Veeky Forums literature

Read Mary Gentle's 'Ash' recently, that was very good.

Good lord was that first book hard to get through with out googling everything.

I managed not looking anything up until the fifth book or so.

Gardens of the Moon is a long running campaign where the players are all mates, there's a bit of liquor involved and the GM has been winging it on the rules from day 1 and operating on rule of cool. Nobody cares, everyone's having fun and the slow power creep kicks in so subtly that nobody notices. And about six months in, everyone, GM included, realises that nobody has any idea what's going on and is afraid to ask.

God I love it. I'm convinced that's what the game that inspired it actually looked like and the authors just ran with it.

Er, the entire malazan series, not just Gardens.

>Thomas Covenant
You and I are niggas now.

I read choose your own adventure novels and fantasy as inspiration for my youtube project.

youtube.com/watch?v=wMOPI-Cz4c0

>all this manure

These are the same people that will claim Tolkien is a hack and that GRRM is a shit writer.

Bartimaus. AU where magicians summon spirits to proform magic and the most sarcastic demon in existence is brought in to do shit

I read moderate quality self published science fiction.

Discworld.

My advice is to either start with Guards! Guards! or with Wyrd Sisters.

GRRM is a shitty writer. He's also a fat, lazy, and a sell out.

GRRM is a shit writer.
His plot was good until he got himself stuck, though.

Tolkien is a rather bad writer (not an awful one though) but he's not a hack because people like him because of his worlbuilding and he was at least good at that.

fan fiction

-The Council Wars by John Ringo is pretty good, I especially like most of his posleen stuff.
-The Belgeriad by David and Leigh Eddings
-Anything by David Gemmell, with my favourite being Ravenheart.
-Darkness / Darlavai series by Harry Turtledove is also pretty interesting.

Read the stormlight archive by Brandon Sanderson!

When you really think about it, every story is really just fan fiction based on something else.

I like to read epics mostly. I've just started to get into the King Arthur mythos from the Middle Ages. There's a gold mine of stuff in old literature for your Veeky Forums needs

The only thing that's kept me from picking up World of Slavness was that it's apparently written in first person.

>looking for something with dragons and shit.
Why read published authors when you can just stay on Veeky Forums?

You can find anything on Veeky Forums. Anything.

>Interlaces up to 5 separate plotlines, not actually keeping any of them chronologically sorted in the main narrative, but still manages to keep them all straight and even drop hints from one to the other as to what's going on, like how Denethor looks into the Palantir right after Frodo gets captured and that's what fuels his despair.
>Manages to create sub-poems within his own fictional universe which hold to alliteration and meter rules in the fictional languages he created for them.
>Creates an extremely dynamic theory of evil that is simultaneously and ambiguously both Boeotian and Manichean
>Creates instantly identifiable speaking patterns based on age by interweaving not only archaisms in word use, but actual archaisms in grammar, so that the older a speaker is, the more like to Anglo-Saxon English they speak.
>Bad writer.

I'm pretty sure you're just missing the actually clever points and figuring it as an adventure story and focused on how kewl it was that Legolas and Gimli killed lots of orcs at the Hornburg.

and also: 1d4chan.org/images/f/f3/DragonLove.png

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I like the black company novels

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1d4chan.org/images/4/49/SheepDragon.png

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This is probably a good thread to ask this in: what's Veeky Forums's thoughts on Tamora Pierce's fiction, and the setting her books take place in?

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I'm reading the latest Skullduggery Pleasant book at the moment, and going through the laborous process of making a full blown audiobook out of an old Shadowrun novel.

A Skullduggery Pleasant RPG is one of my biggest desires in life.

Started this recently. I'm still at the beginning, but it's been good so far.

Honestly, use FATE. I tried using the Dresden system, but the styles of Magic are inherently different. FATE Core really captures the one-trick pony style of characters like Billy Ray, but it's flexible enough for Elementals and Adepts.

The setting and flavour doesn't lend itself to a lot of crunch.

>Anything

I want the adventures of some giantess and her human friend in a way that's organic and natural like what this picture shows- companionship and love.

I'm currently in an exhaustive survey of the epic poems and mythological literature of human history. I also suffer from adhd AMA

Or you could just recommend some books, you pompous twat.

Nicomo Cosca is my spirit animal.

Make sure you read all the other books and stories he set in that universe too.

>'Question: what does tg read?'
>Answer? Answer
>'pompous twat'

K

Enuma Elish was a lot of fun, would highly recommend.
Asshole

It is. It's also filled with a lot of cultural artefacts and turns of phrase that make no sense to me, but presumably do to a native russian speaker. As the books go on things start getting *weird*.

That book is amazing. Never have I wanted to murder a character in a book in my life more than reading this book. You'll know who I mean at the end.

Just started 1001 Nights. 30 pages down; 2500+ pages to go.

Vathek was a wild ride, I think most people here would enjoy it if they don't mind older books.

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I'd have enjoyed an ending where it's made clear that the whole thing was just Cannaryth remembering this dialogue long after it happened.
Still a neat read, though.

Thomas covenant was a weird read.

The only thing that kept me turning was a morbid curiosity of what was next. I didn't like Thomas, just because of all of the opportunities he fucks up or isn't able to take advantage of. Much like myself.

My name is even Thomas. Fuck.

Your next line is going to be: "I really liked The Wheel of Time."

Is it worth finishing? I saw the first part that Sanderson wrote and couldn't bring myself to read it. Lacks any of the subtlety that Jordan wrote with, which is saying something. And the prose is barely serviceable.

If you mean Bayaz, I'd easily say one of the best villains of all time.

Mark Lawrence's Red Queen series is also good

Circle of Magic got me to create my own fantasy worlds and characters, so I have a soft spot for Pierce even though I doubt the quality of her books holds up at this point.

Just finished The Witcher Saga, was pretty great.

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Finished the Hammer's Slammers series recently.

Fun read if you're into Vietnam + hovertanks + energy weapons.

David Drake was a vet of the Vietnam war, so his expertise comes through pretty often in his writing (also some of his short stories are literally just recounted experiences of buddies that he repainted) and he does a good job of portraying his soldiers and just how shit a battlefield can really be.

He had a pretty believable idea of what future warfare might look like, though I don't think he sees the robotic revolution coming as hard as the futurists want it to. A.I. is incorporated into a bunch of stuff but doesn't override the human pilot, central command has access to and can remotely pilot armored vehicles if they need to do something important (like using a tank's main cannon to shoot down enemy satellites or aircraft). Does a decent job of justifying the Vietnam-like combat because anyone with a deep enough pocket can pluck satellites and aircraft out of the air like they're fucking tulips, limiting the guys on the ground to the sensor suites of their local armored company or command car.

Fair warning, the series was a bunch of short stories before they became proper books. Their serialized nature means Drake repeats himself on a lot of points in each story, like how the powerguns work, or certain details about the hovertanks. Pretty minor thing but I figured I'd mention it.

Finished Promise of Blood. amazing book. very shit ending.

Not him, but I finished out of loyalty. The second of the three Sanderson WoTs is readable, the other two were pretty weak.

sorry, I only have giant, not giantess

what books would you recommend ?

I've attempted to finish lord of the rings multiple times but never made it through the trilogy.

It's just so badly and aimlessly written with twenty page tangents on the shapes of rocks and streams. Reminds me of one of those that guy campaigns where he puts all this pointless detail in when you just want to kill goblins for loot.

Reminds me that lore creators have no place writing fiction

>this is what modern youths unironically believe

>What is bait

Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales are the shit if you like historical fiction. Steer clear of the Last Kingdom series, though, it's ass.

This is pretty cool. Thanks user

Patrician.

Some little more advanced, non-genre fiction I can recommend for getting inspiration.

The absolute apex of fantastic/magical writing of all time. Very advanced, not easy to read, but insanely clever and imaginative:
>Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones/Labyrinths (two different translations of his collected works).
You can actually find them all on-line:
posthegemony.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/borges_collected-fictions.pdf
OR
wizchan.org/hob/src/1449201237263-0.pdf
You can check which translation you like the more! (I would recommend skipping the Universal History of Iniquity though.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is probably the best story about world-building ever written (also a genius insight into philosophy of language, semiotics, and criticism of 20th century totalitarian regimes).
Stuff like Garden of Forking Paths, Library of Babylon, Circular Ruins, The Immortal, The Zahir, Funes The Memorious etc.. are just amazing exercises in imagination, and shit like The House of Asterion is an interesting take on traditional mythological tales.
Again, it's not an easy read though. If you find something particularly difficult to swallow, just skip to the next story, perhaps revisit later if you feel like it.

I can also strongly recommend:
>Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita"
(for more contemporary "urban fantasy")
>Milorad Pavić "Chazarian Dictionary"
also for world-building and some serious mind-bending (its also the closest that non-genre fiction ever gotten to game-book concept)
>Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"
for some amazing, surreal and imaginative spaces, landscapes and general visions
>John Fowles's "Magus"
For some pretty interesting conspiration-style play (basically, it's a book about a guy finding himself being manipulated into a sort of psychotic larp - also it contains the best literally sex-scenes ever written)
>Franz Kafka in general
namely his shorter works, Contemplations and Country Doctor Collections are my favorite.

Bayaz isn't bad, but I seen way better.

Read the Noble Dead Series, it was interesting. Not sure if I'd read it again, but it gave me some ideas for future campaign NPCs.
Great stories if you want to learn how to establish your own worlds. The World Building in that series was excellent.

>literally sex-scenes
"And then she sucked his dick. Literally. It's not a metaphor or anything, she actually really did put his penis in her mouth, applied a gentle sucking pressure, rubbed the underside of the head back and forth with her tongue and bobbed her head up and down. She also stroked his shaft with her hand so you could say that it was as much a handjob as a blowjob (note: no actual literal "blowing" occurred at this point), but what she was doing with her mouth commanded more of his attention. When he was much younger he had preferred to receive oral 'no-hands', but later came to appreciate how much more intense the combined experience could be. He reflected on this only briefly, because he could feel his orgasm approaching, and he sincerely hoped that she did not stop or try to change her stroke at the wrong time."

OK, I got to say, I laughed, and you got me. Point for you.
That said, the reason why the sex scenes in Fowles are so damn great is precisely because they are quite literal, with very little metaphors or analogies. They are just extremely well written. In general the book is surprisingly good at exploiting male urges, even when it comes to romance.

Other authors I've also thought of that might be worth checking in for Veeky Forums folk if they are not like and can handle actual literature:

>Bruno Schulz: Senatorium Under the Sign of Hourglass and Crocodile Street
These are kinda Kafka-esque but a lot more surreal and magical, and again have an amazing ability to instill a sense of wonder and uneasiness into mundane scenarios.
>Michal Ajvaz (recently translated into English), Golden Age and The Other City
Also from the family of Magical Realism. Golden City takes ages to get going, but once you reach the second half, it actually has some AMAZING fantastic ideas of crazy, strange and improvized stories that I think anyone who ever mastered a game session will find extremely amusing and inspirative. Seriously: it's worth perserving, even if the book starts slow and explicitly declares to the reader that "this book is going to be boring and nothing is going to happen in it". It lies, just wait till the second half.
>Ray Bradbury (particularly his stories between 1955-1970's)
Ray Bradbury is seriously underrated as an author. In his better stories, he goes way out of the realm of genre fiction.

Also, just a quick list of other, more notorious authors worth checking out:
>Nathaniel Hawthorne
>Edgar Alan Poe
>Sinclair Lewis
>C.K. Chesteron
>Karel Čapek (his "War with the Newts" and "Krakatit" are particularly interesting)
>Emanuel Swedenborg

Finally, I always found classic collections of mythology and folkore great. Thousand and One Nights (unabridged and uncensored) is an amazing work. I also liked Afanasyev's Russian Fairytales.

>Set out to write a cliche fantasy adventure because it's easy
>No deep love for the genre, no preconceived notions. Advice for fantasy writers is to completely avoid fantasy
>Write one of the best fantasy coming of age stories of all time

Why aren't you as good as David Eddings Veeky Forums?

>Just finished The Witcher Saga, was pretty great.
You liked it?
I mean: I grew up with the books and have a ton of good memories with them, but looking back at them... they aren't all that damn great. I'd even go as far as to claim that the games are actually better: as stories and writing goes. Which is pretty harsh.

They are... harmless and entertaining at times, especially if you get to read them in original or one of the good translations, but they can also be incredibly tedious and the characters (especially the female ones, and the saga's Geralt - in short stories he is quite fun, but in the saga is he just dreadfully boring from the second book on) made me want to punch someone, namely the author.

Towards the end it also veers off into the insane territory quite hard.

>No deep love for the genre, no preconceived notions. Advice for fantasy writers is to completely avoid fantasy
Honestly, I think that is really the ONLY way to write good literature that is also fantasy. God knows I think the genre has an incredible potential, but it's incredibly bogged down by shit.

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I think you can write good genre fiction while still reading it, but you have to be VERY aware that any idea you have, you may have stolen

After nearly 15 years after having read the book, I still remember half the cast, they were that good.
Polgara, Belgarath, garion, Seda (Silk or velvet in english perhaps?), Durnik, the knight, berserk , the lord of horses... Ce'Nedra can die tough.
Polgara must be the closest think to a waifu than I had.

Silk in English, But in the Malloreon there's a woman called Velvet.

Sir Mandorallan, Barak, Hektor. Fucking love them all

Ce'Nedra is best girl, she basically got me to like tsunderes before I knew what tsunderes were. Velvet and Taiba are also pretty great

>, but you have to be VERY aware that any idea you have, you may have stolen
Honestly, it's not the theft of ideas itself that bothers me. At all. I'm a subscriber to the Borgesian school of thought that basically suggests that there is no such thing as originality, and that is fine.

My problem is not the lack of originality, but the lack of meanings. Hell, fantasy is rooted in mytholog/folklore, and those are rooted in archetypes. And the continuity of archetypes is in fact one of the things I believe can fantasy make so damn strong.
The problem is that most fantasy authors copy these archetypes without any thought of their purpose of function: they do it because they are genre staple, not because they actually want to use them to communicate an archetypal concept.

And ironically it gets even worse when they try to liven them up by altering it, because all they do is just render the original archetype even more meaning less.

So stealing: that is fine with me. I don't demand originality (though I would like to see a broader set of inspirations, medieval Europe and Scandinavian mythology ARE getting a little worn out in particular).
It's just that most fantasy writers rely extremely heavily on what were originally archetypal, symbolic concepts (monsters and dragons, elves and fays, spells and curses, gods and hero's) without ever bothering to think what these bloody fucking things are supposed to represent. Like what the fuck did make the dragons and elves in Tolkien so great? Because it was not their ability to spew fire or those fucking pointy ears.

Most fantasy authors don't seem to understand this and that is what is bothering me.

Those books were such a delight. The world couldn't be more of a cliche, full of badly tought points like how massive the tiemline is and how few things happen. The plot without that many twists and mostly predictable. But the characters man. It flowed. The way they interacted with each other was nearly magic, you got caught and entranced. And at first they were mostly caricatures or paragons about they countries (not-northman the berserk, not-cossack the horse rider, the not-france knight), but how they growed in you. Garion best boy too.

y'all niggers need to get yourselves some Robert E. Howard

>Howard.
>Not Clarck Ashton Smith.
Howard had Conan, Lovy his mythos.
But Clark is best boy.

shit taste detected

CAS is ok, has some good stuff, but Literature begins and ends with Howard: Howard Philips Lovecraft and Robert Ervin Howard.

Where are my vernor vinge boys at. If you don't think a fire upon the deep is one of the the best "an ancient evil awakens" story's out there, you can get the fuck outa my face

I have 170 or so books and less than two dozen are non-fiction. Some of my favorite authors.
High fantasy
>Wheel of Time
>Brandon Sanderson
>Discworld
>Tolkien
>Song of Fire & Ice
>Narnia and other old series (not my favorite but they fill a bit of space)
> Jim Butcher - Dresden Files/Codex Alera/ his new series
Future fantasy
>Dune
>Asimov
>40k stuff
>various other things like Ender's Game

bump?

Has anyone combined robots and high fantasy stuff?
I don't mean steam robots I mean like circuits and shit.

You sir are my nigga

Oh man, this is a huge issue for me in so much modern fiction.

I want something comfy with romance set in a fantasy world. My edgelord days are long behind me, now I just want "I'm a single dwarven dad doing my best to raise my adopted half elf daughter while hopelessly flirting with the widowed baker down the way"

There is a fair bit of that in manga, but I don't know of any books.

Orconomics: A Satire (The Dark Profit Saga Book 1) is my recommendation.

It is a comedic high-fantasy novel (with more than a few touching moments including what an elven lifespan has done to some of their psyche) that sees a disgraced dwarven berserker trying to repair his tarnished reputation alongside a few other washed-up/flawed heroes including a thief-turned-bard, a pair of philosophically (and elementally) opposed mages, and a has-been ranger.

Overall the book provides not only a fairly well fleshed-out world but also an interesting look at how an adventure based economy would work.

So in the writing of "giantess slowly falls for an adventurer in the same manner presented as in this picture" what exactly does Veeky Forums look for? Like, how does this work. (All the precedents on Veeky Forums just have vore and foot shit and nothing else and that's just fucking the worst thing ever.)

How do they...DO.

Magically induced synchronized dream states. They meet in the dream land and get all the naughty stuff taken care of while they can be the same size.