'Game of Thrones' Season 6: The 22 Biggest Changes From/Additions To the Books

For many characters and storylines, the end of Game of Thrones Season 5 marked the end of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire roadmap. With the 10 new episodes comprising Season 6—one of the series' most fast-paced and significant—we received a ton of all-original developments courtesy of showrunners/writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Here's what Game of Thrones Season 6 added to the lore—and what it completely changes. 

**Spoilers for both Martin's novels and HBO's series abound!**

1. Every single thing with Daenerys' dragons.
The last dragon scenes in the books are Dany suddenly flying Drogon out of the arena in Meereen (possibly the best scene in A Song of Ice and Fire so far) and Drogon refusing to help Dany get back to her city once they're way out in the middle of nowhere. So all the fire-spraying, Khalasar-intimidating, armada-leading dragon action this season—which by Episode 9 included an escaped Rhaegal and Viserion—was brand new. After 4,000 pages of waiting, it was extraordinary.

2. Cersei detonated the Great Sept of Baelor and everyone in it.
Book Four, A Feast for Crows, offers one of the series' chilliest moments when Cersei uses wildfire to torch the Tower of the Hand—which is inside the Red Keep, not across King's Landing—presuming Tyrion and Varys are hiding within. Reading it, the level of destruction is staggering. But on the show, wildfire can look like the equivalent of a medieval nuke, and its target was a far more populated, sacred place. With its detonation, we lost the horrible High Sparrow, the questionable Margaery Tyrell and her blundering father, as well as a bunch of trial-attendees and the entirety (or majority) of the also horrible Faith Militant.