The Monsters of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves – Posts

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is chock-full of the fantastic creatures and species you’ll find in the Forgotten Realms, with beings like aarakocra, tieflings, yuan-ti, dragonborn, halflings, and even the occasional human among their residents. But what about the monsters?

We’ve compiled a list of all the iconic D&D monsters we spotted in the film along with their stats so you can use them in your games.

Warning! There are spoilers below!

Animated Gold Dragon

A seemingly stray spell causes this gold dragon statue to come to life. While not a true gold dragon, this animated stone beast is a formidable foe for the film’s adventurers. If you want to re-create this type of threat in your games, consider using the stats for a huge animated object found in the table for the animate objects spell:

Among the many creatures that Doric wild shapes into are these tall flightless birds with wedge-shaped beaks that lend them their iconic name. One or two axe beaks might not pose a threat to a party of adventurers but a flock might start giving them trouble.

The displacer beast is a panther-inspired monster that originated in the Feywild. There, they gained the ability to displace light in order to create nearby illusions of themselves that make them a challenge to strike with an attack. Part of what makes these monstrosities so scary is that while many creatures hunt merely to feed, a displacer beast revels in the sport of it.

You won’t have to travel all the way to Thay or enter into any pacts with Szass Tam to create an army of these undead soldiers to throw at your adventurers. We’ve got their stats for you right here. While the individual dread warrior carries a low challenge rating, the real threat is when they attack in hordes. Their Undead Fortitude gives them the potential to survive killing blows too, ready to attack again.

Easily one of the most recognizable and beloved monsters in all of D&D, the gelatinous cube wasn’t going to sit out of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. These oozes aren’t very intelligent themselves, but they can often be found silently moving through the halls of dungeons, engulfing unexpecting adventurers and dissolving their organic body parts in the process. Often the surest warning sign of a gelatinous cube is the remains of its previous victims, still held suspended inside the cube’s body.

Arachnophobes don’t have too much to be anxious about in the D&D movie. The appearance of this pest is over by the time you’ll have moved your hands to cover your eyes. Within the game, these creepy crawlers are exactly what it says on the tin, a giant spider. An encounter with them carries all the accouterments you’d assume, like crawling on walls, bites from its mandibles, and webbing to snag adventurers up for supper. 

Skulking around the Underdark, intellect devourers are four-legged predators made from literal brains that have been subjected to the nightmarish rituals of a mind flayer. Their ability to hone in on the intelligent thoughts of nearby sentient creatures makes them highly effective and frightening predators. The most terrifying aspect of facing an intellect devourer comes when a victim is incapacitated around them. If the intellect devourer’s target fails an Intelligence contest, the monster can consume their brain, seizing control of their body, and learning everything they ever knew. Adventurers may not even realize a member of their party has been replaced by an intellect devourer until it is too late.

Another one of the most popular D&D monsters ever, the mimic is a shapeshifting foe that assumes the form of common inanimate objects that its prey is likely to interact with. While the most recognized form for most players is the treasure chest that appears in the film, a mimic can shapeshift into other basic materials such as wood or stone. A crafty Dungeon Master who wants to keep their players on their toes might instead choose to have a mimic shapeshift into doors, furniture, or even more mundane items that players might not think to avoid, such as cutlery or stones on the floor.

While the owlbear that appears in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a Wild Shape form of Doric’s, the ones your players encounter in the game are much more likely to be a cuddly ball of murder. As the name suggests, this apex predator combines the predatory instincts of an owl with the size and ferocity of a bear. While these creatures have been domesticated by wood elves and hobgoblins, they’re much more likely to be found in their own dens among the bones and remains of their previous quarries.

An entire Uthgardt Elk army is overwhelmed by the fury of the black dragon Rakor. His Acid Breath and Frightful Presence make him a formidable foe. Black dragons are typically found in the dingiest of places, such as swamps or flooded ruins and caves. Their own presence can often shape the land around them into murky, boggy wastelands to match their acidic nature.

While many D&D monsters are threats for the bodies and lives of adventurers, the chittering sounds of these insect-like critters signal danger for the party’s gear instead. Hide your nonmagical metal weapons and armor when a rust monster is around. Attacks made with its antennae, as well as attacks made against it by the players, result in permanent damage or even complete destruction of the metal items in question.

One of the most crowd-pleasing moments of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is the appearance of the red dragon Themberchaud, in a scene that allows the movie to check off the boxes of both dungeon and dragon. While Themberchaud has had a presence in D&D stories dating back decades, players of the fifth edition might be most familiar with his appearance in the Out of the Abyss adventure. This chaotic, fire-breathing menace has the stats of an adult red dragon in that book, so we’re including those stats here, but a DM looking to replicate his fearsome, unstoppable menacing role in the film might want to upgrade him to an ancient red dragon.

Sofina, the Red Wizard of Thay serves as the primary antagonist of the D&D movie. This fearsome necromancer is a force to be reckoned with for the heroes of the movie, and could also make a cunning villain for your own players. We provided a stat block for her along with the other main characters of the film in our special Thieves’ Gallery, which you can claim as a special gift to your party from your friends at D&D Beyond.

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.