

His fiery breath lights the forges and tempers the steel produced by the city, and his every whim is attended to by the monastic Keepers of the Flame. As a young dragon just under the age of 100, he is described as the Wyrmsmith of Gracklstugh, and a descendant of previous dragons in the same role. In this early source, the dragon is given a fascinating role in the city of Gracklstugh. Themberchaud the dragon first appeared in Drizzt Do’Urden’s Guide to the Underdark, an accessory for 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, published in 1999 by TSR.

The duergar, also called gray dwarves, are like the drow of dwarves: Cold, grim, and work-obsessed, they have all the crafting skill of the more familiar fantasy dwarf archetype, with none of the boisterous fun. The Forgotten Realms is the most popular campaign world for the Dungeons & Dragons RPG, and the Underdark is a massive subterranean cave system below the surface that’s home to all kinds of monsters and subterranean species, including the ever-popular drow, or dark elves. If that’s too many fantasy nouns for you in one sentence, we can break that down. Themberchaud is a red dragon who dwells in Gracklstugh, a city of duergar in the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Who’s the fat dragon in the Dungeons & Dragons movie?

The movie itself doesn’t get into the dragon’s backstory, but here’s what we know about the Underdark’s weighty menace. If writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were willing to go all-in on a deep-cut character like Themberchaud, what else from the sourcebooks could I expect them to dig into? That made me feel pretty good about the chances that the movie was really going to dig into D&D lore. I had a theory, but it wasn’t confirmed until the toys for the movie were solicited - the red dragon in Honor Among Thieves is Themberchaud, who has a pretty significant history in the Dungeons & Dragons game. When the first trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves dropped late last July, a friend of mine almost immediately DMed me to ask, “Is there any lore about the fat dragon?” Dragons whose body types differ from those slim, snaky models in the D&D Monster Manual are pretty rare, which made this chonky boy stand out.
