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The New Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Poster Features Art From The Wrong Roleplaying Game

Chris Pine in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Paramount Pictures
By BJ Colangelo/

Oh. Oh, goodness. Oh goodness, no. Look, mistakes happen to the best of us, but it's not often that a mistake happens that likely required approval from an entire board of marketing executives and some producers before being made. 

San Diego Comic-Con kicked off yesterday with huge news regarding "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves." In addition to the panel featuring some of the cast and crew, Paramount also dropped the film's first look trailer, and gave the attendees in Hall H a sneak peek look at some of the film's footage. For those of us hanging out at home and watching all of the news roll in by obsessively refreshing Twitter, we also got the chance to see the exclusive SDCC made for the film's booth/tavern.

Don't get us wrong, it's a pretty cool poster, especially considering the emphasis on the game's memorable characters rather than it being an overly Photoshopped collage of celebrity faces the way posters are usually designed these days. There's only one problem — one of the monsters on this poster is not from Dungeons & Dragons, but instead the artwork from the role-playing game Pathfinder. In the left hand corner of the ampersand, a brain creature with claws and an elongated tongue can be seen. It's a pretty creepy creature that definitely fits into the world of D&D, but it's actually the design used in Pathfinder for the Intellect Devourer. And we're not talking about an Open Gaming Content interpretation for the creature ... we mean the literal artwork commissioned by the artist Paizo to be used in the Pathfinder 2 Beastiary. OOPS.

Paramount has seemingly pulled the poster

Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Paramount Pictures

It's important to note that the intellect devourer is in fact a Dungeons & Dragons monster that appeared all the way back in 1976, and the monster has popped up in every subsequent edition ever since. The issue here is not that the poster showcases an intellect devourer, the issue is that the artistic presentation is fully just stolen artwork. The intellect devourer became available as Open Gaming Content roughly 20 years ago under the Open Gaming License, making the creature available for other role playing games to incorporate. It's the same reason why Stranger Things is able to use the name "demogorgon" without getting sued to hell and back.

However, the specific artwork of the intellect devourer used by poster artist BossLogic for the convention is not part of the available Open Gaming Content. There is, of course, no way for us to know whether or not BossLogic knew that this particular artwork was not the intellectual property of Dungeons & Dragons, and we don't want to assume bad faith, but no matter the circumstances that led to the poster design, it's still a problem — even if unintentional. We have gotten word that the poster is no longer available at the booth, likely pulled until the situation is remedied. Hopefully all of the impacted parties can have a cute lil' Zoom call and restore some honor to what is likely unintentional thievery.

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