I loved it, and ill be buying the next two if they finally come out..its long though and might take a while for you to get into it...the hero is a leper who rapes a child at the start...read!

Thats not a very convincing recomendation....

I'm going to chime in and recommend The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
It's bizarre, though, that someone else has noticed the parallels. I thought that was just me.

Geomancers (sort of) that later become tainted and need to use blood.
Aquamancer (sort of) piratey giants.
Forestals, which control tracts of forests and make the trees attack people who enter.
Glomdoring-esque swamp.
Seren-type instances of 'pure' forests, people living in treehouses.
Wurd/Wyrd reference thing.
Sparkleberries.

And probably more things I'm not thinking of. Weird.

The first trilogy was really good. The plot is very unique amongst fantasy literature, and you alternate between pity and rage at the main character. He's not a heroic hero, and he's not a heroic anti-hero.

The others were not really that great, I didn't think. Plus, somewhere along the line, the author started getting fixated on a particular word and would use it over and over. There are more occurrences of the word "exigent" in the second trilogy than there are in the rest of the books in the Library of Congress, including "Barstowe's Naturale Historye of Exigent Thynges."

I'd say it's worth reading without question: a superb set of books with unparalleled originality. But I disagree that there's any notable similarities with Lusternia. Almost any fantasy story of any breadth is likely to have as many similarities, and quite a few have a lot more, but that's just because of drawing on common elements from archetypes, symbolism, and mythology (for instance, wyrd deriving from northern European mythology).

I found them uneven. Some of the books were very good. The whole situation is reasonably unique and there is definitely some grittyness about the stories (or the two parallel ones). My biggest complaint was in some of the later ones it was like the author ran out of ideas so it was a case of "oh well that kinda panned out cool last time, let's do it again!". It would be hard to write that much and keep the ideas going.

Reading this thread it seems the basin is far more lively at other times. All the gods are mute in my timezone.

Favorite NPC Comedy award: Graad Proudstone. Celest's uber-flaming besotted dwarf architect.

Other Favorite NPC: Lord Japhiel for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately I've not spent as much time interacting with people as I'd like to. Zynna is quite possibly the nicest person I've ever met ICly and I had a fantastic conversation with Aison the other day. I'm going to spend more time bantering with all of you! Mark my words.

Agree that Aison is fun! I had a lengthy tell-fest with her regarding the whole Raziela thing that I really enjoyed.

I love everyone.

I love Kharvik.

I love Rakor and Kharvik.

I also love Rakor and Kharvik.

I hate Balizar, though.

Take it back!

Take it back? I won't take it back. I'm leavin' it out there. It's entered the arena and it's here to stay.

I
Luv
Jack

Ranging from pastel to radioactive?

Lisaera >.>

And klia.