Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like SwordQuest

anchored on:secondary world

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of The Lord of the Rings
                  The Lord of the Rings

                  series · 13 books · 1954

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar bysecondary worldepic fantasy+3 more

                  The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by the English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's book The Hobbit but eventually developed into a much larger work. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.

                • Cover of The Hobbit
                  The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldquestsfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  The Hobbit (1937) is J. R. R. Tolkien's children's fantasy novel following the reluctant burglar Bilbo Baggins, who joins a company of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf on a journey to reclaim treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. It stands as a complete adventure on its own, but shares its setting with the rest of Tolkien's legendarium and leads into the events of The Lord of the Rings.

                • Cover of Shannara
                  Shannara

                  universe · 50 books · 1977

                  Start hereWord and the Void · The very beginning of the timeline

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+3 more

                  Long after the world we know has burned itself to slag in the Great Wars, the Four Lands rise green over the bones of the old age. Science is a forbidden memory; magic has come back into the world, and with it the old divisions — Men, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and Gnomes, each Race a splinter of what humanity became. This is the far-future Earth of Shannara, where the ruins buried beneath the soil are ours, and the only keepers of the vanished knowledge are the Druids of Paranor, who wake once a generation to meet the darkness rising again. Terry Brooks opened the Four Lands in 1977 with The Sword of Shannara and has charted its history for four decades since — a legendarium ordered not by throne but by a single bloodline, the Ohmsfords, each generation inheriting an Elfstone, a blade, or a wishsong when the age demands a hero. The original trilogy gives way to the Heritage of Shannara, the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, the High Druid, Dark Legacy, Defenders, and the concluding Fall of Shannara; the Genesis of Shannara books reach back to the apocalypse itself, and the Word and the Void trilogy back further still, into a demon-haunted version of our own present that is the root of everything after. In 2025 Brooks passed the histories to Delilah S. Dawson to carry forward. What sets these books apart is their long memory: a world where every triumph is provisional, where the same evil returns wearing a fresh shape each age, and magic always exacts its price. The reading is warm and headlong — questing companies, old talismans, journeys across a mapped and named wilderness — shadowed by the knowledge that all of it stands on the wreckage of a former world. Enter as readers first did: with The Sword of Shannara, then onward in publication order. The chronological path, beginning with Word and the Void, rewards a second journey, once the Four Lands already feel like home.

                • Cover of Riftwar Saga
                  Riftwar Saga

                  series · 7 books · 1982

                  part of The Riftwar Universe

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy

                  The Riftwar Saga is Raymond E. Feist's debut fantasy trilogy, opening with Magician, in which an orphaned apprentice named Pug is swept up when otherworldly invaders emerge through a dimensional rift into the frontier kingdom of Midkemia. Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon carry the resulting war to its close, and the trilogy became the founding entry of Feist's much larger Riftwar Cycle.

                • Cover of Sparhawk
                  Sparhawk

                  universe · 6 books · 1989

                  Start hereElenium · Start here

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldquestsfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  Sir Sparhawk is not a young man, and he has little patience for the pageantry his order pretends to. A Pandion Knight of the militant Elene Church, he rides home from a long exile to find his kingdom rotten with intrigue and his young queen, Ehlana, poisoned — kept alive only inside a shell of living crystal. To wake her he must find Bhelliom, a jewel with the power to remake the world or unmake it. So begins a long ride across the continent of Eosia. This is warm, character-first epic fantasy from David Eddings, told across two trilogies. The Elenium — The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, The Sapphire Rose — pits Sparhawk against a corrupt church and a hungry elder god. The Tamuli — Domes of Fire, The Shining Ones, The Hidden City — carries him east into the vast Tamul Empire, where older enemies stir. Around him gathers a quarrelsome company: the Styric sorceress Sephrenia, the thief-boy Talen, the plain-spoken squire Kurik, and a small, imperious goddess who plays a set of pipes and always, somehow, gets her way. The pleasure here is the talk — grizzled knights trading dry insults between miracles and murders, a hero who solves as many problems with patience as with a sword. It never reaches for grimness or grand obscurity; it wants your good company for a long journey. Newcomers begin with The Diamond Throne and read the six in order: the Elenium stands whole on its own before the Tamuli widens the map.

                • Cover of The Well at the World's End
                  The Well at the World's End

                  William Morris · standalone novel · 1896

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldquestsfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  The Well at the World's End is a high fantasy novel by the British textile designer, poet, and author William Morris. It was first published in 1896 and has been reprinted repeatedly since, most notably in two parts as the 20th and 21st volumes of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, in August and September 1970.

                • Cover of Elenium
                  Elenium

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  completed

                  part of Sparhawk

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldquestsfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  The Elenium is a series of fantasy novels by American writer David Eddings. The series consists of three volumes: The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, and The Sapphire Rose. The series is followed by The Tamuli. The Elenium is Eddings' third fantasy series.

                • H
                  Hawkmoon

                  series · 7 books · 1967

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

                  similar bysecondary worldepic fantasy+4 more

                  The History of the Runestaff is an omnibus collection of four fantasy novels by British writer Michael Moorcock, consisting of The Jewel in the Skull, The Mad God's Amulet, The Sword of the Dawn, and The Runestaff. Charting the adventures of Dorian Hawkmoon, a version of the Eternal Champion, it takes place in a far-future version of Europe in which the insane rulers of the Dark Empire of Granbretan are engaged in conquering the continent. Written between 1967 and 1969, it is considered a classic of the genre, and has proven highly influential in shaping subsequent authors' works.

                • Cover of The Quest of the Riddle-Master
                  The Quest of the Riddle-Master

                  series · 3 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldquestsfantasyepic fantasy

                  Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy follows Morgon, prince of the small island of Hed, whose discovery of three star-shaped birthmarks on his forehead draws him into a search for his own hidden identity and a confrontation with ancient, shape-shifting powers. Drawing on Celtic myth, the three books are prized for their lyrical prose and riddle-based magic, and are often cited among the best high fantasy of the 1970s.

                • Cover of Cosmere
                  Cosmere

                  universe · 54 books · 2005

                  Start hereThe Final Empire · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  Before the worlds, there was Adonalsium, and then there was not. A god shattered into sixteen Shards of raw creative power, and those who seized them carried their fragments across the void to seed new planets, new peoples, new ways of working the impossible. The Cosmere is the one universe those Shards made: a scattering of worlds that seem, at first, to share nothing but a sky, until you notice the same law running quietly beneath each of them, and the same silent traveler passing through their margins. Every world keeps its own book and its own magic. On Scadrial, the Mistborn cycle burns metals into power: a self-contained trilogy of thieves and tyranny, followed by a second era that drags the same world into gunslinging early industry. On storm-battered Roshar, The Stormlight Archive raises its vast, ongoing epic around knights, spren, and oaths spoken aloud. Elsewhere stand the shorter keystones: Elantris, a city of fallen gods; Warbreaker, a tale of returned dead and living color; White Sand, told in graphic-novel form under the twin suns of Taldain. Threaded between them run the novellas, from Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter to The Sunlit Man and the pieces gathered in Arcanum Unbounded, where the hidden connections surface most plainly. All of it is the design of one hand, Brandon Sanderson, working a single pattern across two decades. What sets this universe apart is its faith in rules: magic here is a system, lawful and learnable, so discovery feels less like wonder handed down than like physics worked out. The cross-connections reward the patient reader, a symbol here, a name there, one immortal wanderer everywhere, but no book demands you have read another first. Newcomers do best entering through Mistborn: The Final Empire, the most self-contained doorway, or the standalone Elantris or Warbreaker; readers who prefer their epics vast can begin with The Way of Kings. The deeper links, and the novellas that expose them, wait for whenever you are ready to look.

                • Cover of Narnia
                  Narnia

                  series · 26 books · 1950

                  part of Narnia Universe

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasy+2 more

                  The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven portal fantasy novels by British author C. S. Lewis. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes and originally published between 1950 and 1956, the series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician's Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle.

                • Cover of Earthsea Cycle
                  Earthsea Cycle

                  series · 18 books · 1964

                  completed

                  part of Earthsea

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy

                  The Earthsea Cycle, also known as Earthsea, is a series of high fantasy books written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), the series was continued in Tehanu (1990), and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. In 2018, all the novels and short stories were published in a single volume, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, with artwork by Charles Vess.

                • C
                  Corum

                  series · 6 books · 1971

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldmagical artifactsfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                • Cover of The Elric Saga
                  The Elric Saga

                  series · 72 books · 1961

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasy+2 more

                  The Elric Saga is Michael Moorcock's sequence of sword-and-sorcery novels about Elric, the frail, sorcery-dependent last emperor of the ancient island empire of Melniboné, who abandons his throne to wander a violent, magic-soaked world carrying a sentient, soul-drinking black sword. Core entries such as Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and Stormbringer trace his path toward a self-destructive destiny, and Elric was later folded into Moorcock's wider Eternal Champion multiverse, of which this saga is one strand.

                • EE
                  Earth's End

                  series · 24 books · 1968

                  similar bysecondary world+3 more

                • Cover of The Riftwar Universe
                  The Riftwar Universe

                  universe · 44 books · 1982

                  Start hereRiftwar Saga · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  On the world of Midkemia a tear opens in the air itself, a rift hung between stars, and through it march the armies of an empire from another world entirely. So begins the chronicle Raymond E. Feist has kept for three decades: the tale of Pug, a castle kitchen boy apprenticed to a magician on the very day the invasion lands, and of Tomas, his friend, who inherits the armor and the ancient fury of a dead dragon-lord. Around these two the Riftwar Cycle turns, widening book by book from one besieged frontier keep into the whole history of a world of kingdoms, guilds, thieves' dens and mage-towers. The cycle runs to roughly thirty novels, gathered into arcs a newcomer can enter and finish on their own. The founding Riftwar Saga (Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon) sets the board; the Serpentwar Saga, Krondor's Sons and the Conclave of Shadows carry the story down the generations; the Darkwar, Demonwar and Chaoswar sagas bring it toward its close. Crossing the rift to the rival world of Kelewan, Feist and Janny Wurts wrote the Empire trilogy, opening with Daughter of the Empire, a court intrigue told wholly from the invaders' side and for many the finest thing here. Shorter Legends of the Riftwar and the game-born Riftwar Legacy fill the corners; later still, Feist opens an altogether new world in the Firemane books. Feist writes fantasy in its most companionable key: apprentices who grow into archmages, tavern boys who become spies and dukes, a world you return to the way you return to an old inn. The mood is adventure before dread, friendship and rank and hard-won craft, wars that cost something, all of it rendered plainly and at a gallop. Begin where it began, with Magician, then follow the arcs in the order they were written, and the rift will carry you the rest of the way.

                • Cover of Zimiamvian Trilogy
                  Zimiamvian Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 1922

                  completed

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy

                  The Zimiamvian Trilogy is a series of fantasy novels by English author E. R. Eddison.Mistress of Mistresses (1935) A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941) The Mezentian Gate (1958)

                • Cover of Magic by the Numbers
                  Magic by the Numbers

                  series · 10 books · 1980

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasy+3 more

                  Master of the Five Magics follows Alodar, a young man from a fallen noble house trying to win the hand of a queen by proving himself in a hard-magic system built from five distinct, strictly rule-bound disciplines — thaumaturgy, alchemy, magic, sorcery, and wizardry — each with its own price and its own limits. Lyndon Hardy's original trilogy, continuing through Secret of the Sixth Magic and Riddle of the Seven Realms, has Alodar master each discipline in turn, before a later book, decades on, adds a fourth-generation story (The Archimage's Fourth Daughter) to the same magic-numbers conceit.

                • Cover of The Drenai Saga
                  The Drenai Saga

                  series · 15 books · 1984

                  completed

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  David Andrew Gemmell was a British author of heroic fantasy, best known for his debut novel, Legend. A former journalist and newspaper editor, Gemmell had his first work of fiction published in 1984. He went on to write over thirty novels. Gemmell's works display violence, yet also explore themes of honour, loyalty and redemption. There is always a strong heroic theme but nearly always the heroes are flawed in some way. With over one million copies sold, his work continues to sell worldwide.

                • D
                  Deltora milieu

                  series · 53 books · 1993

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldquestsfantasy+2 more

                • Cover of Trillium / World of the Three Moons
                  Trillium / World of the Three Moons

                  series · 5 books · 1990

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+2 more

                  Trillium is a series of five fantasy novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May, and Andre Norton, each with the word "trillium" in the title. They take place in a post-holocaust world that is hinted to be a colony of earth on another planet where magic works.

                • Cover of Forgotten Realms: The Legend of Drizzt
                  Forgotten Realms: The Legend of Drizzt

                  series · 39 books · 1988

                  part of Forgotten Realms

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  The Legend of Drizzt is a series of fantasy novels by R. A. Salvatore that began in 1988, and consists of 39 books as of August 15, 2023. They are based in the Forgotten Realms setting in the dimension of Abeir-Toril on the continent Faerûn in the Dungeons & Dragons universe currently published and owned by Wizards of the Coast. It combines the series The Dark Elf Trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, Legacy of the Drow, Paths of Darkness, The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, and other sets into an abridged compilation. Drizzt Do'Urden is the main character of most of the books.

                • Cover of Forgotten Realms
                  Forgotten Realms

                  universe · 526 books · 1987

                  Start hereForgotten Realms: The Legend of Drizzt · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+1 more

                  Come in from the cold and mind the door — the wind off the Sword Coast has teeth. Faerûn is a lived-in world, the best-charted of the many lands that share the sky of Toril: a continent of walled cities and haunted wilds where the gods are near enough to answer, magic is a craft with rules and a cost, and every tavern hearth throws light on someone with a blade, a grudge, or a tale worth the telling. Beneath it all lies the Underdark, that black underland where the drow raise their spider-city of Menzoberranzan; above, the merchant towers of Waterdeep, the frost of Icewind Dale, the ruin-strewn North. This is the sword-and-sorcery world of Dungeons & Dragons rendered into prose — grand, generous, and endlessly walkable. It is a world of many hands, and the shelf shows it: some five hundred novels across eighty-odd cycles, uneven as any long telling but rich past counting. R. A. Salvatore's dark-elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden anchors the whole — the Icewind Dale and Dark Elf trilogies and the long saga that follows. Ed Greenwood, who first dreamed the Realms, chronicles the Old Mage in the Elminster books. Around them turn the god-walking Avatar cycle and its Time of Troubles, the six-author War of the Spider Queen, Salvatore's Cleric Quintet, and Elaine Cunningham's elf-and-drow songs; Troy Denning and a company of others fill the marches between. What holds it together is warmth — the register of a bard who wants you fed and seated before the tale turns. Newcomers should follow Drizzt first: read Homeland and the Dark Elf trilogy for his beginning, or The Crystal Shard as first readers met him. Either door opens the Realms; the other eighty cycles wait past it.

                • Cover of His Dark Materials Universe
                  His Dark Materials Universe

                  universe · 13 books · 1995

                  Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here

                  similar byadventurousfantasy+3 more

                  In a world like ours and unlike it, every human soul walks outside the body in the shape of an animal — a daemon, who speaks, who cannot be lied to, and who settles into one fixed form only when childhood ends. This is the country of His Dark Materials: a company of parallel worlds across which an invisible dust of consciousness drifts down upon the waking mind; where a Church that calls itself the Magisterium would sooner sever a child's soul than let that Dust be understood; and where a golden instrument, the alethiometer, answers true questions for anyone with the patience to read it. Philip Pullman's design stands in two trilogies and a scatter of shorter tales. His Dark Materials — Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass — carries Lyra Belacqua from the rooftops of a shadow Oxford across the borders between worlds. The Book of Dust returns to that same territory: La Belle Sauvage looks back to Lyra as an infant carried through a great flood, while The Secret Commonwealth follows her grown and less certain into adulthood, with a concluding volume closing the arc. Around them sit slim companion books — Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine — and Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation, made with Pullman's blessing. The register is grave and luminous at once, its title lifted from Milton and its quarrel drawn from Blake: a story that takes the side of curiosity, love, and the physical world against any authority that would forbid them. It reads as adventure — armoured bears, aeronauts, knife-cut windows between skies — yet reasons like philosophy. Begin with Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and read the first trilogy through before turning to The Book of Dust, which deepens everything the first has already made you feel.