Why RPG tie-in novels are actually BETTER than most other fantasy

What I enjoy most about writing this blog is jumping to the defense of entertainment that suffers from an undeserved bad reputation in the mainstream. Not to be overly dramatic, but I feel the internet can often be a place that punishes integrity and independent thought, and online groups make people feel pressured to agree with majority opinions, often to the extent that a large part of the audience feels like they’re not even allowed to voice their views. I’m sure there are lots of explanations for this, but snobbery is obviously one of them.

On the whole, I think the online reading community is decidedly more wholesome, more nuanced and frankly more, well, normal, than the movie community and especially the truly unhinged gaming community, but there are still a good deal of questionable Mandatory Opinions™ floating around on Goodreads and other such corners of the web (e.g., the absurd idea that “tropes are bad”) .

One ubiquitous assumption, even among die-hard fantasy readers, is that tie-in novels set in RPG worlds are by definition lower-tier fiction that couldn’t possibly compete with the really good mainline authors such as Sanderson, Hobb, Rothfuss and the like. To this I say: lies! Nothing but lies!

If you ask me what my favourite fantasy book series is, I’ll answer “The Lord of the Rings,” to which the reply will be, “okay, outside of Tolkien”, and then I’ll think a bit and I think I will mention the “Gotrek and Felix” series and “Dragonlance” as my favourites.

I’ve been reading fantasy from a very young age. I’ve read most of the big names from every decade that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings. And mostly, I’ve been left wanting.

Let me go over a few of the recent ones who have been receiving rave reviews and sold lots of books: Brandon Sanderson, John Gwynne and Patrick Rothfuss.

Sanderson is a terrific world-builder who outlines very intricate plots with killer finales. Unfortunately, his characters can be a little dry, and his prose even more so. But I wouldn’t mind these smaller shortcomings if it weren’t for the big one: Sanderson’s books don’t have that magic spark. They feel technical, constructed, impersonal. This is mostly due to the fact that everything in his world, however strange, makes perfect sense, and is explained scientifically. He is famous for his “magic systems”, which are very well constructed, but they’re ultimately nothing more than fake science. As soon as magic can be entirely explained as a system, it ceases to be magic. To parody a well-known phrase: any sufficiently advanced magic system is indistinguishable from technology.

John Gwynne. Man, I loved those books at first. Coming from Sanderson, these were a breath of fresh air to me. Unlike Sanderson’s more outlandish creatures and locales, Gwynne’s focus was on medieval authenticity, a briskly paced story and lots of incredibly well-written action scenes. His characters were straightforward but believable, and magic was allowed to just be magical. I was completely on board with The Faithful and the Fallen, up until book 3 (interestingly, the most beloved book in the series), when all of a sudden, Gwynne begins to deconstruct the mythical elements of the story, tearing them down and reducing them to the mundane. He continues in this vein with each new book, making them feel a bit more modern with every iteration. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Gwynne doesn’t handle the transcendent or the metaphysical very well at all. Prophecies and destinies don’t really mean anything. There is no eschatology, no real end-game, nothing that this epic conflict ultimately really revolves around. It’s just “flawed to the point of idiocy but at least not outright evil” guys fighting “completely evil just for the sake of it” guys, but without any humour. We’re supposed to take seriously a world where angels and demons both are just “meh” guys with wings, either of the feathery or the leathery variety. And that was incredibly frustrating to read, considering how awesome some of the locations, creatures and adventures themselves were.

And then Rothfuss. Man, I have no idea why The Name of the Wind was such a popular book. The most unlikeable and unbelievable protagonist I’ve ever read about, making his way through the world to prove to everyone that he’s the most amazing man who ever lived. Written in first person, no less. I didn’t pick up on much interesting world-building, and magic once more was just a system. Hard pass.

So… Frustrated as I was with modern fantasy, I decided to try my hand at something different: the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, written as part of the Dragonlance setting for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game, back in 1984, when tabletop was the only kind of roleplaying game.

It started in a tavern. With a party of adventurers. They were about to embark upon a quest to find ancient items. They made their way through caves and dungeons. They encountered traps, mazes and enemies. And they even got treasure along the way.

People say that when you read the first Dragonlance novel, you can practically hear the dice rolling, and that’s absolutely true. It’s also not incredibly well-written, introducing far too many characters at once and jumping from one person’s point of view to another’s without any clear transition.

None of that mattered to me. Dragonlance had the soul of fantasy. It had a wild, untamed world full of mystery and adventure. It had high stakes, prophecies and destinies, gods and mortals and everything in between. And it had a cast of characters you learned to truly love and care about. The second book cemented that, all the while improving on the pacing and the prose. I fell in love with the series and kept on reading.

I’m now twelve books in, and I love it even more than I did at first. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m fully aware of a multitude of objective flaws in these books. The narrative makes some strange jumps, sometimes things happen that don’t make sense (especially once the series starts to introduce time travel,) and the authors’ philosophy on the nature of the war between good and evil seems flat-out wrong, but still, none of that matters to me because they made me love the characters and the world they inhabit and I love reading about their adventures, which are always original and surprising and above all fun to read about. I desperately want the heroes to find happiness at the end of the story, and there aren’t too many books that can do that.

The other series I discovered along the road was Gotrek and Felix, written for the Warhammer Fantasy universe, primarily inspired by the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay tabletop game. This is a book series that feels exactly like playing through a tabletop campaign for this game. It centers around the two titular characters, the human poet/swordsman Felix Jaeger and the dwarf slayer Gotrek Gurnisson. They are an odd pair, but the best of friends. Over the course of the series, they go through some of the most insane adventures imaginable, facing ever more frightening opponents, always saving the day and never getting any credit for it. A widening cast of supporting characters is introduced along the way, including multiple love interests for Felix. Unlike Dragonlance, these books are extraordinarily well-written. It’s amazing how William King manages to go from a ridiculously overblown action scene involving vomiting trolls or tentacled mutants to a quiet moment of philosophical pondering and make it all feel like it belongs in the same world. After seven books, Scottish-born William King moved on and was replaced by American author Nathan Long, whose style and sensibilities clearly differ, even though I believe he made an earnest attempt to stay true to the originals. In my view, though, you simply can’t replicate that original magic, which only offers further proof that William King was really creating something special.

I can’t think of anything I don’t like about that original run of Gotrek and Felix. The adventures are refreshing and unpredictable, the characters are heartfelt and real, and the humour is spot-on.

Let me tell you, both Dragonlance and Gotrek and Felix have given me far more enjoyment than any of the more mainstream fantasy books from the past few decades. They’ve also taught me more about storytelling and writing, and given me more to ponder about philosophically, even if I often end up disagreeing with the authors.

By the way, I should also mention another Warhammer Fantasy novel here, called Drachenfels. It’s got nothing to do with Gotrek and Felix, but man, was that a brilliant book.

So, why is it that these novels never get any attention from any of the book reviewers on YouTube (I refuse to use the term BookTube, sorry)? Why is it that they consistently hover somewhere below four stars on Goodreads, whereas the newest Sanderson or Ryan Cahill will always automatically get near-perfect marks? I don’t know, but people are missing out.

I very frequently see people online sneering at tie-in fiction, saying that such books are universally trash compared to “real” fantasy novels, when in my experience, I would almost state the opposite (I don’t think Sanderson etc. are trash, but I vastly prefer these RPG novels). I don’t really care enough anymore about popular opinion to guess why this prejudice exists, but I just want to set the record straight. RPG tie-in novels are great. Sure, there are bad ones, but percentage-wise, I’ve actually encountered more good ones in this category than in mainline fantasy.

And I have a theory as to why RPG tie-in novels tend to be so good. I believe a major part of it has to be the shared nature of the world itself. You see, when a “normal” fantasy author creates a world for their series, most of the time, that entire world will be developed solely to support a series of about three to seven books, at most. Several consequences ensue:

• The first book in the series will always have to carry the burden of explaining that world to the reader, leading to pacing issues and repetitive setups.
• The world is often fabricated around the story, making it feel a bit shallow and wonky, like movie sets for towns in old westerns.
• Alternatively, the world is extremely detailed and well-developed, tempting the author to artificially inject as many references to its riches as possible, or running the risk of hinting at dozens of amazing locations, peoples and characters we will never actually get to see.
• The author’s attention is split between the construction of the world and the actual story that plays out. Usually, at least one of them will suffer as a result, and more often than not it’s the plot.
• Authors are tempted to make the story they’re telling the definitive story of that world: the most important thing that ever happened in their setting. This makes sense, but it leads to fairly repetitive storylines. Every fantasy series has to be about “the final confrontation”.
• Since every series introduces its own world, authors are tempted to make their world into something not-too-familiar. As a result, we often get annoying and shallow subversions or uncreative pretensions of originality. A book isn’t more unique simply because it doesn’t have any dwarves or elves in it. Nor do “different” dwarves or elves do much to make it more interesting, in my opinion. Most of the time, these attempts to stand out don’t actually add anything positive and only serve to make the work feel less like fantasy.
• Authors writing in their own worlds are more likely to be driven by their egos. They want to prove that their setting and their story is different, special, amazing and unique. It becomes more about standing out than about simply telling a good story and entertaining the audience.

On the other hand, RPG tie-in novels are free from a lot of these burdens. The world already exists and the author gets to contribute to its growth. The participatory nature of this project automatically makes it less egotistic and more professional. The worlds are often incredibly well-developed because they weren’t entirely created by a single person with limited time. This also helps make the histories feel more real, since they’ve been written down from many different viewpoints and varying backgrounds, just like real history.

Tie-in novelists are almost always professional authors who have been selected by the publisher because of their writing abilities, which actually makes their penmanship more dependable than even the big names in mainstream fantasy fiction today. Far too often, I’ve encountered knights and peasants in medieval fantasy settings who talk like modern sitcom characters. I can’t stand it when the word “okay” is used in this context, for example. This sort of thing would never happen in a Warhammer novel.

Starting a book with an already familiar setting can also be a boon to both the author and the reader. For readers, it feels like we’re getting invested in a certain world. With each outing, we get to know the fictional universe a bit better, and there is a certain pleasure in this growing familiarity. For authors, an established world allows for fresher narratives. Since it’s clear that the Forgotten Realms will continue on for some time, its next novel doesn’t always have to deal with a world-ending threat or force an epic storyline that involves as many cultures and locations as possible. It can simply be about a small group of adventurers and their antics in one particular city. The next one might be about something completely different. All of it contributes to the nurturing of this giant, living universe that becomes more and more like a real place with each outing. It’s a wonderful sort of project.

Now, with all this said, does this mean I will spurn all non-tie-in fiction? Will I urge you to do the same? Of course not. There are still lots of wonderful original fantasy books being written, and there is obviously a great joy to be found in both creating and discovering a new setting. I still hope and believe I will discover many great new books in this genre, unattached to any game or other form of media.

Nevertheless, I believe there are good reasons to respect RPG tie-in novels as absolutely worthy counterparts to other fantasy novels, and I’ve never encountered a serious argument for why they would be inferior. Thus concludes my rant for the day.