The Crafters Books in Order

The Crafters is not a traditional novel sequence with one lead character moving from book to book. It is a shared-world family anthology, built around the descendants of Amer Crafter and the magical Talent that runs through the line. Along with that inheritance comes Willow, the family familiar, which gives the series a connective thread even as the stories move across different generations and situations.

That structure is important. When you open The Crafters or Blessings and Curses, you are not settling in for one long quest. You are stepping into a lineage. Different writers explore different moments in the family's history, from more openly magical eras into times shaped by science, skepticism, and social change. The question becomes not only who has power, but how a family remembers, hides, uses, or misunderstands it over time.

This is a genealogy of magic.

Christopher Stasheff co-edited the books with Bill Fawcett, and that editorial role fits him well. He had a long-standing interest in societies under pressure and in people trying to carry moral responsibility across unstable worlds. Here, instead of building one continuous plot, he helps shape a setting where inheritance itself becomes the story. Magical skill is an heirloom, but so are fear, pride, bad choices, and unfinished business.

Because the books are anthologies, the tone can shift from story to story. Some entries lean toward folklore, some toward family drama, some toward more overt fantasy conflict. What holds them together is the sense that the Crafter line keeps moving through history while trying to survive the collision between old powers and a more rational, modern age. The magical gift does not vanish just because the world changes. It becomes harder, and sometimes stranger, to explain.

These books reward readers who like linked stories.

If you are browsing this page, it helps to approach The Crafters as a shared setting rather than a single-hero saga. The pleasure comes from accumulation, the way one generation echoes another, the way a familiar returns, the way Talent can bless or burden a family depending on the moment. It is a smaller corner of Stasheff's work, but it connects neatly to his usual interest in how people live with power when history keeps shifting around them.