So I made the terrible, horrible, no-good mistake of blasting through the entirety of “The Dragon Prince” on Netflix last night – only about 20 episodes total, each being about 20-25 minutes long – and now, my brain has sort of engaged on “how do I rip this off for gaming?” Because of course it does.
I’ve made no decisions to start planning for something like this, but I would be a liar if I didn’t say that the thought had not actually occurred to me that, right now, I could rip this show off almost entirely wholesale, plop it down in the middle of some random world, and run it in D&D. Honestly, I think I’d even lean toward using D&D 5E just because it seems a whole lot quicker.
The core conceit is thus: on this world, magic is mostly elemental-based and draw upon “primal sources” – the sky, the stars, the ocean, the earth, the sun, the moon – and humans weren’t born with magic, but discovered ‘dark’ magic which requires someone to basically leech energy from magical creatures themselves. This led them to harvest various magical creatures, which horrified elves and dragons who drove the humans out of their lands. Thus, there are basically two major nations, with the ‘dragon king’ protecting the border. Prior to the show starting, the dragon king was murdered by humans who, the story goes, also destroyed his only egg (and heir.)
As the story begins, elf assassins, including Rayla who is one of the Main Characters, have been dispatched to assassinate King Harrow of Katolis. She ends up meeting Callum, who is Harrow’s stepson, and Ezran, Harrow’s heir, and they discover that the Egg wasn’t destroyed, but instead was taken by the king’s high mage and close adviser, Viren, who is a master of dark magic. The three kids end up deciding to try and return the Egg to the dragon queen to avert the coming war. Hijinks ensue. Along the way, Callum ends up becoming a sorcerer himself and, by the end of the second season, has actually become the only human who can naturally cast instead of relying on Dark Magic.
So ultimately, this is actually a normal questline – take this MacGuffin to That Place – but the interesting thing to me is that the MacGuffin is actually alive! In fact, the end of the first season revolves around them trying to keep the critter from dying inside the egg, and culminates in it hatching so it’s a baby dragon.
But yeah. I needed this potential fantasy game to think about like a hole in the head, you know?