Robert Bevan's "Caverns and Creatures" series is available on the cheap for the next few days... specifically, as I write this, the deals below have four days and 17 hours left to go. I'm guessing this is a promotion leading up to the release of a new volume in the series.
Volume I collects the first four novels, and it's on sale for 99 cents. I already own the first three, but I bought this because it was cheaper than paying the regular price of five bucks just for Book Four.
In addition to the novels, there are four short-fiction collections so far, each of which includes six stories.
d6,
2d6,
3d6, and
4d6 are also on sale for a buck each. These short stories aren't especially connected to the novels, but they involve the same main characters going on what are usually ill-fated adventures. I'd advise reading them after the second novel and approaching them as off-screen adventures that happen after they settle into their new home base. It's not a perfect fit - I didn't get the sense that Book Two left them in that situation long enough to have so many adventures - but reading the novels up to that point gives you the proper background as to who they are and how they got there.
And where is that? If you know the reference, it's
Guardians of the Flame done as potty humor. A roleplaying game group mocks their new GM to the point that he uses magic dice to send them into their game world, where they arrive as the characters they were playing. The author gets way too much mileage (IMO) out of the half-orc's extremely low Charisma score, which manifests primarily as "ugly, smelly, and can't control his bowels."
With that in mind, some of the ways the arbitrary game mechanics come into play are pretty neat. They show up with copies of their character sheets, which update in real time - so when one of them gets kidnapped, the rest pull his character sheet out to see if he's okay. This isn't a "someone made a game based on a fantasy realm" concept, but the reverse: the realm is defined by the game, even to the point of defying physics and common sense. That's a solid part of the humor. (Those poor horses...)
For five bucks, I recommend the series to anyone who's ever tried to bend D&D's game rules to do something appalling and/or gross, but not to people put off by toilet humor.