Today, during their Showcase at Gen Con 2025, Magpie Games announced further details on their partnership with bestselling author Naomi Novik. The first game released by the studio will be Temeraire The Roleplaying Game. We spoke with the author about her partnership with Magiepie and a few details about what fans can expect from the upcoming game.
“My agent Cynthia came to me with Magpie as a potential partner for making a Temeraire game, and from the first time we talked, I felt it was just a great match,” said Novik. “The challenge–and the fun–of turning Temeraire into a game is the way it mixes the fantasy of dragonriding and the swashbuckling of the Napoleonic Wars and the Austenian comedy of manners. Their plans for how to make all of that work with their own core storytelling process sounded so right to me.”
Temeraire is a fantasy series set during an alternate history of our world during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 18th Century. The books focus on an air war fought with dragons who bind themselves with their human riders. They combine swashbuckling fantasy with the high tension air combat of military fiction.
“I love reading both history and fantasy for the joy of traveling to a world that I can never really visit — the one because it’s gone, and the other because it’s never been,” said Novik. “As a writer, I love them both because you need to do the same work of worldbuilding in order to take your readers along with you. Building a fantasy world on top of a historical world is all about figuring out where to draw the line between history and imagination. With Temeraire, one of the pleasures was staying as close to historical accuracy as I could in everything except the dragons, because I wanted the dragons to feel very real and almost ordinary — something that the reader could believe in as easily as the sailing ships and the great battles and the formal dances. I really enjoy both the constraints and the resources of staying accurate to a historical setting. What I mean is, if you want to write about a meal in a historical setting, and you want it to be accurate, you can’t just write that scene without constraints–you can’t have them eating whatever food comes to mind. But you also have the wonderful ability to just go and find out. You can look up menus and meals that were served in Georgian England; there are so many facts we know about what materials they had, what technology; we can read books written atthe time to get inside the head of people who really lived back then.”
Novik has been a fan of RPGs for decades. Her early experiences shaped her love of fantasy. Though this is her first foray into a licensed RPG, she’s very familiar with the classics.
“I started DMing around age 10 with Advanced D&D,” said Novik. “I still have my copies of Temple of Elemental Evil and Tomb of the Lizard King and a cardboard box full of ludicrously overpowered characters. I had a tough time recruiting players so ended up with one pal and our little sisters, none of whom were really interested, so I encouraged them by handing out hilarious amounts of xp and treasure.”.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Licensed role playing games often expand the worlds that they support. For example certain details from the most recent series of Andor first appeared in sourcebooks for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Because Game Masters tell their own stories, the best RPG sourcebooks give more detail about areas outside the original media.
“I’m really excited about the new opportunities that fans will have to imagine themselves vividly into the world of Temeraire,” said Novik, “and to tell their own stories. The books have a tight focus on the story of Laurence and Temeraire; so much more is happening in the world around them that we didn’t get to see. I hope the game will let readers explore much more of the world and dive deeper into all the stories I didn’t get to tell. I especially love that Magpie has come up with a great way to let players play either human or dragon characters.”
Temeraire The Roleplaying Game puts players in the saddles and boots of the British Air Corps to give players the core experience they lived from the books. The bond between pilots is strong but one of the most memorable parts of the books are the relationships between the dragons and their riders. The game hopes to strengthen and challenge those bonds through the adventures in play.
“Magpie’s concept,” said Novik. “which resonated with me immediately, is to center the game around the formations of the British Aerial Corps. In Temeraire, these formations, which are made up of dragons and their crews of human aviators, are fighting on the front lines of the Napoleonic Wars. They’re the equivalent of a squadron in an air force–if the planes could talk and had their own opinions. Laurence and Temeraire themselves are assigned to one of these formations, headed by the Longwing dragon Lily. Everyone in a formation can play a significant role, from the dragons to the cook on the ground crew, and Magpie is putting together a system for players to develop their own characters from among both a wide range of dragon breeds and aviator military positions.”
Current plans for the game include a quickstart to show off the rules plus a crowdfunding campaign sometime in 2026. Magpie Games anticipates a 2027 release for the game. If everyone goes to plan, that means a Gen Con 2027 debut for Temeraire The Roleplaying Game.
“I think Temeraire The Roleplaying Game [is] going to allow players to have story experiences on all those different layers,” said Novik. “The fantasy of working with dragons and the fun of imagining yourself into a different era, the adventure of war and individual combat, and the more subtle level of the personal and the political. And because it’s all happening within the formation, you can have all these potentially very different characters bound together and interacting naturally, and working towards larger complex goals.”
