We’re going down, down, down by the river, and back to the city of Baldur’s Gate… albeit on TV, rather than in a game.
Deadline reports that HBO is working with Hasbro to develop a Baldur’s Gate TV series, which will be set immediately after the events of Larian’s third entry in the beloved RPG series. Craig Mazin, who has been the at-times-controversial figure behind HBO’s other big-ticket video game adaptation, The Last of Us, will create, write, executive produce, and showrun the new series.
Jacqueline Lesko, Cecil O’Connor, and Hasbro Entertainment’s Gabriel Marano will join Mazin as executive producers, while Chris Perkins—the former senior story designer for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, who jumped ship from the company to join actual-play company and rival TTRPG designer Critical Role last year—will serve as a consultant on the series.
Baldur’s Gate 3 saw an unlikely crew of characters brought together by the threat of the Cult of the Absolute—itself a front for the machinations of the sinister ilithid Mindflayers and a plot to invade the Forgotten Realms—and save the city of Baldur’s Gate from certain doom, generations after the events of the first two games in the trilogy. It was released in 2023 to critical acclaim and mass success, and developer Larian repeatedly confirmed that they would not be responsible for developing a fourth game in the series in the wake of its reception, leaving Hasbro with the reins on this particular vision of Dungeons & Dragons after bidding farewell to the game with an open-ended epilogue that teased the potential for further adventures for the party, six months after the events of the main game.
Since then, Hasbro has struggled to capitalize on the popularity of Baldur’s Gate 3, largely sticking to merchandise (some better than others) and some awkward integrations of key characters from the game into projects like the scrapped Virtual Tabletop system Project Sigil. But a TV show continuation also faces a series of challenges for Hasbro and HBO alike to overcome: the strongly baked-in popularity of the performers who brought Baldur’s Gate 3‘s characters to life with fans, how the show approaches providing a “canonical” conclusion to the player-driven choices of the game, and even the very nature of its central customizable protagonist, Tav.
Where other video game adaptations have decided on trying to hew as closely as possible to the source material, going their own way, or attempting to avoid that issue entirely, a Baldur’s Gate TV show will have a lot of hurdles to contend with to get its audience on board, well before it gathers its party and ventures forth.
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