speak with dead, and then with how sudden or undignified the deaths were — including one man who never saw the battle, but slipped and broke his neck on the same morning while exiting his bath.
• Bling of War: The paladin Xenk (Rege-Jean Page) wears fancy gold and silver armor while escorting the party through the Underdark, which comes in handy when they face off a squad of Thay assassins.
• Blob Monster: A gelatinous cube is one of the hazards the heroes face in the High Sun Games.
• Bloodless Carnage: For a movie that features intense melee fights involving characters getting stabbed, slashed, smashed, crushed into the ground, even a few heads getting cut off and throats getting slit, there's a surprising lack of blood (though admittedly, a few examples could be justified due to the victims being undead and having no blood to shed). The most we get is a bit of blood on a dagger that pierces Holga's heart, and it's still way less than it should for an organ that literally pumps blood.
• Blood Sport: The High Sun Games, where adventurers are hunted by monsters through a slowly-shrinking maze. They can find weapons in chests, but some chests may be mimics. It's implied that few people, if any, live to reach the end. The previous Lord of Neverwinter had them banned for being too barbaric, but Forge has reinstated them so that he can steal all the money placed by the wealthy betting on the games and Sofina can cast her spell on all the audience members.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Xenk has trouble understanding things like sarcasm, colloquialisms, and irony. While he's highly capable, he might be denser even than Holga.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Forge lets the party fight for their lives in the High Sun Games rather than execute them immediately. Justified, as Sofina wants them alive so she can turn them into undead with the Horn of Beckoning Death.
• Booby Trap: To get to the powerful artifact Xenk has hidden away, the party needs to cross a bridge over molten lava. Xenk is in the middle of explaining that to avoid triggering the trap, they have to walk in a very specific, complicated order. And then Simon ignorantly trips it, causing the entire bridge to collapse.
• Bookends: The film starts and ends in a wintry prison, where the imprisoned characters try and plead their cases to a council that decides their pardons. Both times, they try to bust the aarakocra councillor out the window in hopes that his flight instincts will take them to safety. It works for Edgin and Holga at the beginning, but Forge's attempt fails because they bricked up the window.
• Brain Monster: Intellect Devourers, brains on four legs that only sense and attack intelligent beings, appear in the Underdark and scoot past our heroes without attacking them. Edgin finds the fact that they held no interest in the team kind of insulting.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the start of the movie, Edgin and Holga escape prison by grabbing an avian member of the parole board during a hearing, jumping out a window, and using their prisoner to glide to freedom. At the end, Forge attempts the same method for his escape... only the guards learned this time and there is no window to jump from. Bonus points for actual bricks having been used to make the trope nominally literal.
  • As Edgin and Holga are about to be executed via axe decapitation and are asked if they have any last words, Holga stalls for time by complimenting the executing guard's axe design and asking about his caretaking methods for the blade. The guard is understandably dumbfounded but indulges her anyway, stating he polishes it with linseed oil once a month. After Holga knocks him out and seizes his blade, she's about to ask Edgin something when he answers her by saying they'll stop by the market to get linseed oil.
  • Also, the heroic but Literal-Minded Xenk, upon hearing Forge called a "son of a bitch" asks if Forge would blame his mother for his shortcomings. When Forge tries to plead his case to the council before trying to escape, he paints himself as the victim of a cruel, uncaring mother putting him to the path of evil.
  • Having gotten what they need from a resurrected corpse, the party leaves, neglecting to ask him the last question he needs to answer before he can die again. The poor guy is still undead and waiting for his question in the mid-credits!
  • Edgin proposes using a druid to examine Forge's vault, saying they could turn into an animal and avoid detection. Holga gives a deer as an example, but Edgin points out that there aren't a lot of deer in Neverwinter. When Doric is spotted near the vault and has to escape the guards, the last animal she turns into is a deer.
  • When trying to convince Doric to join their group, she keeps asking what Edgin is adding on his own, other than plans that apparently fail and require fixing on the run. Holga is quick to point out that he also plays the lute, to which an annoyed Edgin says it's irrelevant. Cue him or rather an illusion of him distracting a group of guards by frolicking around and playing his lute much later into the story. This one got spoiled by the trailers, where the payoff is instantly shown for a quick laugh.
  • Among what sound like Tall Tales about Xenk is that he defeated a beholder with nothing but a sharpened gourd. The animations that play during the closing credits include one of a beholder being stabbed in the central eye by a gourd.
  • During their prison break, Holga distracts a guard by hitting him in the head with a thrown potato. ("She's throwing potatoes!") In the third act, she rescues Kira from Forge by hitting him with a thrown potato.
• Butt-Monkey: Poor Jarnathan can't catch a break during his time on-screen. At the beginning of the movie Edgin and Holga push him out the window and use him as a paraglider to escape, and at the end of the movie Forge tries to do the same only for him to crash them both into a brick wall.
• The Cameo:
  • Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila and Bobby — the six protagonists of Dungeons & Dragons — are shown among the competing groups of adventurers at the High Sun Games. They are even named as such in the credits.
  • Bradley Cooper makes a brief appearance as Holga's ex-husband.
  • Paul Scheer shows up on a painting that the party smuggles a portal from the Hither-Thither Staff under. In-universe, it appears to be recurring Forgotten Realms character Volothamp Geddarm.
  • Tom Morello appears as Kimathi Stomhollow, the dwarf in the High Sun Games who gets eaten by the Displacer Beast.
  • In the Australian edit of the film, Aunty Donna provide the voices of the corpses.
  • French duo Frédéric "Fred" Molas and Sébastien "Seb" Rassiat from Joueur du Grenier have a voice-only cameo in the French version, alongside French streamer Alphacast (all three of which are big tabletop fans), as the undead in the cemetery.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': The very first time Edgin succumbed to the temptation to break his Harper oath, stealing a bit of gold from a Red Wizard, led to the death of his wife.
• The Caper: The second and third acts revolve around a plan to rob the vaults of Castle Never during the High Sun Games.
• Caper Rationalization: Edgin and Holga's real objective with the heist is to rescue Kira from Forge and obtain the Tablet of Reawakening. Stealing the rest of the treasure is more of a side bonus, plus a way to reimburse the rest of the Caper Crew.
• Captain Obvious: When Simon's illusionary distraction breaks down and horrifies the guards, Holga dryly observes, "I think they're starting to get suspicious."
• Casting Gag:
  • In the Japanese dub, Holga is voiced by Yuko Kaida, who previously voiced Risty, another tougher-than-nails tomboyish barbarian warrior from a medieval high-fantasy franchise who took many notes from Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Also, Michelle Rodriguez, Holga's actress, once again plays the tough but loving mother-figure of a multi-racial surrogate family who comes back from the dead.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The Hither-Thither staff the party accidentally discover turns out to be more useful than the Helm of Disjunction they're actually questing for. They use it to get the Helm of Disjunction, find the treasure they took the Helm of Disjunction to get, and ultimately scatter said treasure to lure the populace out of the range of the Big Bad's undeath ritual.
• Chekhov's Gag:
  • The little flame Simon conjures on his finger is introduced to show how bad he is with magic. Later in the film, Edgin gets the idea to use it to ignite Themberchaud's inflammable breath, blasting open the cavern the party is trapped in and allowing them to escape.
  • Forge has a hot-air balloon with his face on it, which initially seems purely to show how egotistical he is. During the climax, Edgin casts one end of a Hither-Thither portal on it to disperse treasure across the streets of Neverwinter, getting the audience to leave the stadium to gather it and removing them from the range of Sofina's spell.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Kira's pendant that allows her to turn invisible plays an important role in defeating Sofina.
  • The walking stick Holga gave her ex-husband turns out to be a Hither-Thither Staff that creates portals within a certain distance, allowing Simon to teleport the team at key moments.
  • When Edgin and his company are raiding the fortress for the Tablet of Reawakening the first time, the Thayan horn is visible and the camera even lingers on it for a few seconds before fading off. This was Sofina's actual reason for partnering with Edgin; his connection to the Harpers allowed her to enter where she could not. Sofina's plot is to use the Horn during the High Sun Games to summon another instance of the Beckoning Death spell to try and turn the entire Neverwinter populace into an army of undead servants.
  • The Anti-Magic bracelets used on Doric and Simon in the maze are used to stop Sofina at the end, when Kira sneaks them onto her using the aforementioned pendant. There's even a lingering shot of them while the gang is reequipping.
  • At one point, Edgin dreams about happier times with his wife and reminisces about a time he was trying and failing to catch an annoying dragonfly in their cottage. His wife suggests letting it go instead of capturing or killing it. When Holga literally dies in his arms much later, a dragonfly picks that moment to land on his arm. This lets him realize the significance of Zia's words and guides him to revive Holga with the Tablet of Reawakening and embrace his new life/family.
• Chest Monster: The labyrinth of the High Sun Games has chests all over with various weapons inside to help the combatants. Holga discovers to her horror that not all the chests are legit — some are actually Mimics, which are the Trope Maker themselves.
• Colon Cancer: The various spinoff comics and novels. These include Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Feast of the Moon and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Druid's Call.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Guess what colour the villainous Red Wizards wear, then notice what uniform colour the Harpers chose for theirs.
• Combat Pragmatist: Nobody in this film fights fair. The thieves use every dirty trick in the book and anything within arm's reach to fight their opponents, and even the Paladin has a detachable blade he can shoot out to stab someone at range. Justified since their opponents are treacherous necromancers who don't even try to fight honorably (and maybe a few innocent city guards, but such is Faerûn).
• Comfort the Dying: The final barbarian corpse interrogated by the party finally gives them a lead on the Helm of Disjunction: he had barely escaped the battle and was on the verge of death, only for wandering paladin Xenk to stumble upon him. According to the barbarian, Xenk somehow made him feel like everything was going to be okay, despite his impending death.
• Commended for Pushback: Elminster refuses to let Simon attune with a magical helmet due to Simon's lack of confidence. When Simon punches Elminster, Elminster says "it took you long enough" and lets him use the helmet.
• Concentration-Bound Magic: Simon's illusion spell requires him to concentrate or the illusion will break apart, as demonstrated when he creates an illusion of Edgin to distract some guards. When his foot gets stuck in a pothole, he loses his focus which causes the illusion to distort and eventually vanish.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Xenk is able to easily dispatch a squad of Thayan assassins, with the only one to pose a challenge to him being their leader, Dralas, after all of his men have been defeated. Subverted, however, since they're undead and not even Xenk can kill them permanently.
• Contrived Coincidence: Played for Laughs on multiple occasions, where the improbability of the situation reads as an actual game of D&D where the DM's plans went awry due to unforeseen circumstances, thus requiring an equally improbable nudge to get things back on track.
  • During their excursion in the Underdark to retrieve the Helm of Disjunction, the party is brought before a complicated bridge puzzle which almost immediately ends up botched beyond repair. Just when it seems like their journey is about to stop dead in its tracks, Simon suddenly makes an extremely useful discovery: the seemingly unassuming "walking stick" that Holga took from her ex? Turns out it's a powerful Hither-Thither Staff that lets them create portals, allowing them to bypass the puzzle entirely and proving to be a valuable tool for the rest of the film.
  • Later as the heroes act out their plan, they use the Hither-Thither Staff to cast a portal onto a painting that gets snuck into the castle's vault, which they intend to use as an easy way in. This gets thwarted as the guard bringing the painting in carelessly lets it drop face-down onto the floor, thus treating the heroes to a portal that leads directly into solid concrete, forcing them to think of another way to get in. The group briefly discusses why anyone would just let a fancy painting fall onto the floor like that to begin with.
• Convection Shmonvection:
  • In the Underdark, fleeing from Themberchaud, the party runs quite close to some lava falls without harm. The only thing the lava ignites is the dragon's breath.
  • Holga is able to pull her axe out of a channel of molten metal in Castle Never's smithy without any sign of it burning her, despite it being in there for several minutes as she fought guards.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The board assembled to assess Edgin and Holga's case only manage to call out that they've pardoned them after Edgin and Holga have escaped (as they weren't sure they'd get a pardon and want to get back to Kira). Because they escaped, they are wanted by the time they get to Neverwinter, which gives Forge cause to accuse Edgin of lying about his intentions and further erode Kira's trust in Edgin, which he wouldn't be able to do if they had just waited to be pardoned instead of escaping. Forge then has Edgin and Holga arrested, kicking off the rest of the plot.
• Creative Closing Credits: They're done in a combination of pop-up book and medieval illuminated manuscript style, loosely recapping the events of the movie and including some bits of D&D lore that don't show up, like a beholder and a gnoll.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: After Sofina's magic is sealed by a Power Nullifier, her remaining life expectancy drops to a few seconds as Doric in Owlbear form proceeds to quite literally smash her into the pavement.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Played with, but ultimately defied. Kira resents her father Edgin for seemingly abandoning her for two years, leaving her behind while he sought treasure and glory. Edgin keeps trying to explain to his daughter, his team, and himself, that he only left in order to retrieve a MacGuffin that could bring Kira's mother back to life. Ultimately, however, Edgin realizes that while he may not have intended to be gone for so long, he did abandon Kira for selfish reasons, aptly summarizing it as "I was trying to bring back my wife, and not your mother." While his initial confession gets thwarted as he delivers it not to Kira, but a polymorphed Sofina, he takes this moment of self-realization to heart, deciding to let go of trying to resurrect his wife (who is implied to be at peace despite her early demise) and instead make the proper sacrifices to earn Kira's forgiveness.
• Deader than Dead: Edgin states that no cleric can help someone struck by a Red Wizard's blade. The official tie-in material clarifies that this means that it takes divine intervention or a legendary magic item like a Tablet of Reawakening to revive someone killed with one.
• Death by Origin Story: A good chunk of the plot is based on recovering the Tablet of Reawakening to bring back Zia, Edgin's wife, who was Stuffed into the Fridge by Red Wizards as part of his backstory.
• Death Trap: The High Sun Games are essentially an elaborate series of these - five challenges involving brutal monsters and lots of death and dismemberment. It’s little wonder the previous Lord of Neverwinter shut them down.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Simon attunes himself to the Helm of Disjunction by chewing out and slugging the insulting image of his ancestor.
• Description Cut: Edgin assures Holga that surely Simon has gotten better at magic. Cut to Simon doing lame magic tricks in front of an unimpressed audience.
• Deus Exit Machina: Shortly after obtaining the helmet, Xenk leaves the party, as he is far more competent, valorous, and strong than the rest of the party and would probably cut about 30 minutes off the movie had he stayed around and helped. Simon even lampshades how much better an adventurer he is than the rest of them.
• Disc-One Final Boss: From the party's perspective, Forge is the Big Bad and their Arch-Enemy, as while they know Sofina has her own agenda (as otherwise a Red Wizard of Thay would have nothing to do with the situation), Forge is the one between them and their goal, as well as the cause of nearly every problem they face in the film. However, they successfully defeat him right as Sofina starts her endgame, forcing them to head back and stop her.
• Dispel Magic: The second act of the film is partly about retrieving the Helm of Disjunction, a Cool Helmet that can negate even the most powerful enchantments.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Red Wizards don't take kindly to anything getting stolen from them, even a single bar of gold amidst their vast riches. Edgin stealing one in the past without knowing their treasure was marked resulted in the Red Wizards destroying his house and killing his wife.
• Dive Under the Explosion: The team gets out of the Underdark by submerging underwater and provoking Themberchaud into destroying the roof of the cavern with his breath.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Thay was conquered from within by a power-hungry megalomaniac who turned his people into monsters. "Germany was the first nation invaded by the Nazis."
• Doing In the Wizard: It's never discussed in dialogue, but a close viewing of the battle with Themberchaud establishes that a red dragon's fire breath is biological in nature, rather than magical: the dragon exhales an inflammable gas, then ignites it with an organ in the back of the throat that produces sparks. When Themberchaud corners the party in a dead end and saturates the room with the gas, Edgin has a "Eureka!" Moment and gets Simon to conjure a flame, blasting open an escape route. This tracks with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rules, as a dragon's breath weapon is not a spell or magical ability and has been confirmed to work in an Antimagic Field in that edition (in previous editions it was explicitly magical).
• Double Caper: The crew pulls off a heist in the backstory, gets betrayed by Forge and Sofina, and then pull another heist to get revenge on them.
• Dramatic Irony: Edgin and Holga escaped from prison in the opening of the film as they weren't sure they'd get pardoned by the parole board. If they had just been patient a little while longer, they would've been released, as after Edgin explained their case, the board decided to approve their pardon.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Zia is killed by Red Wizards, but not before hiding her infant in a cupboard, saving her life.
• Easily Forgiven: Holga doesn't seem to hold any ill will against Edgin for having the instinct to abandon her in the heist gone wrong when Sofina's time stop spell engulfs her. Justified, as she knew he was trying to get the tablet for Kira to get her mother back, and Holga loves her every bit as much. Also, given that nothing is shown of the intervening two years between that heist and the start of the film, she might well have had hard feelings to start but has now forgiven him. Or that she knew, if Edgin had escaped, his second order of business would have been busting her out (his first order of business, naturally, being reuniting with his wife).
• Epic Fail: At one point, Simon attempts to use a Major Image spell to create an illusion of Edgin serenading some guards, distracting them as he, Edgin, and Holga slip past. Unfortunately, his foot becomes stuck in a hole along the way, breaking his concentration and making the illusion malfunction and warp like a poorly animated CG cartoon character, much to the guards' confusion and horror, before they realize what's going on and give chase.
  Guard: What madness is this...?
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Edgin and Holga are introduced as cellmates in prison. Edgin, knitting on his bed, snarkily "shows their new cellmate around" and tells him not to bother Holga. When the new cellmate does, Holga puts aside her potato and beats him up. This firmly establishes them as a Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy pair who have a deep understanding of each other.
  • Later, when meeting the council for their pardon, Holga cynically believes Edgin's plan is not going to work and snarkily refuses to join him when trying to argue his case to the council, but as soon as Edgin gives her the signal, she instantly joins him and together they leap from the building alongside their hostage. This shows that despite her snark, she implicitly trusts Edgin with her life and will go along with his ideas no matter how bad they might seem.
  • When Holga and Edgin visit Simon's show, he's annoying the audience with elementary parlor tricks while secretly stealing their valuables, hinting that he's more intelligent than is initially apparent. When the jig is found out, he's able to claw his way out of the situation even if he futzes some spells. This characterizes him as an Inept Mage who can pull through in critical situations. He also, as Edgin later points out, reverses the gravity of the entire room, indicting he's a lot more powerful than even he believes.
  • Simon takes them to meet a druid acquaintance of his, Doric. The team initially assumes Doric is a rebel being tried for crimes against Neverwinter, until Simon points out that Doric has shapeshifted into the horse before beating everybody bloody. She's quickly characterized as a powerful and serious shapeshifter with a talent for stealth who wants to defend her home.
  • When the party goes to meet Xenk, they watch him calmly rescue a Tabaxi cub by convincing the large fish who swallowed him to cough him back up and return the cub to his parent in front of a cheering crowd, establishing him as a righteous and popular individual with a respect for life.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Forge is selfish, greedy, and seems to have Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. But he takes his role as Kira's foster father very seriously, even admitting to Edgin that he enjoys being a father more than he ever thought he would. He even makes it clear to Sofina that he wants her to spare Kira (along with himself) if no-one else. He's still willing to hold a knife to Kira's throat in order to force Edgin to hand over the Tablet of Reawakening, though. He also honestly thinks it would be better for Edgin and everyone else to simply die than to go into the High Sun Games and be subject to Sofina's spell.
• Evil Overlooker: Take a look at the poster. Then ask who the Big Bad is.
• Evil Plan: Why Sofina was backing Forge to become Lord of Neverwinter, so he could restart the Games and draw as huge a crowd as possible. Sofina would then unleash the Beckoning Death, turning almost the entire populace of Neverwinter into an undead army and allow Szass Tam to have a foothold into the rest of the realm.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: During the final fight, Sofina casts a spell towards the heroes and hits a dragon statue next to them, making Holga think that she missed them. The spell actually animates the dragon statue, which Sofina uses to fight them with.
• Exact Words:
  • Simon casts Speak with Dead, telling everyone that once a body is raised, they can only ask a total of five questions before the spell is spent and the corpse is dead again forever. This seems to imply asking the reanimated corpse five questions only, unfortunately, the party asking each other also counts...
  • When Forge and Sofina have Edgin captured, Forge laments that he would hate to see his old friend die. Thus, he decides to leave the room so he wouldn't have to.
  • Edgin's hell-bent on getting the Tablet of Reawakening to resurrect Kira's mother... which is what he does in the end when he uses it to resurrect Holga, who has been Kira's Parental Substitute and surrogate mother ever since her infancy.
• Failed a Spot Check: The guards behind a moving carriage are too busy chatting with each other to notice Simon struggling to hold on to its underside via a magic portal, and when they spot Holga hanging onto what looks like a pair of legs sticking out from the ground a smile and wave from her is enough to shake any suspicion off. This is rather more literal than most, (3rd Edition) D&D is the Trope Namer for Failed a Spot Check (5th Edition would be "Failed a Perception Check" or "Too Low Passive Perception").
• Failure Montage: The many, many, many attempts at digging up a body to find out where the Helm of Disjunction was taken.
• Fake-Out Opening: The first couple of minutes of the film have a rather ominous sequence following a transport cart across the snowy landscape to Revel's End and Gorg the hobgoblin being escorted in, whereupon we cut to Edgin cheerily knitting as he introduces Holga, who beats the snot out of Gorg. Per the art book this was a deliberate trick to make viewers expect a more traditional, serious fantasy movie.
• Family of Choice: Edgin spends the film trying to resurrect his wife so that he and his daughter can be a proper family again. By the end he realizes that the party members are already his "people", and that it's just as true, if not moreso, to say that Kira's "parents" are the ones who raised her, himself and Holga.
• Fat Bastard: Themberchaud is an adult red dragon who's so fat he can barely walk (definitely can't fly) and spends most of his on-screen time rolling around killing and eating people, unable even to use his dragon-breath thanks to his size (unless there's an external flame to help him, such as a lava flow).
• Feedback Rule: Played for Laughs when the party gets their hands on Sending Stones, and using them while within a few feet of each other immediately generates a loud ringing noise.
• Fiendish Fish: Xenk rescues the tabaxi kitten from the gullet of a huge freshwater fish.
• Fire-Forged Friends: By the end of the film, Kira is reconciled with her father, Simon has come to trust Edgin more than he had, Doric has come to realize that not all humans are bastards, and the team is dedicated to staying together and working together in the future.
  Doric: You're not going back to the Harpers? Be with your people?
  Edgin: I'm with my people.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • The fact that Edgin and Holga have already been pardoned and their escape is unnecessary is foreshadowed a few seconds before the reveal by the fact that the document with the decision has already been sealed with green wax. To hammer home this point, the end of the movie shows Forge's failed pardon being stamped with red wax.
  • When Sofina casts Time Stop at the final fight and approaches Edgin to kill him, a sharp-eyed viewer will notice he's not perfectly still. Five seconds later, it turns out that Simon had successfully Counterspelled the Time Stop and they were just pulling a fast one on Sofina so Kira could put the magic-dampening bracelet on her.
• Foil: Xenk is the Ideal Hero to the protagonist Edgin's Anti-Hero. Xenk acknowledges that both of them have lost important people, but Xenk has used this as motivation to become a do-gooder while Edgin has become a thief. Before helping him, Xenk makes Edgin promise that he'll spread Forge's wealth, which Edgin ends up fulfilling. The reason for their differences winds up contrasting them even further: Xenk became a do-gooder because his family was killed; Edgin's family was killed because he was a do-gooder.
• Forced Perspective: The movie frequently resorts to this camera trick for the actors playing halflings. And perhaps owing to the movie's comedic tone, whenever humans and halflings interact, the filmmakers are all but blatantly saying, "Yes, we're doing the Hobbit Trick."
• Foreshadowing:
  • Edgin's admission to Kira that he was trying to resurrect his wife, not her mother, acknowledging that he did it for himself and not for her. They end up using the Tablet of Reawakening on Holga... because this time Edgin chooses to save Kira's mother not his wife.
  • Forge's offhand remark to Sofina that the Red Wizards are "about to be considerably less popular" makes sense in hindsight when you find out what her plans are for Neverwinter.
  • When asked why he's reinstated the High Sun Games, Forge says that they bring the city together, and adds in a more joking tone that "rich bastards" bet a lot of money on them. This is in fact completely true, although not in the way his guests take it: the Games literally bring the city together, as in, to one location where they can all be hit with the Beckoning Death, and Forge plans to take the treasure and run while Sofina murders and enslaves everyone.
• Forgot About His Powers:
  • During a chase scene, a dragon destroys the bridge the characters are using, Doric loses her footing and is left dangling on a ledge before being helped up by Simon, having apparently forgotten that she can shapeshift into a bird or another animal that could scale up the ledge just fine. It's possibly justified by the stress and panic she might have been feeling, but noticeable all the same. It is hinted by Doric's passive nature throughout that sequence that it is emulating an absent player whose character is handled by the DM for continuity.
  • Edgin's official character sheet says he can cast spells, but we never see him do so. Or do we? Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane was invoked by the filmmakers intentionally.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: At the end of the movie, Forge stands before the parole board to give account for his crimes, and starts to blame his stern mother for his actions. The board, not amused, denies his release.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Played with. Many of the elements of the story are lifted straight from the game, including the monsters, but the film has no issues with breaking from the rules of the game for narrative reasons due to Rule of Drama or Rule of Funny. The most pointed out examples are the classes of the main characters not lining up with their game counterparts: Edgin has no magical abilities and is essentially a noncombatant (Bards are renowned as good at a little bit of everything), Doric casts no spells but has MUCH higher Wildshaping abilities than her game counterpart (Druids in most iterations are only just behind Wizards and Clerics for breaking the game in half with spells), Forge is a Rogue who performs nothing remotely like a Rogue (Sneak Attacks, Trap Detection and Disarming, or other out-of-the-box skills), Holga comes off more as a highly-proficient Fighter than a raging Barbarian (though her Super-Strength and Toughness, along with her battlecry, is evocative of a rage), etc. Gags like the Intellect Devourers also make no sense as the species would presumably die of starvation if it took a genius-level intellect to even attract their attention. Finally, the monsters at the maze at the end are a little on the weak side (they're all Challenge Rating 2 or 3) for what are supposed to be a city-wide spectacle, but the adventuring challengers do have to start with no weapons and inability to use magic.
  • In a more direct sense, official statblocks for the main cast have been published, putting most of them in the level 16-18 range (the exceptions being Sofina, Forge, and Xenk at levels 19, 20, and 21 respectively). In game terms, this would place them among the strongest mortal beings in existence, with Simon in particular being only slightly less powerful than the Big Bad, but it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining to watch the heroes just curb-stomp everything for two hours.
• Gelatinous Encasement: To escape from the High Sun Games, Doric urges the rest of the heroic party to jump into a gelatinous cube that is part of the Mobile Maze, and thus lowered below the arena when the blocks retract. The move would be rather suicidal in most circumstances; Doric manages to save the group by making sure the tip of her finger is touching the edge of the cube, and then using Wild Shape to turn into a garter snake which slithers in the cavity left by her body, reaching the hole and escaping. She then returns to human form and pulls out her companions one by one, before the acid of the cube can digest them.
• Glad He's On Our Side: After watching Xenk singlehandedly take on an entire squad of undead Thayans, Holga comments that she's glad he's with them.
• Glamour Failure:
  • At one point, Edgin appears before several guards while singing a song... which turns out to be Simon casting a Major Image illusion to distract them as they sneak by. Unfortunately, he ends up briefly getting his foot stuck and messes up his concentration, causing said illusion to start "glitching", treating the guards to a frankly surreal sight of the fake Edgin bloating and shifting uncontrollably, freaking them out before they realize what's going on.
  • Sofina's true appearance is revealed during the final battle when it looks like she's managed to trap the party with another Time Stop spell; looking like a rotting corpse with tattered, moth-eaten robes. It's because Simon finally has the talent to counterspell it, the party were all faking being time-frozen to sell the ruse, and Kira used her invisibility necklace to move in and slap an Anti-Magic bracelet on the Red Wizard as she has her villainous rant — the moment her true undead form is unveiled being the moment Kira made her move.
• Gravity Screw: Simon desperately casts Wild Magic to escape the crowd angered by his attempted theft of their valuables, causing gravity to invert and slam everyone into the ceiling. When they manage to catch him again, he restores normal gravity, and yet another casting sends him plummeting through the skylight and tumbling through the air until he undoes that one last time.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Big Bad Duumvirate in the film are not on equal footing, and even so the bigger bad of the two is loyal to a lich, Ssaz Tam.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Both Holga and Doric (in her owlbear form) employ this tactic in fights, smashing guards into each other and sending them flying.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • Inverted with one guard after Doric is discovered spying on the castle. Doric hides inside an empty armor and leaves the scene. A passing guard notice that something is off and soon starts chasing her while alerting the other guards.
  • The soldiers guarding the carriage carrying treasures for the High Sun Games are chatting with each other, so they don't notice the two people trying to portal into the carriage from the ground. During the same operation, one of them makes eye contact with Holga on a nearby hill, who appears to be handling a pair of legs of someone that looks inexplicably submerged into the ground. She gives him an awkwardly polite wave and he doesn't give it any further notice.
  • When Edgin plays a lute to distract the guards (actually an illusion from Simon), they all gather around him and do nothing instead of arresting him. Not helping their case is that there's a wanted poster of him and Holga earlier in the movie and they fail to recognize him. It's only when the illusion breaks down that they start to wise-up and by that time, it's too late. Edgin and the party are already inside the castle.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted in the main foursome, where the female members are the brawlers (Holga with her weaponry and Doric with her animorphism), while Simon is a sorcerer and Edgin is the noncombatant bard leader.
• Happy Flashback: When Holga lies dying, we see several flashbacks of her in happier times raising Kira, as Edgin realizes that he needs to let his wife go and use the Tablet of Reawakening to bring back his daughter's Parental Substitute.
• Has a Type: Holga and her ex-husband Marlamin are clearly each other's types; Marlamin's current partner is also a human barbarian, and in the Medals for Everyone scene at the end, Holga silently flirts with the halfling bestowing her the medal.
• Head Desk: When the party is about to be tossed into the High Sun Games, Simon is seen repeatedly thudding his head against the wall.
• Hellhole Prison: Subverted with Revel's End. Yes, it's situated in the tundra of Icewind Dale several days away from civilization, but according to the Adventure Module that introduced it to the Forgotten Realms setting, the cells are magically heated to 68°F/20°C, the prisoners are given appropriate clothing when brought outside for Prisoner's Work and each prisoner may plead their case to the Absolution Council once per year.
• Here We Go Again!: Much to the exasperation of the Absolution Council, the Halfling councilwoman in particular, Forge attempts to escape justice, much like Edgin and Holga had in the beginning, by using the winged Council member Jarnathan to glide out of the window. Unfortunately for him (and for poor Jarnathan) the Council have since had said window bricked in.
• Hero Insurance: It appears that at the end Edgin and Holga are pardoned for breaking out of prison due to saving Neverwinter.
• Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: Why Edgin turned to thievery. As a member of the Harpers, he fought to protect the innocent and apprehend evildoers, but the organization's refusal to accept payment for good deeds made it hard for him to support his wife and young daughter. When he stole some treasure from a Red Wizard during a bust, he inadvertently led the Thayans right to his door, directly causing the death of his wife and sending him further into a life of crime.
• Hero of Another Story: The cameoing protagonists of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon are essentially this, being the stars of their own Trapped in Another World story set in the D&D universe whom Edgin's crew briefly encounter at the High Sun Games before their paths abruptly diverge, leaving the 1983 heroes in an Uncertain Doom situation but not without the possibility of survival.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Edgin's role in the Harpers was to be a bard by day, occasionally masquerading as a beggar, in order to collect information and interfere with plans.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Sofina tells Dralas in Thayan that the guards behind them allowed their enemies to escape. This language barrier allows Dralas to take them by surprise.
• Hit Stop: We watch in all its glorious slow motion... Forge getting hit in the face by a potato. Mind you, Holga threw it hard enough for the potato to shatter on impact.
• Hobbits: The film portrays Halflings in an unusual way as having normal human proportions but only half of normal human height.
• Homage Shot: There are three shots in this film that are directly taken from velociraptor scenes in Jurassic Park.
  • The opening prison cart drop off is blocked just like the velociraptor intro.
  • The overhead shot where the party pulls Doric away from the dragon's bite is nearly identical to when Grant pulls Lex up into the air ducts away from the jumping velociraptor.
  • After the displacer beast's dwarven victim realizes the true hunter is over his shoulder, it is framed the same way as when Robert Muldoon meets his end after muttering "Clever girl" to the alpha hunter.
• Honor Among Thieves:
  • Title notwithstanding, Edgin's crew (with one exception) are tight-knit and well-meaning. They make a point of only stealing from people who can afford to lose it, and in the climax, they give up their score in order to save the entire city.
  • Played with when Xenk the paladin trusts them to honor their oaths, not because they're thieves, but because Edgin is a former Harper. They do.
• Honorary Uncle: After Forge took her in, Kira began referring to him as "Uncle Forge".
• Hourglass Plot: At the start of the film, Edgin is a wanted criminal while Forge is considered a pillar of the community. By the end, Edgin is hailed as a hero while Forge is being kept in the same prison Edgin was being held.
• I Gave My Word: Just as Sofina is about to cast her spell, Forge comes by and reminds her that he has done everything she asked and was told once he did he be allowed to leave with the gold safely. Surprisingly, despite how much she despises him, she doesn't pull Exact Words, I Lied, or even You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on him, choosing to honor the agreement and coldly tells him, "Get out of my city."
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: After several attempts at resurrecting barbarian corpses to ask them about it, the party finally finds one who knows where the Helm of Disjunction, a MacGuffin critical to the current plan, is. He had barely escaped the battle with the helmet and was on the verge of death, but was able to pass it on to Xenk, a wandering paladin.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Once they finally get their hands on the Helm of Disjunction, Xenk hands it to Edgin, asking him to solemnly promise that he will guard it with his life. Edgin says he will... and immediately passes it to Simon.
  Edgin: Hold this.
• Indy Escape: At one point during his pursuit of the intruders to his lair, the obese red dragon Themberchaud slips and starts rolling on his side, threatening to crush the protagonists who have to run for their lives.
• Inside a Wall: In Edgin's backstory, an infant Kira managed to survive the home invasion that claimed her mother when Zia hid her in a secret compartment behind a tile in the wall. Edgin found her crying, but mercifully alive and unharmed. Many years later, following Edgin's prison escape, he returns home to find it cleared out in the intervening years, but checks the compartment and finds his lute still there.
• Instrument of Murder: Edgin's weapon of choice (besides his wits) is his lute, which he tends to wield as an improvised bludgeon. He even gets a few solid hits in on Sofina with it.
• Interrogating the Dead: The Speak with Dead spell, along with why one should be very careful with what they ask. The party eventually has to resurrect over a dozen skeletal barbarians to track down the helmet they need.
• Invisibility: Kira has a magical pendant that allows her to become invisible. She uses it as part of Edgin's crew of thieves, and in the climax to render Sofina powerless with an anti-magic bracelet.
• Irony: Edgin, the bard, whose job it is to know and tell stories, is the only member of the party who hasn't heard of the famed exploits of Xenk.
• It Only Works Once:
  • Edgin's goal is to retrieve a Tablet of Reawakening that can bring anyone back to life no matter what killed them, wanting to use it to restore his wife and Kira's mother. Ultimately, he and Kira use it to bring Holga back to life after she's killed in the final battle, as Holga has been Kira's maternal figure and part of Edgin's life as long as Kira can remember.
  • Done humorously in the end where Forge thought he could he could reuse Edgin and Holga's escape plan only to learn that the parole board bricked the window shut to avoid that scenario again.
  • Downplayed with the Speak with Dead spell. Once you ask the resurrected corpse five questions, it's Killed Off for Real and can't be revived, but you can just cast the spell again on another corpse.
• It's the Journey That Counts: The main characters either end up with almost nothing of what they wanted at the beginning, or they have to endure a lot of hardship during their quest to achieve something that turns out to be useless per se. In the end, however, it all works out because the Character Development they experience during the quest allows them to gain what they need to defeat Sofina and be happy again.
  • Had Edgin and Holga had waited another ten seconds they would have received their pardon without having to break out of prison. However, having them escape through a glass window, when it is Forge who tries to use it to escape as well, it turns out that the window is now a stone wall, preventing his escape.
  • The Helm of Disjunction was meant to be used to get into a vault which then turns out to be empty, as the treasures are kept elsewhere. At first, it might seem that everything the group has gone through to retrieve it has been for naught, but by learning to master its power, Simon manages to find the confidence he needs to use his magical powers effectively, and this proves crucial to defeating Sofina.
  • The whole story began when Edgin decided to steal the Tablet of Reawakening and resurrect his wife. However, when Holga is mortally wounded and he realizes that Kira needs Holga (whom she considers her true mother) more than how much he needs his late wife, he decides to use the Tablet on the first. If they hadn't tried to steal the tablet in the first place, Holga would never have died and the tablet would still exist, but on the other hand, that also means that Sofina would still be alive and waiting for the opportunity to unleash Beckoning Death, Forge would still be at large and willing to sacrifice thousands of innocents for his own gain, Simon's self-esteem issues would still prevent him from doing anything good with his life, Doric would still not trust humans, and Edgin would still be unable to come to terms with his wife's death.
• Jump Scare:
  • Played for Laughs at during the Speak with Dead scene. Simon speaks the incantation... and nothing happens. He turns to the others to wonder if he's saying it right, when the corpse pops up. Simon Screams Like a Little Girl, then tries to play it off to Doric as being not scared, but startled.
  • During Xenk's flashback to his witnessing of the Beckoning Death, his parents fall behind in the cloud. As he stands just beyond the edge of the spell's range, their now undead forms pounce at him with a snarl.
  • In the transforming maze of the Arena, Holga runs into a treasure chest and gleefully reaches out to open it hoping to finding a weapon, only for a chameleon-like tongue to burst out of the lid to reveal the fanged mouth of a Mimic, which wraps its tongue around Holga's foot and lunges forth to try and munch into the barbarian.
• Just Like Robin Hood: Edgin's band of thieves initially made it a point to only steal from people who wouldn't feel the loss and minimize hurting others in their heists. Their One Last Job in the prologue goes awry because Sofina started blasting out the offensive magic.
• Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: Forge Fitzwilliam attempts to do this. He's become accustomed to Edgin's daughter Kira treating him as a father figure, and part of his motivation (or at least a bonus) for having Edgin and his Platonic Life Partner Holga (who's effectively a mother to Kira) killed is to avoid returning her to his custody (instead of letting Edgin take the tablet, bring his wife Back from the Dead, and leave with them both).
• Like Brother and Sister: Edgin explicitly describes his relationship with Holga as being like this; while she is Kira's mother figure, Holga rejects the idea that they could ever be involved. When a tavern keeper mistakes them for a couple, they both react with disgust, and overall make it pretty clear that, as much as they care about each other, it's not and never will be romantic for either party.
• Limited-Use Magical Device: The Tablet of Reawakening can only be used to revive someone once because it disintegrates and flows into the person being resurrected to carry out its purpose.
• Living Statue: Sofina ends up bringing a dragon statue to life to battle the heroes.
• Logo Joke: The Paramount Vanity Plate is set in a frozen wasteland with its stars skating along a frozen lake, while the Entertainment One logo is made out of ice. It then segues to the intro, set in the snowy landscape of Icewind Dale.
• MacGuffin: There are three that form the backbone of the film.
  • The Thayan horn, once used by Szass Tam to raise an army of the undead and conquer Thay, which Sofina now plans to use against the people of the Sword Coast.
  • The Tablet of Reawakening, which can bring anyone back from the dead, that Edgin wants to use to revive his dead wife and ultimately uses to revive the mortally wounded Holga.
  • The journey to acquire the Helm of Disjunction takes up a major portion of the middle of the film. Even though it ultimately isn't directly involved in the denouement (See It's the Journey That Counts above), it's still the MacGuffin for the characters.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Simon exasperatedly has to explain this whenever Holga asks him to just use magic to solve a random problem.
• Magitek: Sending Stones are like magical walkie-talkies, even having feedback if used too close to each other. However, they only work for an hour.
• Major Injury Underreaction: After the final battle, the camera pans down to reveal that Holga has been stabbed just below the heart, by a dagger that prevents anyone it kills from being resurrected normally. She calmly remarks "That's not a good place." Justified in that she was at peace with her impending death, viewing it as a Heroic Sacrifice, and was trying to put on a brave face in front of Kira.
• The Man Behind the Man: Szass Tam, the evil lich ruler of Thay. Hundreds of years ago, he cast a spell to turn the people of Thay into his soulless undead slaves. Now his servant Sofina seeks to do the same in Neverwinter, with Forge's aid, to expand her master's influence.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy:
  • Platonic Life-Partners Edgin (a knitter, musician, and charismatic noncombatant) and Holga (a brusque fighter from a warrior culture) are the Feminine Guy and Masculine Girl respectively.
  • In addition, Holga seems to have a thing for guys who are softer and more "feminine" than her, as both of the men she shows interest in (her ex-husband and the guy she flirts with at the end) are halfling men with much gentler dispositions than her.
  • Simon and Doric are a downplayed example. Doric does not fit the "masculine" stereotype and nor does Simon fit the "feminine" one, but in battle she relies much more on her own physical strength, and his efforts to find his self-esteem are one of the main subplots of the film.
• The Missus and the Ex: Holga visits her ex Marlamine in the name of closure, only for his current wife to enter the home while they're talking. Gwinn happens to be a barbarian woman too, even bigger than Holga, showing Marlamine Has a Type. They stay civil to each other, although Holga is clearly distraught.
• Mobile Maze: Downplayed. The maze in the High Sun Games doesn't rearrange its layout, but as the Games continue, more and more of the walls are lowered into the ground, making the players easier prey for the monsters. The crew escapes by jumping into a gelatinous cube right before it drops, then having Doric Wild Shape out so she can pull them out below the surface of the arena.
• Multipurpose Tongue: The mimic Holga encounters has a sticky, frog-like tongue that it tries to use to devour her.
• The Multiverse: Hinted at existing in the film's universe. The archmage Mordenkainen, a key figure from the Greyhawk setting (the world of Oerth) is namechecked a few times, and it is known in game-canon that he did visit the Forgotten Realms setting (the world of Toril, where the film takes place) on at least a few occasions in his astral wanderings and invent spells used in multiple worlds ^note At the very least, he and Elminster canonically did often get together on Earth to swap magic notes and stories, and he does appear hobnobbing with Elminster in a cartoon graphic for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
• Mundane Utility: Played for Laughs. Forge repeatedly complains that his tea is too hot and asks his right-hand wizard Sofina to cool it down for him. She sticks an icy finger in his cup, which disgusts him enough that he doesn't drink it afterwards.
• Mythology Gag:
  • One of the other teams in the arena during the High Sun Games are the kids from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series.
  • When Forge betrays Edgin and Holga, Sofina restrains the two by turning the floor into quicksand very similar to the trap shown in the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie.
  • The standard scale in the tabletop game for determining distances are squares of five feet by five feet, just like the arena used for the High Sun games that rise and fall to form the walls of a maze.

Tropes N–Z

• Nature Hero: Doric, and the rest of the Emerald Enclave, are fighting to protect the natural wilderness from people like Forge who would destroy it for material gain.
• The Necrocracy: Szass Tam is a proud undead-supremacist who turned the entire country of Thay into his zombie slaves and is looking to do the same to everywhere else as well.
• Necromancer:
  • Sofina and her master Szass Tam are two Red Wizards of Thay, notorious evil wizards. Tam is a lich (a type of the undead who uses a Soul Jar for living beyond their physical death — it's also implied Sofina is too). Their plan is to turn many people into undead soldiers who Tam can use in conquering lands beyond Thay as well using a powerful spell, which he'd already used in their country.
  • The heroes use a spell to question dead barbarians in seeking a powerful magical artifact, something encompassed by the original meaning of "necromancy".
• Never Split the Party: In true D&D tradition, the other contestants released into the arena for the High Sun Games who don't stick together are individually ambushed and killed by the displacer beast or the gelatinous cube. Holga nearly gets killed by a mimic when she splits off to check what looks like a chest, in the same scene.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailers paint a slightly different picture of the film: instead of being duped into stealing a separate artifact by Forge, the trailers make it seem that Edgin and company willingly stole the Thayan horn for Sofina directly. In general, the trailers make it seem like the film has more apocalyptic stakes, whereas in the film Edgin and company's goal is to rescue Edgin's daughter, Kira, with Sofina's plot not becoming clear until the last third.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Several examples.
  • The plot catalyst is Edgin's band of thieves unknowingly helping a Red Wizard steal a powerful evil artifact.
  • Had Edgin and Holga just waited to hear what the Council's decision was — they were planning to grant them a pardon — before trying to escape, they would have walked out scot-free at the beginning and not spent the film as fugitives. This helps Forge turn Kira against Edgin when he goes to pick her up.
  • When Edgin and Holga go to find Simon, he's in the middle of a shoddy magic show — which turns out to be a distraction for him to rob the audience by making their valuables levitate away. Seeing his old partners in crime pop up unexpectedly after two years surprises him so much that his concentration breaks, causing the ball of gold and jewelry he'd accumulated to clatter onto the floor, alerting his marks to what's going on and inciting an angry mob against him.
  • While he was a Harper, Edgin stole some treasure from a Red Wizard he had helped apprehend. Unfortunately, Red Wizards mark their treasure so they can hunt down thieves. This resulted in the Red Wizards seeking revenge and killing Edgin's wife.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Long ago, Szass Tam used an evil spell to turn the people of Thay into his undead slaves. In the present day, his minion Sofina plans to use the same spell to conquer Neverwinter.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: After Sofina is depowered, Doric, wild shaped into an Owlbear, proceeds to pounce on her and completely maul her before throwing her across the town square so hard it collapses a wall on top of her.
• No Kill like Overkill: After Owlbear-Doric delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Sofina, Edgin stops her because, "I think that's enough!", only for Sofina to keep moving, so Doric delivers another No-Holds-Barred Beatdown before tossing her into a wall.
• No Prison Segregation: Lampshaded. Edgin and Holga are incarcerated together, and their new hobgoblin cellmate comments that he has never shared a prison cell with a female before (suggesting that it's unusual even in this setting). She promptly delivers a beatdown when he starts getting fresh with her.
• Not My Driver: Doric successfully infiltrated an execution by posing as one of the guards' horses.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Despite Sofina being a very powerful undead wizard, she is never referred to as a Lich onscreen.
• Ode to Intoxication: "Juice of the Vine", the melancholic melody that celebrates to the joy alcohol brings to the uncertain and perilous life of an adventurer:
  No fortune found, nor faith divine
  Come close to topping the juice of the vine!
  With cherry crew, we sip and sway
  Let's tip the tankard and waste the day!
  Ree, raw! Well ye' ken! Our toils can wait for a time!
  We saw the folly of men, who'd rather than revel repine!
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The party from Dungeons & Dragons manages to survive the first round of the High Sun Games without losing a single party member and make it to the safety cage at the center well before the main characters do. While their fate is unknown, they also clearly overheard Edgin reveal it's a trap and begin discussing it, implying leaving it open they also escaped offscreen.
• Off with His Head!:
  • Lampshaded. Edgin and Holga are about to be beheaded in an alley, until Holga wrenches a cobblestone out of the street, blocking the axe and beats up the guard/executioner with it while Edgin tries (with little success) to saw through his bonds on one of the steps.
  • When Dralas murders the guards for allowing Doric to escape, he decapitates the last one.
• Oh, Crap!: Holga's face turns when she spots the Beckoning Death being brough on Neverwinter. Everyone turns to see what she's looking at and they join her in being horrified.
• One-Hit Kill: A Red Wizard's dagger is so deadly that it only takes a small stab to finish one off, and its effects can't be cured by magic. The only known way of counteracting it is by using a Tablet of Reawakening (which Edgin uses to resurrect Holga), which in itself can only be used once before disintegrating.
• One Last Job: The heist in the flashback prologue was meant to be Edgin's final job, but it went awry and he wounded up in prison.
• The Oner: Doric shapeshifts into a fly to scope out the vault. When Sofina spots her, she has to escape the guards in an extended chase scene that takes her all across the city, shifting into different animals the whole way, done in one shot.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Like in the source material, chromatic dragons have different abilities based on the colour of their scales. The flashback scenes of a barbarian war feature a black dragon that breathes corrosive acid, while Themberchaud, a red dragon, breathes fire. There is also a stone statue in the shape of dragon that gets brought to life by magic.
• Out of Continues: Edgin mentions Clerics reviving people, implying resurrection spells exist. However, anyone who dies by a Red Wizard's blade can't be cured or resurrected in any way except for a Tablet of Reawakening.
• Outrun the Fireball: The heroes have to outrun several fire breaths from Themberchaud in their encounter with him.
• Overcrank: Holga throwing a potato at Forge while he's taking Kira hostage is filmed in dramatic slow motion, including when the potato hits Forge's face with so much force that it bursts out.
• Palate Propping: Edgin tries to hinder the animated drake statue by using Holga's axe to wedge it inside its maw. The axe handle is telescopic, however, and doesn't keep the statue's mouth open for long.
• Panopticon of Surveillance: Revel's End, the prison tower in the frigid wastes of Icewind Dale, is designed this way, with floor after floor of cells ringed around a central tower.
• Panthera Awesome: The displacer beasts, which resemble huge panthers with six legs but have tentacles that allow them to conjure illusions.
• Parental Substitute:
  • Holga has been Kira's mother figure since infancy, which becomes a plot point later as Edgin chooses to resurrect her rather than his wife when he realises this.
  • Forge describes his custody of Kira in terms of parenthood.
• Pet the Dog: Despite his having stabbed his old crew in the back and basically being the only reason Edgin and Holga were arrested, Forge kept his promise to look after Kira. And he clearly did a good job, seeing as how she willingly refers to him as "Uncle Forge" and is perfectly healthy and happy when Edgin and Holda reunite with her.
• Picture-Perfect Presentation: When Xenk Yendar starts telling the backstory of Thay by opening a history book showing the country, the drawing of ominous towers segues into a directly matching picture as the flashback begins.
• Platonic Co-Parenting: Edgin and his best friend Holga raised Edgin's daughter together after the death of his wife with assistance from the rest of the team. Edgin and Holga shut down any indication of romance between them.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Edgin and Holga's relationship is the cornerstone of the movie — they are longtime best friends, co-parent Edgin's daughter, and recruit the rest of the team together. Their relationship remains platonic throughout the film, and they at one point specifically shoot down a bartender's belief that they're together.
• P.O.V. Cam: When the point of view of the guards trailing the treasure carriage is shown. Seeing Holga holding someone's legs and waving back is definitely a headscratcher.
• Power Nullifier: Doric and Simon have anti-magic shackles locked around their wrists before they're put into the High Sun Games, though only on one wrist. Doric has hers pulled off her arm as she is almost pulled into a Gelatinous Cube, while Simon has the keys to his tossed to him by Edgin after their escape from the arena. One is surreptitiously handed to Kira before the final showdown, which she later slips on Sofina when she thinks she's time-frozen everyone, allowing Doric to finish her off in her Owlbear form.
• Pragmatic Adaptation:
  • While the film is largely faithful in preserving game mechanics, it willfully fudges around the nature of some elements that would make more sense for a movie, both in terms of narrative balance and drama. For example, Doric is able to Wild Shape far more often than a typical Druid could in gameplay, but neither she nor Edgin are shown using any other magic associated with their classes in order to emphasize Simon's role as the party's Sorcerer. The story also makes a big deal out of attunement: in the game, it's a nominal gameplay element for balance purposes^note In 5e rules, each character is only allowed to attune with up to three different items at a time — its purpose is to prevent players from stacking up on too many powerful items at once, thus potentially breaking game balance that usually just requires a user to be with the magic item of choice for about an hour, but in this film, it's a much more arduous and magically-involved test of character that Simon struggles with and informs much of his personal character arc (though that also might just be due to Simon's horrible control of magic due to his insecurity).
  • The film also takes a distinct adaptational approach in focusing not so much on the direct fiction and grand mythos of Dungeons & Dragons or the Forgotten Realms setting (though they are quite faithful), but rather the down-to-earth social interplay of the main party. Dungeons & Dragons as a game is notoriously difficult to adapt into linear media due to its heavy basis on engagement and ingenuity between participating players, with the setting often just functioning as a mere vector for a socially-driven metagame rather than being the main point of interest (hence the fact that many actions tend to be determined by literal dice rolls). Previous big-name adaptations (from the 80's cartoon to the infamous 2000 film) had issues of primarily focusing on the fantasy side of D&D, and in taking away the metagaming aspect, they often come off as generic fantasy fare. Honor Among Thieves addresses this with its far more character-focused approach, opting to prioritize individual interactions and development over the central heist plot (which has a tendency to jump around a lot), making it the closest it can to recreate the metagaming aspect unique to D&D (in simpler terms, how it feels to play the game) while still fitting the linear, grounded medium of film.
  • In terms of handling established D&D canon, the film makes the decision to play fast and loose with the lore of Forgotten Realms, preserving several locales and mechanics established by its worldbuilding, but deviating in a lot of ways in order to suit the particular story of the film. Again, this is itself evocative of how most players approach lore while playing D&D — the fiction of the Forgotten Realms is there and quite robust, but it's often treated more as a flexible launching point for groups to form their own continuities and "what-if" scenarios rather than hard gospel, and fudging around the lore to fit the needs of an individual campaign is expected, if not necessary (such as to fit with the players' suggested backgrounds).
• Prisoner's Work: Edgin, Holga and the rest of the prisoners at Revel's End spend their days breaking the ice into blocks.
• Race Lift:
  • Elminster, a seminal character in Forgotten Realms lore, has generally been portrayed in official art (and Baldur's Gate III) as Caucasian. In the film, Elminster is Black when he appears to his descendant Simon via a magical interlude. Of course, this is revealed to actually be an avatar of Simon's self-doubts who de-ages to look exactly like Simon before disappearing, so may not reflect Elminster's real appearance.
  • In the cameo by the kids from the Dungeons & Dragons animated series, Eric the Cavalier, who was white in the cartoon, is played by mixed race actor Trevor Kaneswaran.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The film focuses on a disgraced bard and his barbarian friend, an amateur sorcerer and a surly druid as they are forced to work together to save the day.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": Both Sofina and Forge keeps repeating "No!" at the same time as their respective plans are simultaneously fooled by the heroes — by having the crowd leaving the arena away from Sofina's necromantic spell, lured out by the treasures that are spilling out of Forge's escape boat.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: When Simon puts on the Helm of Disjunction in an attempt to attune to it, he ends up in a strange Pocket Dimension within an instant of time, where all of his "present" surroundings gradually distort and melt like some kind of bad acid trip. This appears to only be a mental thing — when he fails, everything pops back to normal (and virtually no time has passed in the process).
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • The council that Edgin pleads his and Holga's case to were willing to pardon them after he acknowledges that they were imprisoned for their thievery and promises to make amends. Had they not used their fellow council member Jarnathan to break out of prison, the warrant for their arrest would have been nonexistent. When Forge attempts to plead his case by blaming his thieving and backstabbing ways on his upbringing with his nagging mother without taking responsibility for his actions, they immediately deny his pardon.
  • Lord Neverember. He had previously banned the deadly High Sun Games before Forge usurped his position, and after he awakes from Sofina's magically-induced coma and reclaims his title, the first thing he does is reward the party for saving his land and sign a Bill of Protection for the Emerald Enclave.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The horn-shaped artifact and the Red Wizard cultists who obtain it just happen to have red and black coloration.
• Red Shirt: Three parties participate in the High Sun Games: the movie's protagonists, a party made up of the protagonists of Dungeons & Dragons making a cameo... and a party of random nameless adventurers who have never been seen before. Three guesses as to which party is slaughtered to the last being in short order.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: Simon conjures up an illusion of Edgin singing to distract some guards, but it starts going wrong when he gets distracted. The first sign of trouble is that it starts repeating a few seconds of song like a broken record.
• Retcon: A retcon of a dubiously canon joke, but a retcon nonetheless. Baldur's Gate 2 had an Easter Egg explaining that the party from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon were all ultimately eaten by Tiamat. Here, they cameo again, alive and appropriately aged-up. (Uni is conspicuously absent, however. Perhaps she did get eaten.)
• Rhetorical Request Blunder: The Speak with Dead scene shows just how easy it is to thoughtlessly ask a question you didn't mean to in casual conversation, not particularly helpful when dealing with a spell that limits your ability to ask questions to a reanimated corpse before it drops dead for real.
  Edgin: [turned towards his party] Four more questions, right?
  Corpse: Yes.
  Edgin: No! No-no, that wasn't for you! [turning to his party again] Did that count as a question?
  Corpse: Yes.
  Edgin: Damnit! [composing himself] Only answer when I talk to you, okay?
  Corpse: Yes.
  Simon: Why did you say "okay?" at the end of that sentence?!
  Corpse: I didn't. [flops]
  Edgin: Fantastic. Where's the shovel?
• Rising Water, Rising Tension: In the Underdark, a dragon corners the party in an underwater cavern, and damages it enough that water starts pouring in from above. To stop them all from dying watery deaths, Edgin quickly devises a plan for Simon to blow open the cavern roof with his magic. It works and the party swims to safety.
• Role-Playing Game 'Verse: Subtle, but present.
  • Every spell shown in the movie is recognisable from the game. Dicebreaker has an article listing all of them.
  • When Simon's introduced, he's showing off a series of deeply boring spells to an audience. One member of the audience heckles that even their kid can cast the same cantrip; many species in D&D have inate spellcasting (tieflings and people with elemtal beings in their ancestry in particular), which starts with a cantrip they can use, even at first level. It's then revealed he's using another spell (likely Magnetism) to rob them. The concentration mechanic means he would be limited in what spells he could cast, and being a sorcerer he would also be limited in how many he had access to. Finally, when he's fleeing from the mob, the effects he gets when trying to cast spells are all results you can get from the Wild Magic table, suggesting that's his subclass.
  • At the climax, Edgin's life is narrowly saved when Holga disrupts Sofina's concentration on the spell she was using to animate the statue attacking him. This is exactly how it would work in the 5th edition rule set (any attack forces the caster to make a saving throw to avoid dropping the spell).
  • Simon is unable to counterspell Sophia in the flashback, but succeeds in the finale; since he would have levelled up by then and have access to the same spell slots she does, and will have increased his spellcasting modifier, this makes perfect sense.
  • A group of intellect devourers show no interest in attacking the party, which Edgin takes as somewhat insulting; the group at that point consists of a bard, a barbarian, a druid, a sorcerer, and a paladin, none of which are classes that rely very heavily on the Intelligence stat.
  • Simon is depicted as a rather inept sorcerer, something he's deeply insecure about. This makes sense as Sorcerers are charisma-based casters, and Simon is demonstratively not a charismatic individual, so he likely doesn't have a very good spellcasting ability. The illusion of his grandfather basically goads him into standing up for himself, which improves his spellcasting considerably; this would fit with the game defining charisma as force of personality.
• Russian Reversal: "You may have forsaken your oath, but your oath has not forsaken you." Edgin dismisses this as nonsense veiled by symmetry.
• Scaled Up: Doric assures the team that if they jump into the gelatinous cube to escape the arena, she'll be able to get them out of the cube. Once they're all trapped, she changes her Wild Shape into a garter snake — the perfect creature to slither through the cavity her body left in the cube. She emerges easily, and then frees her friends.
• Secret Test of Character: The film uses attuning to a magical item, normally a very bog-standard, easy task, as something much more like this. Simon first has to overcome his own insecurities before he can use the Helm of Disjunction, a Legendary-class magical item. It's partially treated as the Helm itself ensuring the person using it understands the weight of what they've been given.^note Given the Helm was created by archmage Mordenkainen, it's entirely possible he built such a fail-safe into it.
• Sequel Hook: As the group celebrates their victory, Simon mentions that Szass Tam will likely come after them for defeating Sofina and foiling his conquest of Neverwinter. Edgin comments that the group will be ready if it does happen.
• Ship Tease: Simon once tried to court Doric, but she rejected him because of his low self-esteem. They decide to give the courting another go in the end.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Inverted with Xenk, who is the Comically Serious among a cast of clowns who provides comedy specifically by his extremely strait-laced presence, and who leaves at the end of the second act so the clowns can get on with their caper.
• Shout-Out:
  • See "Homage Shot" above for the references to the first Jurassic Park film.
  • Harpers wearing a very specific shade of blue and functioning as spies? Someone on the writing staff was clearly a fan of Dragonriders of Pern.
  • Of all the names to choose for the magical party member: Simon the Sorcerer.
  • A statue in front of Neverwinter's arena clearly depicts Lord Nasher Alagondar exactly as he appears in Neverwinter Nights 2.
  • Sofina's reaction to spotting Doric wildshaped as a fly, with a pointed finger and a shrill scream, is straight out from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
  • The visual effects and sound design of the Hither-Thither Staff greatly call to mind the Portal Gun, with the only difference being that both portals are blue rather than one blue, one orange.
  • One of the groups that compete in the High Sun Games are the protagonists from the Eighties Saturday morning Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.
  • A giant transforming monster repeatedly mashing the city-seizing egotistical supervillain, much like a child swinging a doll into the ground, again and again for much longer than necessary. The directors admitted the beatdown was lifted directly from The Avengers.
• Showdown at High Noon: The Wizard Duel between Sofina and Simon in the climax is framed this way, right down to a basket rolling between them like a tumbleweed. They also choose to use similar "weapons" for their standoff, both casting a variation of a large magical hand (Simon casting Maximilian's Earthen Grasp, Sofina likely casting Bigby's Hand).
• Shown Their Work: All the spells used in the film, while largely unnamed, are all spells used in the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper RPG. Several spells are also seen failing when the caster gets distracted or hurt, all of which follow the "concentration" rule.
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: In the backstory/flashbacks, Edgin and his team agree to work with a mysterious woman, Sofina, to steal some Harper's treasure because it includes a Tablet of Reawakening that he wants to use to resurrect his wife. It turns out to be a trap, as Sofina betrays them and catches Edgin and Holga in her Time Stop spell, getting them arrested and thrown in prison. It turns out that Forge was also a traitor who was conspiring with her all along.
• Skewed Priorities: Exploited by Holga to buy time for her to dig up a stone block to fight with; as a guard is preparing to decapitate her and Edgin and asks if they have any last words, she compliments the design of his axe and inquires about his caretaking methods for it. He's understandably confused why those would be her last words but indulges her anyway.
• Small What: Doric gives out a small "Huh?" after Edgin delivers an impassioned "No! We must never stop failing! Because the minute we do, we've failed!".
• Something We Forgot: The crew walks out on a resurrected dead man as he finishes answering his final question. After they leave, he tries to point out that that was actually their fourth question, not their fifth. In the mid-credits scene we see him still there, waiting to be asked the final question. Fortunately, the Speak with Dead spell eventually times out.
• Special Effect Failure: Done In-Universe when Simon conjures up an illusion of Edgin singing to distract some guards; when he gets his foot caught in a loose cobblestone, the fake Edgin manifests a Repetitive Audio Glitch before warping and distorting visually.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The first thing we see Xenk do is rescue a Tabaxi cub that was swallowed by a giant fish. He literally saves the cat.^note A common screenwriting term for a protagonist doing something good as an Establishing Character Moment to make the audience like them.
  • The city of Neverwinter is somewhat famous throughout Faerûn, and the Neverwinter Nights games helped make it that way. Near the end of the film, Sofina casts her spell to darken the sky, turning it into a Neverwinter Night.
  • Sofina casts Bigby's Hand to go after Doric, which prompts Simon to do the same to stop her. It's Hand to Hand combat.
• The Stinger: The last corpse Simon resurrected, still sitting in his grave in a mid-credits scene, asks for someone to ask him one more question so he can drop dead again.
• Stripped to the Bone: In the High Sun Games, a random party member dives headfirst into a seemingly innocuous gelatinous cube while Doric gets her hand stuck in it, the latter exclaiming that it burns and would have dissolved her limb as Holga pulls her free. By the time Simon and Edgin reunite with them, all that's left of said random party member is his skeleton.
• Super-Breath: Themberchaud has trouble with igniting his Breath Weapon, but a mere exhalation of his is enough to send the whole party flying backward, above the Thayan assassins pursuing them, before they even see the red dragon.
• Superhero Speciation: Edgin the bard and Doric the druid would both be able to cast spells according to D&D rules. However, neither of them do this during the movie to make Simon the sorcerer less redundant. Edgin relies on his charisma, planning, and music while Doric relies on her shapeshifting.
• Tail Slap: The animated drake statue strikes Doric's owlbear form with its stone tail, sending her flying.
• Tainted Veins: Zia is killed by a Red Wizard, and near the end of the film, Holga is mortally stabbed by Sofina's blade. To visually indicate that a wound from a Red Wizard's blade is so fatal it can't be healed by regular magic, veins around the wound begin to darken and spread.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Despite Dungeons & Dragons being the Trope Namer and codifier for playing this trope straight, this film frequently subverts it:
  • During the battle over the Helm of Disjunction, most of the barbarians killed after passing the helmet to another were busy explaining to their comrades why the Helm of Disjunction should never fall into the hands of their enemies, thus giving said enemies an opportunity to bisect them at the waist, shoot their head and eye out with an arrow, etc.
  • During the climax, Sofina starts angrily ranting at the party before Edgin sneaks up behind her and belts her in the head with his lute.
• Talk to the Fist: When Forge has a dagger to Kira's neck he begins monologuing about his villainy and ill-gotten riches. Holga throws a potato at him, it hits him square in the face, and a fight commences.
• The Team: Naturally, for a movie based on the tabletop RPG. Edgin is The Leader, who comes up with the plans and the person to whom everyone looks to for guidance. Holga's strength and fighting prowess make her a natural fit for The Big Guy but she mostly serves as Edgin's lancer, being his closest confidant and friend. Simon is a purely magic-based combatant; his role in the group is to come up with unorthodox ways around their various obstacles. Doric's shapeshifting gives her a variety of roles, such as brawn (especially in owl-bear form), espionage, and lateral thinking. Xenk the Paladin is a Guest-Star Party Member who guides the heroes through the Underdark and proves himself a much more capable combatant than the rest of them but takes his leave once his part in the quest is done so the others won't be Overshadowed by Awesome. Kira is The Heart of the team, being beloved by everyone and acting as their Morality Pet. She also assists in various heists with her invisibility necklace.
• Tempting Fate: As the group is entering the Underdark, Xenk tells them that if it gets too dark they can take his hand and he will lead them. Edgin, unsurprisingly, quips that he's not going to take his hand. Of course, he later gladly grabs Xenk's hand after the paladin saves him from being eaten by Themberchaud.
• Tentacle Rope: Sofina summons tentacles (likely the Evard's Black Tentacles spell) to restrain the party after she catches them sneaking around Castle Never.
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: Finding out where the Helm of Disjunction is from the reanimated barbarian corpses turns out to be this for the party, as they were all playing Keep Away with it and the majority of them were killed shortly after passing the helmet to the next person.
• Thinking Up Portals: The Hither-Thither Staff allows Simon to conjure up portals. The only real difference from the Trope Namer is that the portals are all one colour.
• This Is Reality: Simon rebukes the party for thinking he can just magick away all their problems.
  Simon: There are limits. This isn't some bedtime story. This is the real world.
• Time for Plan B: Plan A for the heist was using the Helm of Disjunction to disrupt the Arcane Seal of Mordenkainen; it however hits a snag when Simon cannot attune with the Helm. Thus they switch to plan B: using the Hither-Thither Staff to create a portal hidden inside a painting that will be deposited in the treasure vault. Plan B also hits a snag, though, when the painting accidentally falls flat on the floor, and the portal leads to solid concrete. Thus Edgin proposes to switch to Plan C — which is a return to plan A, except he won't call it that because "Plan A has a stink on it." When asked what to do if Plan C still fails, Edgin touts plan D — a return to plan B (Doric having suggested she could carve a small hole at the edge of the portal and slip there as a worm), just not called that because plan B has a stink on it too.
• Time Stands Still: Sofina is capable of casting the ninth-level spell Time Stop, which is shown as a sphere of stopped time expanding from the caster. This is how Edgin and Holga were captured and put into the prison tower in Icewind Dale two years prior, while she also casts it during the film's climax, only to be stopped by Simon successfully Counterspelling it.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Holga is a buff barbarian woman; her ex-husband is a slender halfling man. It appears to be a type for both of them; as his current wife is an even taller woman, while she winks at another halfling man at the end.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Potatoes for Holga. As is appropriate for a barbarian, they double as a useful weapon on several occasions.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • Forge is introduced as Edgin's friend and a valued member of their crew of thieves, but the film's trailer gives away that he becomes an antagonist.
  • The first of the released trailers managed to spoil a perfectly set up Brick Joke regarding Edgin's lute playing, by showing both the setup and the payoff right after it, even if there is more than an hour of movie between those scenes.
• Truer to the Text: While the original three movies did have aspects of the tabletop game, Honor Among Thieves is a far more faithful adaptation, including monsters, spells, classes, locations, and even canon characters, and is set in the Forgotten Realms setting.
• Two Girls to a Team:
  • Holga and Doric are the two women on the four-person Caper Crew (which temporarily becomes a Five-Man Band with Xenk in the second act before he parts ways with them).
  • This was also true of Edgin's past Five-Man Band in the flashbacks, where Holga and Kira (once she was old enough to start helping them) were the two girls, opposite Edgin, Simon, and Forge. Though it became a Gender-Equal Ensemble for their final job that went horribly wrong, thanks to Sofina being a Sixth Ranger Traitor.
  • The gender ratio flips in the end as Kira once again becomes the fifth member of the group after they rescue her from Forge.
• Uncertain Doom: Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila and Bobby (the six protagonists of Dungeons & Dragons) are last seen inside a cage in the arena during the High Sun Games, having learned from Edgin and his party that the games are rigged and they'll die if they stay. Afterwards, when Sofina unleashes her spell, the middle of the arena where they were last seen is the only part of the city really affected, so things are not looking well for their survival, but they don't die onscreen and the warning they got from the protagonists might've given them enough of a heads up to escape.
• Underground City: The Helm of Disjunction is kept hidden in one in the Underdark, though the city is unoccupied.
• Undignified Death: One of the corpses the party interrogates didn't die in battle, and instead slipped after getting out of a bath and cracked his head on the tub.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The heroes defeat Sofina using a coordinated effort to have Kira stay hidden while the others fight her, then pretend to be trapped by Sofina's Time Stop spell and have Kira put the anti-magic cuff on Sofina while she's gloating. The plan goes off without a hitch because the audience never sees it being discussed or plotted.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The crowd at the High Sun Games is unperturbed by a giant, Obviously Evil cloud gathering above them. It takes a hot air balloon dispensing gold to draw their attention.
• Unwanted Revival: Discussed. Edgin explicitly states that Zia's death and finding a way to bring her back is what's currently motivating him and has been ever since he learned about the way to do it. Xenk tries to convince him that perhaps she wouldn't want to come back to this plane of existence, and Edgin might be robbing her of a new life. While it's unclear whether that's true, Edgin ultimately decides that Zia is trying to tell him not to selfishly focus on bringing her back just for his own feelings, because she didn't mind dying if it was to save Kira. Instead, he revives the newly dead Holga, who very much does want to be brought back.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Subverted. While the tough female character played by Michelle Rodriguez does once again meet a violent end, she's quickly brought back with the Tablet of Reawakening.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Forge's ultimate intention is to flee Neverwinter with all the city's and its rich visitors' treasure, leaving everyone else behind to suffer Sofina's spell.
• Villain Respect: One of the reasons that Sofina gives for allowing Edgin and his party to participate in the games instead of killing him outright is because they'd beaten everything sent after them thus far, so they've "earned it." From her point of view, it also means when she turns the whole arena into her undead servants, their strength and skill will be hers.
• Violation of Common Sense: Under normal circumstances, you should never, ever, jump inside a gelatinous cube unless you want to be slowly dissolved by acid. Lucky for the party, Doric's plan works. The party manages to escape the maze and she finds a way to free everyone from the gelatinous cube by shapeshifting into a snake.
• Visual Pun:
  • Xenk rescues a child Tabaxi (humanoid cat) from the mouth of a giant catfish. In effect, he literally fished the cat out of a catfish.
  • When Xenk leaves the party, he continues walking a surprisingly straight line down the beach, even right over a boulder he could have walked around. He's walking the straight and narrow path, alluding to the morally upright lifestyle that a Paladin must adhere to.
  • A hot air balloon bearing Forge's likeness is used to shower the party's stolen treasure over the city of Neverwinter, luring the crowd in the stadium out into the streets and beyond the reach of Sofina's Beckoning Death. Look closely at the placement of the portal... They put Forge's money where his mouth is.
  • In the final battle against Sofina, she and Simon face off with their own versions of Bigby's hand... it's a hand-to-hand combat.
• "Wanted!" Poster: Edgin and Holga naturally gets a wanted poster after they escape from prison a few seconds before their pardon was announced. Later they pretend they've been let free for "good behavior", but Forge Fitzwilliam pulls out the poster and show it to Edgin's daughter Kira to convince her that her father had been lying from the moment he showed up.
• We Meet Again: Xenk and Dralas, upon meeting in the Underdark, "greet" each other in Thayan, showing they clearly have a history together. Dralas even boasts that he'll make sure they won't meet again.
• We Need a Distraction: To get past some guards, Simon conjures up an illusion of Edgin singing a song. When he becomes distracted, the illusion undergoes In-Universe Special Effects Failure, giving away the ruse and forcing the party to run for it.
• We Used to Be Friends: Forge used to be a part of the Caper Crew, but has not only turned to the evil Red Wizards of Thay in the present, he also poisons Edgin's daughter Kira against him. Edgin and Holga plan the film's plot around saving Kira.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • After they succumb to the Beckoning Death, the zombified Lords are never seen again in the film. It is likely that they were destroyed, but how and by whom is unclear, especially given Xenk's earlier comment about how it is hard to kill that which is already dead.
  • Xenk makes Edgin promise to defend the Helm of Disjunction with his life. After discovering that the vault is empty, it's never shown or mentioned again.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Simon calls out Edgin for his stubbornness after he talked him into this.
• What You Are in the Dark: After escaping the High Sun Games, the heroes manage to rescue Kira, steal Forge's boat and make their way from the city with all his treasures aboard. Unfortunately, at that moment, Sofina enacts her final plan to convert all of the city's citizens into her slaves, leaving the heroes with the choice to either abandon the city to the Red Wizard or turn back and try to save the day. Without even exchanging a word with each other (other than Edgin giving a resigned "Well, shit..."), they choose the latter and turn back, coming up with a plan to save the day while sacrificing all the riches in the process.
• Wizards Duel: Toward the end of the film, Simon (a sorcerer) faces off with Sofina (a Red Wizard of Thay).
• Wrongful Accusation Insurance: Played With. The fact that Edgin and Holga were actually getting their parole granted by the board doesn't cancel out the consequences of their escape from prison in the Cold Open in and of itself. A new warrant is issued for their arrest in short order.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
  • Xenk believes Edgin still has the spirit of a Harper, even if he's left the organization and become a thief. He makes Edgin swear on a Harper's book to redistribute Forge's wealth among the people of Neverwinter instead of keeping it all — and then says he knows Edgin is bullshitting, but believes Edgin will change his mind and keep the promise when it counts. He's right.
  • Edgin also consistently tells Simon that he's not as bad at magic as he thinks (and not just because, as Holga points out, he doesn't actually know any other sorcerers). As he details later, Simon's spells work best when he's in mortal danger. Justified in that mortal danger is the only time he's angry and focused enough to quit worrying. Also justified in that, as a Wild Magic Sorcerer specifically, Simon's magic isn't meant to be controlled consciously so much as an instinctive reaction. Going by in-game logic; Simon is at his best when he's at his most confident because that makes him the coolest, most awesome, most charismatic version of himself. Sorcerers run on charisma, not intelligence. Rule of Cool personified.
• You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: The undead of Thay are extremely difficult to kill for good, as a group of them show when Xenk mows down a group of assassins that just get right back up. Getting eaten by a dragon does the trick, however. It's telling that Sofina is only killed in the finale once her magic is negated.
• You Have Failed Me: Sofina's not happy with the guards who let the party escape, and commends them to the tender mercies of her master assassin.
• You Need a Breath Mint: At the movie's climax, as Edgin is pretending to be caught in a time stop to distract Sofina delivering some evil gloating, he breaks the pretense to tell her that her "breath smells like... old clothes." No surprise here, since she revealed herself to be undead.
• Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: Implied. Edgin and company encounter some Intellect Devourers in the Underdark, which Xenk explains are attracted to high levels of intelligence. The Devourers walk right on by the party, apparently not even noticing their presence.
  Edgin: Well that's a little hurtful.
• You Would Do the Same for Me: In the Underdark, Edgin and Xenk are careening towards a dragon. Xenk heroically leaps into the air and stabs the dragon, knocking it out for long enough that the two are able to escape. Once they've got a moment, Edgin thanks him; Xenk solemnly says that he knows Edgin would do the same for him. Edgin sheepishly pretends to agree. (Xenk may or may not be screwing with him here. It's hard to tell with Xenk.)
• Zombify the Living: The Beckoning Death is a high-level necromancy spell that can turn a large group of living humanoids into undead. Szass Tam used it to turn Thay into The Necrocracy and seize control of the nation in the film's backstory, and his pupil Sofina is planning to use it on the citizens of Neverwinter attending the High Sun Games.

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♫ Do you see the wings of time?
Do you feel a sense of pride now?
Do you know you'll never fly alone?
We did it right this time! ♫

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