A few years ago it was the heyday of big, high fantasy TV series. Yes, the grit of Game of Thrones and Witcher were still popular, but there were also a selection of shows with a higher level of magic, higher level of heroism and a set of characters who you wanted to win. It was the era of peak fantasy TV.
Slowly but surely these faded away.
Some series got a reasonable run — The Magicians reached a conclusion. Some series were cut quite short — Willow, ended with more story to tell.
Universes were announced to be expanding. Shadow & Bone went from having the Six of Crows spinoff announced to the entire project dying.
There was big money in fantasy for a bit. These weren’t Brit TV specials like Merlin or modern attempts at low budget like Xena.
The biggest money of them all is still around. Rings of Power, the prequel-ish endeavor by Prime Video churns along at price points that are normally saved for theater or Andor.
The wheel weaves as the wheel wills, always turning.
Sometimes the wheel destroys the things you enjoy, like Wheel of Time — especially the last half of season 2 and all of season 3 with strong reviews and great fan appreciation. While there was enormous pushback against the changes made to adapt to the shorter run time of a book plus a bit per season, as well as pushback against the attempts to be less coded and more openly diverse, the series was generally well received. It was generally profitable.
It’s gone.
The story won’t finish (except in the books, which will always be around). Yes, there’s a petition to Save Wheel of Time. I hope it succeeds. Brandon Sanderson seems to suggest it should, but will not.
Petitions and book reading are passive.
Don’t be passive — adapt those stories to an RPG
Playing games in those worlds is active participation in the fandom, and helps build out that word of mouth.
You don’t need to have an authorized book in order to play. Any fantasy series, movie, video game, book, comic, etc can show up at your table.
You can instead borrow the themes, cultures, characters and put them in your world. Sure, you could play pure within the world created by Robert Jordan or Lev Grossman or Jonathan Kasdan.
The power of roleplaying games is that the tale is yours, no one can take it from you. The rules can be simple enough to fit on a business card or so complex it fills bookshelves.
What happens to Jade, Kit and Elora?
That’s up to you.
What happens to Mat, Perrin, Elayne, Min and the rest?
That’s up to you.
Take the themes, tropes and world of that story that a committee decided was no longer worth being told and tell it yourself.
That’s why I fell in love with D&D and RPGs in the 80s.
The unfinished trilogy, or maybe not
Back in my youth my bookshelves were covered with science fiction, fantasy and encyclopedias. Words on a page were meant to be consumed by me, like a black hole consumes a galaxy.
I’d shop at a used bookstore, looking for a new series to start. Except sometimes I’d never find book 2, let alone the inevitable trilogy. Sometimes I would start with book 3!
One of my favorite tales, and I say this as someone who had pets but didn’t really discover the love of pets until my 30s, was a story about a fading order of knights who rode giant tigers. The hero wasn’t really part of the order. His family was and he had that extremely large cat. In this dying world they journeyed, starting as outsiders and immediately recognized as legendary. But they were just a dude and a great cat.
They didn’t want to be heroes. It was so compelling, this story of man and beast who wanted to be normal while the world needed them to be great.
I never found book 2.
But I had already discovered Dungeons & Dragons. A character paralleling that tale was created. We roamed the worlds that Erik and Justin and Chis and Abel and Hayes and Jacob and Colin and Andrew and others created.
We finished that tale.
Wheel of Time is over, unless it isn’t
The series explored slightly different things from the books. One of those was how tales are told. There’s a suggestion from the meta of the series that within a world where there are endless retellings of tales and history.
What changes, and what stays the same is part of that story.
Your RPG could lean into that by playing similar characters at different levels, at different times with a power to oncer per month to have a past power show up, maybe ramping faster as time goes by.
Another possible exploration from the Wheel of Times series and books is how power corrupts. The nature of saidin is that man with power lose control of themselves — mentally, emotionally, physically.
Want to toss a saidin power into your D&D?
Maybe your Rand-ish character is a Warlock that has to roll on the Wild Magic table every time they cast a spell.
Of course, one of the most potent tales from the books that is amplified in the series is that women are not side characters. They are as important to the story, and powerfully so, as anyone else.
You don’t need special rules for this. The modern versions of D&D encourage this.
From Willow there is a connection in the series to the tales from the movie (history is a massive throughput in Wheel of Time as well).
To see this at your table means connecting a current adventure or campaign to one that ended a decade, a century, a millennia, an age ago.
A D&D campaign that builds off of former campaigns is a structure that generally needs some continuity of players, but can also be done through one-sheets, common knowledge pages and a regular re-telling of special moments.
This could happen around the campfire, on the steps of a temple, inside a tavern or any place where the PCs meet NPCs.
Find what’s important from these tales and make them your own
It’s rough to lose a special story.
You have your memory. You have your hope.
You have a game to help you continue the legends that are important to you. You don’t need Rafe or Sera or Kasdan.
You need dice, paper and a table of friends.
