By Ed Fortune
The latest Dungeons and Dragons movie, Honour Among Thieves, is a rip-roaring fantasy romp and also a heist movie. And as we all know, all good heist crews have a mix of specialists and stereotypes that bring unique skills to the caper. Doric the Druid (played by Sophia Lillis in the movie), is perhaps the most complicated, being both a wildcard and the new kid. Which is probably why they’ve released Druid’s Call, a novel that details Doric’s back story.
Doric is a tiefling, a mortal being whose lineage has been in some way touched by the infernal beings from the Nine Hells. Or, to put it another way, Doric was born with a touch of the devil in her bones, which means that not only does she have horns and a tail, but she’s also not human. Her parents shun her, and we learn (mostly through flashbacks) how rough her childhood was and the challenges she faced being the only girl in the village with horns and a tail.
This is a coming-of-age story, which makes sense; Doric is pretty young in the movie, and this is very much a direct prequel; just as we finish learning about who she is, how she came by her druidic powers and what her motivations are, the story draws to a close. Pretty much every question you might want to ask about Doric is answered here (including those about her shape-shifting talents). We’d have liked to have seen a bit more about Doric being a tiefling (it’s a really interesting part of the broader D&D meta-narrative), but as this is essentially a fun read to get you hyped for the movie, we’ll not worry too much about it.
In many ways, this feels like a bit of a return to the plethora of D&D-themed fantasy novels that dominated the market back in the ’90s. It’s a light, fun read that uses the reader’s familiarity with the Forgotten Realms and fantasy tropes in general to tell a simple but fun story. It goes easy on some of the exposition to focus on the interpersonal drama at times. This is an accessible, fun read, and we do hope it leads to more novels set in the Forgotten Realms.
