Robb Stark
The Stark heir, a boy of fifteen with a direwolf named Grey Wind and his father's sense of duty. Fostered his half-brother Jon and his father's ward Theon like brothers.
A soul of House Stark, born at Winterfell.
The fuller tale
Season One
Eldest and heir, left to hold Winterfell while his father goes south and his siblings scatter — a boy playing lord until the news from King's Landing makes him one in earnest. He calls his father's banners the moment Ned is taken, and the army follows a nineteen-year-old south more on his family's name than his experience. At the Whispering Wood he proves he has a gift for it anyway, routing Jaime Lannister's host in the dark and taking the Kingslayer prisoner — a victory that wins him a crown of his own before it wins him his father back.
Season Two
King in the North now, and undefeated in the field, which turns out not to be the same thing as winning the war. He falls for Talisa, a healer working his own camp's wounded, while his mother is away trying to buy him an alliance with Renly and his bannermen wait on the marriage to a Frey daughter that was promised to seal the crossing at the Twins. He keeps Jaime Lannister as a prize worth more alive than dead and keeps racking up battles that move the map without moving him any closer to King's Landing.
Season Three
He marries Talisa, breaking the Frey match his mother negotiated to buy the army its crossing, and loses Karstark's swords soon after when he executes the old lord for murdering Lannister hostages in revenge. Weakened and short on allies, he agrees to mend the breach at Edmure's wedding to a Frey daughter, marching his depleted army and his pregnant wife into the Twins to make it right. The music turns, the doors are barred, and Robb dies watching his direwolf and then his wife and mother killed before him, cut down with his bannermen at a table where he came to make peace.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Murdered at the Red Wedding (S3·E9)
The Young Wolf broke a marriage pact with Walder Frey, and the old man's revenge was a wedding. Under guest right, with the doors barred, Roose Bolton drove the blade home: 'The Lannisters send their regards.'
On the page. Murdered at the Red Wedding (ASOS, ch. 52)
The Young Wolf came to the Twins to mend a broken marriage pact and died under guest right with the Rains of Castamere playing — quarrels from the galleries, Roose Bolton's blade, and Grey Wind's death howling in the yards.
The Red Wedding was Walder Frey's revenge dressed as a reconciliation: Edmure Tully would marry a Frey girl in Robb's place, the slight forgiven, the alliance mended. Robb came to the Twins under guest right, ate the bread and salt, and watched the bedding carried out — and then the doors were barred, the musicians in the gallery produced crossbows, and the Rains of Castamere played. Quarrels took him; his men were cut down around the tables; and Roose Bolton delivered the last thrust himself, with a line the North has never stopped repeating — the Lannisters send their regards. In the books the words are 'Jaime Lannister sends his regards,' and the boy king dies rising from the table with a quarrel already in him.
The desecration afterward was the point. The Freys hacked the head from Grey Wind — who died raging in the kennels, feathered with bolts — and sewed it onto Robb's body, parading the wolf-headed king to mock everything the North had crowned. Catelyn died moments after her son; Talisa, in the show, before him, the knives finding her belly first. The massacre broke the northern cause in an evening — and bought its authors a curse with compound interest, paid out over the rest of the tale by a daughter of the man they'd killed two books earlier.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Robb has no point-of-view chapters in the books — he is seen almost entirely through Catelyn, a boy-king glimpsed by a worried mother — and the show's decision to follow him directly is its single biggest structural change to his story. It needed a bride who could share scenes, so Jeyne Westerling of the Crag, a westerlands girl wed in haste and left behind at Riverrun, became Talisa of Volantis, a battlefield surgeon who marries him on screen and follows the army. Book Robb is also younger — fourteen when the war starts — and his queen never comes within a hundred leagues of the Twins.
The other divergence is the will. Book Robb, knowing Sansa is a Lannister hostage and believing Bran and Rickon dead, legitimizes an heir in front of witnesses — most readers assume Jon — and sends Maege Mormont and Galbart Glover toward Greywater Watch with copies. The show discards the entire thread and routes the North's future through Sansa and Jon's politics instead. It is the clearest case in the whole adaptation of a book plotline still loaded and waiting while the show simply walked around it.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.