The Right Way to Use 'Honor Among Thieves' Characters in Your Next D&D Campaign

If you're among the many fantasy fans blown away by Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, there's now an easy way to bring the film's characters and magical items into your own pen and paper D&D campaign. Wizards of the Coast has released movie-accurate character stat blocks. magic items, and a set of digital dice for use in D&D Beyond. But should you?

How to download Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves content

If you have a D&D Beyond account, you can get the movie content by clicking on this link and then clicking "sign in to claim." From there, visit your compendium and you should find everything ready to go. (If you don't have a D&D Beyond account already, you can get one for free.)

Included in the download are stat blocks for Edgin, Doric, Holga Kilgore, Simon Aimar, Xenk Yendar, Forge Fitzwilliam, and Sofina herself. Each has unique special abilities and characteristics you'll recognize from the movie. The magical items include the Helm of Disjunction, the Hither-Thither Staff, and three other from-the-flick mystical artifacts. The dice skin is pretty cool too, if you're into digital die rolls.

How to use Honor Among Thieves content without breaking your game

It's one thing to have all the information you need to put these characters and items in your game, but actually using them effectively is way more complicated than just downloading some stats. These characters work so well in the movie because many creative professionals spent millions of dollars and countless hours fine-tuning every aspect of a cinematic experience. Every part of the movie is designed to fit together, so if you take a piece out and plop it into your ongoing campaign, it's probably not going to work out very well.

As written, these are powerful, high-level characters, so if you were inspired by the movie to get your pals together for your first D&D adventure, I'd keep all of the movie-characters as quest-givers or cameos, instead of "join the party" NPCs. Unless you nerf her heavily, having Doric join the group for a low-level dungeon crawl would break most games, and pitting a lower-level party against Sofina would wipe everyone off the table.

More importantly, why would you want your D&D game to follow a story crafted by Hollywood screenwriters anyway? Make your quest about the characters you and your friends have dreamed up instead. Encouraging reckless, ridiculous creativity is the best thing about any role-playing game. Minus that, it's just dice rolls and fancy math.

How to change Honor Among Thieves NPCs into playable characters

If someone at your table is a hardcore fan of the movie and wants to be Forge Fitzwilliam instead of just meeting him, it wouldn't be difficult to translate all of these NPCs into playable characters--most of the info is already there, and filling in the rest will be a snap. But keep balance in mind, both in the encounters and within the group, and nerf when necessary. You generally want everyone at the table to be roughly equal in power. At its best, a D&D game is experiment in ensemble storytelling in which everyone gets to shine. You don't want your session to become "The Amazing Adventures of That One Guy From the Movie (and his friends)."

Better yet, instead of playing as a character from this movie (or any movie), consider an homage: If you like Edgin Darvis, by all means, roll up a bard, but make them your bard. Maybe they're a little like Darvis, but they'll ultimately be shaped by you, the situations in your game world, and your horribly low dice throws.

The same basic guidelines apply to the magic items: These downloadable artifacts are all extremely powerful, potentially game-breaking gear--perfect for specific uses in a movie, but probably not made for whatever world you are creating. I wouldn't throw the Helm of Disjunction or the Horn of Beckoning Death into a low level campaign unless "weaklings-wielding-bazookas" is the vibe you're going for. Maybe keep them as "end of the module" rewards, or as the Thing the Big Bad Evil Guy wields that allows him to rule the village.