The D&D movie’s big boi dragon Themberchaud has an equally large place in the game’s history

polygon.com:

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.

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. That made me feel pretty good about the chances that the movie was really going to dig into D&D lore. 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?

The movie itself doesn’t get into the dragon’s backstory, but here’s what we know about the Underdark’s weighty menace.

Themberchaud is a red dragon who dwells in Gracklstugh, a city of duergar in the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. If that’s too many fantasy nouns for you in one sentence, we can break that down. 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. 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.

Themberchaud the dragon first appeared in Drizzt Do’Urden’s Guide to the Underdark, an