Epic Fantasy Series to Sink Your Teeth Into (Beyond Brandon Sanderson)
April 22, 2026
Fantasy readers are notorious binge-readers. If you’ve powered through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Era 1 or The Stormlight Archive, you already know the particular pleasure of a fully realised world — one with internal rules, a deep history, and enough story to fill months of reading. Finding your next series at that scale is harder than it should be.
These seven series deliver the depth and ambition you’re looking for. Some are decades old and still unmatched. Some are darker. Some are warmer. All of them reward the kind of committed readership that epic fantasy demands.
David Gemmell — The Drenai Saga
David Gemmell invented a subgenre. His Drenai Saga Series is the foundational text of what readers now call “heroic fantasy” — stories about courage, sacrifice, and ordinary people (often old, often broken) making an extraordinary last stand. Where Sanderson’s heroes tend to discover hidden power, Gemmell’s heroes win with what they have left.
Legend, the first book and still the best entry point, follows Druss the Legend — a 60-year-old warrior, arthritic and past his prime — as he defends a fortress that cannot possibly hold. It was written as Gemmell himself awaited cancer surgery, which explains why the book understands mortality in a way that most fantasy never approaches.
The Drenai world is not as intricately systematised as Sanderson’s Cosmere. The magic is sparse. What it has instead is moral clarity and emotional weight — the sense that heroism is chosen, not gifted.
Start with: Legend — it works as a standalone and will tell you within 50 pages whether Gemmell is for you.
Who will love it: Sanderson readers who respond to the heroic register — the idea of a character choosing to stand when standing costs everything — will find Gemmell deeply satisfying.
See the full Drenai Saga reading order →
Robin Hobb — The Farseer Trilogy
Robin Hobb is the author most consistently recommended to readers who loved Sanderson’s character work but want something more psychologically intense. The Farseer Series follows FitzChivalry Farseer — a royal bastard trained as an assassin — through one of the most emotionally brutal coming-of-age narratives in the genre.
Hobb’s world does have a magic system (two of them, actually — the Skill and the Wit), but they function differently from Sanderson’s rules-based frameworks. They are more personal, more dangerous, and their costs are genuinely terrible. Fitz pays for every use of his power in ways that compound across the trilogy.
What sets Hobb apart is her willingness to let her protagonist suffer consequences that don’t resolve neatly. The Farseer Trilogy is not always comfortable reading. It is, however, extraordinary fiction.
Start with: Assassin’s Apprentice — which opens with Fitz as a young child and builds the world and the relationships that will sustain the entire Realm of the Elderlings universe across 16 books.
Who will love it: Sanderson readers who invest heavily in character — who care as much about who Vin or Kaladin become as what they do — will find Hobb’s approach deeply rewarding. The world expands significantly beyond the Farseer Trilogy if you want to follow it.
See the full Farseer Series reading order →
Terry Goodkind — Sword of Truth Series
Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth Series is a foundational series for a generation of fantasy readers — the kind that shaped what people expected from the genre in the 1990s and early 2000s. It follows Richard Cypher as he discovers his identity, his destiny, and a world of complex magic and political upheaval that will take 17 books to fully resolve.
The series is maximalist in the best sense: the world is large, the stakes escalate across every book, the magic system has genuine internal logic and genuine consequences, and Richard is one of the more interesting protagonists of the era. Goodkind wears his influences on his sleeve (Ayn Rand is a visible presence in the later books, for better or worse) but the storytelling is propulsive enough to carry readers through the series regardless of where they land philosophically.
Start with: Wizard’s First Rule — the series opener, which begins as a fairly grounded fantasy before revealing how large the world actually is.
Who will love it: Readers who want a long series with escalating stakes and a hero who grows significantly across the arc will find the Sword of Truth series satisfying. It has the same “I need to understand the rules of this world” appeal that draws readers to Sanderson.
See the full Sword of Truth Series reading order →
Robert Jordan — The Wheel of Time
If scale is what you’re after, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series is the series. Fourteen books (the final three completed by Brandon Sanderson himself after Jordan’s death in 2007). A world so detailed that there are dedicated encyclopaedias. A magic system, the One Power, that is among the most fully realised in the genre.
The Wheel of Time is not a series you read casually. The early books are deliberately slow-building. The world accumulates. Characters that seem minor in book one become central in book six. Jordan is asking for your patience and your trust, and if you give him both, the payoff — particularly in the middle and late books — is extraordinary.
Start with: The Eye of the World — which deliberately echoes Tolkien in its opening movement before departing radically to establish its own identity.
Who will love it: This is the natural next series for Sanderson fans, and not only because Sanderson finished it. The One Power’s rules-based structure, the political complexity, and the sheer commitment to world-building all map directly onto what makes the Cosmere compelling. Jordan is partly why Sanderson became the writer he is.
See the full Wheel of Time reading order →
Brent Weeks — The Night Angel Trilogy & Lightbringer Series
Brent Weeks writes dark epic fantasy with the kind of propulsive plotting that makes it hard to sleep. His Night Angel Series — a trilogy about a street kid who becomes the world’s most lethal assassin — is one of the best dark fantasy debuts of the past twenty years: morally complex, technically accomplished, and genuinely surprising in where it goes.
If the Night Angel trilogy captures you, his Lightbringer Series is a five-book epic built around one of the most inventive magic systems in the genre — chromaturgy, in which magic is tied to the manipulation of light and colour. It’s Sanderson-adjacent in its systems-thinking approach, but Weeks brings a darker sensibility and more ruthless plotting.
Start with: The Way of Shadows (Night Angel #1) for character-driven dark fantasy, or The Black Prism (Lightbringer #1) if you want the more structured magic-system experience first.
Who will love it: Sanderson readers who want their world-building paired with grittier violence and morally compromised protagonists. Weeks doesn’t protect his characters the way Sanderson often does.
See the full Night Angel Series reading order → · Or jump to the Lightbringer Series →
Donna Grant — Dark Kings Series
For readers who want their epic fantasy lore paired with romance and contemporary stakes, Donna Grant’s Dark Kings Series is one of the most ambitious paranormal fantasy universes running. Dragon-shifters — ancient beings hiding in the Scottish Highlands — navigate a modern world that doesn’t know they exist, while the mythology of their origins deepens across 35 books.
The Dark Kings series is not grimdark. It’s romantic and expansive and rewards readers who commit to long-form world-building. If the Cosmere appeals partly because of its sheer scope, Grant has built something comparably large in a completely different register.
Start with: Darkest Flame — the first full novel in the series, which establishes the world and the nature of the dragon-shifters without requiring any prior reading.
Who will love it: Readers who want the long-arc investment and mythological depth of epic fantasy combined with romance and a contemporary setting. Grant is building something genuinely different from the grimdark tradition.
See the full Dark Kings Series reading order →
Joe Abercrombie — The First Law World
If Brandon Sanderson represents epic fantasy’s optimistic tradition — heroes discovering power, worlds saved by courage — then Joe Abercrombie is its shadow. His First Law Series opens with The Blade Itself and immediately establishes that this is a world where heroism is naive, power is self-serving, and the “heroes” are deeply compromised from the first page.
This is grimdark fantasy at its most accomplished. Abercrombie’s characters — the torturer Glokta, the barbarian Logen Ninefingers, the aristocratic soldier Jezal — are among the most complex in the genre, and watching what the world does to them across the trilogy is grimly riveting.
The world doesn’t end with the trilogy. The First Law World Series continues with three standalone novels set in the same world (Best Served Cold, The Heroes, Red Country), all of which can be read without the trilogy but reward those who have. The Age of Madness Series picks up a generation later, in a First Law world that has entered an industrial revolution, and is arguably his best work. And the Shattered Sea Series is a standalone YA trilogy — Viking-flavoured and somewhat more hopeful — if you want to explore a different register.
Start with: The Blade Itself — which opens with one of the best first chapters in fantasy and doesn’t let up.
Who will love it: Sanderson readers who want to test their assumptions about what epic fantasy can do. Abercrombie isn’t nihilistic — he cares deeply about his characters — but he refuses easy answers. Reading him alongside Sanderson is one of the most illuminating exercises in understanding the genre.
See The First Law Series reading order → · First Law World standalones → · The Age of Madness →
Also Worth Your Time
David Eddings wrote The Belgariad Series — five books that are warm, witty, and enormously influential on the genre. Start with Pawn of Prophecy. If you want classic 1980s fantasy with excellent characterisation and a world that’s a pleasure to spend time in, Eddings is essential.
Terry Brooks and the Original Shannara Series offer the deepest fantasy backlog on this list — decades of interconnected novels set in the Four Lands. Start with The Sword of Shannara for the foundation.
The Common Thread
All of these series share one quality with Sanderson’s work: they treat the reader as someone who wants to understand the world, not just be carried through it. The magic systems, the political structures, the histories — they’re there because the authors built worlds first and then told stories inside them.
That’s the sensibility Sanderson readers recognise. These authors share it.