Online Fantasy Epic, First of A Kind
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Tad Williams, writer of the Otherworld fantasy books as well as many more, has hit upon something that's really a unique and cool approach to writing a book. It's an online "Epic Fantasy" to be released in bi-weekly installments, but with the webpage having not only the story but history, lore, maps, etc.. of the whole new world. The name? Shadowmarch.
For now, it's free. You can read the prologue and first episode as well as learning some history about the world and check out a few maps. Here's a clip from his "about" page:
People have been asking me for a long time to do another epic fantasy, something like my Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn books.
Doing the same thing again (or almost the same thing) has never appealed to me very much — life is short, and there are many, many stories waiting to be told. But what excited me, in a way that simply writing another long fantasy book did not, was the idea of trying to do something genuinely new and interesting on the net.
Shadowmarch is more than simply a novel to download. It's a serial story — episodic, presented in regular installments more like a television show, that can either be downloaded and perused at leisure (even printed out) or read right on the site. We already have (and will continue to add) art, maps, and background history of the world, all available as part of the package. The site is a growing multimedia experience — we'd like to expand to animation and 3-D art of the locations, even RPGs — but we're going to start modestly. (Modest is all we can afford — more about that later.)
