The night is dark and full of terrors, but HBO isn’t willing to let Westeros go dark just yet. Although there are only two truncated seasons of the smash hit Game of Thrones left, HBO is developing multiple spin-offs set in the same world that George R. R. Martin created for A Song of Ice and Fire.
HBO made the expected but still thrilling announcement on Thursday afternoon, according to The New York Times. The network is working with four writers who are all looking through Martin’s many books and compendiums, like the World of Ice and Fire encyclopedia, for possible scripts. At this point, there’s no telling when in Westeros’s rich history the new shows would be set (or if it would even take place in Westeros instead of Essos, the ancestral home of the Targaryens).
None of the four writers, Max Borenstein, Brian Helgeland, Jane Goldman, and Carly Wray, have ever written for Game of Thrones before, although Martin is helping the last two out with their scripts.
In theory, this means that there could be up to four spin-offs, though chances are not every script will pan out. Details are still scarce at this time.
Dan Weiss and David Benioff, the executive producers of Game of Thrones, will serve as executive producers on the new series too, but HBO says they won’t play big roles in the production. “We will support them as they take a much-deserved break from writing about Westeros once the final season is complete,” the network said in a statement.
The earliest that we could expect a Thrones spin-off to air would be sometime in 2019, which would be great, since the main show will end in 2018.
Game of Thrones’s seventh season will premiere on July 16.
