BioWare, a game developer under Electronic Arts, announced today that they will begin working with Green Ronin publishing to create a pen and paper RPG set in the world of their upcoming game, Dragon Age: Origins. We've talked about Dragon Age here before, and from what we've been able to gather it looks like BioWare is really going all out on this one.

BioWare's said several times that Dragon Age is supposed to be the 'spiritual successor' to the massively successful Baldur's Gate franchise. Considering the money, effort, and prestige that BioWare's invested into this project, we can expect them to continue to throw a huge degree of support behind Dragon Age.

The move to pen-and-paper is an extremely sensible move. 'Traditional' gamers are still a huge market and, if Green Ronin does a good job of it, a well made PnP could be very lucrative. It would also draw more gamers to the computer and console versions of Dragon Age, which was undoubtedly BioWare's main reason for making this move.

Dragon Age: Origins isn't the first game to make the jump from electronic to traditional gaming. Diablo, Warcraft, and a whole slew of other video and computer games beat them to it long ago. What might separate Dragon Age from its predecessors is the level of effort being put into its PnP adaptation. Green Ronin is a good gaming studio, with a lot of work adapting fiction licenses (A Song of Ice and Fire, Black Company) into paper RPGs. Whatever they manage to come up with, it's sure to be at least worth a gander.