TSR Best D&D Novels

[TheSword]

For me, in no particular order favourite jnclude

Prism Pentad
The good Drizzt trilogy (Homeland, Exile & Sojourn)
The War of the Spider Queen
The Last Mythal Trilogy
The Return of the Archwizards Trilogy.

They would be my favourites I reckon. The others I read were largely a bag of shaitan.

 

[Zaukrie]

I haven't read one in a LONG TIME....so who knows how they hold up:

Moonshae trilogy
Erevis Cale trilogy

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I've idly been going back and re-reading those books as before-bed reading. While it can be hard for me to separate my sense of nostalgia from stuff like the first three Dragonlance trilogies, I've generally found the following to be the better offerings.

The aforementioned Dragonlance Chronicles, Legends (Legends, with its smaller cast, is ostensibly more tightly plotted and better written than the original trilogy, in my opinion), and Tales trilogies
Elaine Cunningham's Elfshadow and Elfsong
Troy Denning's The Parched Sea
Christie Golden's Vampire of the Mists
David "Zeb" Cook's Soldiers of Ice
P.N. Elrod's I, Strahd

 

[Sacrosanct]

For me, in no particular order favourite jnclude

Prism Pentad

I just got this series in the mail yesterday, so it's next up.

 

[TheSword]

I just got this series in the mail yesterday, so it's next up.

Nice. It’s a great take on D&D. I don’t like what the story did to the setting but the story itself is great.

 

[Zaukrie]

BTW, I agree....Deed of Paksanarrion is a great DnD series (even if it isn't officially DnD). Though, like nearly all of them, it really features one person, not a team.

 

[Zaukrie]

There are very few DnD novels. Almost all of them feature on main character, not a party. Having written a first draft fantasy novel, about a party, it is really hard to write about that many characters and have them be interesting. Dragonlance is about a party.....but not many are.

 

[Sacrosanct]

There are very few DnD novels. Almost all of them feature on main character, not a party. Having written a first draft fantasy novel, about a party, it is really hard to write about that many characters and have them be interesting. Dragonlance is about a party.....but not many are.

Nah. A lot of books only seem like that because out of the 3-5 adventurers part of the group, it always seems like only one is focused on the most as the main protagonist. But that's exactly like D&D, because we always have the one player who wants to be the center of attention.

 

[Nebulous]

I have always had a soft spot for Gary's original Gord book: Saga of Old City. I was pretty young when I read it, maybe 12, and it was a pretty damn swashbuckling adventure of violence and surprises. I still have it somewhere. I liked the sequel too, Artifact of Evil, but then Gygax wrote all the others under a different imprint and the quality seem to go down. And the stories got weirder.

 

[humble minion]

There are very few DnD novels. Almost all of them feature on main character, not a party. Having written a first draft fantasy novel, about a party, it is really hard to write about that many characters and have them be interesting. Dragonlance is about a party.....but not many are.

There are actually quite a few. Drizzt has his group of friends (very unbalanced though, not a spellcaster among them!), and the Prism Pentad books (Verdant Passage in particular) have almost a classic D&D party. Thinking of others - the Moonshae trilogy has a party, and others that also have a really tight PC-group type arrangement off the top of my head are Azure Bonds, King Pinch, the Cleric Quintet...

Novel parties tend to split up more than PC parties though, just for dramatic tension.

What is very rare in D&D novels is point-of-view, game-accurate spellcasters. Low-level spellcasters, not the uber can-do-anything-offhandedly people like Elminster or the Simbul or Azalin or Hamanu or later-books Raistlin. Spellcasters who ponder what spells to prepare that day, or who worry about whether they should use their one daily third level slot to fireball the gnolls or save it for later, etc etc.