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Hey, I've been looking for some nice fantasy books to read lately, but I'm looking for books that capture the feel of old TTRPG games, focused in exploration and environments or just traveling to the unknown. I was thinking on reading Moorcock and his Elric saga since apparently it was an inspiration for OD&D, but I've heard that only the first book is worth reading. Any thoughts?
Otherwise, feel free to share your fav books and discuss them.
>>48269088
>I was thinking on reading Moorcock and his Elric saga since apparently it was an inspiration for OD&D, but I've heard that only the first book is worth reading.
That's not at all true. The original saga is, overall, pretty strong (Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Weird of the White Wolf, The Vanishing Tower, The Bane of the Black Sword, and Stormbringer). Note that the books are composed of various stories ("books") that tie together to varying degrees and which vary in quality as well. The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, for instance, starts off a bit weak, I think, but gets better after its first "book".
>>48269088
Book of the New Sun, although it's not easy getting into. It definitely nails the exploration and mystery elements though.
>>48269088
Fritz Leiber's short stories about Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser have great old-school atmosphere, they're collected in 2 doorstops called "The First Book of Lankhmar" and "The Second Book of Lankhmar".
Jack Vance's Dying Earth books also have a great feel (dunno if it's precisely what you're looking for, slightly more whimsical but still excellent), they're collected into one doorstop.
>>48269088
Moorcock is good.
Elric is AD&D in a nutshell. You have a nice hack-slash atmosphere, but it's always sorcery that actually wins the war. You have loads of different magical creatures, artifacts, characters and places, without it looking pasty and generic like 4e. Magic is very real and very unknown.
Corum is a little bit more comfy, even more on the second saga, but still very brutal and oldschool. Second trilogy is pretty much irish/celt mythology with him in the middle, which leads to a good outside-of-dungeon OD&D atmosphere.
Zelazny is also cool.
His amber chronicles have pretty much everything Magic the Gathering plays on, but 20 years before. Near-demigods walking between different realities, summoning shit from cards, using magic energy from distant lands, overpowerful beings fighting each other in battles spanning multiple planes and minions all over them. First 5 books are pretty much hack-slash-strategy, and don't explain much of what's happening(magically). The other 5 explain in way more detail how magic works, and the protagonist is actually "programmer who decided to create quantum shit that requires intertwining planes to work". Also, the werewolf scene is hilarious.
I aspire to someday be able to completely absorb the subtext of Gene wolfe's farts, because his text is something that surprises me more and more with each read so i think i'll never be able to fully grasp it. as >>48271043
said, his new sun saga is not easy to get into... but if you can bear with late zelazny, you can make the effort to read it. It is so good and full of hidden content that even the stories told by the characters are good and full of hidden content.
I reccomend moorcock, zelazny and wolfe, in order.
>>48269088
If your looking for a good fantasy series that just started check out Dawn of Wonder by Jonathan Renshaw. The book was amazing.
>>48269088
Moorcock's The Fortress of the Pearl is fabulous for exploration and dungeon-of-the-minddelving.
A Voyage to Arcturus.
Savage Pellucidar.
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>>48269088
Shut up and read this.
You need this, everyone need it
>CTRL+F Earthsea
>CTRL+F Le Guin
>CTRL+F Boat Jedi Wizard Chronicles
>>48271169
>Dying earth
my nigga
>>48275722
To expand on this Anon's recommendation, it's a series about a powerful wizard traveling through an archipelago world held together by magic. It's an interesting synthesis of themes from American Indian folklore and Taoistic cosmology, with a good bit of Judeo-Christian themes, too.
Stylistically speaking, it's a lot like Tolkien in reverse. Whereas Tolkien places detailed worldbuilding over fluid storytelling, Earthsea's worldbuilding is sparser, almost minimalistic, so as not to get in the way of the pacing of the story.
Thematically speaking, it's worlds apart from Tolkien as well, but that's more of a difference of kind. It's less about a band of heroes out to defeat a powerful villain and more about cosmic struggles between primeval forces and how those that struggle plays out among the people of Earth, either on a global scale or on a personal scale. Thematically, it's more like the Silmarillion than the Lord of the Rings.
The storytelling, on the other hand, is often more like the Hobbit -- episodic, moving from island to island as events occur.
It's pretty low-magic by today's standards. Don't expect pulpy spellslinging. Magic is more along the lines of healing, illusions, conjuring, polymorphing, and influencing the weather -- that last one is a big one, given the nautical nature of the setting.
Oh, and the prose is achingly beautiful. What's the literary equivalent of an eargasm?
Hack'n'slash you say?
God. The amount of books I have started to read and dropped since they were cringeworthy piece of shit. Can't trust any recommendations anymore.
>>48275722
>>48276152
Also, if you want to check Earthsea out, don't expect hack-'n'-slash. That's just not how the series rolls. There is conflict, including violent conflict, but violence is not the main source of conflict in the books.
>>48269088
Elric is very badly written - I'd advise you try Fafhrd and the Grey Mousr.
>>48276966
It's a classic worth checking out not that much because of what it tells, but how it influenced most of the fantasy worlds that we deal with
