10 things The Witcher show should adapt from the video games

1. More Witchers

For the most part, Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels strictly follow the tale of Geralt as the story’s sole Witcher. While we do get to spend a little time with Vesemir, Eskel, Lamert and Coen — the other Witchers of the Wolf School, which Geralt belongs to — by and large we only get passing references to other witchers throughout the series.

The games are a totally different story.

Sapkowski’s books had three “schools” — Wolf, Cat and Griffin. The games took things a step farther and added more, like the School of the Viper and the School of the Bear. Over the course of the three games, Geralt has run-ins with more than a few other Witchers of different stripes. Usually they’re part of short side stories that highlight injustices in the world, or how the abuse of power can drive warriors of an otherwise honorable caste to do some less than honorable things.

In one instance, Geralt meets a Witcher who, after a stint murdering people as part of a criminal gang, retires to the city of Novigrad and adopts a human family…and uses them as a moral shield to try and avoid justice for his past violence. In another, Geralt comes across a village that has been massacred by a Witcher. While the case seems cut and dry, in the end it turns out that the villagers tried to stab that Witcher in the back rather than pay him, and he lost control.

The games are absolutely fantastic at portraying the ambiguity that suffuses the books, with the other Witchers providing plenty of it. Seeing how others have walked — or gone astray of — the same path as Geralt encourages us to reexamine his choices.

As Geralt tells the Cat School Witcher in the video above, “They call me the Butcher of Blaviken, for good reason. Sometimes…sometimes heads just roll.”