April A to Z Day 6: Fantasy

Let me tell you a little about my fantasy project. I rarely discuss it online, because it’s my most prized intellectual property. I only have a few scenes, and the project’s on hold for now because my social media strategy requires me to produce an insane amount of blog content for the first year. Here’s what I have. It started as an adolescent dream in the late 80s:

1. A well-developed cast who have either family or childhood relationships. They are commoners, but are placed near centers of power.

2. A professional-quality map of a continent and archipelago that runs from northern tropic to south pole of an earthlike planet, complete with fractal coasts and latitude lines. I built it from the tectonic plates all the way up to the weather system. It has evocative, plain-English names for large terrain features.

3. More than 100 pages of background covering basic history, the emergence of cultures, dominant religions, governments, currencies, resource distributions, population, a very detailed system of functional magic, and much more. I have a lot of it cross-referenced in offline wiki format. Capitols and second cities alone number almost 60, and every one of them is named.

4. It’s low fantasy, and heavy on social realism, but includes a lot of fantastical elements (extradimensional travel, anyone?) Settings are large cities that fall slightly toward the renaissance end of an urban-renaissance fantasy sliding scale; and rural settings with a spaghetti-western feel. It also incorporates elements of Steampunk, but it’s not a true Steampunk world.

The story is a long tale of interpersonal and family conflict set against the backdrop of war between three competing religious/economic systems.

So, what do you think? If it were well-plotted and the first chapter grabbed you, would you read such a tale?