The Forge
The Forge is not one world but a cluster of them, and not a system but an economy. The gods here are real, numerous, and hungry: they run on mortal belief, and everything mortals call magic — classes, blessings, levels — is a grant from a god with motives of its own. A class is a loan. A miracle is a withdrawal. Belief freely given is the only currency that matters, and enough of it, gathered in the right hands, can make a brand-new god from scratch.
The stories range across the whole map of that economy: a dead village on the Veridian frontier rebuilt soul by soul, a Roman-Renaissance port whose priest-cartel refuses classes to the working majority, an island nation that has forgotten the invasion is coming back, a desert continent crossed by a dead Australian truckie turned god of travellers, a drowning water-world with a century left on its clock. Different worlds, different registers, one rulebook: power is a bargain, and the price is always paid by someone.
How it fits together
The place to start is The Village: the cornerstone of the whole Forge and the origin of the Trinity — Ash, the amnesiac who would not stay summoned; BOB, the voice at the back of his skull; and Sylvara, the goddess with almost nothing left. The Tempering picks up the same frontier twenty years later, with the Trinity as elders and a new generation inheriting the war they left unfinished, and The Refugees then carries the three of them to another world entirely, arriving as gods and washing up with nothing.
Everything else stands alone. The Classless, The Warriors, The Unseen and The Travellers are self-contained sagas on their own corners of the map, sharing the divine economy but not a cast. The Outsiders is eight standalone novels about the people the economy was never built for — read them in any order. And The Book of Found Souls is the gentlest door of all: short tales from the casebook of the god of Lost Souls, free for mailing-list readers.
Start at the beginning
The Village is the cornerstone of the whole Forge — a dead frontier village rebuilt soul by soul, and the origin of the Trinity the rest of the cluster is still arguing about.
Start with The Demon Harvest →