About this Series
This is the landing page and index for my Dungeons & Dragons essay series, a lengthy quest to read an ungodly amount of novels published by TSR and Wizards of the Coast as tie-ins to the D&D tabletop roleplaying game. Like my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, the essays here put a specific parameter—D&D novels—on my reading and critical writing in order to help me further one of the key projects of the Genre Fantasies blog: to develop a more wholistic and historically grounded view of the “great unread” of fantasy fiction in the 1960s–1990s. The D&D reading series is also part of a larger push to take “franchise fiction” seriously and explore its role in literary, cultural, and genre history.
For critical and theoretical background to this series, I recommend starting with my manifesto of sorts, “Who Cares about Dungeons & Dragons Novels Anyway?”
The relationship of D&D novels to one another is messy and complicated. So to simplify things I organize the novels I cover into sections based on their campaign setting or storyworld (e.g. Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Spelljammer). Within campaign settings, I then organize the books roughly chronologically based on publication date.
Rather than split up novels in a series, I list every work in a trilogy, quartet, etc. together and organize the relationship between series (or the rare standalone novel) based on the publication date of the first work in a series. Several series—for example, Salvatore’s Drizzt books—belong to meta-series; in those cases, I put the name of the meta-series (e.g. Legend of Drizzt) in parentheses after the title of a trilogy or quartet. Meta-series are rare, so it should be easy to identify what belongs with what.
I will add titles to this list based on what I expect to cover in the coming months, rather than listing all several hundred D&D novels on this page from the beginning. That would risk making painfully clear how impossible it will be to actually complete this project—but everyone needs to fight their own battle against entropy in their own weird way!
Books Covered
⤷ Forgotten Realms
Icewind Dale Trilogy (Legend of Drizzt)
- The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore (1988)
- Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore (1989)
- The Hafling’s Gem by R.A. Salvatore (1990)
Dark Elf Trilogy (Legend of Drizzt)
- Homeland by R.A. Salvatore (1990)
- Exile by R.A. Salvatore (1990)
- Sojourn by R.A. Salvatore (1991)
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