Transmedia is a term coined by pop culture academic Henry Jenkins and used throughout the entertainment business. Here is his definition.

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

Media companies today are constantly looking for the next story they can convert into a transmedia franchise. An IP with transmedia potential can be worth billions of dollars. Obvious examples at this moment are The Avengers and Game of Thrones. Note the last sentence of Jenkins’ definition. “Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.”

That element is very important. A unified story with the same major themes told across media categories is a requirement for effective transmedia. It’s a story that you get in pieces of from different media like a scavenger hunt. If you want to get the whole Spiderman experience, you need to go read comics, watch the cartoons, play the PS4 game and see the Avengers movies. It’s only been a recent development that media companies begin with the intention of creating a transmedia franchise.

This is mainly a function of technology and the entertainment businesses being conglomerated into large multi media corporations. The technology piece is obvious. Comic books and trade paperback books only became viable business in the late 1930’s. Television, film and radio are all less than a century old. Many of today’s most popular media types didn’t exist until personal computers, the internet and mobile phones became ubiquitous. Automation and globalization has driven down production costs for manufacturing and printing by using inexpensive labor in the developing world. New markets in countries that have rapid growth like China and access to those markets via the internet has also driven these franchises.

What used to happen is that a novel or film would become popular with a large audience and then the suits from a different media would see the opportunity and license the property. Superman comics were popular so radio executives made a radio show. The radio show and comics were popular so film executives licensed film rights. This incremental method is how Middle Earth and Hyboria became large franchise properties over time but was not the original intention of their creators. I don’t think it was until the late 70’s and early 80’s that anyone really noticed you could build a story with the intention of telling it across multiple media from its inception. One of the companies that figured it out was TSR.

On their way to a job interview with TSR, Tracy Hickman and his wife came up with the idea for a series of adventure modules where each color of dragon in the AD&D Monster Manual was the central obstacle, somewhat reminiscent of Against The Giants series. Management at TSR liked the idea and decided that they could build a new campaign setting franchise around it to include board games, and miniatures. Hickman got the green light and started getting other staff members at TSR to contribute their particular talents to the project.  At some point, the team working on the project got management to agree, reluctantly, to add novels to the product line. My understanding is that the novels were thought of as a marketing tool to sell more game books. There was not much expectation that the novels would sell. It ended up the novels made more money for TSR than the game books did. They were read by fans of epic fantasy fiction who didn’t play the game. The audience was much bigger than the gaming hobby. I knew a lot of people in the 80’s, including my mother, who never picked up a D20 but read at least a dozen Dragonlance novels.

Dragonlance was wildly successful and TSR just kept adding more products because there was, for a while, an insatiable demand for them. There were calendars with the iconic images of the characters and dragons, board games, Dragon Magazine articles, the Spellfire card game, and video games. TSR’s experience with Dragonlance gave them a foundation for how to deploy transmedia strategy effectively. This led to the creation of Dark Sun and Planescape. Both product lines were built, with the intention of being a transmedia story with novels, video games, miniatures and board games to go along with the RPG products. We see it today in the 5E era with Forgotten Realms. While the business piece of the story is important, I am most interested in why the transmedia strategy works in the first place. What is it that gets people to come back to the Marvel Universe, Krynn or Faerun?

The thing that Dragonlance, LotR, Conan, Avengers and Game of Thrones have in common is world building. Every DM knows that a key ingredient of a successful Dungeons and Dragons game is effective world building. If your world isn’t interesting then your players aren’t going to be engaged enough to want to explore it, meet its people or have adventures there. Great world building is key because you can tell a lot of different stories, with different characters that all have the world in common.

The Dragonlance team did a very effective job at building the world. This gave them enough room to tell different stories of Krynn across the product line. You couldn’t get the whole in just one of the stories. Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman did a great job of leaving tantalizing hints about the broader world in their novels. They would mention legendary knights, old wars and gods which kept the reader asking questions about those stories and those heroes.  In order to get the full Dragonlance story, you had to play or at least read through the game supplements, the novels, and the comic books.

Many of the current generations of creative people in the various forms of entertainment media we have today grew up playing D&D. They are becoming better and better at building these sorts of transmedia properties. I think we will continue to get this sort of intentionally constructed “world building” approach to storytelling across media types.