By Ed Fortune
The Road to Neverwinter is a prequel novel intended to add more back story to the forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons Honour Among Thieves, and it’s a companion to the other two prequel books, The Feast of Moon (a graphic novel) and The Druid’s Call, which as the name suggests, focuses on Doric The Druid. However, you don’t need to have either of those to enjoy this, nor do you need to know anything about Dungeons & Dragons.
Much like the Honour Among Thieves movie, this is the tale of fantasy adventurers who get involved in a heist and an origin story that explains how Forge, Edgin, Holga, and Simon got together in the first place. As in the movie that it foreshadows, this book feels like someone played a game of D&D and then wrote it up into a novel; the interactions are very organic, and the plot flows easily. Most of the twists come from character failure, and it’s reasonably witty.
Novelist Jaleigh Johnson is no stranger to tie-in fiction and has written plenty of books set in the fantasy world of the Forgotten Realms before, and you can tell; this book reads like a good, old-school D&D novel. The story is relatable; the villains are villainous, the rogues are roguish, and the heroes aren’t as clever as they’d like to be.
Johnson gets the feel of the characters from the movie spot on. Put it this way; when reading the book, we found the characters sounded like those from the feature film. We get some fun references to the broader world of D&D, and the author uses a classic Monster Manual horror very well.
This is a well-written, quick-to-read bit of fantasy fun, and we profoundly hope that the film’s success and these books will lead to many more D&D novels in the future.
