I'm half way thru the Legacy series now, and i'm enjoying it.
The one book I've enjoyed most, out of the 7.5 i've read so far, was Sojourn, the last of the homeland series.
From other people's posts, I gather that "hardcore" fantasy readers have some dislike for Salvatore. Perhaps his work is too "main-stream" as some of it has spent time on the New York Times Best Seller List.
Salvatore's dark elf books are the first fantasy books i've read outside of the LOTR books, that i've really been able to get in to. That is not to say that I've tried a lot, but what has peaked my interest in this particular series is its close resemblance to the world of Norrath!
Before playing EQ, I really was not interested in fantasy literature, I mostly read Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz, and other often best selling authors. I spent a lot of time in college reading technical journals for literature reviews, and the first book I grabbed off the shelf in the grocery store was a welcome escape from the pages and pages of dry research papers.
Anyway, at some point I got heavily addicted to EQ, and ran into scores of toons whos name's were variations on Drizzt (Drizit, Drittz, Drizt...), Zaknafein, Catie Brie, Breunor, Wulfgar and Artemis Enteri. It didnt take long before I asked someone... what are all of these similar names about!?! Well, after making a few jokes about un-original toon names, I was told to go out and read those books, because they are pretty fun to follow.
I read the Crystal Shard at exactly the right time in my EQ carreer to become immediately interested. The main characters are a dwarf warrior, a barb warrior, a delf ranger, human ranger, and a hlf rogue! No healer and you could sub in a caster, but its almost an eq party!
You could take the locations in the series a step further and compare... Mythril Hall = Moradhim, Icewind Dale = Halas, Menzoberanzan = Neriak, Calimport = Freeport (my personal favorite), Silverymoon = fayspire (maybe)... etc.
Anyway they might not be the most well written books, but I definately enjoy them. What helped was that I immediately had a familiarity with the types of characters as Salvatore's description fell much in line with my impressions from eq.
For anyone who wants to read some tales of adventure closely in line with the eq way of things, i'd reccomend this author and series! The only thing it needs imo is a little more undead/necromancy ;)
Edited, Tue May 25 16:02:18 2004 by BlondebeardThePirate