“One of the things that was most interesting when I met with Andrzej is that I said I was very surprised at the strong women that were in the books,” Hissrich recalls. “And he said, ‘You never met my mother, did you?’” Hissrich says that Eastern influence, where a culture was led by women after men died in medieval warfare, is one of the many standout aspects of a universe she’s become intimately familiar with.

In preparation for pitching on the series, she read the books cover-to-cover, and then after getting the series, she “imprinted” them to memory by listening to them again as audio books on her daily commute. (She also played the video games, as best she could while admitting gaming is not her natural habitat.) In it all, she came to a realization that it is in those strong women and the earlier short stories where the foundation for this series could be built. What made her vision of The Witcher most persuasive to Netflix wasn’t that she was rushing into the epic saga so many gamers might have already memorized, but also digging into the earliest short stories compiled in books like The Last Wish.

Says Hissrich, “I think anyone who pitched on The Witcher kind of immediately started on the saga, because it is the most serialized storytelling. It is the easiest place to start. You can sort of see episode to episode. But I felt if we skipped the short stories, we would miss the juiciest world-building and sort of the foundation, the environment from which these characters grow. So I knew I needed to include the short stories, and I wanted to tell them with Yennefer and Ciri at the forefront as well as Geralt, even with The Last Wish [set] before Ciri is born.”

It also offered major roles for relative newcomers like Chalotra and Allan. The British born Chalotra especially enjoyed an added duality to the character that was only ever hinted at in the books and video games. Before she was an all-powerful sorceress, Yennefer was born with a hunchback and very much abused and vilified by her own family for it. Both sides to this character, told in the present and via flashback, provide two different challenges for a character who on the page was initially defined by her mysteriousness toward Geralt.

“What’s been exciting is the backstory is new, that it’s not explored in the novels,” Chalotra says in a separate interview. “So I got the chance to explore all the complexities, all the layers that are underneath the Yennefer we know and love.” One of the most intriguing is unpacking the trauma left by living with physical disability. Because even in a world where magic can take away physical scars, the psychological ones remain.