Progeny - TV Pilot/Video Game Concept

Project Type: Original Game Concept / Television Pilot
Year: 2024–2025
Role: Creator & Writer
Genre: Fantasy / Science Fantasy
Format: 54-page Pilot Screenplay + Original Game Outline

Progeny began life not as a television series, but as an original video game concept.

I first developed the world of Xolis around the idea of six distinct Provinces, each shaped by its own history, culture, environment and relationship with the ancient gods that once ruled them. At the centre of the story were six prospective Champions: characters with independent histories, motivations and questlines whose paths would gradually converge around the Heliarath, a deadly contest used to select the next General of Xolis.

The original game concept was designed around switching between these six playable protagonists throughout the story. Each Champion would provide a different perspective on the wider world and its conflicts, with their individual narratives gradually revealing pieces of a much larger mystery surrounding Xolis's forgotten history, its supposedly dead gods and an approaching war.

When I was later tasked with writing an original television pilot as part of my Creative Writing and Screenwriting degree, I chose to return to Progeny and explore how the concept could work in an entirely different narrative medium.

Adapting it for television meant reconsidering how a large game world could be introduced without relying on player exploration. The pilot needed to establish the mythology and history of Xolis while introducing multiple locations, cultures and character storylines, each distinct enough to stand independently while beginning to reveal the narrative threads connecting them.

I used the pilot's opening sequence to establish the ancient history of Xolis visually, before moving into the present-day world through its characters. Rather than introducing every aspect of the setting at once, different environments, beliefs and conflicts are revealed through the people who inhabit them — from Skyla and her found family navigating the criminal underworld of Drathe, to Haider's supernatural journey through Tthatin and Sorren's life within the technologically advanced military state of Vheim.

Writing Progeny in both forms became an exercise in worldbuilding, character-led storytelling and adaptation. The underlying world and narrative remained the same, but the way the audience experienced them had to change. Ideas originally intended to be discovered through exploration, quests and player-controlled characters instead had to be communicated through scene structure, dialogue, visual storytelling and intersecting narrative threads.

Story & World Overview

Progeny is set in Xolis, a civilisation divided into six Provinces, each shaped by the influence of an ancient god or goddess. Once, these gods ruled Xolis directly, sharing resources and power between their territories and building a civilisation that connected the mortal world of The Below with the celestial realm of The Above. Each Province developed its own identity: from the magically illuminated lands of Seles and the crystal-rich mountains of Kiphia to the coastal wealth of Isiross, the natural wilderness of Tthatin, the technologically advanced Vheim and the central oasis of Vora.

That age ended during an uprising later remembered as The Change. Mortals turned against their divine rulers, stole their power and forced the surviving gods into exile. In the aftermath, six new mortal rulers seized control of the abandoned Provinces and deliberately reshaped the historical record, restricting or destroying knowledge of the world that had existed before them. Over centuries, the gods themselves faded into little more than myth.

In the present day, Xolis is governed by The Six Crowns. The Provinces remain separated by The Expanse, a vast desert filled with ancient myths, creatures and forgotten history. But something beneath it is beginning to awaken.

With war approaching, Xolis must appoint a new General. That General will be chosen through the Heliarath: a deadly contest in which Champions fight for the right to Ascend. At the centre of the story are six potential Champions, each beginning in a different Province with their own conflicts, relationships and reasons for eventually entering the Heliarath.

Skyla begins in the slums of Drathe, Vora's capital, working alongside a group of thieves and mercenaries she considers family. After a mysterious figure claims to know the truth about her birth, she learns that reaching the Heliarath may be her only route to the answers she has spent her life searching for. Getting there, however, means navigating Vora's criminal underworld and making increasingly dangerous deals with the people who control it.

Haider, once a healer and protector of Tthatin, has abandoned that calling after his village was destroyed and his family taken by an ancient demon. Now driven almost entirely by revenge, he travels the Terra Province hunting supernatural creatures and increasing his own magical power. His search eventually draws him towards forgotten temples, old gods and a bargain that could offer him his family back — at the cost of entering the Heliarath for someone else's purposes.

Kallias, heir to the Crown of Isiross, occupies an entirely different corner of Xolis. Raised amongst wealth, political influence and court intrigue, he has spent his life concealing the truth that he is a demigod. When that secret is exposed, his position collapses and he is forced beyond the security of the royal court, following visions that may reveal both the truth of his ancestry and the history his world has tried to bury.

Sorren serves as a Peace Officer in Vheim, a technologically advanced Province whose polished military image hides deep corruption. Frustrated by routine work and haunted by the disappearance of his brother, he is eventually drawn into the very military system he has grown suspicious of. What begins as an opportunity to prove himself leads towards secret organisations, government conspiracies and evidence that Vheim may know far more about the coming conflict than it admits.

Sitara is one of Seles's Light Bringers, part of a religious sisterhood tasked with preserving and teaching the Province's magical traditions. Newly ordained, she must undertake a pilgrimage into The Expanse in search of a forgotten temple. There, her understanding of the Old Light — and of Xolis's accepted history — begins to unravel as she encounters beings and knowledge that should no longer exist.

Runa, meanwhile, lives largely in isolation within Kiphia. After the deaths of her brothers and years of disturbing visions, she has devoted herself to the forbidden practice of communicating with Gem Souls, astral beings contained within the Province's crystals. Her search for greater magical understanding eventually leads her into ancient underground structures and into contact with Xaros, the supposedly long-dead god of Kiphia.

Although the six stories begin independently, they are designed to gradually converge. Each Champion is drawn towards the Heliarath by a different need — truth, revenge, duty, ambition, justice or survival — while the larger mystery surrounding Xolis unfolds around them.

In the original game concept, the player would move between these six characters throughout the first part of the story, experiencing different Provinces, combat styles and questlines before eventually choosing one Champion as their primary endgame character. The remaining five would continue as major NPCs, allowing relationships formed throughout the earlier story to influence the later conflict.

Their paths ultimately lead to the same arena. But before the Heliarath can determine its victor, the contest is interrupted by the return of the very beings Xolis has spent centuries insisting were dead: the ancient gods and the Yashac, enormous basilisk-like Old Gods long buried beneath The Expanse. The expected war between Xolis's Provinces becomes something much larger — a conflict between mortals and the powers they once overthrew.

At the centre of Progeny is one question:

When history has been rewritten by the people who won, how do you know who the monster really is?