Westeros

The second enhanced edition of the A Song of Ice and Fire series—e-books exclusive to Apple iBooks, filled with glossaries, annotations, illustrations, and more—has now been released and can be purchased on iTunes. As we’ve said previously, these enhanced editions are really aimed at readers who find the mass of characters, locations, and incidents daunting, as the embedded information really helps with keeping track of what’s going on. However, the added art and some of the more obscure trivia in the annotations may well appeal to hard-core fans, so feel free to give it a look as well!

UPDATE: According to a follow-up report this week, as reported by Göteborg Posten, it looks like HBO has indicated that while it found Gotland very interesting it doesn’t have what they’re looking for and so Game of Thrones wll not be filming there. You can find our original report below:

A curious item out of Gotlands Tidningar caught our eye, as it indicated a production company on Gotland was currently involved in collecting location photos for what we can only assume is early location scouting for season 8 of Game of Thrones.

According to Olivia Munck of The Line, a production and location services company in Gotland, over 300 images have been sent to the production in several batches as different environments and places were requested; these include images of the medieval town of Visby, followed by a second batch of Visby photos with a focus on older or more “aged” environments, and then a batch of photos focused on old farmsteads on Gotland (including Kattlunds and Stavgard).

Visby, which was the center of Hanseatic League for two centuries, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the best preserved medieval town in Scandinavia. Its medieval walls stretch for over 2 miles (3 kilometers), it’s packed with ruins of churches and cathedrals (such as St. Nicolai, where Linda and I held a few talks last year). It’s a beautiful, and quite unique, place, which has for over 30 years hosted the famous Medeltidsveckan medieval festival. The rest of Gotland is also dotted with historical sites and sites of archaeological value, and features some beatuiful vistas (as one can see on The Line’s site). And of course, being in Scandinavia, it’s also known to get a good deal of snow which one supposes might be considered useful for the final season of the series.

So, is the production actually going to end up filming in Sweden? Munck was also interviewed by Sveriges Radio after the initial article made the rounds in the press, and there reiterated that she felt the production certainly has some interest in filming there since she doesn’t suppose they would have asked for so many pictures over time if they were writing it off. At the same time, however, she cautioned that nothing was certain at this stage, that no contracts had been signed, and gave it no better than 50/50 odds after citing that Sweden does not have the kind of tax breaks for film productions that Iceland, Spain, Croatia, and other countries where Game of Thrones has filmed previously.

According to Munck, after all these photos the next step for the production (if they continued to be interested) would probably be sending someone over to take a look around in person.

The storming success of the GRRM Box limited edition collection—Random House reports that only 4 of the initial 200 Ultra Limited boxes remain—has led to the publisher and HBO offering fans in the United States (and the U.S. only, alas!) to enter a sweepstakes with the chance to win limited-edition and collectible Game of Thrones prize packs! Three winners will be selected on Tuesday, November 15th. All you have to do to enter—besides live in the U.S. and meet the other rules and requirements—is enter your email address.

What’s in the prize pack? Some amazing stuff, we have to say:

Tomorrow is the official release date for A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition, which is being released to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Of course, the book has hit shelves in some stores—check your local bookshops!—and there have already been some early reviews. One of these comes by way of our friends at A Podcast of Ice and Fire, and they’ve gone ahead and shared their thoughts on the book. For our part, Linda and I had an early chance to look at the book, and we have to say there’s some fantastic new art from Levi Pinfold, Magali Villeneuve, and Aranzta Sestayo. There’s also the welcome republication of some of Michael Komarck’s beautiful artwork based on the series that he’s done over the years. Definitely worth checking out, and we hope we’ll see more illustrated editions down the road!

For a recent preview featuring some of the artwork, make sure to take a look at Vanity Fair’s article from last month.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of A Game of Thrones, Random House and HBO has teamed up to create a box containing a special collectible version of the A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition as well as a selection collectibles and exclusive items. The box will be available in three versions—Special, Limited and Ultra—though sadly only in the US and Canada. The full press release has been included below.

Today we say Happy 10th Anniversary, Blood of Dragons MUSH! If Elio and I had not met on Elendor MUSH back in 1995 and if we had not decided that we wanted to start a MUSH of our own, Westeros.org would not exist. Of course, the site has grown far beyond our original intentions—which was simply to provide information to players of our game—but it all started with the weird and wonderful hobby of on-line roleplaying.

And if anyone wants to give it a try, we always welcome more converts to the world of text-based gaming. Or “collaborative story-telling” as we sometimes describe it as, because it is a lot more about shaping stories together than rolling dice and beating up monsters. If that makes you curious, try out our web-based guest client to visit Westeros in the time of Baelor the Blesed.