17 Things to Look Forward to in Legacies

Legacies, the newest spinoff from The Vampire Diaries shared universe, will premiere this week, and it's something of an understatement to say that we're excited to see how this show continues upon the magic of The Originals.

Click through to find out what we're most excited to see in Legacies.

TV Guide staffer Lindsay MacDonald contributed to this gallery.

(Full Disclosure: TV Guide is owned by CBS, a parent company of The CW).

While The Originals dove headfirst into the lives of Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan) and his siblings in New Orleans, Legacies will pick up where that story left off, with his daughter Hope Mikaelson (Danielle Rose Russell) attending a boarding school for magical children in Mystic Falls.

Hope's time at school has only been briefly touched on in the fifth season of The Originals, but we'll be living there full time with her on Legacies. She'll face the bullies of Mystic Falls High and the mean girls of the Salvatore Boarding School, plus all the supernatural threats that come with being the tribrid daughter of Klaus Mikaelson.

Hope will be 17 years old when the show kicks off, giving it a two-year time jump from the end of The Originals. That will officially make Hope the same age Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) was when The Vampire Diaries launched, which means it'll be a sort of return to original form for the new series, despite its new timeline, characters, and settings.

Whereas all the vampires, witches and werewolves had to often hide who they really were while residing in Mystic Falls throughout The Vampire Diaries, Legacies' supernatural boarding school will allow these superhuman creatures to live together in peace, free to be who they are. It's a great concept (think X-Men meets Charmed), and it'll be interesting to what these kids can do when they're not spending so much time trying to conceal their identities.

Klaus and Elijah (Daniel Gillies) bit the dust -- literally -- in The Originals finale, so they obviously won't be around to visit Hope at her new school. However, Julie Plec did tell TV Guide that new series will answer the question of where their souls ended up in the afterlife. None of the other cast members of The Originals have signed on to continue their roles on Legacies, which means Hope's family will be out of sight but not out of mind when the show premieres. (However, fans of The Vampire Diaries universe know as well as anyone that you can never say never when it comes to old characters coming back into the picture -- whether they are alive or not.)

One fan-favorite character from The Vampire Diaries who will appear in Legacies in a very big way is Alaric Saltzman (Matt Davis) -- yes, Mystic Falls' occult expert extraordinaire -- who'll be a series regular, no less. As headmaster at The Salvatore Boarding School for the Young and Gifted, Alaric will play a major role in the series, in much the same capacity as he did on The Vampire Diaries. And Alaric isn't going to be alone ...

Alaric and Caroline (Candice King)'s twins will be part of the show too. Josie (Kaylee Bryant) and Lizzie Saltzman (Jenny Boyd) also attend Hope's boarding school, and they've got a bit of a mean girl reputation. Don't worry, though, The Vampire Diaries fans will remember that Caroline Forbes also started out as a mean girl before the show developed her into a complex and incredibly beloved character.

Lizzie in particular will have a lot in common with her mother. Jenny Boyd told TV Guide. "I've really tried to sort of bring that out in her and adopt some of those similar characteristics because Lizzie really does identify Caroline as being her mom and feels very close to her," Boyd said. "She has a lot of similarities in personality, but then she's also very different. I think she's got a more volatile side, to put it in those terms. She's very emotional and she's dealing a lot of very strong feelings. She's very vulnerable, and she's not so good at hiding it."

While Caroline will be mentioned in the series, she won't be at the school, and she'll even end up missing her daughters' birthday. "[The twins] believe she's off on recruiting missions, and Alaric knows that she's actually off doing other things that have to do with the long term survival of their daughters," Plec said. "So the mystery of 'Where is Caroline? Why isn't she coming home for their birthday?' that kind of thing is going to be part of our story in the hopes that one day we'll be able to have her walk through the doors as well." But while King's role reprisal is still up in the air, we do know of a few other TVD favorites who'll be stepping into the show ...

Julie Plec confirmed at San Diego Comic-Con that Sheriff Matt Donovan (Zach Roerig) will appear in the Legacies pilot this fall. Matt was the only person on The Vampire Diaries to start a human and stay a human over the course of the show. He eventually joined law enforcement and rose to the rank of sheriff, which is a position he still holds in Mystic Falls when Legacies premieres.

It's also been confirmed that Jeremy Gilbert (Steven R. McQueen) will appear in the third episode of the season. Though Jeremy was originally a human on The Vampire Diaries, he turned out to be a Hunter, a mostly-human individual with increased strength and a strong desire to kill vampires. He left Mystic Falls to continue hunting supernatural creatures who preyed on humans, but he returned to help Caroline and Alaric start their school in The Vampire Diaries series finale.

What would a Vampire Diaries/Originals spin-off be without a healthy amount of animosity between dueling factions? With Legacies, we already know that the kids of Mystic Falls High think the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted is basically a troubled rich kids school, but they have no clue it houses some of the most dangerous magical teenagers in the world. Resentment has built between the two schools over the years, which we're sure to see culminate in the town's annual flag football game that will take place in Episode 2.

According to Julie Plec, the Salvatore School kids have one responsibility in this game: Lose spectacularly or risk revealing their powers. Hard to do if the bullies of Mystic Falls High have anything to say about it. "This bully and this mean girl are just poking and poking and poking, and so our kids really have to, like, you know... control themselves," Plec teased. "And, you know, that, of course, goes terribly wrong."

Lots of familiar faces will pop up in Legacies, but that doesn't mean we'll be devoid of shiny new faces. Classmates will also include a hot werewolf with anger management issues named Rafael (Peyton Alex Smith) and will be a male vampire named M.G. A townie, Landon (Aria Shahghasemi), will also catch Hope's eye. And that's only a few of the many new characters heading our way!

Things may look a whole lot different around Mystic Falls by the time we pick up with Legacies, but some things simply never change. The Miss Mystic Falls pageant, for one thing, will definitely play out again in the new show.

Julie Plec told TV Guide, "We are just now sitting down to start talking about Miss Mystic Falls. We've really enjoyed incorporating some of the traditions that we established over the course of The Vampire Diaries... and who doesn't love a good, totally sexist, dated beauty pageant?" Count on Josie and Lizzie in particular to take after their mom and go all-in on this tradition, but don't count Hope out of the competition just yet either.

Legacies won't just be introducing new supernatural creatures we've never seen before; the show will actually be implementing a monster-of-the-week format that will establish a more procedural nature to the show.

The Vampire Diaries and The Originals fans won't want to miss it when Legacies brings back all the magic of Mystic Falls, starting Thursday, October 25 at 9/8c on The CW.