Dragonrealm

Before men raised their first walls, the drakes ruled. In the Dragonrealm the great dragons wear crowns and human faces both — the Dragon Kings, scaled lords who hold the land as feudal masters and suffer no human sorcerer to rise unchecked. Into their long dominion comes Cabe Bedlam, heir to a wizard's blood he never asked to carry, and the realm's uneasy balance begins to tip toward war. Richard A. Knaak has tended this world across three decades. The founding run — from Firedrake through Ice Dragon, The Crystal Dragon, Dragon Crown and on to Shade — traces the long struggle between the Dragon Kings, the exiled Bedlam line, and the Gryphon, a lion-eagle warlord who claims a human throne. Origins of the Dragonrealm reaches back before all of it, to the Vraad: an arrogant, deathless race of sorcerers who fled a dying world and became the ancestors of drake and man alike. Later trilogies such as The Turning War, along with the novellas and the Dragon Throne tales, return to the same soil, while the Legends of the Dragonrealm omnibuses gather the earliest books into single volumes. The pleasure here is old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery given room to breathe: shapeshifting dragons who scheme like kings, cursed warlocks such as the endlessly reincarnating Shade, an enchantress bound in amber, and a magic drawn from the land itself. Begin with Firedrake and read forward in publication order — the surest path into the world, and the one the omnibus editions lay out. Save the Vraad prehistory of Origins for after you know the realm it built.