Books like Pool of Radiance

Stellar writing or crafty plotting? Not particularly. But, this was my post-Tolkien teenage fantasy gateway drug that paved the way for the discovery of Brooks/Salvatore/Eddings/Feist/Rawn/Martin/Abercrombie/Rothfuss/Sanderson/Weis and Hickman/et al, and for that reason alone, it's a seminal classic in my heart.Also, Ren is a badass and made me want to be a forest ranger. I somehow ended up in legal marketing instead, but that's just because I wanted to pursue something that would keep me on the constant edge of danger.