By USA Goldmines 
It’s not often you can say you’ve come face to face—and eye to oh-so many eyes—with a Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons, but if you pay a visit to Universal Studios Hollywood’s new nighttime event, Universal Fan Fest Nights, you currently can do just that.
After years of success with the annual Halloween Horror Nights, 2025 marks the first year the LA-based theme park has held the springtime event called Universal Fan Fest Nights. Like Horror Nights, it offers unique experiences built around a number of popular franchises. These include several not Universal-owned, such as Star Trek, One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen, along with added elements to the theme park’s Super Nintendo World and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter lands, and a big use of the original Back to the Future sets on the backlot.
But where HHN is all about scaring people, mainly via its immersive houses, FFN offers a lot of variation on exactly what you might do for each title participating, and for Dungeons and Dragons, that means taking guests through their own mini-D&D adventure called Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep.
While giving me a tour of the Secrets of Waterdeep Universal Fan Fest Nights space, Stephen Siercks (Senior Director, Entertainment Production, Universal Studios Hollywood), explained why the pre-show room contains elements from actual Dungeons & Dragons games—and associated merch—fans would be familiar with. Siercks shared, “What we wanted to create here is that moment where you’re celebrating the game, and then you’re in the game. We were able to have all the different collectibles and items celebrating the brand, and the posters on the wall around you.”
And then you step into Waterdeep….
All Are Welcome at Universal Fan Fest Nights’ Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep
As many people there are who have played D&D, there will always be those who are still new to the game, which is why the introduction to Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep includes a very quick explainer of some of the basics, like the four character classes, which Siercks said “Was for the most casual fan. It’s that simple quest style. Something has been stolen, we’re recruited to help find it, and we actually start the education part of it out in the queue. So we’ve got as queue entertainment a video that plays out there that starts to introduce the characters, the spells, the town, the motivating circumstance around it.”
You then get into the story through the introduction of the first character (and real-life performer) you meet at Universal Fan Fest Nights’ Dungeons & Dragons‘ attraction, Lanalay Starshadow, the high-elf cleric who sets the story into motion before you begin your true journey with two others. Siercks said that all those elements “were part of the early concept of this, and really establishing both the characters as well as the storyline early in the experience, and then continuing to come back to it throughout. And then the other part that we were really excited about is that it’s unique to this experience that our adventurers, Throckary and Evalina, who we meet here in the quest unveiled, travel with us through the rest of the experience. Getting to know those characters along the way really helps to find that connection that motivates the story along.”
When I spoke to Kara Kenna (Creative Lead at D&D for Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons & Dragons), she explained that with Universal’s Secrets of Waterdeep, “The goal of this was not to teach people the full mechanics of the tabletop role playing game, but to get to step inside The Forgotten Realms and experience the D&D world and its villains and heroes for a day.”
This does include some fun, specific elements from the games explained to you by Throckary and Evalina throughout the experience, as you travel from room to room through the story. Said Kenna, “My favorite part is getting to learn about what Vicious Mockery is, which is a spell where you use verbal insults as magic to overcome a foe. Then getting to come up with your own insults to yell at Xanathar as a group was very fun.”
Building a Beholder
Ah, yes, Xanathar! The massive Beholder, who boasts a huge eye in the center of his face, along with several additional eyestalks, is a well-known entity for those who play D&D, but suffice to say, he makes an impression regardless of your history with him.
Xanthar is the centerpiece of Universal Fan Fest Nights’ Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep, and seeing him brought to life is an undeniable thrill, including for the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Kenna notes, “I’m used to seeing our characters on paper or on a TV screen or a movie screen, but haven’t actually gotten to stand in front of a life-size Beholder as it’s being constructed by master puppeteers before. So that felt like an amazing collaboration and opportunity to see these characters in a totally different way that I’ve never seen before.”
She isn’t kidding about master puppeteers, given Secrets of Waterdeep‘s Xanathar was built by the team at the legendary Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Said Peter Brooke (Creative Supervisor at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop), of the process, “We have a great designer here, Robert Bennett. He did the original Xanathar sculpture for us to work off of, and then Scott Johnson, who supervised this particular job, he’s a great designer and fabricator and he was tasked with enlarging it to the ultimate size.”
Recalled Kenna, “I got the opportunity to go down and see if they were just building the foam structure, and how they thought about how he would move, how he would appear to float. It was very, very impressive to watch them take our lore and the intricacies of our character and just realize him in such an amazing, beautiful way.”
Making Xanathar Last (And Float!) In Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep
Most of the time, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is making a puppet for a film or TV series, and Brooke said they do have to think about things differently for something like Universal Fan Fest Nights, where Xanathar will appear live in front of guests and Dungeons & Dragon fans over and over again.
Explained Brooke, “There is a difference of an approach to a certain extent, perhaps not so much in terms of the aesthetics, but certainly in terms of the technical parameters, because Xanathar has to operate for several hours of the day over [several weeks] So we’ve got to bear in mind that durability of the materials that we’re going to use and the durability of the mechanisms, but we’ve also got to consider that the performer, or the puppeteer, in this case, is going to be in there for quite a while. When you’re working on a movie thing or a TV thing, you’re really just trying to achieve the shot, for the most part. And if you can get through the shot, then if anything goes wrong, you’ve got a chance to maintain it or to repair it quite immediately. But Xanathatr has to be durable and work for a long time.”
As Brooke mentioned, there is indeed a live puppeteer involved in bringing Xanathar to life in Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep, including working his eyes and jaws. And as Kenna mentioned, despite his large size, Xanathar surprisingly doesn’t sit on any base and truly appears to float during the Universal Fan Fest Nights experience. Explained Brooke, “To give the sense of the floating orb that it’s supposed to be, it’s actually on a cable suspended from above. So there’s an innate sense of a sort of floating motion, just by virtue of the fact that it’s hanging from a cable. So inside, [the puppeteer has] got the eyes and the jaw, and then they can orient both the eye and the body of Xanathar so that it can follow the action around the room.”
Originally, the makers were going to give Xanathar a base to sit on, using a pile of gold to conceal the ground support, but Brooke said as they further developed the character, “We started to figure out what the character was about in terms of its movement. And so we ended up suspending it, and [Universal] retooled their set. We had it suspended on a rope here in the shop and once we’d seen it that way, we thought, ‘Okay, this is the way we should do it,’ because it offered this lovely sense that it was floating above the treasure, as opposed to being grounded onto a structure.”
Eggs of Easter
Beyond the pre-show room having real-life D&D game elements, there are a ton of props and weapons lining the shelves in the first couple of rooms of the Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep experience, and, not surprisingly, Siercks noted, “There are easter eggs around every corner. So every shelf is lined with an Easter egg of some sort, and then peppered in there are just some of our great set dressing and props that we have in our inventory that we’re able to pull out for the different experiences.”
Kenna was impressed by that Universal had done, saying, “They put so much thought into all of those details and recreated actual magic items and artifacts from the player’s handbook and the DMG [Dungeon Master’s Guide] and D&D lore. I was sad I didn’t have more time in that room to look at each individual thing, because having been a part of the approval process, I know what’s in there, and you could spend an hour going through all the details!”
Asked to name a favorite Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep Easter egg from the Universal attraction, Kenna replied, “My absolute favorite is Sylgar, the goldfish. He’s sitting there with Xanathar. And I think Xanathar is so amazing that you might get distracted and not get a good look at Sylgar. But he is my favorite character in D&D, so make sure you check him out!”
Indeed, you can spot Sylgar in his tank to Xanthar’s side. While the Henson Creature Shop worked on Xanathar, the team at Universal made his goldfish buddy and Brooke loved the final team-up of the team of the very differently sized creatures. “It was great. We’d only ever seen a mock up of the fish that they brought to one meeting. But once Xanathar was installed in the set, and we were spending time up there working on it, we got to see the relationship between the two characters.”
Another creature worked on in-house by Universal Studios Hollywood is the Mimic, who disguises itself as a chest at one point, as Mimics love to do. Said Siercks, “When you look at things that we wanted to bring to life for our guests as part of the experience, the Mimic was at the top of that list. It’s a fully animatronic figure that comes to life in the middle of the action, and our actors need to tame it with a whole monster spell to be able to keep it at bay. It’s a real surprise and delight opportunity for our guests as the story continues to unfold. “
Finding The Story of Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep
There is a ton of Dungeons & Dragons lore and history to pull from when crafting something like the Secrets of Waterdeep at Universal Fan Fest Nights, and Siercks said it was an embarrassment of riches they had to choose from for inspiration. “There’s 50 years of legacy for Dungeons & Dragons brands. We really wanted to make sure that we were creating a story that the most casual fan could follow, but the fan of D&D could really immerse themselves within so that’s when we certainly zeroed in on the Sword Coast and the town of Waterdeep, and then being able to bring to life the beholder, Xanathar, were kind of our two bookends. And then the story developed from there.”
Siercks noted it was nearly a two year process binging D&D to the inaugural Universal Fan Fest Nights, remarking “We’ve been working in partnership with Hasbro and the Wizards of the Coast team to establish and develop the story and then continue to be able to check in throughout the development process to make sure that we’re still staying true the two foundational goals of Fan Fest nights, which is being fan first—servicing the fans who have such fandoms for these genres – and being authentic. So how do we do it in a way that is both uniquely Universal and then authentic to each of these franchises and genres?”
Kenna said that on the Wizards of the Coast side, “We wanted to have a great mix of high stakes adventure, but also silliness and comedy. D&D really mixes those in a fun way. And it can be as dramatic and scary as you want or as silly as you want it to be as a role player. So mixing scary Red Dragons with Xanathar and his best friend goldfish definitely felt like a nice mix of scary and silly and fun.”
The Faces of Universal Fan Fest Night’s Waterdeep
In a typical Halloween Horror Nights house, you might have a recurring character pop up in different rooms, but it’s done via multiple scareactors playing them. And in another experience at Fan Fest Nights, for Star Trek, while actors play key roles as characters you interact with, they stick to one room, ushering you along to the next performer. But Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep instead has you sticking with the same two actors playing Dwarf bard Throckary Heartsong and Tiefling fighter Evalina Kemplina for nearly the entire time.
Discussing rooting the Dungeons & Dragons Universal experience to these two characters (and their performers), Siercks explained “Early in development, we wanted to make sure that we’re able to create a connection to our guests throughout this experience so that the storyline could continue to grow and evolve as we got deeper and deeper into the environments. And the best way to do that is to allow us to be introduced to two characters who then are with us for our journey and with us for our quest. And from there, we’re able to establish Throckary and Evalina, who are two just perfect [examples] of the dominant Dungeon & Dragons type character, and being able to establish that and be able to follow those three lines were really unique and special to the event.”
Kenna also loved how Universal Fan Fest Nights could echo the Dungeons & Dragons game using this approach, saying, “At the heart of D&D is an adventuring party, and when you play a game, you usually travel through with that party and maybe have conflicts, friendships, overcome obstacles with them. And so I think having the same people take you through each room and go through the entire adventure with you gives you a little bit of that adventuring party experience.”
While moving room to room, you do stay in each area for a bit as Throckary and Evalina expand the story and interact of Secrets of Waterdeep with each other and the guests, which is quite different from Horror Nights, where you constantly move forward.
Siercks noted this was an arena they were excited to delve into, saying “Fan Fest nights allows us to do is to be able to develop the storyline a little bit deeper, be able to to be able to introduce the characters a little bit more on a larger scale, and also to create these environments that our guests will appreciate. We knew that as we selected these brands, these franchises to develop, that being able to allow our guests to experience them in a more grand way was important. So that’s what brought us to the story-based pulse attraction and being able to allow our guests to be able to have more time in each of these rooms and be able to be told a longer, deeper story, which ultimately results in a longer experience too. So both Dungeons and Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep and Star Trek: Red Alert are around 10 to 12 minutes—longer than a traditional Halloween Horror NIghts-style experience.”
While actors play Throckary, Evalina and Lanalay in Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep, Xanathar is also a notable character in his own right. When it came to giving Xanathar more than just an imposing physical presence at Fan Fest Nights, Brooke said, “That’s one of the things that we kind of pride ourselves with doing very well, and that’s creating personalities and bringing a sense of character to these monster-type things. And. And that’s sort of an evolution that’s just trusting the creative process. Out of that comes this personality we also have. We had regular visits, not just by the Universal guys, who would come perhaps once a week to see the progress as we were working out technical aspects, but we also had a visit from some of the people from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, and so they could further illuminate us as regards the kind of lore of Xanathar and what he should do.”
The Fans Meet Fan Fest
Universal Fan Fest Nights is now open to the public, and everyone involved has been very happy seeing the reactions from attendees. Kenna remarked that walking through Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep alongside fans, “I loved watching them see all the details and easter eggs and kind of whisper them to each other and call them out. You could tell people were really engaged and looking around and looking for all of those hidden details and it was really fun to watch them discover them.”
Brooke said it was very satisfying seeing Xanathar moved from the shop into his home within Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep. “It’s something that we’re familiar with and we’re used to working with, but then with the addition of the lights and the sound and how that character integrates into the whole storyline of the event is very cool. Particularly the way that, with the lights and the sound, all of a sudden it became like a theatrical event and not just a big sort of ball floating about on an empty set. So it’s always great to see the final end result.”
As we stood in front of Xanathar a few hours before guests would arrive for the night, Siercks remarked, “One of my favorite parts about this experience is being able to stand in this room and just watch the guests as they hear that evil laugh behind us and then turn to see Xanathar be revealed all of his glory. Just that moment, especially for our Dungeons & Dragons fans, is such a great and rewarding moment within the experience.”
Universal Fan Fest Nights is now open at Universal Studios Hollywood on select nights through May 18.
The post Inside Universal Fan Fest Nights DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: SECRETS OF WATERDEEP appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
All rights reserved to : USAGOLDMIES . www.usagoldmines.com
You can Enjoy surfing our website categories and read more content in many fields you may like .
Why USAGoldMines ?
USAGoldMines is a comprehensive website offering the latest in financial, crypto, and technical news. With specialized sections for each category, it provides readers with up-to-date market insights, investment trends, and technological advancements, making it a valuable resource for investors and enthusiasts in the fast-paced financial world.