By Ed Fortune

As the excitement behind a Dungeons & Dragons movie that’s actually good so does the inevitable demand for stories featuring the characters from that movie. IDW’s The Feast Of The Moon is a graphic novel prequel to the movie that introduces us to all the heroes in the new movie and provides a rip-roaring adventure at the same time.

We get two stories here, one which focuses on Elgin’s band of merry thieves and another which is a solo adventure for the Paladin Xenk Yendar. The first story has the feel of a fun, straightforward bit of swords and sorcery nonsense in which a bunch of down-on-their-luck adventurers end up protecting a village from bandits, which is also the plot of the adventure found in the Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set. Some nice emotional beats are set up for the movie, so this works well to complement the main feature, which is entirely the point.

The Xenk solo story is pure cheese and fills in a bit of utterly unnecessary backstory for the movie. It feels like it goes through a tropes checklist, which is part of the fun. Also, bonus points go to Xenk for being able to pronounce svirfneblin; he really is very special.

Continuity-wise, it slots in nicely between Druid’s Call and The Road to Neverwinter; Doric the Druid isn’t in this graphic novel, which is a pity as they could have given her a solo story similar to Xenks.

This is the sort of straightforward comic book fun we’ve come to expect from IDW’s Dungeons and Dragons range; if you’ve enjoyed previous D&D books such as Spine of The World or Infernal Tides you will get a blast out of this one. The artwork, lettering and general production isn’t anything special and the characters look reasonably close to the movie stars, but not quite. In other words, the usual sort of fair we’ve come to expect from movie tie-ins.

A perfect companion for the movie and one to add to the growing collection.