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Dungeons & Dragons was once best known in pop culture as the game played exclusively by outcasts, like on Freaks & Geeks and Stranger Things. In more recent years, however, the tabletop role-playing game has become much more popular in mainstream media, and there are several TV shows on the way that bring the D&D action to the small screen. Some are based on pre-existing campaigns, while one involves actual play on camera in an episodic format, and others are entirely original.
Television has turned out to be the best format for bringing Dungeons & Dragons to life on screen. Chris Pine's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves film was a hit on Rotten Tomatoes with critics and viewers, but enough of a box office disappointment that no sequel was produced to follow up on the 2023 movie. In contrast, Prime Video already has two successful shows that are adapted from real-life D&D campaigns, and the list of small-screen adventures is only growing.
In fact, most of the D&D shows that are moving forward already have built-in fanbases who will be interested in seeing how the campaigns are turned into television. There are live-action and animated projects on the way, and viewers won't need to roll any dice to go along for these Dungeons & Dragons rides. Viewers don't even need to be well-versed in D&D mechanics or lore to tune into a TV show inspired by the game, and it may just be a matter of time before the list of hit Dungeons & Dragons shows will be a lot longer.
The Legend Of Vox Machina Season 5 (Prime Video)
The Legend of Vox Machina was the first hit show inspired by Dungeons & Dragons in the last decade, and it was all but guaranteed to be a success. The series is an adaptation of Critical Role's first D&D campaign, which ran from 2015-2017 with a cast of prolific voice actors playing on camera for millions of viewers. The show, which started out as a Kickstarter to fund an animated feature, recently wrapped its fourth season on Prime Video, and there's still one season left to go before the final credits roll on the Vox Machina team of heroes.
Unfortunately, Prime Video has not yet confirmed when exactly the fifth and final season will be ready. The first two seasons were released almost exactly one year apart from each other, starting in early 2022. The wait for season 3 was significantly longer, with nearly 20 months passing before the premiere in 2024. The break between seasons 3 and 4 was of a similar length. If that pattern continues for season 5, The Legend of Vox Machina might not be back with its final season until late 2028.
That said, the Critical Role team has had plenty of time to plan ahead for the final season, since Prime Video renewed Vox Machina for the fourth and fifth seasons at the same time. The animation is presumably what will take the longest, so details about when it will be ready to debut are likely a long way off. In the meantime, Prime Video has another animated D&D show that is expected to release a new season during Vox Machina's hiatus.
The Mighty Nein Season 2 (Prime Video)
Following Critical Role's success with The Legend of Vox Machina, The Mighty Nein arrived on Prime Video in 2025 as the adaptation of their second D&D campaign. While not a direct sequel to the original, the shows share the same fantasy universe, and are tied closely enough that eagle-eyed fans noticed a Mighty Nein Easter egg in the latest season of Vox Machina. Set on the continent of Wildemount, the show brought together a motley crew of adventurers with varying levels of trauma in their backstories, and season 1 ended on a cliffhanger to set up season 2.
Prime Video has not yet announced when The Mighty Nein will be back, but it's possible that the schedule will be comparable to Vox Machina. Both shows received orders for two seasons from the very start, which led to the hiatus of less than a year between Vox Machina's first and second. The Mighty Nein premiered in November 2025, so fans may be able to count on the next season in November 2026.
Cast member, executive producer, and Critical Role co-founder Travis Willingham dropped some encouraging comments in April. He told ComicBook.com:
We were so happy with the response to season 1. We left off with Yasha finally meeting the Mighty Nein in the tunnels underneath Rexxentrum. Obviously, that’s going to have to resolve itself somehow. I don’t know when Amazon is eyeing the release date for that, but that second season is almost entirely finished, so it’ll be ready soon. It depends on where they want to drop it in their slate.
If season 2 was almost entirely finished in late April, then a premiere before the end of 2026 is certainly feasible. Critical Role revealed details about The Mighty Nein (and Vox Machina) at San Diego Comic-Con last year, so fresh news about the Mighty Nein could break by the end of July.
Forgotten Realms (Netflix)
The world of Dungeons & Dragons will come to Netflix in live-action, but not as a sequel to the Honor Among Thieves film. The new project, which hails from Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy, will be called Forgotten Realms. The title is taken not from a specific campaign or story, but from the fantasy world setting in which many D&D games take place.
Chris Pine's movie was set in the Forgotten Realms world, as is the Baldur's Gate video game franchise. The TV show will take place in that world, but details have been otherwise scarce since the project was first announced in 2025. Shawn Levy shed some light on why there have been so few developments since early 2025, telling Collider late last year:
The reason that it’s taken so long, and the reason why it is a challenging process is you’re not adapting story IP. You’re adapting a world, and a lexicon, and a spirit, but story needs to be invented, largely from scratch, and it needs to be invented in a way that feels organic to everything that’s great about D&D.
Unlike The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein, with hundreds of hours of actual play source material from Critical Role, the Forgotten Realms show's story is a blank slate other than the setting. The live-action Dungeons & Dragons series was originally set to release on Paramount+. Given Netflix's success with fantasy titles like Stranger Things and (to a lesser extent) The Witcher, it could be the ideal home for Forgotten Realms whenever it arrives.
Baldur's Gate (HBO)
If there's one property that helped introduce the idea of playing Dungeons & Dragons to the masses, it would be the Baldur's Gate video game franchise. News broke in early 2026 that HBO is working on an adaptation of Baldur's Gate 3, the most recent (and immensely popular) installment in the game series. The show will avoid the potential problems of adapting the beloved characters, and instead pick up in the aftermath of the game's ending. It's a bold move, and a major departure from how HBO adapted The Last of Us from game to screen.
That said, Craig Mazin, the co-creator of HBO's The Last of Us, is on board Baldur's Gate as writer, executive producer, and showrunner. Fans of the franchise don't have to worry about whether he has the background to bring the world to life on television; Mazin told Deadline that he's put "nearly 1000 hours into the incredible world of Baldur’s Gate 3," and he's a "devoted fan of D&D." Chris Perkins, the former Head of Story at Wizards of the Coast, will be a consultant.
The series will feature existing characters from Baldur's Gate 3 and original characters, so it should be interesting to see how casting decisions are made for the familiar faces. Mazin reportedly planned to contact the voice actors to participate in the TV show. The Last of Us managed to do just that by casting Ashley Johnson, the voice of Ellie in the games, to play the mother of Bella Ramsey's character on the show. All of this said, Mazin's deal for Baldur's Gate was reportedly only closed in early 2026, and there have been no major updates since February.
Dimension 20 (Dropout)
There are plenty of options to watch (or listen to) actual play Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and Critical Role is arguably the most successful in expanding beyond the tabletop. Dimension 20, hosted by longtime Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan, is the actual play option that releases campaigns that are on the shorter, more digestible side with a high production value. The result is an ongoing production that genuinely feels like a TV show with different seasons instead of one saga that spans hundreds of hours.
At the time of writing, D20 is releasing its 30th season on Dropout, a rising streaming platform with plenty of shows that are worth binge-watching. The D&D series started out relatively small, as one of Dropout's two options when it rose from the ashes of CollegeHumor in 2018. Within a decade, Mulligan and the rest of the cast were performing an episode of Dimension 20 at Madison Square Garden.
While it's not a scripted series that's based on Dungeons & Dragons, Dimension 20 combines the feeling of a show with a traditional release schedule together with a format that introduces viewers to how D&D actually works, while delivering plenty of laughs. Plus, for anybody who is anxiously awaiting news of Critical Role's animated projects, Forgotten Realms, and/or Baldur's Gate, there are plenty of episodes of Dimension 20 to keep anybody busy.
