Douglas Niles

Douglas Niles is a fantasy writer and a game designer born in Brookfield, Wisconsin. At a young age, he got an interest in heroic fantasy and wargaming, and since then, he began writing short stories and brief films while in high school. Niles went to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied speech and minor English.

The best place to start is the Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest series, the earliest of Douglas Niles's multi-book series: it opens with Dungeon of Dread (1982) and runs to 55 books across 1982–2019, ending with The Mad Mage's Academy (2019). Douglas Niles's other series stand alone, so they can be read in any order.

Douglas Niles has 191 books catalogued in this guide, published between 1982 and 2019. 184 of them belong to 31 named series — the largest being the Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest series with 55 books — and 7 are standalone titles, collections or anthologies.

Read each series in publication order — the numbered entries in each series follow the year each book first appeared. Douglas Niles's series do not depend on one another, so they can be started in any order; by start date they are Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest (1982–2019, 55 books), Expert (1982–1987, 5 books) and Novice (1982, 1 book), plus 27 more.

This guide splits Douglas Niles's 191 books into 31 named series and 7 titles that stand alone or appear only in collections: Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest (55 books, 1982–2019); Super Endless Quest / Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Gamebook (19 books, 1985–1998); Dragonlance Modules (13 books, 1984–1988); Dragonlance: Chaos War (7 books, 1998–1999); Dragonlance: Lost Histories (6 books, 1995–1996), plus 26 further series.