The Kingkiller Chronicle

by Patrick Rothfuss

The Kingkiller Chronicle tells the life story of a man named Kvothe. In the present day, Kvothe is a rural innkeeper, living under a pseudonym. In the past, he was a wandering trouper and musician who grew to be a notorious arcanist (wizard), known as the infamous "Kingkiller." The series is framed as the transcription of his three-day-long oral autobiography, where he "trouped, traveled, loved, lost, trusted and was betrayed". Present-day "interludes" concern his life as an innkeeper, with each present day depicted in a separate book. The series is a secondary world fantasy. It has its own magic systems, mixing alchemy, sympathetic magic, sygaldry (a form of runic magic combined with medieval engineering), and naming (a type of magic that allows the user to command the classical elements and objects), plus others.

Part of Temerant

Temerant is the world of Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle, a secondary world fantasy universe built with unusual attention to internal consistency across its mythology, music, and systems of magic. The setting is anchored in the Commonwealth and the surrounding nations, though its geography is less central to the work than its intellectual architecture. The most fully realised element of Temerant's worldbuilding is sympathy, a magic system governed by laws closer to physics than enchantment, requiring concentration, understanding of underlying principles, and a willingness to bear personal cost. Alongside it sit naming, a rarer and more mysterious discipline, and the Adem mercenary culture with its own codified philosophy of music and motion. Temerant's mythology is layered and deliberately incomplete, with the Amyr, the Chandrian, and the shadowy Fae realm offering more questions than answers. Rothfuss has constructed a world that rewards close reading, though the long wait for its third volume has tested the patience of even devoted readers.

Publication Order

1
The Name of the Wind
2007
2
The Wise Man’s Fear
2011