Remediating The Tempest As A Playable TTRPG Module

More than 400 years after it was written, Shakespeare’s The Tempest continues to be republished, restaged and remediated into different forms, prompting new ways of seeing and analyzing the play. This research paper examines the process of transmedia adaptation through the case study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest adapted into a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) module. The Tempest is remediated as an interactive game based on Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition ruleset, designed to be facilitated by a Dungeon Master and played by a group of three to five players. The process of remediating The Tempest takes the play’s setting, characters, narrative conflict, and dialogue and translates them into the formal structure of the TTRPG, prompting questions that have long been asked in adaptation studies: how important is fidelity to the source text? What is lost, gained, and changed in transmedia translation? What role does the translator play in the creation of the adaptation?