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Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Appendix E: Inspirational Reading

Top 10 Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Appendix E: Inspirational Reading : The Book of Three, Throne of the Crescent Moon, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Compleat Enchanter, The King of Elfland's Daughter, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, A Wizard of Earthsea, Witch World, Elric of Melniboné

The Book of Three
AuthorLloyd Alexander
ISBN0805080481
Taran wanted to be a hero, and looking after a pig wasn't exactly heroic, even though Hen Wen was an oracular pig. But the day that Hen Wen vanished, Taran was led into an enchanting and perilous world. With his band of followers, he confronted the Horned King and his terrible Cauldron-Born. These were...
Throne of the Crescent Moon
AuthorSaladin Ahmed
ISBN0756407117
The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, home to djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, are at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious master thief known as the Falcon Prince. In the midst of this brewing rebellion a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes...
Three Hearts and Three Lions
AuthorPoul Anderson
ISBN0575074981
The gathering forces of the Dark Powers threatened the world of man. The legions of Faery, aided by trolls, demons and the Wild Hunt itself, were poised to overthrow the realms of light.
And alone against the armies of Chaos stood one man, the knight of Three Hearts and Three Lions. Carlsen, a twentieth-century...
The Compleat Enchanter
AuthorL. Sprague de Camp
ISBN0345314352
The Mathematics of Magic was probably the greatest discovery of the ages - at least Professor Harold Shea thought so. With the proper equations, he could instantly transport himself back in time to all the wondrous lands of ancient legend. But slips in time were a hazard, and Shea's magic did not always...
The King of Elfland's Daughter
AuthorLord Dunsany
In fantasy, I've seen magic used in many ways: as plot device, curio, religious allegory, and the personification of morals, but rarely do I find a book where magic is truly magical. Too often, it's a convenience, a cliche, but for Dunsany, magic is pervasive, mysterious, unknowable, and lovely. He...
Dragons of Autumn Twilight
AuthorMargaret Weis
ISBN0786915749
Life-long friends, they went their separate ways. Now they are together again, though each holds secrets from the others in his heart. They speak of a world shadowed with rumors of war. They speak of tales with strange monsters, creatures of myth, creatures of legend. They do not speak of their secrets....
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
AuthorRobert E. Howard
ISBN0345483855
Poem and first 13 tales, in order written, plus Miscellanea drafts, notes, maps by author.
Cimmeria poem
1 The Phoenix on the Sword 1932
2 The Frost-Giant's Daughter 1976
3 The God in the Bowl 1952
4 The Tower of the Elephant 1933
5 The Scarlet Citadel 1933
6 Queen of the Black...
A Wizard of Earthsea
AuthorUrsula K. Le Guin
ISBN0553383043
”The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”


The Folio Society edition is superbly illustrated by David Lupton.

The boy is born on the island of Gont in the archipelago of Earthsea. This is a world infused with magic. Not everyone can control this magic, but those...
Witch World
AuthorAndre Norton
ISBN0441897088
Andre Norton enthralled readers for decades with thrilling tales of people challenged to the limits of their endurance in epic battles of good against evil. None are more memorable than her Witch World novels. Simon Tregarth, a man from our own world, escapes his doom through the gates to the Witch World....
Elric of Melniboné
AuthorMichael Moorcock
ISBN0441203981
It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair that flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody....He is Elric, Emperor of Melnibone, cursed with a keen and cynical intelligence, schooled in the art of sorcery...
The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft
AuthorH.P. Lovecraft
The weird fiction short stories of H.P. Lovecraft from 1917-1935. Excludes collaborations.

The eBook’s table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.

The Tomb (1917)
Dagon (1917)
Polaris (1918)
Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
Memory...
The High Crusade
AuthorPoul Anderson
ISBN0743475283
In the year of grace 1345, as Sir Roger Baron de Tourneville is gathering an army to join King Edward III in the war against France, a most astonishing event occurs: a huge silver ship descends through the sky and lands in a pasture beside the little village of Ansby in northeastern Lincolnshire. The Wersgorix,...
Bulfinch's Mythology
AuthorThomas Bulfinch
ISBN0375751475
For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known.
        The stories are divided into three...
Split Infinity
AuthorPiers Anthony
ISBN0345354915
On the technological, decadent world of Proton, someone was trying to destroy Stile, serf and master Gamesman. His only escape lay in Phaze, a world totally ruled by magic. Soon he learned that his alternate self had already been murdered, and that he was next. On Proton, his fate depended on winning...
Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland
AuthorLady Augusta Gregory
ISBN0901072370
It's always weird to read a book that's essentially a twice-over translation. First the original author translated the myths to English, and that was over a hundred years ago... and then the Polish translator, while trying to keep the archaic and mythical sound of the original, translated it into Polish......
The Face in the Frost
AuthorJohn Bellairs
The Face in the Frost is a fantasy classic, defying categorization with its richly imaginative story of two separate kingdoms of wizards, stymied by a power that is beyond their control. A tall, skinny misfit of a wizard named Prospero lives in the Southern Kingdom a patchwork of feuding duchies and...
The Best of Leigh Brackett
AuthorLeigh Brackett
ISBN0345259548
There was once a young girl who created a host of strange and wonderful worlds. These were her very own planets, with such fascinating features as the Sea of Morning Opals, the Mountains of White Cloud, wicked Canal cities, and lost lands full of magic and mystery.

That girl's name is Leigh Brackett....
The Long Tomorrow
AuthorLeigh Brackett
ISBN0441061354
Two generations after destruction rained down upon America's cities, the population is scattered into small towns. Cities are forbidden by law, as is scientific research.

Rumors abound of a secret place known as "Bartorstown", where science is untrammelled by interference or hatred....
The Sword of Rhiannon
AuthorLeigh Brackett
ISBN0441791425

Since I have been reading a lot of Leigh Brackett recently, I decided it might be fun to watch the first half of "Eldorado" again--one of my all-time favorite Westerns--for which Brackett wrote the screenplay. I was struck--as always--by how elegantly and efficiently the first half is constructed,...
What Mad Universe
AuthorFredric Brown


Fredric Brown was a true ubermensch of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and his short stories are still among the best ever written in the genre. I mean that. Best...Ever...Written.

What Mad Universe is one of only a handful of SF novels that he wrote, a tear-inducing shame given...
The Dying Earth
AuthorJack Vance
ISBN0671831526

I did not like this book much the first time I read it, but after reading it a second time while visualizing its characters as puppets, I found I liked it much more.

This book—particularly the first three stories—irritated me. I found its wizards to be contemptible creatures, morally...
The Fallible Fiend
AuthorL. Sprague de Camp
ISBN0786246626
The demon Zdim was happy with his philosophy on the Twelfth Plane, until he was conjured to Prime Plane to serve the human wizard Maldivius. There, to a logical fiend, men seemed wholly irrational. He was ordered to eat the first being to enter a sanctum, then beaten for devouring the wizard's apprentice,...
Lest Darkness Fall
AuthorL. Sprague de Camp
ISBN0515608173
When am I? Padway asked himself after the lightning-flash knocked him down. He knew where he was--Rome. He was there to study archaeology, and even though the lightning had left him dazed, he could see the familiar Roman buildings. But the buildings looked newer and the crowds in the street were wearing...
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
AuthorLord Dunsany
ISBN0486442179
An influential fantasy writer and a key figure in the Irish literary renaissance, Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany (1878-1957) produced a trove of gems of the imagination. The 12 stories here are some of his best. They will take you on a remarkable journey to places that sometimes...
The Maker of Universes
AuthorPhilip José Farmer
ISBN0722134487
When Robert Wolff found a strange horn in an empty house, he held the key to a different universe. To blow that horn would open up a door through space-time and permit entry to a cosmos whose dimensions and laws were not those our starry galxy knows.

For that other universe was a place of tiers, world...
Faeries
AuthorBrian Froud
I bought this book for my wife some years ago. She was an artist and very talented. Near the end of her life one of the subjects she was beginning to work with was "fantasy subjects" including faeries. She was (as I said above) very talented and throughout her life as she would pick up different techniques...
The Killing Moon
AuthorN.K. Jemisin
ISBN0356500764
THE CITY BURNED BENEATH THE DREAMING MOON

In the ancient city-state of Gujaareh, peace is the only law. Upon its rooftops and among the shadows of its cobbled streets wait the Gatherers - the keepers of this peace. Priests of the dream-goddess, their duty is to harvest the magic of the sleeping...
The Shadowed Sun
AuthorN.K. Jemisin
ISBN0356500772
The second book in the Dreamblood duo continues on in a tradition of immersive Egyptian-like settings, although the culture is still uniquely Jemisin's: a city built on the idea of peace, magic users that harvest and gift dreams, a plague of dreams harming so many people, and a war in the desert.

There's...
Tigana
AuthorGuy Gavriel Kay
ISBN0451457765
A masterful epic of magic, politics, war, and the power of love and hate—from the renowned author of The Fionavar Tapestry and Children of Earth and Sky.

Tigana is the magical story of a beleaguered land struggling to be free. It is the tale of a people so cursed by the black sorcery of a cruel...
The Eyes of the Dragon
AuthorStephen King
ISBN0751504572
A kingdom is in turmoil as the old king dies, murdered by a strange and horrible poison. While the land of Delain mourns, the evil wizard Flagg, hatches an unscrupulous plot, which sees the King's eldest son Peter imprisoned for his father's murder, and the youngest son inherit the throne. Only Peter...
Hiero's Journey
AuthorSterling E. Lanier
ISBN0345308417
Per Hiero Desteen was a priest, a telepath -- and a highly trained killer. Together with his great riding moose and the young bear who was his friend, he was on an extraordinary mission. For this was five thousand years after the holocaust known as The Death. Now the evil Brotherhood of the Unclean was waging...
The Unforsaken Hiero
AuthorSterling E. Lanier
ISBN0345302281
Per Hiero Desteen was alone, weaponless and without food or water, facing the unknown perils of the desert in this grim world, five thousand years after the holocaust known as The Death.

Sent south to spy on the evil Brotherhood of the Unclean which fought to destroy the emerging civilization...
Swords and Deviltry
AuthorFritz Leiber
ISBN1595820795
For the first time-the story of how the greatest heroes in fantastic literature first met.

'The two thieves had themselves been robbed by two youths, who eyed each other suspiciously over the sprawled, senseless bodies.

Fafhrd said: 'Our motives for being here seem identical.'...
Dwellers in the Mirage
AuthorA. Merritt
ISBN0020228724
Angry Warrior, Modern Man. . .

Leif Langdon was suddenly ripped from the 20th century and plunged into the ancient world of The Mirage. But his entrance into this awesome land awakened the slumbering Dwayanu, who in this strange incarnation was also Leif. Thus, two-men-in-one battle with...
The Moon Pool
AuthorA. Merritt
ISBN0819567078
One of the most gripping fantasies ever written, The Moon Pool embodies all the romanticism and poetic nostalgia characteristic of A. Merritt's writings. Set on the island of Ponape, full of ruins from ancient civilizations, the novel chronicles the adventures of a party of explorers who discover...
Perdido Street Station
AuthorChina Miéville
ISBN0345459407
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies the city of New Crobuzon, where the unsavory deal is stranger to no one--not even to Isaac, a gifted and eccentric scientist who has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known...
The Jewel in the Skull
AuthorMichael Moorcock
ISBN0583113680
Fantasy legend Michael Moorcock won hundreds of thousands of readers with his vast and imaginative multiverse, in which Law and Chaos wage war through endless alternative universes, struggling over the fundamental rules of existence.

Moorcock's heroes of the multiverse have been lauded...
Swords Against Darkness IΙΙ
AuthorAndrew J. Offutt
ISBN0890833397
9 • Foreword (Swords Against Darkness III) • essay by Andrew J. Offutt
14 • The Pit of Wings • [Ryre] • shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
34 • The Sword of Spartacus • [Simon of Gitta] • novelette by Richard L. Tierney
58 • Servitude • (1976) • shortstory by Wayne Hooks
72...
Titus Groan
AuthorMervyn Peake
ISBN0879514256

What an odd fantasy! No swords, no sorcery, no elves, no thieves, no imaginary beasts, no multiple planes of existence . . . nothing but a cavernous castle peopled by eccentrics with Dickensian names (Sepulchrave, Prunesquallor, Swelter, Flay) whose lives are determined by centuries--perhaps...
The Blue Star
AuthorFletcher Pratt
ISBN0345298527
Lalette Asterhax could not escape her destiny. She was a hereditary witch in a world where witchcraft was banned by ecclesiastical and temporal powers. And any man who possessed her would then gain possession of her precious Blue Star…and all the powers it could bestow. Rodvard Bergelin was a reluctant...
The Broken Lands
AuthorFred Saberhagen
ISBN0671653806
I have wanted to read Fred Saberhagen's Sword books for a long time and I had read somewhere that this trilogy was the precursor to them. Perhaps if I had read this when it was originally published I would have liked it more. It was boring and flat to me. In a post apocalyptic world the Empire of the East is enslaving...
The Crystal Shard
AuthorR.A. Salvatore
ISBN0786942460
Review of the audiobook narrated by Victor Bevine.

Between 10 and 20 years ago, back when I only read a handful of books each year, I read through most of this series (up to book 17 of The Legend of Drizzt). With my recent re-introduction to reading thanks to audiobooks I've had the opportunity...
The Eye of the World
AuthorRobert Jordan
ISBN0812511816
The first series that showed it was possible to do an uninspired rewrite of Tolkien and make a mint was Shannara. After that the doors were flung wide, and the next to profit off the scheme was was Robert Jordan. Of course, I'm not suggesting it's bad to take inspiration from older authors--all authors...
The Coming of the King (Books of Merlin, #1)
AuthorNikolai Tolstoy
ISBN0553283952
This book had huge amounts of potential that it didn't quite live up to. Tolstoy has wrote some great non fiction on British Dark Ages history and pre-Christian European religion (do your self a favor and read his book Quest for Merlin!) but as far as fiction his writing style just didn't flow well. It took...
The Shadow of the Torturer
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0671540661
Wolfe has an almost legendary status amongst fellow authors; Gaiman called him 'a ferocious intellect', Swanwick said he's "the greatest writer in the English language alive today", and Disch called this series "a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity".

You can rarely trust the...
The Book of Wonder
AuthorLord Dunsany
ISBN1587156377
"Not only does any tale which crosshatches between this world and Faerie owe a Founder's Debt to Lord Dunsany, but the secondary world created by J.R.R. Tolkien--from which almost all fantasylands have devolved--also took shape and flower from Dunsany's example." --The Encyclopedia of Fantasy...
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