Finding the audiobook of Simon Green's Deathstalker free on Audible until next week, I decided to revisit it. It's a book I read in the 90s, but I've found most of it has stuck with me, and my impression hasn't changed. It's high of action and invention, but above all, it's a really rpg setting-like world.
Of course, almost any setting is gameable, but some worlds seem have been built with the requirements of game settings in mind: distinct character types with cool abilities, sources of those cool abilities as setting elements, and factions in varying degrees of conflict. The Deathstalker series has all of this and the kitchen sink: noble houses, rebel ESPers, rebel cyberpunks, a sleeping cybernetic army, an inimical AI civilization, and mysterious alien threats. Sources of "power" including intensive training, cyber-and biotech enhancements, weird alien tech, and psionic abilities. And there are swordfights.
All of this reminds me of a gaming setting. It says "play me," I think, more than any rpg tie-in fiction I have read (which isn't a lot, admittedly, but some).
Another series with this quality is Stephen Hunt's Jackelian novels. They are steampunk at base, but also sport robots, feyblooded mutants, biotech, Lovecraftian ancient gods, and a number of post-apocalyptic secrets. I gave them a fuller overview here.
I'm sure there are other such book series out there. Sykes' Graves of Empire series is in that vein, though not as kitchen sink as the above. Certainly, mainstream comic book universes are this and then some.
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