by Ed Fortune
Honour Among Thieves has been the 2023 fantasy blockbuster that we didn’t know we needed. The movie, based on the vast and well-documented world of Dungeons & Dragons, is absolutely filled with visual references, easter eggs and other elements from a game that’s been around for almost fifty years. So a book that’s filled with loads of detail about the making of the movie would be quite a useful thing to have if you wanted to know what they all are.
Luckily, The Art and Making of Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves fulfils this role quite well. This is a coffee table book stuffed full of stills from the movie, as well as production art, storyboards, visualisations, and behind-the-scenes photos. And yes, that includes photos of the costumes for the various fantasy creatures, including the bird and cat people.
Author Eleni Roussos takes the right angle throughout; this is a book that tells movie buffs all the information they want to know about the production and balances this with various bits of relevant D&D knowledge. Fans of the TTRPG will know the basics, but unless you’ve gone frame by frame through the movie, you will have missed some of the many references. Interviews are used sparingly and cleverly; we get insight into the movie without too much overlap.
The book shows the movie’s development quite well, and it’s nice to see various iterations of character and costume design scattered throughout the book. The Art and Making of Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves is a very pretty visual reference and handy for movie fans and Dungeon Masters alike. It’s not comprehensive; the writing provides some insight, but it’s mostly there to provide context for the very nice art. At roughly 200 pages, there are a lot of very nice pictures here. A good resource to add to your movie book or D&D collection.
