Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an adventure game released on Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 in November 2003. It is the third installment in the Broken Sword series, released six years after the previous installment, The Smoking Mirror. The Sleeping Dragon moved the series to 3D graphics and is the only game in the series not to use a point and click interface. The player assumes the role of George Stobbart, an American patent lawyer who flies to the Congo to write a patent for a scientist who claims to have found a source of unlimited energy.

Following the events in Smoking Mirror a few years ago, George Stobbart has returned to his life as a lawyer and finds himself flying to the Congo Basin, alongside his pilot, Harry Gilligan, to meet a scientist by the name of Cholmondeley, who claims to have created a machine that can make limitless energy. However, a storm forces the pair’s plane to crash land on a cliff-top, right close to the scientist’s lab. Escaping the wreckage, George makes his way to the lab, arriving just in time to see the scientist gunned down by a pale, lanky man, known as Susarro, and his bodyguard, after being questioned on an unknown subject.

A postcard hidden in the lab prompts George to travel to Glastonbury, England, to search for a man named Bruno, a friend of the scientist who had advised him to flee. In his attempts to find out where Bruno is, he quickly learns that he disappeared before his arrival and is now in danger. Although not knowing where he is exactly, after visiting a fortune teller, George spots a building that caught fire, and goes to deal with it, saving an old man trapped within it. When they chat, he quickly learns that the old man’s name is Bruno Ostvald, the scientist he met in the Hotel Ubu in Paris, and a Neo-Templar.

Bruno reveals to George that he left the group after the events of Shadows of the Templar and that they are now led by Susarro, who took over and renamed it the Cult of the Dragon. Susarro is seeking to gain immortality through the use of the Earth’s ley lines, which Cholmondeley was using in his experiments, and Bruno explains that he is able to track these with a special device he has, believing Susarro may be going to a site in Paris to find something important, prompting the pair to follow after him.