If you relished following Cugel’s slippery schemes after Iucounu hurled him north in search of the Overworld lenses, you’ll feel right at home with Shea’s thief Nifft. Like Cugel, Nifft tackles jobs that are equal parts scam and survival, and his "solutions" tend to be as amoral as they are ingenious. The tales carry that same wry edge—where a clever lie opens doors, a sharper betrayal keeps them open—and the world bristles with exotic hazards that punish hubris as reliably as Cugel’s own misadventures do in The Eyes of the Overworld.

Loved the deadpan, needling humor that dogs Cugel from one fiasco to the next? Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic riffs on that same comic energy. Hapless wizard Rincewind careens from one ill‑starred escapade to another with a tourist in tow, skewering fantasy tropes with the kind of sly asides and verbal sparkle that echo the satiric bite of Cugel’s cons and comeuppances in The Eyes of the Overworld.

If Vance’s languid, baroque sentences and jeweled diction were part of the allure—those luxuriant descriptions of strange cities and stranger customs that Cugel drifts through—Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer offers that same sumptuous voice. Severian’s wanderings through a far‑futuristic, fading world carry the rich, ceremonious language and layered irony that make Cugel’s travels so intoxicating in The Eyes of the Overworld.

If you enjoyed how Cugel ricochets from one discrete scrape to the next—each episode a fresh grift, hazard, or humiliation—Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser deliver that same episodic snap. The stories in Swords Against Death hop from city to wasteland with brisk, caper-like momentum, the way The Eyes of the Overworld parcels Cugel’s journey into glittering, self-contained misadventures.

If what hooked you was the Dying Earth’s uncanny shimmer—the way Cugel’s path crosses relics, half‑remembered powers, and bizarre societies—Harrison’s The Pastel City saturates its landscapes with that same eerie, twilight energy. Like Cugel’s trek for the Overworld lenses, the characters move through ruins and marvels that feel both ancient and inexplicable, yielding that delicious sense that reality itself is fraying at the edges.