Warcraft Universe

Azeroth is a world that has been broken more than once and is lived in anyway. Orcs came through a portal that should never have opened; a prince slaughtered his own people in order to save them; night elves have been guarding a wound in the world for ten thousand years while the Burning Legion waits on the other side of it. The books here are that world in prose — Warcraft as novels, running beside the games rather than explaining them. Christie Golden, Richard A. Knaak and Jeff Grubb do most of the building. Knaak's War of the Ancients trilogy goes back to the Sundering and the first Legion invasion; Grubb's The Last Guardian sits with Medivh in Karazhan before the first war; Golden writes Rise of the Horde and Arthas: The Rise of the Lich King, and William King's Illidan later makes the case for the man everyone had already convicted. Further volumes shadow each expansion in turn — Shadowlands, Dragonflight, The War Within — and Greg Weisman's Traveler walks the same map at a child's height. The tone is high fantasy played loud: oaths sworn in blood, betrayals with centuries behind them, grief that keeps arming itself. Nearly every book stands alone, so the way in is the story you want rather than a fixed line. For the deep history, begin with The Well of Eternity; for the war everything else assumes, Rise of the Horde; for the fall that defined a generation of players, Arthas.