Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 follow.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a huge hit in a way that no other Dungeons & Dragons video game ever was. Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro and the current D&D license holder, would obviously love to capitalize on the game’s runaway success. Larian Studios decided not to make any more Baldur’s Gate games, though, so the folks at Wizards need to turn elsewhere to capitalize on its popularity. That means spinoffs, and likely lots of them.

We’ve already seen characters from the game turn up in official D&D RPG products. Karlach and Minsc grace the cover of Heroes of Faerûn, for example, with Astarion and Shadowheart joining them in official artwork within the book. Astarion got his own digital product, and the alternate cover of the Monster Manual features a mind flayer who is very recognizable to players who made it to Act Three of the game.

But those are all cameos. Beyond the boundaries of the rulebooks lie the spin-off products that feature these popular characters’ personalities, the aspects of them that fans fell in love with them. Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion comes out this month, Karlach is getting a comic book, and the game as a whole is getting an HBO spinoff series. But how will these complex and multifaceted characters translate to other media?

Larian created a very rich story with Baldur’s Gate 3, and part of that is that the characters people meet in Act One are only facades or surface impressions of who they really are. As the game goes on, you discover that they run much deeper, but only if you get their initial masks to drop. How will that sort of depth translate into spinoff stories where the corporate owners of the brand will want the characters to be as recognizable and marketable as possible?

Let’s take a look at what Wizards of the Coast has done with this sort of thing in the past and what it might mean for the future.

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