Other than an occasional foray in to the various DnD universes, I’ve never read anything based on a game. So, I’m curious what you guys think about these books? What is the state of the DnD novels these days? Any worth reading? What about other games: Magic The Gathering, Warcraft, Diablo, Warhammer, Halo, etc? I imagine if one found the lore of a particular game interesting, than the books wouldn’t be so bad. Or, are they best used to prop up a wobbly table?
The whole Dragonlance World (the novels) was game based.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dragonlance_novels
One of my favorite all time characters is the broken wizard Raistlin Majere.
I’ve enjoyed just about every Dragonlance novel I’ve opened.
Atari Force was a comic book based on the Atari games.
Through the Looking-Glass, and, to a lesser extent, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
there are books based on chess,
and I’m sure there are romans that use bridge or Go the basis for their universe
Books of Musicals based on games include Damn Yankees, Chess and The Beautiful Game (about soccer).
I haven’t read any of the fantasy game based books. But I have read a number of the books based on the Vampires: The Masquerade games. And they definitely are sub-par to other vampire novels. I believe that these books are often written under contracts which limit the author’s royalties. This partial ownership appears to result in the authors saving their better material for other books they own outright.
I only read the first couple but the Magic: the Gathering books were simply terrible. Amateurish hack writing designed to simply inject “This is a M:tG book!” as often as possible.
Wasn’t the Malazan Book of the Fallen developed from the author’s role-playing games?
Most likely. As I understand it, when I did a brief investigation into possibly writing for Wizards of the Coast, you’re one of a stable of contracted authors. They decide they want a book written, so they pick an author and go, “We need a Magic: the Gathering book centered around character X. The plot is X goes to land Y to retrieve artifact Z with his party of characters G, H, I, and J. Make sure he discovers that his mother is goddess Q in the process. Have the manuscript to us in a month.” It’s very much fulfilling a contract and not really creative work in the strictest sense. As a result, the books tend to be very workmanlike: potentially entertaining, but they’re really just merchandising and not great fiction.
Ed Greenwood’s early D&D books aren’t so bad as that, as he originally wrote the novels as his own creative work, and they were responsible for the Forgotten Realms setting. Again, they’re not high art, but they’re not terrible and in some cases fairly witty and engrossing. Naturally, of course, Wizards bought the IP to the Forgotten Realms stuff and he’s now one of their contracted authors, or was last I knew.
I’m a huge fan of Forgotten Realms novels. I’d say 60% - 75% of them are disposable, but there are some real gems here, too. Even the disposable ones I gobble up. I’m a sucker for just about any good ol’ fantasy romp.
Myst had a trilogy of books based of it.
Planescape: Torment was even novelized…twice.
An excellent trilogy of books, too. They were written by the game’s creators, so they tie in really well. The writing is excellent, too, superior to most game-based books.
In a double “Based off a game” whammy, the novelization of “Pool of Radiance”, the old SSI computer game based in the AD&D Forgotten Realms setting, was one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
That sounds disappointing, but accurate.
I’d like to second the Myst trilogy. I’d love to read more fiction set in that universe, although not necessarily with those core characters, but there doesn’t seem to be hell of a lot of fanfiction out there.
I recently stumbled on to Keychain of Creation, and would love to know if there is any good fiction out there based on Exalted.
There were four novels put out based on the Doom games (the first two, at least). The first one adheres pretty closely to the first game (space marine making his way through the UAC moon base invaded by demons/aliens), the second one uses the setting and monsters from Doom 2 (on earth; the revenant, mancubus, chaingunner, arch vile, etc all make appearances). The next two books went off on their own into a normal science fiction story. I personally like 'em a lot, they keep enough from the game to appeal to me as a Doom fan, but also introduce enough of their own ideas to remain interesting.
Starship Titanic was originally a game before being novellized, but that might not count, since the original game was designed as a work of interactive fiction, and written by an accomplished author.
I posted this list to a blog I run for librarians and video games…
http://www.videogamelibrarian.com/2008/07/resources-reading-list.html
I really need to update it.
Can’t be. It had sequels and by definition the sequels have to be even worse. 
Someone as a gag gave me one of the X-Com novels. Painful doesn’t begin to describe it.
But that’s the thing about these licensed novels; they’re going to be farmed out cheaply, written quickly, and created only to lure in fans of the license rather than people who want a good book.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention Rainbow Six. The game was designed and plotted before Tom Clancy decided to adapt it for his book. However because it doesn’t take as long to write a book as it does to make a game, the two were released almost simultaneously.