What is the Village at the Crossroads?
Welcome to Part 1 of our three part blog series introducing our project. Stay tuned in the weeks to come for the rest of the series. We’ll update this post with links once those blogs are published.
Part 1: [You Are Here] What is the Village at the Crossroads?
Part 2: (Posted 2026-02-18) Who is Creating the Village at the Crossroads?
Part 3: (Coming Soon) Where is the Village at the Crossroads Headed?
So you’ve reviewed our homepage and have been adequately teased about our project – The Village at the Crossroads. You know that we are trying to write fantasy books for young kids. Undoubtedly though, you want a bit more detail. How are we approaching this and what do we feel makes our particular idea special?
The Joy of World-Building
For Sid and me, one of our favorite aspects of fantasy – whether it’s a book series, a video game, or a tabletop campaign – is the world-building.
Good fantasy requires not just strong characters and a compelling narrative, but an interesting setting as well. The world provides the canvas on which the plots are woven together. It creates consistency, and it brings a smile to your face when you connect with a minor character you haven’t seen in a while. It sets the tone, lays down the rules, and provides a new frontier for your imagination.
Moving Beyond the “Main Character”
In my experience as a new dad, most children’s book series have a major character (or a couple of characters) that anchor the stories. Franklin the Turtle has 52 books about Franklin the Turtle. There are over 300 books about the Berenstain Bear family. Bluey has an expanded cast of characters all with various levels of prominence, but the titular 6-year old dog is undoubtedly the “main” character with Bingo, Bandit and Chili playing strong back-up roles.
Most successful children’s series seem to focus on their “main” recognizable character.
When my daughter was born, a gift that we received was a four-book boxset from the Peter Rabbit series. Reading through these (and reminiscing on reading them during my own childhood), what struck me as interesting was that each book focused on an entirely unique character. Peter Rabbit. Squirrel Nutkin. Jeremy Fisher. Each book tells a stand-alone story about a stand-alone character. The savvy reader will note, however, that these books do share a “world”. Jemima Puddle Duck is the primary character of her own “Tale” book, but she also appears in the narrative briefly when reading The Tale of Tom Kitten.
I was inspired.
A Shared Universe of Fantasy Archetypes
Given the richness of fantasy worlds, and the wide variety of fantasy archetypes that exist throughout different mediums, a “Peter Rabbit Tales” style setup seemed like it could be an awesome idea for a series of books about kids. Think about what you know about fantasy and imagine the vast potential. A Wizard character. An Elf and a Dwarf. A Dragon. A tribe of Goblins. A blacksmith and a knight and a charming Rogue. Each of these characters could populate a shared place, having a chance to star in their own stories. In other instances the colorful cast can play support to the stories of other characters. And throughout it all, kids can be exposed to all sorts of different fantasy tropes and begin letting their imaginations run wild.
This is what we’re hoping Village at the Crossroads will be. Sid and I, with our love of worldbuilding, want to develop a fantasy setting which we can populate with a colorful cast of fantasy-inspired characters. We want these books to be fun for parents to read to their kids, and we want the stories to help young imaginations run wild dreaming about magic and mysticism.
No one puts their imagination to use quite like children, except maybe fans of the fantasy genre. Imagine what can be unlocked when someone falls into both categories!