New Game of Thrones spin-off teased ahead of House of the Dragon season 2 premiere

Fans of Game of Thrones are probably counting down the hours until House of the Dragon season 2 premieres — 87 hours at the time of writing — but novel writer George R.R. Martin has another number he wants you to be thinking about.

This number is '10,000', specifically Ten Thousand Ships, because the figure (who's also a producer on all the Game of Thrones series) has spilled some tea on this anticipated spin-off.

Martin has confirmed in a blog post that a writer has been attached to Ten Thousand Ships, a spin-off which was announced several years ago.

This writer is Eboni Booth, a playwright famous for Primary Trust and Paris which have both received awards over the past few years. Booth has also written episodes of Julia and We Were the Lucky Ones, co-producing the latter too.

Eboni has apparently been working on a pilot for Ten Thousand Ships for HBO which Martin promises will have "ten thousand ships, three hundred dragons, and those giant turtles".

Ten Thousand Ships is set to tell the story of a princess called Nymeria, from a people called the Rhoynar which was all but wiped out by an army of 300 dragons. Nymeria took her people on boats (no prizes for guessing how many) on an adventure across the seas, sort of like the Odyssey, until they settled a region called Dorne which features quite a bit in Game of Thrones.

The series was reportedly being worked on several years ago and was thought to have been scrapped, but Martin's blog post proves that it's being revived with new talent.

HBO is no stranger to scrapping Game of Thrones pilots. Reportedly, the first pilot of the original show was scrapped and never aired, and it had to be re-shot by a new director before it was released. And after HBO commissioned five spin-offs in 2017, it slowly confirmed that some of them had been scrapped, with only 2 still in the works by 2019.

So the fact that Ten Thousand Ships has picked up enough steam to be posted about by George R.R. Martin suggests good things about this next spin-off. Just don't expect to be able to see it any time soon, given the scope of projects like these.