Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
So, the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves looks pretty good, all things considered. (Yes, yes, there are people who really want it to be a failure for some reason and it's going to be successful in what appears to be a very Guardians of the Galaxy fashion, but Guardians of the Galaxy made $772 million, so I think we can probably count that as some version of "success.")
Back in 2000, when a very different Dungeons & Dragons movie was on its way to theaters, Wizards of the Coast prepared some content about Izmir, the setting for that movie. Although it ultimately only appeared as Web freebies on the D&D website, there were hints that it might have originally been intended for some sort of hard copy product, before it was clear that the movie was a disaster.
But the Honor Among Thieves trailer, whatever you think of it, looks vastly less like a disaster than the 2000 trailer did.
So it seems likely that there's going to be at least some portion of the movie-going public that's going to walk out of multiplexes next spring and want to go home and play a D&D game.
But at Wizards Live, WotC didn't announce anything to grab those folks by the hand and say "right this way, folks," perhaps with the characters from the movie slathered all over it.
Unless they did.
Coming out some time before the end of the first quarter of 2023 is Keys to the Golden Vault, a book of short heist adventures that we, at the moment, know nothing else about.
What if it is the D&D movie tie-in?
Recent adventure anthologies have all had some sort of loose connective tissue, like Candlekeep or the Radiant Citadel, to link them all together as well as serve as a setting usable outside of that context.
What if the Golden Vault book is heists in and around Neverwinter, one of the places Honor Among Thieves is set, and features a gazetteer of the city? Movie-goers would be able to walk out of the movie theater and grab a book with the ridiculously handsome Chris Pine and Rege-Jean Page on the cover, featuring the sort of shenanigans that they get into in the movie.
"But Whiz," I hear you ask, "why wouldn't WotC just say so, then?"
Because they got burned badly in 2000 and are nervous and won't commit to it being a movie tie-in until the last possible moment. If the movie looks like a dog when they see a near-final cut in December, on goes the alternate cover and key pieces of art featuring the movie characters are swapped out, and the movie character NPCs get their names changed. Compared to a bunch of books they might have a hard time selling with the stink of a bad movie on them, paying for some alternate pieces of art and a few pages of alternate text is pretty cheap.
Now, they still don't have a starter set featuring the movie characters, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have an alternate version of Stormwreck Isle, with movie characters in the art instead of the cartoon characters -- neither of whom appear in the actual adventure of course, for reasons -- ready to go. Or, at worst, they're ready to slap a bunch of shiny stickers on their Stormwreck boxes, with a message like "See Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in theaters, then BRING THE ADVENTURE HOME!"
Or maybe not. That's how I'd do it, anyway. (Call me if you want some of this grade-A marketing genius, WotC.)
In any case, adventure anthologies work for me, as do heists, so they've got a sale either way.
Back in 2000, when a very different Dungeons & Dragons movie was on its way to theaters, Wizards of the Coast prepared some content about Izmir, the setting for that movie. Although it ultimately only appeared as Web freebies on the D&D website, there were hints that it might have originally been intended for some sort of hard copy product, before it was clear that the movie was a disaster.
But the Honor Among Thieves trailer, whatever you think of it, looks vastly less like a disaster than the 2000 trailer did.
So it seems likely that there's going to be at least some portion of the movie-going public that's going to walk out of multiplexes next spring and want to go home and play a D&D game.
But at Wizards Live, WotC didn't announce anything to grab those folks by the hand and say "right this way, folks," perhaps with the characters from the movie slathered all over it.
Unless they did.
Coming out some time before the end of the first quarter of 2023 is Keys to the Golden Vault, a book of short heist adventures that we, at the moment, know nothing else about.
What if it is the D&D movie tie-in?
Recent adventure anthologies have all had some sort of loose connective tissue, like Candlekeep or the Radiant Citadel, to link them all together as well as serve as a setting usable outside of that context.
What if the Golden Vault book is heists in and around Neverwinter, one of the places Honor Among Thieves is set, and features a gazetteer of the city? Movie-goers would be able to walk out of the movie theater and grab a book with the ridiculously handsome Chris Pine and Rege-Jean Page on the cover, featuring the sort of shenanigans that they get into in the movie.
"But Whiz," I hear you ask, "why wouldn't WotC just say so, then?"
Because they got burned badly in 2000 and are nervous and won't commit to it being a movie tie-in until the last possible moment. If the movie looks like a dog when they see a near-final cut in December, on goes the alternate cover and key pieces of art featuring the movie characters are swapped out, and the movie character NPCs get their names changed. Compared to a bunch of books they might have a hard time selling with the stink of a bad movie on them, paying for some alternate pieces of art and a few pages of alternate text is pretty cheap.
Now, they still don't have a starter set featuring the movie characters, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have an alternate version of Stormwreck Isle, with movie characters in the art instead of the cartoon characters -- neither of whom appear in the actual adventure of course, for reasons -- ready to go. Or, at worst, they're ready to slap a bunch of shiny stickers on their Stormwreck boxes, with a message like "See Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in theaters, then BRING THE ADVENTURE HOME!"
Or maybe not. That's how I'd do it, anyway. (Call me if you want some of this grade-A marketing genius, WotC.)
In any case, adventure anthologies work for me, as do heists, so they've got a sale either way.
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