'Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' is just as cheerfully chaotic as your most memorable game sessions

This movie is what you get when your only writing guideline is Rule of Cool

Your average gamer isn't necessarily a professional writer, so an RPG campaign full of clichés is an expected part of the deal. How many times have you created a character whose backstory can be summarized as "marauders burned my village and I had to learn to survive alone"? In keeping with that not so venerable tradition, the D&D movie adaptation Honor Among Thieves draws from la crème de la crème of tired story beats: it starts with a threat of prison rape and soon after reveals that the entire plot rests on a fridged woman (complete with the most generic domestic look and bland under-the-blankets flashback). Not very promising for a fantasy movie produced in this century, but as an adaptation of the game, it's depressingly accurate. Backward storytelling choices aside, Honor Among Thieves is undeniably fun. The action is riveting, the humor is sincere, and the attention to detail is commendable. It will certainly recoup some of the goodwill Hasbro clumsily squandered earlier this year when it tried to squeeze more money out of players and independent game designers.

If each viewer brings their own interpretation to a movie, this death-of-the-author approach applies even moreso to the freeform experience of RPGs. There's a unique appeal to this curious form of interactive improvisational theater with occasional murder and pillaging. Now, the curious thing about adapting D&D to the screen in the era of 5e rules is that the game designers have grown averse to settling on any specific lore. The (very ill-advised) goal of D&D 5e is to be as nondescript as possible, to lend itself to any kind of story, to be all things to all people. In a truly generic system, that design choice can work wonders. In D&D, it detracts from the flavor of the story and punishes the players. Rules alone won't sustain a game that declines to adopt a distinctive identity because, to be brutally honest, 5e is not a terribly well designed system. To be successful, Honor Among Thieves couldn't just be a generic fantasy movie, and definitely couldn't rely too much on game stats.

This need to balance the faithful with the interesting adds difficulties to the adaptation process. As happens with videogame movies, the rules of the fictional world are constrained by very specific expectations that players bring to the viewing experience. The casual viewer of action cinema may not care for the Dificulty Class of item attunement or what it means to give birth to a tiefling, but those are the small details that D&D enthusiasts will be looking for. Can we nitpick this movie with the rules of D&D? Sure we can: the sorcerer's personality has too little Charisma for him to cast any spells; the druid isn't supposed to put on metallic armor; the paladin's ability to detect evil shouldn't be constantly active; the evil wizard casts too many spells per turn of combat; a fiery explosion can't harm a red dragon... but does any of that really matter for your enjoyment of the movie? Absolutely not. (Maybe D&D designers will watch this and finally learn that infinite spell slots don't break the game.) While Honor Among Thieves draws heavily from the geography and fauna of the official Faerûn setting, it isn't written to follow Monster Manual stats. It's written by Rule of Cool. That's what makes it excel above previous, and best forgotten, D&D movies.

One more factor in its favor is the media landscape it's made in. Although the superhero story structure has become exhaustingly ubiquitous these days, it still sells tickets. What this means for a D&D production is that it arrives into a moment in which once obscure geeky obsessions are finally perceived as cool, in which a basic, lazy, predictable Hero's Journey can still sustain an enjoyable blockbuster. Furthermore, where the movie fails to follow the narrative conventions of adventure cinema, RPG fans will know to read those deviations as normal. Plans and backup plans that fail one after another, endless interruptions for backstory infodumps, minor side quests, an ensemble of heroes who just so happen to share compatible motivations, a totally improvised winning strategy... that's just how the game goes. In any other fantasy adventure, those quirks would be marked down as amateur screenwriting mistakes. But they're precisely the quirks that give an RPG campaign that special flavor of constant uncertainty. Where a traditional narrative relies on causal logic and character consistency, RPGs are at the mercy of the dice. Just like when your Dungeon Master allows an action not specified in the manual because your idea is too awesome to care for game balance, Honor Among Thieves gives itself permission to ignore good screenwriting advice and go for what feels cool to do.

The unfortunate result is that you need previous immersion in the specific RPG flavor of collaborative storytelling to fully enjoy the experience. Many viewers will get a sense that the pieces don't quite fit, some cuts are too abrupt, some sequences go by too fast, characterization is implausibly flat, backstory is excessive, choices are too convenient. The thing is, that's exactly how a gaming session is structured: bite-sized chunks of unrelated plot stitched together by authorial fiat. If you're in the niche audience that has been waiting for a decent D&D adaptation for decades, this is finally the movie you were asking for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector

A frank portrayal of the cruelty of class inequality and the poisonous allure of belief in destiny

The world of Elijah Kinch Spector's debut novel Kalyna the Soothsayer isn't a nice one. The royals are more concerned with their banquets and opera galas than in protecting the commonfolk. What nominal justice there is cannot thwart the rule of whoever can hire the most mercenaries. The unstable regime of the Tetrarchia, a federation of four perpetually quarreling kingdoms not quite held together with spit and prayers, hasn't managed to overcome xenophobic prejudice. For Kalyna, the daughter of a penniless family of nomadic fortune-tellers, life is an unceasing barrage of persecution, neglect, abuse, and hunger. Generations of her ancestors have subsisted by using their divinatory powers to help ordinary people improve their sad fortunes a little, and that's the only trade Kalyna knows how to do.

Except Kalyna was born without magic. Unable to see the future, she gets her job done by gossip, hearsay, acute observation, and plain guile. She's a fraud, and her family's precarious livelihood depends on her keeping the pretense that she's an accurate clairvoyant. By paying close attention to the important details, connecting the dots, and making likely guesses, she awes her clientele with her ability to predict what is totally predictable, just unnoticed. So far, these sketchy methods have sufficed to put just enough food on the table for herself, her disabled father, and her violently hostile grandmother. But when a prince from the kingdom of Rotfelsen snatches her from her family and demands predictions of the nation's future, she has to quickly become even more resourceful and conniving to stay in business—and stay alive.

Despite her finely honed talent for careful observation and deduction, Kalyna can't imagine the voracious whirlwind of intrigue, betrayal, hipocrisy, fanaticism, divided loyalties, and decadence she's been thrown into. She's barely prepared for the immensely rich and crafty schemers she's going to have to outwit, but they're no more prepared for the fierceness with which she's willing to oppose rabid nationalism and stand for the masses of low-born. The safety of the four kingdoms is now in the hands of a professional liar set against an entire aristocracy made of liars.

Kalyna the Soothsayer is clear-eyed about the effect that relentless oppression can have on otherwise decent people. This protagonist is still fundamentally well-intentioned, but the brutal harshness of life in the Tetrarchia has forced her to learn to play dirty. Although her conscience is torn by all the tactics of manipulation she's had to rely on to make a living, she can still effortlessly weave more and more lies each time. She doesn't hesitate to use her allies as tools, withhold crucial facts, ruin reputations, threaten, blackmail, and burn bridges to sustain the farce that she has prophetic visions. While she loves her father tenderly and feels sympathy for the plight of the poorest, she's had to navigate the world with a self-imposed indifference to the consequences of her deception.

What these intersecting conditions produce is a brilliantly constructed character, endlessly multilayered and relatably conflicted, with a scarred interior that nonetheless perseveres by sheer survival instinct. Kalyna's inner monologue is a delicious parade of sharp political commentary, pragmatic callousness, reluctant hope, internalized self-loathing, wounded desire, the driest sense of gallows humor, and a drive to independence made of the hardest bedrock. It's an engrossing experience to feel the author lure the reader into rooting for a shameless charlatan, and the key to this trick is in the push and pull of battling impulses in Kalyna's mind. In her impossible situation, she doesn't cease to wish there were a right thing to do, and much of the enjoyment of this novel comes from watching her rationalize which of all the wrong choices is the least catastrophic.

By placing a powerless person at a position of influence among ruthless masterminds, the author also offers a harsh critique of the inner workings of centralized power. The plot threads related to resurgent hyperpatriotism, national mythbuilding, and raw ambition couldn't be more resonant to today's readers. Despite its everyday complications, diverse government comes out victorious, but the story makes a forceful point about the delicate work needed to preserve a civic community built from the strength of the many.

In a setting shaped by magical lineages, ancient mysteries, forgotten world-shaking beasts, and secrets that sleep under the earth, the use of a completely ordinary human as the central focus of the narrative serves to highlight the value of mundane life. Pomp and glory and patriotic pride are mercilessly denounced as the ridiculous folly they are, a fraud more outrageous than Kalyna's daily machinations. Even more than the gift of seeing the coming events, it's fatally dangerous to trust those with absolute power with the gift of believing that fortune smiles upon them.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Kinch Spector, Elijah. Kalyna the Soothsayer [Erewhon, 2022].

'Dragon Age: Absolution' packs dragon-sized themes in an elf-sized package

Against the common cliché that expects very little quality from videogame adaptations, this miniseries explores the danger of hunger for power with the depth of prestige TV

Across the iterations of the Dragon Age line of videogames, the common message has been about the tragedy of too much ambition. Time after time, someone seeks a quick path to greater power, and soon the repercussions become everyone's problem. Variations on this theme of human hubris range from the cosmic to the quotidian, turning the history of Thedas into a long series of misguided attempts to correct the excesses of the previous misguided attempt.

Any resemblance to actual events, etc.

The new Netflix miniseries Dragon Age: Absolution offers a chilling portrait of the insidious way ambition can seduce and eventually destroy. In a fantasy empire where humans reign and elves are a subjugated underclass, those in positions of power have seemingly never needed to learn that using others is wrong. The practice has taken root so strongly that it's reflected even in the smallest misdeeds: every time a character in the series is revealed to have done something bad, the badness is defined by a choice to use people—sometimes literally. This is consistent with the way the Dragon Age franchise has usually represented evil: humans using demons, demons using humans, humans using elves, Qunari using mages, mages using blood, mage hunters using lobotomized mages, armies using children, the noble families using each other as pawns... it's a very Kantian stance where the hallmark of evil is failing to see other people's autonomy and instead seeing only their usefulness. The main religion of the continent even has as its main precept that magic (i.e. power) should serve us, not be served by us. The fatal mistake of every overconfident mage in this setting is to lose their sense of purpose and become a plaything in the service of power.

What this worldview does for the Absolution miniseries is provide a moral anchoring point for characters' actions. One villain is so controlled by resentment that they plan to make a whole civilization pay for the atrocities committed by their rulers. Another is so disconnected from the lives of ordinary people that they plan to break the laws of nature to keep their former playmates. Even our heroic protagonist is at one point guilty of sacrificing the safety of a child to fulfill a job. And in each case, a plausible-sounding argument might be made for those terrible choices. This is a world that puts people in impossible situations and continues to punish them for desperately trying to break the cycle of mistakes. However, this is not a bleak world. The reason this particular type of moral failing has been represented so many times across Dragon Age continuity is not because the writers want to impart a nihilistic view; it's because multiple examples of the same mistake serve to illustrate how many opportunities people get (and miss) to make the world better. Nothing forces the factions in the setting to mistrust and scheme against each other; it's the unnecessary pattern of paying back revenge with more revenge that keeps the world burning. Underneath every well-written tragedy is this humanistic hope: it's not that the universe is fundamentally tainted; it's that people could choose better but don't.

The starkest metaphor for the way evils works in Dragon Age is blood magic, a route to power literally fueled by the suffering of others. In a neat practical symbolic package, blood magic can stand in for numerous forms of sociopathy, indifference, or exploitation. Quite intentionally, Dragon Age lore is vague enough about the earliest era of its universe that it's debatable whether it was the first demons who used the first humans or vice versa, but what is certain is that the theme of weaponizing others for one's ends is firmly established in the very foundation of the setting.

This is what makes the character of Rezaren, the main antagonist in the Absolution miniseries, so instantly compelling to watch. He is so deeply convinced of his own good intentions that he doesn't notice the incongruity of resorting to blackmail, backstabbing, torture and enslavement in order to regain a distorted idea of childhood harmony. In our times, we're sick of hearing of the ties between totalitarianism and toxic nostalgia, but the boring trope exists for good reasons. Rezaren exemplifies the villain with a motivation disproportionately smaller than his methods. A lifetime of infinite privilege has rendered him incapable of empathy, because, for the pampered nobility he comes from, the pain of growth is not a normal part of life but an embarrassment that must be punished.

Dragon Age: Absolution relies on too many flashbacks, which do the pacing no favors, but one key event in the past of both the heroine Miriam and the villain Rezaren is revisited from their opposite perspectives in a narratively fascinating manner. It's unfortunate that the plot takes so long to get to its actual theme (there's an air of the perfunctory in the boilerplate D&D party adventure of the first two episodes), but once the viewer learns what this series is actually about, once the extent of Rezaren's evil is exposed, the rest of the story goes by in a thrilling breeze. The mage Rezaren is a fantastic achievement of characterization precisely because of how casually appalling he can be. And again, we see an effective use of ambiguity in the portrayal of his backstory: is he a bad person because of the elitism of his upbringing, or was he honestly a good child who only turned bad because he was briefly in contact with a demon?

Be that as it may, Rezaren outshines our heroes in terms of viewer's interest. We've seen D&D campaigns so many times it's difficult to present an interesting group dynamic that doesn't resemble every game we've played. Rezaren is something else. He's so deluded by his privilege, so oblivious to the inherent dignity of others, that he considers the death of a slave as an affront to his property rights. He has lived such a suffocatingly sheltered life that he cannot comprehend why his former enslaved playmate would want nothing to do with him, and he even offers to enslave her again as if he were doing her the greatest favor.

The tragedy of Rezaren is that he knows no way of interacting with people apart from using them. This is nominally supposed to be Miriam's story, the epic journey that reconciles her with herself and heals her inner wounds, but as usually happens in epic stories, the heroine's victory is only as interesting as the villain's villainy.

If the viewer only gets to the first episode, it would be easy to be fooled by the appearance that Dragon Age: Absolution is like every other D&D-adjacent show. Miriam's companions are assorted flavors of generic archetypes and comic relief. But finishing the series (which should have been a single feature-length movie, honestly) is very much worth the less than stellar beginning. The combat scenes are decently animated, and the visual style fulfills its function of catching the eye, but where the show excels is in the moral drama. To be clear, there's never a doubt that Rezaren is in the wrong; there's no possible "other side" to the argument. What nonetheless makes him such an interesting character is how easily self-deceived someone can become when no one dares challenge the proclaimed goodness of their intentions.

Rezaren is a complex, fleshed-out villain on a par with the most wicked that Game of Thrones or its imitators can offer. There's no mystery to his motivation; there's just an incorrigibly warped perspective that no amount of emotional contact can fix. That such a feat of writing was possible in just six half-hour episodes is reason enough to recommend Dragon Age: Absolution. But for fans of fantasy warfare, heist missions gone catastrophically wrong, or gruesome forbidden magic, there's abundant material to sate that hunger. There's also a dragon, if you're into that. But the seriousness with which this story addresses horrifying extremes of pride, ambition and callousness is the true jewel hidden inside the sparkling, colorful exterior.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the touch of genius that was using an imprisoned dragon to symbolize the lingering tensions of a highly unequal society, +1 for creating a villain that is at the same time fully reprehensible and fully understandable.

Penalties: −1 for excessive exposition of world history facts that are foreign to this specific plot.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall

 

A Crown for Cold Silver tells the story of a second revolution, forged on the legend of the fiery blue-haired mercenary general Cobalt Zosia and her five villains, who together won the support of the people and overthrew the crown. But wearing the crown is not always as easy as winning it, and Zosia ended up faking her death to pass the burden of the crown to another. Now decades later, Zosia's life is uprooted and she is forced out of retirement to re-join with the villains of old to exact her revenge.

I’m glad I finished this book, because I really wanted to throw in the towel on several occasions. I trudged on maily because throughout my reading I was truly torn about A Crown for Cold Silver. The world built is utterly fantastic, I can’t deny that, but the world-building and character-building is less than. The prose during the development stages is often clunky and dull, not to mention rife with info-dumping and overtly transparent characters. But after struggling to get through my read,  I was often retrospectively impressed with the story and the world the author created.

Much of A Crown for Cold Silver is familiar, but the brilliance is in its fresh take on the familiar. The book is essentially a mercenary fantasy, but here the mercenaries are well past their prime, complaining of creaks and cramps and pot bellies. We have the traditional European model society, but with some Asian flare (primarily just in names and street decorations though), and extremely blurred gender lines. Same sex marriage is the norm and is practiced among all walks of life, from the religious to the ruling classes.

The strength of the writing is in the dialogue, and once most of the setup is done (at around the 75% mark), A Crown for Cold Silver becomes much more of a pleasure to read. I found myself laughing out loud at times and even starting to feel compassion for many of the characters that I was apathetic about most of the book. Not Ji-hyeon though, ugh.

Eventually my strategy became to read on but skip ahead whenever a character (or the author) became too loquacious. This is what allowed me to, in the end, say that I liked the book. I do wish the diversity was a little less superficial though, because women with mustaches, men who are not taken seriously because of their lack of masculinity, and Asian culture represented by paper lanterns and samurai-like swords feels a little flat.

So, do I recommend this book? Sure, but with reservations. If you are able to look past the misgivings I've mentioned, or if they aren't things that normally bother you in the way they do me, then you will be in for an incredible new world and a really good story. Personally though, I'd rather not have to put in so much effort just to enjoy a book.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 for lacing the familiar with new, +1 for tactfully incorporating diversity without overplaying it, +1 for roping me in a the end

Negatives: -1 for clunky expositionary prose throughout most of the book, -1 for the awkward but not in a good way Ji-hyeon/Sullen teen romance thing

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

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POSTED BY: Tia

Reference: Marshall, Alex. A Crown for Cold Silver [Orbit, 2015]