How Much D&D Stuff Is There Anyway? Part 4: Novels

This is the fourth in a series of articles attempting to answer the question: How much D&D stuff is there anyway? So far, we’ve looked at editions, settings and magazines. Our hypothetical collector has spent close to $30k on TSR and WotC D&D products, some licensed 3e setting material and nearly a thousand magazine issues. The focus so far has been on collecting RPG material, and there is certainly a lot of that.

In this article, we are moving beyond table-top gaming, and diving into the world of D&D fiction. There have been hundreds of D&D novels published over the last five decades, and since TSR’s line of novels was built on top of the success of the Endless Quest books, we’ll also be covering the various gamebooks. As we go, we will continue to keep track of what our hypothetical collector adds to their D&D collection.

Part 4: Novels and Gamebooks
The first novel published by TSR was Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which famously launched the Dragonlance setting in 1984. The history of D&D fiction, however, is slightly more complex, so there are some other milestones worth noting before we get to Dragons of Autumn Twilight:​

Having covered those three curiosities, we are still not ready to tackle Dragons of Autumn Twilight. It may have been TSR’s first published novel, but it was far from TSR’s first book. By the time it was released in 1984, the company had already published thirty-eight titles in the Endless Quest (and related) series of gamebooks, making Dragons of Autumn Twilight only the thirty-ninth book published by TSR.

Gamebooks
Gamebooks are sometimes referred to as Choose Your Own Adventure books after the Bantam Books line launched in 1979. In the early 80s, Rose Estes championed the idea of TSR’s book department launching a similar range. She was challenged to write them herself, and did, contributing eight of the first ten Endless Quest titles. The books were very successful, reportedly selling 400,000 copies for some titles and millions in total. This success caused TSR to invest more in its book department, which led to the Dragonlance series and pretty much everything else we’re covering in this article, so we have Estes to thank (or blame!) for this part of our D&D collection.

The initial run of Endless Quest books was thirty-six titles, published between 1982 and 1987. Only twenty-four of these were labelled as “A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Book” on the cover. The other dozen titles are for an eclectic mixture of other TSR worlds (Top Secret, Star Frontiers, Gamma World) and licenced properties (Conan, Tarzan), with one book (Mystery of the Ancients) set in its own post-apocalyptic setting. Only one book in the series takes place in an established D&D world; Circus of Fear is explicitly set in the World of Greyhawk. TSR also published four Collector’s Sets of Endless Quest books, each consisting of four books in a slipcase. Our hypothetical collector collects only the two dozen D&D volumes in the series.

Buoyed by the early success of the Endless Quest line, TSR’s book department launched three spin-off lines in 1983. The ten books in the Fantasy Forest series were aimed at younger children, while the six books in the Heart Quest series were romantically themed and aimed at female teen readers. Neither of those series includes any D&D material, so our hypothetical collector can skip those and move on to the slightly trickier 1985 Endless Quest: Crimson Crystal spin-off line. None of the four books in the series is explicitly labelled as a D&D product, but three of them take place in fantasy worlds that could be D&D settings. The books also feature D&Disms like the burning hands spell, which is enough to persuade our D&D collector to add the three fantasy Crimson Crystal gamebooks to their collection.

TSR launched a line of Super Endless Quest books in 1985, but quickly rebranded the line as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Gamebooks. These books included tear-off bookmarks with customisable attributes, hit points and sometimes spells or additional stats to track. The books also assume the use of dice, which are thrown and combined with one of the protagonist’s attributes to give a result. Several of the books are explicitly set in existing D&D worlds, with four Dragonlance, one Ravenloft and one Forgotten Realms title in the series. The fifth book in the line, Test of the Ninja, is set in historical Japan, but it is still labelled as an AD&D Adventure Gamebook, so our hypothetical collector picks up all eighteen books in this series.

The year 1985 was a busy one for TSR when it came to gamebooks. As well as the ongoing Endless Quest and newly launched Super Endless Quest lines, two additional lines were launched. The six-book D&D Cartoon series was similar to the Fantasy Forest line, and aimed at younger readers. In each one, the reader could take on the role of one of the characters from the TV series. More innovative was the series of 1-on-1 Adventure Gamebooks which also debuted in 1985. Each of these consisted of a slipcase containing two books, one for each of two players. As well as controlling either the protagonist or antagonist in the story, each player handled the monsters and NPCs faced by their opponent. Seven of the ten pairs of books can reasonably be considered to be D&D books, with one set explicitly in Lankhmar and another in Dragonlance. Warlords has the Oriental Adventures logo on the cover, but takes place in a fantasy version of Japan, rather than being set in Kara-Tur. Two of the remaining books are set in the Marvel universe, while one (Battle for the Ancient Robot) has its own sci-fi setting.

By 1987 the original Endless Quest line had come to an end, and TSR’s book department was clearly transitioning its focus to novels. That didn’t stop TSR from launching two final lines of gamebooks: Lazer Tag Adventures and Catacombs. The setting for the former was a distant future in which Lazer Tag had become a galaxy-wide popular sport. The licensed Lazer Tag series lasted only three volumes, with the fourth title cancelled before release. Our D&D collector can safely ignore those. Not so for the Catacombs series. These were not novels, but substantial, full-sized books with complex webs of options and detailed illustrations on which many of the story choices were based. The second and fourth books in the series carry the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms logos, so definitely count as D&D products, while book three is based on the Top Secret game. The first Catacombs book, Faerie Mound of Dragonkind, isn’t explicitly a D&D book, but the list of monsters includes duergar, nightmares, spriggans, faerie dragons and other D&D creatures, so our hypothetical collector picks up three of the four books in this line. The last of the Catacombs books, Knight of the Living Dead, was published in 1989, and it was also the last gamebook TSR released for several years.

In the mid-1990s, TSR decided to relaunch the Endless Quest brand, with a fresh series of eleven gamebooks. The line included two Greyhawk books, two Ravenloft books and one title set in Al-Qadim — the only fiction work published for that setting. The remaining books in the series were for TSR’s Dragon Strike, Gamma World and Amazing Engine games. The fifth book in the series, A Wild Ride, is the only product ever released with the Wild Space logo on it. We’re going to count that one as a Spelljammer product (for reasons).

More than two decades after TSR last published an Endless Quest book, Candlewick Press produced a fresh set of six titles under licence. According to their dust jackets, all of these are set in the Forgotten Realms. One of them, Escape From Castle Ravenloft, actually takes place entirely in Ravenloft, but involves characters abducted from Faerûn. Our collector picks up all six books.

Before we (finally!) get to Dragons of Autumn Twilight, let’s take a look at the impact of adding all of those D&D gamebooks to a hypothetical collection:​

Here’s what the D&D gamebook output looks like over time. Note that these graphs include only the titles that our collector has decided contain D&D content, and not all of each line of books:

Dragonlance
The importance of fiction to TSR in the 1980 and early 1990s is often overlooked. As James Lowder wrote here on ENWorld, the book department was astonishingly successful. According to Lowder, in 1990 TSR books accounted for 17% of scifi/fantasy bestsellers at two large book chains, with most of the twenty-three releases that year being bestsellers. That was a higher percentage than any other publisher that year, achieved with a staff contingent of only 5½ people. The Endless Quest books had paved the way, but it was the launch of the Dragonlance series that truly put TSR on the map as a fiction powerhouse.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight was released in November 1984, with a cover price of just $2.95. It was the first book in the Chronicles trilogy, and this set a pattern for future novel releases. The vast majority of all TSR books were part of a series (usually either a trilogy or a hexalogy) and this approach became so entrenched that R. A. Salvatore said in a 2002 interview: “[…] my editors can think only in terms of “series” instead of novels, which is a good thing, job-security wise, I think.”

The following year, Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning were both released, and in 1986, all three books in the Legends trilogy were published. That equates to six novels in twenty-one months, meaning Weis and Hickman were effectively producing a new book roughly every 100 days, an astonishing pace for any author. Clearly this wasn’t sustainable, as evidenced by 1987’s Tales and 1988’s Heroes series, which brought in additional authors. The pace of new releases remained at three books per year until 1990, when it doubled to six new Dragonlance novels. Perhaps coincidentally, the cover price for new releases jumped from $3.95 to $4.95 that year.

For the purposes of counting and costing novels, we’re going to assume that our hypothetical D&D collector buys the first version of each novel. If that was a hardcover release, then our collector wasn’t wise enough to wait for the paperback release, and bought the hardcover. On the other hand, our collector ignores gift sets, omnibus editions (typically a whole trilogy combined into one large book) and collector’s editions. The exceptions to this are the Annotated Chronicles and Annotated Legends, which our collector is going to pick up, on the basis that the annotations are new content (but we won’t count the pages for those). Our collector also includes the two Best of Tales collections and Dragons in the Archives, despite most of the content being reprinted stories.

An examination of a graph of Dragonlance novels released over time reveals that the majority (70%) of all Dragonlance fiction was published after WotC purchased TSR in 1997. Equally evident is WotC’s decision to drop the Dragonlance fiction line in 2008, with the following two years’ releases being only titles needed to complete existing series. The three new Weis and Hickman books released from 2022-2024 were not published by WotC, but by Random House Worlds under licence.

Here are the totals for all of the Dragonlance novels:​

Greyhawk
The first novel set in the World of Greyhawk was Quag Keep, which we covered above. Andre Norton was collaborating with Jean Rabe on a sequel when she passed away in 2005, and although Rabe completed Return to Quag Keep, reviews were generally unfavourable. While both books are likely to be of interest to Greyhawk completists, our hypothetical collector decides to skip them, since they aren’t officially D&D novels.

The first Greyhawk novel published by TSR was Saga of Old City, in 1985. Penned by Gary Gygax, this is also the first book in the Gord the Rogue series. The second Greyhawk book (Artifact of Evil) followed in 1986, and continued Gord’s story, but by then Gary had lost control of TSR. In his settlement with TSR he kept the rights to Gord the Rogue, and his New Infinities company published five more books in the series in 1987 and 1988. In the final book (Dance of Demons) the world of Oerth is destroyed, Gygax’s way of making a clean break with all things Greyhawk.

TSR’s Greyhawk line continued without Gygax, with Rose Estes (of Endless Quest fame) being roped in to write the Mika Trilogy. The Mika books are not well-regarded by Greyhawk fans, and Estes herself noted in a 2017 interview that the first two books “were awful”. Despite having written nine Endless Quest novels, she felt that she did not have the necessary skills to write a serious novel, and had to learn on the fly. It is true that Estes’s later books in the Greyhawk line were an improvement, but as she suggests in the interview, most people had stopped reading them. TSR let the Greyhawk line lapse in 1989, but published one final book (Night Watch) set in Greyhawk as a stand-alone novel, lacking either D&D or Greyhawk branding. Our collector picks up the seven Gygax/Estes Greyhawk novels and Night Watch, but skips the five New Infinities titles.

Our collector also decides to skip the Sagard the Barbarian series, which were a mid-1990s collaboration between Gary Gygax and Flint Dille. The books were written before Gygax’s departure from TSR, so it is strange that the books were published by Simon & Schuster and not TSR. The Sagard books are gamebooks rather than novels, and take place on Oerth, so might be of interest to Greyhawk collectors, despite not being officially D&D books.

In 1999, WotC launched a series of “Classic” novels, each of which was based on a 1e adventure. These were all set on Oerth and carried the Greyhawk logo. While most of the books are stand-alone novels, the three titles written by Paul Kidd feature the same characters and form their own trilogy within the series. Those three were also the most favourably reviewed of the series.

Here are the totals for the official Greyhawk novels:​

Forgotten Realms
Although it would eventually become the dominant line of D&D novels, the Forgotten Realms setting was only the third setting to get fiction support, with Darkwalker on Moonshae published in 1987. That book was not originally intended to be a Forgotten Realms novel. As Jeff Grubb explains, TSR UK planned to develop a new setting, which was to be supported with both game and book products. Unfortunately, TSR UK stopped producing new material, got rid of their designers and became little more than a sales office for the TSR. This left Doug Niles with a half-written novel with no home.

Grubb and Greenwood were working on the original Forgotten Realms boxed set at this time, and the unfinished Darkwalker novel presented an opportunity to launch the setting with both novel and game support. (Darkwalker was eventually published two months before the boxed set.) In order to make this work, Greenwood’s original Moonshae Isles were replaced with Niles’s version and the book was completed, to become the first of many Forgotten Realms novels.

While the Moonshae trilogy was the first Forgotten Realms series, it isn’t the most well known. That honour belongs to R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt series, with more than forty novels now featuring the drow ranger. Salvatore originally intended for The Crystal Shard to be set in the Moonshae Isles, and planned to use some of the characters from that series (Daryth and his moorhound Canthus) to introduce Wulfgar, whom he viewed as the protagonist of his tale. When he became aware of the scale of the Realms, he relocated the story and replaced Daryth and Canthus with Drizzt Do’Urden and Guenhwyvar. This proved fortuitous, as Salvatore has now sold more than 35 million books, the majority of which feature Drizzt.

We’re going to follow the same guidelines as for Dragonlance when counting the Forgotten Realms novels: Gift sets, collector’s and omnibus editions are out; The Annotated Elminster is in (but we won’t count the pages); the various Best of titles are included (as is The Dao of Drizzt); and the cost is based on the first version (hardcover or softcover) of each book. The 2002 revised version of Spellfire has been counted as a separate book. Neither A Reader’s Guide to the Legend of Drizzt nor The Legend of Drizzt Visual Dictionary is included here. Those are both books about D&D fiction, but they aren’t novels or gamebooks.

The spike in 1998 is not, as it might be tempting to assume, simply WotC catching up with delayed 1997 releases, but was caused by the addition of a series of nine Double Diamond novellas to that year’s schedule, nearly doubling the total for that year but adding only the equivalent of two full novels in page count. Only 25% of all Forgotten Realms novels were released by TSR before WotC took over the company, with peak novel output being from 2005 to 2008 at fifteen titles per year. There is a clear drop in releases after 2012, and eight of the titles released in 2011 and 2012 were digital-only releases. By the end of 2016, WotC had ceased publishing novels entirely, and in 2017, there were no new Forgotten Realms novels (or D&D novels of any kind) for the first time in thirty years. Since 2018, all D&D fiction has been published under licence, with only one or two books published each year. Honor Among Thieves caused a slight bump in 2023, as several movie-related titles were released.

Here are the totals for the Forgotten Realms novels:​

Spelljammer
TSR released novels for almost all of the settings pumped out in the 1990s, with Spelljammer being no exception. The six-book Cloakmaster Cycle was released between 1991 and 1993. Twenty-one years later, a seventh Spelljammer book was released, to accompany the 5e version of the setting. Nearly half of the cost of collecting these books is the 2024 hardcover!

Here are the totals for the Spelljammer novels:​

Ravenloft
D&D’s horror setting was supported by a line of twenty novels during the TSR era. At the time, communications between TSR’s books and games departments was poor, leading to some novels contradicting established setting lore. Two of the Ravenloft novels (The Enemy Within and Lord of the Necropolis) were eventually declared non-canonical. The books clearly sold enough copies for WotC to relaunch them as the Covenant series from 2006 to 2008. Two additional novels were published in 2008 (Heaven’s Bones and Mithras Court), but you wouldn’t know that either of them was a Ravenloft—or even a D&D novel—from the cover. A third book (Black Crusade) was written, but never printed, and WotC released it as a free download in 2009. The most recent novel set in Ravenloft was the hardcover Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd published by Random House Worlds in May 2025.

Here are the totals for the Ravenloft novels:​

Dark Sun
The world of Athas received two pentologies and a trilogy during the TSR era, with the initial Prism Pentad notoriously upending much of the setting’s starting assumptions and effectively removing three major villains from play. Despite that, by all accounts the series sold relatively well and the Prism Pentad was rereleased by WotC between 2008 and 2009, followed by three brand new titles in 2010 and 2011, shortly after the release of the 4e Dark Sun setting books. If, as is widely expected, Dark Sun gets a 5e book in 2026, it seems quite likely that we might also get some fresh fiction for the setting, as has been the case for Spelljammer and Ravenloft.

Here are the totals for the Dark Sun novels:​

Mystara
Perhaps because the Known World didn’t really have a strong brand identity of its own, TSR didn’t publish any fiction for the setting until 1992, when the three-part Penhaligon Trilogy was released. Those books have the basic Dungeons & Dragons logo from that era on the cover, but by then support for the basic D&D RPG line was dwindling and the Known World transitioned to the 2e Mystara setting in 1994. Five novels carrying the Mystara logo were released between 1994 and 1996.

There was also a seven-book run of First Quest novels. These were published between 1995 and 1996, so could have been Mystara books, but perhaps because they were targeted at young adults, TSR decided to use the First Quest brand to differentiate them. First Quest was the title of a 1994 introductory 2e boxed set (later re-released as The Introduction to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Game) and the novel line was marketed alongside that set in the 1995 TSR Master Catalog.

Here are the totals for the novels set in the world of Mystara:​

Birthright
By 1995, TSR was producing products (of all kinds) at a breakneck speed. The five printed Birthright novels were released in a thirteen month period between August 1995 and September 1996. A sixth novel (The Falcon and the Wolf) was scheduled for December 1996, and three more (The Shadow Stone, Siege and Aquitania) for 1997, but all of those were casualties of TSR’s collapse. WotC eventually released The Falcon and the Wolf as a free online download in 2000.

Here are the totals for the Birthright novels:​

Planescape
Although the Planescape campaign setting was released in 1994, the year before Birthright, it was the last of the TSR-era settings to get a line of novels, with The Blood Wars trilogy debuting in 1996. Two additional stand-alone novels followed: Pages of Pain in 1996 and the video game tie-in Torment in 1999. The latter deserves some additional attention, if only as a warning to steer clear of it. Torment the game has been rightly lauded over the years. The novel, on the other hand, is simply bad. The characters in the novel are pale shadows of their game versions (and two of them mysteriously switch species), the dialogue is humorless and inconsistent, and some of the most interesting plot points and locations from the game are dropped entirely. Worst of all, the Nameless One, who is the protagonist of both the game and book, is arbitrarily assigned a name early in the book, for no apparent reason other than perhaps the difficulty of writing for a lead character with no name.

Here are the totals for the Planescape novels:​

Eberron
Perhaps surprisingly, the youngest of D&D’s major settings is the one with the third highest number of fiction titles (after the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance). From 2005 to 2010 Eberron enjoyed fairly strong fiction support, but the novel line was wound down in 2011/2012 as WotC moved out of the book publishing business. This meant that the third title in The Lanternlight Files (titled Death Comes Easy) was never published, and the loose ends from the second book in the series were left forever unresolved. The final Eberron book (Skein of Shadows) was released in 2012 but only as a digital book.

Here are the totals for the Eberron novels:​

Of course, we also need some graphs. Here is a simple plot of novels per year:

Here is the same count, but showing how much each setting contributes to the totals:

Here’s how many pages our hypothetical collector would need to read each year to stay up-to-date:

Finally, here is how much our collector had to spend each year. The spike in costs for 1996 is caused by the high number of hardcovers that year. In 1995, only two of the thirty-five novels were hardcovers, but in 1996, ten of the thirty-six books were hardcover releases, accounting for 58% of that year’s costs:

That brings us to the end of part four of this series. Thanks for reading this far! We are not yet quite done with printed D&D material. The next installment in this series will investigate D&D comics, colouring books and other printed oddities.​