The Riftwar Saga Review: Two Worlds, One War, and a Classic Fantasy Gateway

A word on what “The Riftwar” actually is

Let’s clear up the shelf confusion first, because it trips people up. “The Riftwar” usually refers to the Riftwar Saga, which opens with Magician (1982). Magician was later split into two volumes for the American market (Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master) and Feist eventually released a revised “author’s preferred” edition. So depending on which cover you grab, you may be holding one book, two books, or the front third of a trilogy. If you’re new, start with Magician. Everything downstream flows from it.

Publication context: a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that grew up

Feist has never hidden the origin story: Midkemia, the world of the Riftwar, began as a tabletop role-playing setting he and friends built at university in the 1970s. You can feel that lineage on the page: the guilds, the political factions, the sense that the map extends well past the edges of the plot. In 1982 that was quietly radical. Tolkien had given fantasy its mythic grammar, but Feist wrote with a gamer’s appetite for systems and consequences, and it shows.

The setup is deceptively modest. Pug, a kitchen boy on the frontier duchy of Crydee, is apprenticed to a magician. His friend Tomas takes a different, stranger road. Then a rift tears open between Midkemia and the alien world of Kelewan, and the Tsurani armies pour through. What starts as a coming-of-age tale on the coast of a quiet kingdom becomes a war spanning two worlds and two magical traditions. That escalation (small, human, local, then vast) is the engine that made Feist a bestseller and made a generation of readers stay up too late.

The honest assessment: what’s great, what’s dated

What’s great is the ambition and the pull. Feist is a natural storyteller in the oldest sense. He wants to know what happens next, and he makes you want it too. The Kelewan sections, especially, remain genuinely fresh: an honor-bound, ritualized alien society that Feist would later mine brilliantly in the Empire trilogy co-written with Janny Wurts (arguably the strongest work in the whole Midkemia canon). The dual-worlds structure gave the book a scope most 1982 fantasy didn’t attempt.

Now the dated parts, because pretending otherwise would insult you. The prose is functional rather than beautiful: Feist moves you through scenes efficiently, but you won’t be underlining sentences for their music. The women in the early Riftwar books are thinly drawn by modern standards; Princess Carline in particular has aged into a bit of a placeholder. And the “farm boy discovers he’s secretly extraordinary” arc, which felt fresher in 1982, has since been run into the ground by a thousand imitators. Some of that isn’t Feist’s fault (he was near the front of the wave, not riding someone else’s) but a first-time reader in 2026 will recognize the beats early.

The Riftwar’s real subject isn’t the war at all. It’s what a person becomes when they’re handed power young: whether Pug’s magic and Tomas’s inheritance make them larger, or simply make the world’s demands larger with them.

The actual reading experience

Comfortable and propulsive is the honest verdict. This is a book you sink into rather than wrestle with. Chapters are long but the momentum rarely stalls, and Feist is generous with payoffs: betrayals land, sieges pay off, characters you assumed were minor turn out to matter. If you grew up on this it hits nostalgia hard; if you’re arriving fresh, expect an old-fashioned pleasure closer to a good historical adventure than to the morally tangled fantasy that dominates today. It is not grimdark. Nobody here is going to make you feel bad about rooting for the good guys, and after a decade of that being unfashionable, plenty of readers find it a relief.

A fair warning: the saga sprawls. Feist wrote Midkemia for the rest of his life, and the quality wobbles across the later cycles. Magician stands tall; some sequels coast. Treat the original trilogy as the core and explore outward only if it grabs you. Check the latest price on Amazon and see which edition you’re getting before you commit.

Who should read it / what to read next

Read The Riftwar if you want foundational, big-hearted epic fantasy and you don’t need every character to be morally compromised. It’s an ideal on-ramp for teens and for adults returning to the genre after years away. Skip it if flat prose or a familiar chosen-one arc will grate on you. If you love it, go straight to Daughter of the Empire (Feist and Wurts): smarter, sharper, and set on Kelewan. For a modern successor to this scope-plus-momentum feeling, try Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. For the older, denser tradition Feist grew out of, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is the more literary cousin.