The best part of The Road to Neverwinter is that it’s a great stand-alone story. If you choose not to read The Druid’s Call or see Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves you can still enjoy The Road to Neverwinter. The characters are fun and richly painted. The adventures are dangerous and exciting. Johnson crafts a thrilling and funny story that anyone can enjoy. I highly recommend reading The Road to Neverwinter soon.

After wrapping up Doric’s introductory book, I was properly primed to dive into The Road to Neverwinter, the movie’s more direct prequel. This novel introduces the bulk of the rest of the cast including Edgin the bard (Chris Pine), Holga the barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), and the roguish Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), but at the heart of the tale—both emotionally and narratively, as she’s regularly asking her dad to recount the party’s grandest adventures—is Edgin’s daughter Kira.

On the one hand, I was regularly disappointed that Edgin seldom, y’know, barded throughout the novel, but on the other hand, he did routinely charm, connive, and break/enter—all aspects of the traditional bard character. (Plus, there are few ways more effective in getting me to truly pull for a protagonist than to introduce them as a struggling single parent!)

At Kira’s insistence, Edgin regales her—and us, the readers—with a series of stories starting back with the earliest days of their adventuring crew. This begins with the introduction of powerhouse Holga (at a tavern, naturally) before developing into a series of ever more ambitious capers around the Sword Coast.

The Road to Neverwinter
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter cover image
Along the way—and against her father’s wishes—a young Kira joins in thanks to her invisibility pendant, a crooked card game between Edgin and Forge finds the gentleman thief signing on, and, trapped on a haunted island, Simon the sorcerer too is absorbed into the team. The action culminates with a daring heist at the estate of an eccentric dragonborn wizard that involves everything from costumes and forged invitations to potions and Slippers of Spider Climbing.

This book also introduces what I’ve come to think of as Chekhov’s Beholder, because if someone mentions a Beholder in act two, you’re damn sure going to have to deal with one before the act three resolution!

Like E.K. Johnston, Jaleigh Johnson does a great job of rooting the narrative’s action in real D&D concepts. When Holga mounts a slippery stone outcropping in a single bound, you just know she aced her Athletics check, and as locks resist simple picking, you can feel Forge and Edgin praying for a natural 20.

The book contains ample D&D beasties to delight in-the-know readers—gnolls, stirges, and even a hag for good measure—yet also gives each enough exposition to fill in those new to the Forgotten Realms. Best of all, there’s a mix of combat and conversation, of carefully laid plans and spontaneous tomfoolery, that mirrors all my best tabletop roleplaying experiences.

And at the center of it all are these archetypes—the grizzled adventurer and the precocious kid and the hapless magician and the stoic fighter—that aren’t afraid to play against type. All this combined makes The Road to Neverwinter a really satisfying read that has me counting the days until Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves opens at my local cinema.