Cities Books in Order

The Cities line is built around a simple idea: let one place carry the story. Each book focuses on a famous fantasy city and treats it as more than a backdrop. Streets, guilds, noble houses, dockside deals, temples, and local grudges all matter as much as the main plot.

That approach suits Greenwood well, because one of his great strengths is making a city feel inhabited. His entry, The City of Splendors, naturally turns to Waterdeep, a place he knows better than almost anyone. The draw is not just what happens there, but how many layers of power and trouble can coexist in the same few wards.

Urban fantasy in this line does not mean modern fantasy. It means dense, enclosed storytelling, where information travels through taverns and servants' corridors, where crime and politics touch, and where a single wrong move can anger both a guildmaster and a wizard. The city is the pressure system.

That is the fun of it.

If you like fantasy that stays inside walls and lets location do heavy narrative work, Cities is a good shared-world line to browse. Greenwood's contribution is especially worth a look if Waterdeep is the part of the Realms you most want to see from the inside.