Yes, yes. The "Cold Winds are Rising." Holy crud, April 1st is taking forever. We're all frothing at the bit here at IGN - in desperate need of more Tyrion Lannister Jon Snow…and, yes, even King Joffrey. That's how much we're jonesing for a Game of Thrones fix! So to tide you over, we've got some scoop.

GoT Series Creators Talk to IGN About the Season 1 Blu-ray

I had a chance to speak to series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss about the upcoming sure-to-be-spectacular Season 2 . What were the big challenges? Who are the new characters we should look out for? What may or may not have changed from George R. R. Martin's second book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Clash of Kings? So get ready for lots of juicy morsels about the Battle of Blackwater, fan outage over Ned Stark and making Daenerys' Season 2 story more dramatic.If you haven't read the books and don't want to know anything about the characters and set pieces of Season 2 (or Season 1 ), avert ye eyes!

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: Adapting the series, as George [R. R. Martin ] has talked about many times, is incredibly difficult mostly because of the scope of the books. And book two, A Clash of Kings, gets a lot bigger in a lot of ways. Book two is just a longer book, first of all. It's just a bigger book in terms of the number of worlds we're supposed to visit. And so when you think about the start of Game of Thrones , the Starks are all pretty much in one place – Winterfell. And even the royal family is going up there for a visit. So everyone's going to gather in the same place. And it's only towards the end of the season that everyone starts to get really diffused. But in Season 2, from the get go, everyone's in a different place. Jon Snow is going beyond the wall, so we went up to Iceland to shoot most of that stuff. Robb Stark is on the march south because he's at war with Tywin. Arya is on the run and Sansa is stuck in King's Landing. And so on and so forth. So from a production standpoint it was a challenge given the schedule that we had to shoot all of these wildly different locations. In Iceland, Croatia and Northern Ireland. And in terms of the storylines, I think our first season was already the biggest task in television history, but Season 2 – even though we killed a lot of people off in Season 1 – has even more characters coming in. And so we can't kill the characters fast enough.: First of all, I love Daenerys' arc in the second book. It's definitely more internal in the book and so one of our challenges was to try to figure out how to make Daenerys' storyline a bit more external. Because one of the advantages we have with the series is the whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" idea. But while there are things we do really well on a TV show, there are also certain things that we just can't do at all. We can't possibly match George. And one of the things we can't match is the access you get to the characters' inner minds. He'll have these captivating interior monologues and unless we wanted to have five minutes of voice over, which we never want to do, it's not going to be something we're going to be able to match. So with Daenerys, specifically, we were trying to come up with a storyline that more or less tracks what happens in the books but then also coming up with ways to dramatize it further.And then there are other places where in the books the characters are largely off-page, for example Robb Stark is obviously an important character, but since he's not a POV character in book two, and there are no chapters he's narrating, we just don't spend all the much time with him in Clash of Kings. And because we love the character, and because we fell in love with Richard Madden's interpretation of him, we wanted to spend more time with Robb in the series. And so that was more taking the storyline that we hear about in the books, off-page, and actually presenting it on screen and making a couple of dramatic changes to his experiences. For each character it's become a case-by-case thing.

Season 1's Best & Bloodiest Kills!

: I hope so. I mean, yeah it does feel that way. And with George, from the beginning we told him, back before we had the rights to do it and we were asking and begging for his permission to adapt this, we always told him that we wanted to do a faithful adaptation. But in cases like this, until you actually get to see it out there, you never know. And I think George believed we were telling the truth, but until he actually saw it I don't think he knew if he could completely trust us. So I think the first part of it was winning George's trust and then secondly, and a byproduct of the first part, was winning the trust of the fans. Certainly not every single fan is going to love it because the fans are not a homogenous group. They have wildly dispirited feelings. And there are fundamentalist fans who don't think anything should be changed. And then there are the fans who do realize that certain things need to be changed.

More about Season 2, including the Battle of Blackwater, on page 2...