Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves could play a sneaky game

Dungeons & Dragons fans might be impatient with the D&D movie being delayed honor among thieves until March 31, 2023, as they’ve been waiting since the storyline leaked in a 2021, in a Filing with the United States Copyright Office. However, the first official look at the film didn’t come until San Diego Comic-Con 2022: Paramount showed a trailer full of identifiable D&D elements that eventually confirmed many details of the story.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes place in the Forgotten Realms, which has been something of a default campaign setting for the game since 5th Edition launched in 2014. The Forgotten Realms is a traditional high-fantasy setting with many iconic elements and a rich treasure trove of lore that could feed into the new film. In the trailer alone there are glimpses of the city of Neverwinter, the Harpers, the Red Wizards of Thay and the Cult of the Dragon.

But one of the most interesting elements of the film might be Hugh Grant’s character – who he is and who he isn’t. According to IMDB, he is “The Rogue”. According to promotional materials for the film, he is Forge Fitzwilliam, the human lord of Neverwinter. But Realms lore does Has a Lord of Neverwinter whose name is not Forge Fitzwilliam. The Lord of Neverwinter is a character with a long, rich history. So why isn’t Hugh Grant playing Dagult Neverember?

Who is Dagult Neverember?

First off, here’s what we know about Forge Fitzwilliam. He used to be a member of an adventure party along with the film’s other characters, but a botched job landed his comrades in jail, while Forge escaped with all the loot and used the wealth to establish himself as lord of the town of Never Winter.

In the established Forgotten Realms lore, the Lord Protector of Neverwinter is a human named Dagult Neverember, and he has played a large part in the history of the Sword Coast region since he was introduced as one of several new characters for Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition, which advanced the story of Forgotten Realms by a century. This time warp should make the setting more accessible to new players, putting them on an equal footing with veteran players when it comes to knowing the lore of the setting.

At the same time, it offered Wizards of the Coast an opportunity to revise the setting to align with the game’s fourth edition design goals. Neverember was launched in 2008 Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide as the new Open Lord of the great city of Waterdeep – a position to which he was appointed by the city’s Masked Lords, who, unlike the Open Lord, hide their identities from the public. In 2011, the character became part of the Neverwinter Transmedia Campaignincluding novels that Discontinuation of the Neverwinter campaign playbookand Cryptic Studios Never winter MMORPG. Much of the character’s development during this period came from Erik Scott de Bie, a Realms novelist and game designer.

So here’s what we know about Dagult Neverember from the existing Forgotten Realms lore: Raised in the city of Neverwinter, he was once an adventurer, a fighter. He claimed he was descended from an illegitimate branch of the Neverwinter royal family that is otherwise extinct. He amassed wealth as an adventurer and then married into a noble family of Waterdeep. The Masked Lords of that city chose him as the Open Lord of that city because his heroic past made him “play the part”.

After securing this position, he returned to a Neverwinter devastated by the eruption of a nearby volcano. He used his wealth and power to help rebuild the city and presented his claimed royal heritage to proclaim himself Lord Protector. Over the next 20 years, he devoted himself to restoring Neverwinter—often appropriated funds from Waterdeep and neglecting one city to rebuild the other. Finally during the adventure The rise of Tiamat, he was ousted and replaced as Open Lord. First, however, he embezzled and hid a large amount of Waterdeep’s fortune, as revealed in the adventure dragon robbery.

Is Lord Neverember the villain in Honor Among Thieves?

Neverember’s moral ambiguity makes him an intriguing character. He has been presented as both a patron of heroic adventurers seeking stability in the Neverwinter region and a self-centered tyrant opposed to underground rebel groups. He can seem altruistic or selfish, depending on how you look at him.

None of this is inconsistent writing. Instead, it reflects that Neverember is a complex character that has been portrayed with many facets. In Neverwinter, some see him as a hero who restored the city to its former glory. Others consider him an intruder who assumed a position of power when no one asked about him. He is remembered in Waterdeep as a corrupt imperialist and thief who shut down city services to help his hometown. Having never been portrayed as a perspective character in a way that allows fans access to his inner thoughts, Neverember defies the simple moral categorization common in a game where creatures can be assigned one of nine different alignments.

The city of Neverwinter beholds in the honor among thieves Trailer is instantly recognizable to anyone who has played in the city since 2011, whether in the tabletop game or the MMO. Lord Neverember is a character that has been inseparable from the city’s history for 11 years. So why set the film there and then replace one of the main characters of the shot with someone else? Especially when Fitzwilliam and Neverember are so alike: Both are former adventurers with shady pasts who have amassed great wealth and thus bought themselves positions of power. Why start from scratch when there’s a character players have been familiar with for well over a decade?

Does WOTC care about Canon?

In 2021, Wizards of the Coast released an article about Dungeons & Dragons canon on his D&D Studio Blog, which clarifies that Wizards does not consider material produced for the Forgotten Realms and other settings outside of the Fifth Edition source books to be canon for the game. Why do they do that? The answer might lie in the blog post comparing D&D to Marvel. What happens in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not canon for the Marvel Comics versions of the characters. They are different expressions of the same characters. With the new D&D movie on the way, this might be Wizard’s way of saying, “Don’t expect this movie to fit the books lore perfectly.”

With that in mind, the answer to the question between Forge Fitzwilliam and Dagult Neverember might be simple: Neverember does not exist in the version of the realms shown in the film. Fitzwilliam effectively replaced him.

But what if it’s not that easy?

What if Forge Fitzwilliam is Day Neverember?

A strange trend has developed in major franchise films over the past few years: to cast a character in the film who is clearly from canon is a new character, even if it’s very obvious who they are. The filmmakers behind blockbusters like Star Trek Into Darkness and spookamong other things, swore that characters who were obviously Khan and Blofeld were in fact not Khan and Blofeld. Moments that were meant to play big twists in these films felt undeserved and hollow, as audiences were meant to gasp at revelations that had been guessed months before, and also meaningless to the characters in the story.

As cinematic storytelling becomes increasingly dominated by creators working in established universes with heavily invested audiences, it becomes more difficult to create meaningful twists that resonate with fans and general audiences alike. One method that has become common is to trick the audience into believing which characters are actually in a particular film.

What if Forge Fitzwilliam bought into a whole new identity, not just politics? We know that Dagult Neverember places a lot of value on his image, and it has also been suggested in the past that his claimed ties to the Neverwinter royal line are false. What if Dagult is a completely made up identity to cover up his past as a Forge? Or maybe Dagult Neverember is the real him and Forge Fitzwilliam was the fake. I mean, the name Forge is a little on the nose, right? Either way, this would fit Forge’s description as a con artist and add a nice little plot twist to the film.

One problem with this theory is the timeline: Neverember ruled his towns for decades in the game, but based on the trailer, it seems like not that much time elapses between Forge’s past as an adventurer and his rise as a politician. This could be why the filmmakers made the change: Forge may be inspired by the story of Neverember, but changing the character allows the filmmakers to tweak details to suit the needs of her Story.

The truth about who Hugh Grant’s character really is and how honor among thieves will fit into the established story of the Forgotten Realms will be seen when the film hits theaters on March 31, 2023.