I'm a little worried about some of the combinations made available by "Song"... there's "Song Thief", which sounds like it would be about Napster and RIAA, "Song Crown", which could conceivably be about Eurovision, and "Song War", ditto ditto. "Skull", "Scroll", and "Rune" occur to me as possible replacements...

Can we use punctuation characters to break up the words? I'm thinking of a list including both "Light" and "Dark" -- I can envision Dark Light, a harrowing tale of the protagonist's walk along the border of madness, lit by the unholy glare of the demons he contracts with regularly (while of course his love interest is a wholesome, innocent priestess from whom he must conceal his dark side), but Lightdark is rather less marketable.

Of course, if I could call them Light / Dark and Dark / Light then we could have a standard Descent Into Evil (While Others Look On In Horror) / Redemption From The Dark Side (Thanks To [insert author's random philosophical "point" here]) duology.

Ooh, this is lots of fun!

Oh come on now, Song Thief, Song War and Song Crown are a gritty, low-fantasy, semi-tongue in cheek trilogy about a young lad from the backend of nowhere who decides he wants to be a bard in a world where barding is a reserved for the middle / upper classes.

Warblade already exists and is a Warhammer tie-in novel...

Alright, I'm sold on the Song-Noun trilogy, but can it be about a halfling who's trying to make it in a series of Elf-run musical contests where the nasty snooty elves won't accept him because of his hairy bare feet and uncouth ways, that is until they hear his soulful baritone and heartfelt lyrics and are all moved to tears &c &c?

It strikes me that you can get even more of these from the formula "X of the Y Z". Shadow of the Blood Wolf is a low fantasy offering in which a sprawling metropolis is threatened by a lupine serial killer, and a wise-cracking thief and a terrified apprentice sorceress have to track him down. In the sequel, Curse of the War Mage, the thief and sorceress's budding relationship is threatened by her master's increasingly bizarre behaviour, which turns out to be due to the sinister influence of a cabal of battle-wizards who he used to belong to and who are still fighting a war that ended centuries ago. In Crown of the Blade Thief Our Hero steals a magic sword which turns out to be a vital clue to his true parentage - he's a lost prince, and naturally he overthrows the corrupt king who ousted his parents and becomes king.

For really advanced players there's the Dragonlance gambit, where you have "VW: X of the YZ", in which WX must be the same for each book (the game here is to make a trilogy where you use each of the words in the list once). The Shadowcrown series is the saga of a mismatched band of heroes who stumble across an ancient evil - namely, an undead king - and accidentally awake him in Shadowcrown: Curse of the Blood Song (the Blood Song in question is the sacred song sung by a ghostly choir which keeps the king asleep and is disrupted by the spilling of blood). In Shadowcrown: Blade of the Wolf Thief a renegade werewolf appears to be an adversary, but actually proves to be a key ally of the party. In Shadowcrown: War of the Dragon Mage the lich is finally defeated when Our Heroes enlist the help of a secret society of dragons; it turns out that the party's mage is in fact a dragon in human form, who proceeds to lead the draconic armies against the forces of the Shadowcrown.