Let's try something out. Post a movie (trailer and/or poster is enough) that exemplifies the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons to you, and make sure to include what your favourite edition of the game is. No actual D&D-branded movies, please, that's too easy. Other than that this is a judgement-free zone of genuine curiosity, don't mock other people's picks. I'll start.
The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)
Favourite edition: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition
Reminding everyone to include their favourite edition of D&D! This is important data. Just edit your post to include it. :)
I’m gonna start marking everyone who doesn’t name a favourite edition down as “5th Edition,” and you’ll just have to carry that upon your souls. 🙂
3.5 player here I feel like I can't think of any which are absolutely, 100% bang-on (Though I haven't seen Fire and Ice yet which seems like the most D&D movie ever) but a few which may come to mind are like
Wiiiizarrds? ...With the notable addition of nazis to the whole vibe
Wizardry's 1991 adaptation, which I can't seem to find a decent cover of
And this is technically an OVA about the length of a movie, but Ruin Explorers is close to my heart as an anime I watched a lot as a kid. This one might be cheating, though, as I'm pretty sure it's based on someone's TTRPG campaign. If we go for animated series and manga, suddenly the pool gets a whole lot bigger - Overlord, Goblin Slayer (Skip the anime on that one - it misses the point,) Samurai Jack, and pretty much any Dungeon series like Dungeon Meshi, Tower Dungeon, or the first half of I'm A Spider, So What? I kinda feel like the pattern I'm noticing out of those is they tend to focus on either disconnected shorter adventures, or very long quests through a dungeon and focusing on whatever random encounters are along the way. That particular experience tends to not be found in a lot movies. There's also the curious case of the Adventures of Puss in Boots animated series, which is structured essentially like a long-running D&D campaign (Concepts show up for little one-off adventures and then start to come back and be iterated upon for further adventures, eventually leading to exploration of the Underdark and alternate planes such as Hell as things escalate to apocalyptic themes and the characters get more experienced.) (...Like, no, really. That's what that series is actually about. At one point they parody Griffith from Berserk.)
Okay, [tumblr] ate my first run at this, so let's try again.
I started gaming in the late 1970s, but because I spent most of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s playing other systems entirely, I sort of skipped directly from AD&D1 to Pathfinder 2e.¹ Oh, I had brief flirtations with AD&D2 and D&D3.X, but I skipped 4e and 5e entirely.
¹ Yes, I am counting Pathfinder 1e, 2e, and Remastered as "Editions of D&D". The Paizo pedigree is as valid as any WotC release. Fight me.
I don't know if AD&D1 is my favorite edition (I would certainly rather play Pathfinder, whose mechanics have benefitted from half a century of playtesting and refinement), but I'll always have an affection for it -- especially for those early days, when everyone was playing a mishmash of AD&D1, "Three Little Books" D&D, third-party supplements like The Arduin Grimoire, and whatever house rules they came up with.
For me, the movie that best captures The Spirit of Dungeons & Dragons is 1981's Clash of the Titans.
I'd been playing D&D for three whole years when Clash came out. It's from that strange post-Jaws, post-Star Wars era, where all the studios were pivoting toward the new paradigm of the Summer Blockbuster. They all knew that Star Wars had finally broken Fantastic Adventure free of the B-Movie Genre Ghetto, and were trying to figure out just how to jump on that bandwagon.
Sometimes, they got it right, and gave us other classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Alien (1979).
Sometimes, they weren't quite sure what they were doing, and we'd get odd artifacts like The Black Hole (1979) ... and Clash of the Titans.
I mean, I'm sure the idea sounded good in the meetings. Ray Harryhausen was one of the Big Names in special effects. He was the genius of stop-motion animation, and had been cranking out well-regarded Saturday Matinee fare since the late 1950s. "Let's give this B-Movie icon an A-List budget and an A-List cast and see what happens!"
What happened looked and felt like a very expensive B movie, full of distinguished actors who never quite seemed in sync with the material.
The plot beats are very D&D, as young Perseus levels up (very very quickly), obtains the various magic items and companions that he needs for his quest (that sword is unquestionably +3 and Vorpal), and wins the day by Clever Use of This Thing He Picked Up rather than whittling away at the kaiju's Hit Points.
Harryhausen's other sword & sorcery excursions -- Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad movies -- are hugely influential on the hobby, but they're B-Movies, and they know exactly what they are. Clash, on the other claw, the Very Expensive B Movie, has an awkwardness that really captures that spirit of early D&D, a sense of "we're breaking new ground, we're not sure what we're doing, and the dice may screw us at any point, but whatever this is, it's gonna be BIG."
I've also got to give a nod to 1984's Conan the Destroyer. Yeah, that's right, Arnold Schwarzenegger's second turn in the role. It's not a very good movie, and it's certainly not a better movie than Conan the Barbarian. However, it feels very D&D, in part because it backs away from the Biblical Epic pretensions of Milius' film, in part because it has that B Movie Charm, but most of all, it's because, unlike the first film, it has a full party of D&D archetypes: Barbarian, Wizard, Thief, and, um ... I'm gonna go with "Monk" for Grace Jones.
And if we're allowing TV shows as well as movies, well, then, I've got to include Thundarr the Barbarian.
reblogging myself for archival purposes














