Who Cares about Dungeons & Dragons Novels Anyway?

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This is the introductory essay for Dungeons & Dragon: A Reading Series.

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When I was ten, fantasy burst upon me like a Revelation.

I’d just seen The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). It had ended without really ending. There were elves and hobbits and wizards and orcs and promises of a continued story of grand scale. This was all brand new to me and I quite literally couldn’t imagine what would come next. I hadn’t been told, going into the movie, anything about it: not that it adapted a beloved classic fantasy novel, not that it was in a genre called fantasy, not even that it was the first in a planned trilogy. I was dumbfounded and enthralled and I wanted more. And then a friend said we could play in that world, or one like it, whenever we wanted.

He introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons. His mother was a fundamentalist Christian who, even in the early 2000s, decades after the Satanic Panic, was still scared that D&D would bring demons into her house. (The Lord of the Rings was OK because Tolkien was a Christian, even if he was Catholic.) So at first we “played” D&D from his and his older brother’s memory of the rule books they owned before their mother threw them out. Then, as I became more invested in it, I (or, really, my mom and assorted family members) bought D&D manuals (this was the 3.0 and 3.5 era) and we smuggled them into his bedroom, hid them under his mattress, and played at night, in the dark, with a flashlight while his mom slept during our weekendly sleepovers.

Later, that same friend introduced me to the renegade drow ranger Drizzt when he lent me a novel called Homeland (1990) by R.A. Salvatore, which he had secretly acquired from a grandmother who thought his mom’s anti-D&D hysteria was very silly. And so, before I ever read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, I had read most of the Drizzt novels then in print (I stopped partway through 2001’s Sea of Swords, because I really didn’t like pirate stuff at that age—and still don’t!). Salvatore, the Forgotten Realms where Drizzt’s adventures took place, and D&D were my pathway into both reading and fantasy, and for many years I read as many Forgotten Realms novels as I could get my hands on (for whatever reason, Dragonlance never crossed my path!).

For a long time I’ve wanted to return to those D&D novels that were so central to my early forays into the realms of fantasy, to bring them under the banner of my project to recover fantasy’s larger history, to revisit these novels as a literary critic and genre historian. Because despite being considered by many critics and historians of fantasy to be the lowest dreck the genre has produced, D&D novels played an important part in the history of fantasy fiction from the mid-1980s and through the 1990s. By looking at D&D fiction one novel at a time, this reading series will (1) explore why they mattered, (2) model a critical approach to such fiction, and (3) demonstrate the value of taking franchise fiction seriously.

But what are D&D novels and why should we care about them?

Put most simply, D&D novels are novels set in the worlds of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game (TRPG) originally published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) and, after the company’s 1997 purchase, by Wizards of the Coast (WotC). The first ostensible D&D novel was Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1978), written after the author had played a session in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk storyworld and published without a licensing deal or any involvement from TSR aside from an excerpt of the novel in Dragon magazine. The novel was about a group of TRPG players transported into the gameworld, going on a D&D style quest to escape, but ultimately trapped forever in the fantasy. But while Quag Keep is an adventure of the D&D sort and inspired by Greyhawk and the TRPG experience, it’s vastly different to the later novels TSR would publish as tie-ins to D&D. While the central publishing focus of TSR from their inception in 1973 was always the manuals and gamebooks for D&D and other TRPGs they developed, beginning in 1982 the increasingly profitable young publisher began to publish fiction, starting with the Endless Quest gamebook series, modelled on the highly successful Choose Your Own Adventure series published by Bantam begun in the late 1970s. TSR continued to experiment with the format between 1982–1984, launching a similar series for younger readers, Fantasy Forest, and one aimed at teenage girls, HeartQuest.

But TSR had their big break for fiction in 1984 with the release of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first in what would become the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, and which launched a long-running meta-series of novels set in the Dragonlance storyworld (called a “campaign setting”). Weis and Hickman’s novel was tied to—and loosely novelized or was inspired by events from game sessions set in—the popular new campaign setting designed by Hickman and wife Laura. The Dragonlance novels and the modules for the campaign setting drove one another’s sales. TSR had hit on a brilliant publishing-cum-marketing strategy and began to ramp up novel production, publishing novels that tied in to every major D&D storyworld as a way of increasing interest in the game manuals while also giving players a sense of what narratives set in the sometimes dramatically different D&D storyworlds might look like. By 1990, TSR’s D&D novels sold on average a quarter of a million copies each and Dragonlance novels had sold an estimated 5 million across the six-year-old series. In Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, Ben Riggs reports that a company sales manual from that year claimed TSR was “the second largest publisher of fantasy fiction in the US” (136). And I don’t doubt it, especially when measured by sales volumes: TSR was a surprise juggernaut and was likely only surpassed by Del Rey. Even its original, non-D&D titles, like Mary Herbert’s Dark Horse series, sold tens of thousands of copies (136).

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, TSR published hundreds of D&D novels and dozens of original novels and interactive gamebooks. They even bought and published Amazing Stories, the sf magazine founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. After WotC purchased TSR and the D&D brand in 1997, they continued to publish D&D novels but dropped the original fiction and gamebooks. Novels published between 1997 and 1999 were still branded with the TSR logo, but from 2000 onward everything was WotC. Novels were still a major ploy in their marketing strategy for new game manuals; Eberron, for example, was released as a campaign setting in 2004 and WotC published a whopping forty Eberron novels between 2005 and 2012. But WotC published significantly fewer D&D novels following the release of the 4th edition of the game in 2008, likely due to declining novel sales and larger shifts in the book industry away from quantity and toward smaller, more consolidated book lists (all of which was affected by the financial crisis of the early Obama years). Today, no more than a handful of D&D novels are published per year, and WotC seems to have entirely outsourced the line to Random House, who puts out the occasional new novel by Salvatore or Weis and Hickman. This incredibly brief overview gives a small glimpse at the sheer scale of D&D fiction. A fuller look at fiction publishing’s place in the TSR portfolio, which at one point made up half of the company’s revenue, can be read in Rigg’s Slaying the Dragon, which draws on archival material and extensive interviews with editors and authors.

What’s notable about D&D novels, apart from just how many there are, is that they occupy an awkward space—and for the purposes of literary, cultural, and media studies: a productive one—between original fantasy fiction and what the publishing industry calls “media tie-in fiction.” In general, I prefer to use the term “franchise fiction” over “tie-in fiction,” since, as I argued nearly a decade ago in relation to Star Wars novels, “‘tie-in’ suggests a secondary, anecdotal relationship subordinating such [fiction] to the “main” or “source” medium of storytelling. For many fans, however, these novels are vital to the experience of a transmedia franchise’s storyworld” (145n8). Thus, “franchise fiction” seems a more appropriate way to center novels/fiction as a way of engaging with a franchise—in this case, D&D. Especially since it’s likely that more people read D&D novels than ever played the TRPG or owned a D&D manual.

Of course, D&D is not your typical media franchise and D&D novels are not your typical franchise fiction, especially compared to something like Star Wars or Stark Trek, where the intellectual property (IP) rightsholders license a (usually separate) publisher to publish novels (and comics) using their IP. Often, this comes with significant strings attached that limit what and how writers can “play” in the licensed storyworld, and there is sometimes a great deal of collaboration between the publisher, author, and rightsholder. In the case of D&D, the IP that is extended or elaborated in franchise novels is the game itself and the storyworld of the game. At the same time, most D&D novels feature original characters and develop original ideas, albeit moored to a particular D&D campaign setting. The most productive storyworlds for D&D novels have been Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, and Planescape. Only rarely do D&D novels narrate events that significantly alter the status quo of these storyworlds at the level of the campaign setting, even if the narratives and characters of the more popular D&D novels are written into later D&D manuals as background information about the campaign setting. In addition, there is often a close relationship between the creator/developer of a storyworld—such as Ed Greenwood for Forgotten Realms or Laura and Tracy Hickman for Dragonlance—and the novels set in their storyworld (in all cases, the IP rights to these storyworlds were owned by TSR/WotC).

But despite all of these factors, which would seemingly make D&D novels really quite interesting, D&D fiction is hardly the stuff of fantasy scholarship, despite their cultural impact and status among fantasy readers. This isn’t a surprise, though, since what is most popular among the general readership tends to be at best ignored and at worst denigrated in the scholarship. As I noted in my essay on Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (1990), one of the most popular fantasy novels of all time, scholars of fantasy have often approached hyper-popular fiction from a position of such profound dislike for the texts (and authors and fans of those texts/authors) that they can seem unwilling to find what makes them so valuable to readers—regardless of the “quality” of such fiction. This is especially the case with the introductory texts in fantasy studies.

Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James’s A Short History of Fantasy (2009), for example, describes “people writing to a franchise” as “real hacks,” and uses Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and the Dragonlance series they spawned as the principle example of repetitive, formulaic fantasy writing (123). Fourteen years later in Fantasy: A Short History (2025), Adam Roberts also uses D&D novels to express his belief that fantasy, more than other genres, tends toward repetition. It’s a frustrating claim and, to me, neither an accurate nor a critically useful one. To that end, he rather boldly claims that “the first Dragonlance novel is repeated literally hundreds of times, rewritten and reissued under different titles with various minimal variations of character and detail, but basically the same tale, the same world” (xv). While Roberts later clarifies that he doesn’t think of the writers of these novels as “hacks,” he finds that their novels nonetheless “tend to a more procrustean and limited praxis” (171). In both of these approaches, taken from the two go-to histories of fantasy written for academic audiences, there’s condescension and overstatement, but little sense of the significance of D&D novels (aside from sheer numbers of such novels, which are treated as embarrassing truths) and no suggestion that there’s anything worthwhile in all several hundred of them.

It should be clear from my general approach to literature practiced on this blog that I’m not interested in any rhetorical move that would assert “but these books are literature and that is why they matter.” I’m not here to convince anyone that Salvatore or Weis and Hickman or Greenwood are overlooked literary geniuses. Frankly, I only care about literary quality as a secondary or tertiary element when I read for the purposes of this blog, that is, for the purposes of writing a more robust history of fantasy. I will comment on the awfulness of an author’s prose, yes, but I also want to see novels as social objects and I try to thread the line between my subjective response and my work as a critic/literary historian. My greater interest is in what such novels do, how readers might have made meaning with them, and how we might read all novels as offering us some way of understanding our cultural history and the history of fantasy fiction. 

Reading these novels critically and with attention isn’t an effort at legitimation, because no form of fiction needs to be legitimated for the purposes of literary criticism, cultural studies, or literary or cultural history. I think, in general, Mendlesohn, James, and Roberts would agree, but I want to resist the temptation inherent in their ideological stance to view such popular fiction as the banal, “procrustean” efforts of “real hacks.” By all means, call a given novel or writer any of those things (I certainly have!), but it should be clear that such rhetorical framing uses individual texts or authors as synecdoche for a wellspring of literary production and, by virtue of pointing to the supposed lack of value in the work of those authors and by substituting their work for a count of novels that is meant to seem artistically egregious, these asides about D&D fiction—just a few short lines in both cases—have the effect of writing off an entire literary field. That such a literary field was obviously productive, lucrative, and popular seems both the point—in that it is too much of those things—and, somehow, irrelevant—because, by virtue of reference to Weis and Hickman’s first Dragonlance novel, it is all able to be siloed away as “bad” (to be fair to Roberts, he does reference a Pornokitsch essay that calls Dragonlance novels “playful,” gesturing to one measure of their value). Such an approach ignores a range of fascinating questions, which this reading series hopes to surface.

Thankfully, a handful of scholars have taken up D&D fiction as serious objects of critical and scholarly analysis and this reading series will be in regular conversation with that work. Some of my favorite work includes the following: Benjamin Robertson’s “From Fantasy to Franchise: Dragonlance and the Privatization of Genre” is a convincing study of the relationship between game logics, franchising, and genre fantasy in the early Dragonlance novels that pushes back against earlier critics’ dismissal of these novels, especially the argument about sameness and repetition. Steven Holmes’s “Negative Estrangement: Fantasy and Race in the Drow and Drizzt Do’Urden” theorizes D&D’s and D&D novels’ construction of race in fantasy as a form of “negative estrangement.” Kieran Strand-Leeds’s “Magic Cloaks on Spaceships and the Chosen One from Space: Science Fantasy as Metafiction” problematizes discussions about genre, metafiction, and the boundary between science fiction and fantasy with a look at the first Spelljammer novel, Beyond the Moons (1991) (and Jane Yolen’s unrelated novel Cards of Grief [1984]). And Maria K. Alberto’s dissertation“Sounds Like It’s Canon Now”: Texts and/as Truths in Transmedia Franchise Dungeons & Dragons is a rich examination of the interplay between D&D manuals and D&D novels as they co-construct and challenge notions of canon, with particular attention to the ever-thorny Drow Question. There are also a handful of articles in Analog Game Studies and chapters in books on D&D that also signal a minor shift in scholars taking D&D novels seriously. Notably, this small body of scholarship doesn’t fawn over D&D fiction, it doesn’t argue its literariness, and it is often pretty critical of these novels, but it respects the novels as texts and tries to understand them for what they are, what they do, in their contexts, rather than writing them off as the work of repetitious hacks.

Perhaps the best critical engagement with D&D novels to date has come from outside the academy in the form of the absolutely incredible blog Let’s Read TSR! (Tor/Reactor and Gizmodo have also done essay series on D&D novels). Far from an obsessive fannish effort at glorifying the D&D novels TSR published, the anonymous author known only as the Candlekeep Janitor (a Forgotten Realms reference) describes their blog as “lit crit and reviews for trashy D&D fantasy novels.” That “trashy” marks the novels’ status within the literary landscape, but occasionally indexes their straight up terribleness as works of fiction. The messy ideological terrain invoked by “trashy” is embraced, loved, and balanced with sincere literary-critical engagement through Candlekeep Janitor’s explorations of more than 80 novels to date (the website has been woefully dormant since September 2024!). My point in highlighting Let’s Read TSR is to emphasize that reading D&D novels with greater care and attention doesn’t mean you have to love them (Candlekeep Janitor is a very harsh critic indeed!), but it does mean taking them seriously. And we can do that with fun as much as with the sharp edge of critique.

The “worth” of D&D fiction and franchise fiction more generally is not just that they exist, which should be reason enough, but that they exist within a literary- and cultural-historical framework that makes them particularly interesting, since they sit at the intersection between (1) efforts to develop franchise IP, (2) the development of transmedia storytelling, (3) the publishing industry in an era of intense conglomeration and consolidation, (4) the history of fantasy and science fiction as modes of popular literary production, and (5) the history of American culture that gave structure and meaning to all of the above. D&D novels are thus as interesting as artifacts of cultural and media history as they are interesting as artifacts of changing literary and genre landscapes. But like other popular franchises that thrived in mass market paperbacks—and not just Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Warhammer, the most fiction-oriented franchises; name a major franchise of the 1970s–early 2000s and I can almost guarantee there was tie-in fiction—D&D has had its fiction systematically ignored by most scholars of literary, media, cultural, and genre studies.

Even game studies has paid little attention, outside of a handful of articles in venues like Analog Game Studies, despite the fact that TSR’s efforts to produce D&D fiction not only reflected larger trends in the publishing world toward producing media tie-in fiction as an essential transmedia (and marketing) strategy. TSR made franchise fiction an important part of the TRPG ecosystem, which was taken up by FASA’s Shadowrun and BattleTech TRPGs and White Wolf’s World of Darkness family of TRPGs, to name the most obvious. They all produced long-running series of 40+, 100+, and 90+ tie-in novels and story anthologies, respectively (and I’m keen to someday do a reading series on Shadowrun!). Not to mention D&D novels were all written by people who played D&D and whose play often self-consciously inspired or served as a laboratory for the novels they wrote. As a result, D&D novels probably helped a lot of players, too, think about the kinds of stories they could participate in and the characters they could create when playing D&D. So D&D novels have a lot to teach us about the relationship between play, rules, and narrative (Alberto’s dissertation, cited above, is an example of this kind of work—more, please!).

One final point about the “worth” of D&D fiction, which is actually a larger claim I want to make about franchise fiction generally, especially in the 1970s–1990s. Franchise fiction represents—or, perhaps, represented—a mode of literary production that is potentially more democratic and that, in the best cases, embraces a bottom-up approach to writing and publishing fiction. By this I mean, that franchise fiction opened a pathway into sff writing for many authors, especially women, whose expertise in the franchise was their most valuable asset to publishers. Many had honed their writing skills through fanfiction writing and they brought their fan networks with them when they became professionally published writers. This was especially the case for Star Trek fiction, and no doubt for other franchises I know less about. TSR was publishing so many novels in the late 1980s and 1990s that they needed writers and so took chances on folks with no background but a modicum of talent. Many of those writers published multiple D&D novels and some had careers beyond D&D fiction. Franchise fiction is also democratic in the sense that it allowed people other than the official creators—the George Lucases and Gene Roddenberrys—to publish “official” stories that had greater cultural sway and impact beyond the highly limited circulation of fanzines and early digital forums.

And, at the same time that it is in some sense a more democratic form of literary production, franchise fiction is also a form of industrially sanctioned and industrially disciplined fanfiction. By this I mean that the fiction franchise authors produce is controlled by and ultimately belongs to the IP holder. Some authors are afforded a measure of independence, in some franchises and at some publishers more than others, but the situation of top-down ownership of franchise fiction creates a fundamental and irresolvable tension between franchise, publisher, author, and text. Whatever is democratic about franchise fiction is also always disciplined by the legal, social, and economic interests of the IP rights holders, and this can play out in many different ways—from an author, like R.A. Salvatore, having no rights to their own highly popular, incredibly lucrative creation (e.g. Drizzt), to corporate censorship of and control over narratives and ideas, to the ability to decide on the canonicity of texts (something fans care a great deal about). This is an analysis of franchise fiction that I have been thinking about already for a decade and which I hope to clarify even more in the coming years as I begin to focus my attention with essay projects like this one. Maybe it doesn’t hold up, it almost certainly needs refinement, and it has to be developed by acknowledging that any given franchise represents different historical circumstances that will impact any future claims about franchise fiction.

All of this, I’d say, makes D&D fiction pretty damn well worth caring about. Hopefully each essay in this series will forward that argument one book at a time, even if I encounter some “procrustean” writing along the way.

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