It's me, Thorn.
Title: Scapegrace ( placeholder )
Synopsis:
It's 1977 and society has advanced thanks to the urban dungeons that sprouted throughout America. Inside these mazes are magical artifacts and treasures guarded by mythical monsters. To collect these spoils of war Guilds were established by the R.G.A. But for centuries the grand prize has always been The Stone Kingdom located in the Black Sea.
23 year-old, Sage Cartwright is a white-passing teacher at an integrated Middle School in Chicago. As a member of high society she is expected to complete her social season as a debutante and find a husband.
21 year-old, Joss Adesina and 11 year-old Elijah Adesina are African-American Magesmiths from Louisiana. Magesmiths are people with unique magic systems and for them their bloodline is Ninjutsu.
After traveling all over the world the sister and brother go to Chicago to stake a claim on this whimsical and forgotten folklore. But a sinister calamity threatens to shake and break the world.
As a reader, I wouldn't read the story based on the synopsis here (speaking overall and as-written). I'm intrigued, but the synopsis is a bit all over the place and makes it tough to really get invested. There's a squandered hook in the setting and presence of the dungeons (that admittedly did catch my interest) because there aren't any clear stakes involved that I can see alongside its delivery.
The character introductions are also out-of-place and feel more like info-dumps and checklists of traits, without anything to really get me invested in the characters or their struggles, which is a necessity in a good synopsis. Rather than introductions to the characters like those, I'd suggest picking one, maybe two, and devoting the synopsis to them and their struggles to deliver the opening character hook, and get the prospective reader caring about them.
To that end, I have a few questions that could (hopefully) help you point the story where you want it to go, but before I get to that, I'd like to address this bit.
It's 1977 and society has advanced thanks to the urban dungeons that sprouted throughout America. Inside these mazes are magical artifacts and treasures guarded by mythical monsters. To collect these spoils of war Guilds were established by the R.G.A. But for centuries the grand prize has always been The Stone Kingdom located in the Black Sea.
Very good. You set the time period and setting genre (urban fantasy circa 1977 in the south-eastern / southern United States) quickly, and also set the tone and direction (adventure, leaning dungeon-crawls) for the story smoothly and it is what definitely caught my interest, but rather than abbreviate things here, I'd suggest spelling out what the R.G.A. is, or more accurately, what the acronym stands for, and the tone of what the organization, and the guilds, represent in your setting alongside how they matter to the protagonist/PoV character(s). Given the era though, that is a very distinct cultural snapshot and does wonders to set the tone for the story without wasting too much time doing so.
There's only one minor inconsistency that I picked up on in this bit. In the opening sentence, you specify the dungeons appeared throughout America, but at the end, state the 'grand prize' has been one located in the Black Sea (in Eastern Europe, geographically speaking). As an equally minor suggestion, I'd say to swap "America" with "the world" to indicate the global status, or put the dungeon in question somewhere in the USA rather than Europe, but this is a little detail. Do with it as you will. It's your story, and your setting.
Now, on to the questions, which are intended to help point you in a direction to hone your synopsis and get you really thinking about the story and the characters the synopsis is meant to pull readers into.
1) Who is the Point-of-View character?
2) Who is the Protagonist?
(They do not necessarily need to be the same character).
3) What are the stakes for the protagonist?
4) What happened in the immediate past before the story starts?
5) What are the stakes the protagonist is facing in the story's opening?
6) What is one immediate, major, challenge the protagonist will face during the story?
7) What is one immediate, dangerous, monster the characters will face (in a dungeon)?
8) Is Ethnicity/Race/Ancestry a major plot-point of your story?
For the last question, it pertains to the info-dump tone that their ethnicities have in the synopsis as-written.
If it isn't a major part of the story (even though it certainly was a major part of the history in the region, especially at that specific time period you picked), then you may want to save that for the in-line narrative and descriptions of the characters and to cut it from the synopsis.
On the contrary, if it
IS a major part of the story (which again, makes perfect sense for the historical time period and location), then not only should it be included in the synopsis, but it could be reasonably focused on alongside the struggles the characters endured as a result.
That's something only you can decide, and whatever you decide, will inherently be the right choice for
your story.
Lastly, this bit (which honestly is the weakest part of the synopsis in my opinion) really needs to be addressed.
After traveling all over the world the sister and brother go to Chicago to stake a claim on this whimsical and forgotten folklore. But a sinister calamity threatens to shake and break the world.
The logistics of travelling "all over the world" in 1977 would be a nightmare [Passports, Funds, Paperwork, Questions and Attention], not to mention the amount of time it would take to meaningfully travel in that scope, especially if one character is only 11 years old at the time of having achieved that. I'd suggest narrowing the scope of the travel to the continental USA, which is a large-enough area to begin with, but isn't unreasonable in the era for a duo of siblings to manage to travel throughout over the course of a couple of years independently.
Now, the introduction of the threat, an unnamed brewing calamity that threatens the world is a massive-scale threat, and probably shouldn't be where characters start out, or what the synopsis drops as an opener, and is delivered fairly late. I'd recommend setting more immediate stakes. Something small that you can name (IE: The dungeon boss-monster of a local dungeon, or maybe the characters stumble on a mysterious artifact and get attacked by forces who are after said object) as the opening stakes and conflict before you move onto the world-ending threats later on in the narrative, and start the second paragraph of the synopsis on the character introduction and immediate stakes and threat.
So, again, I hope this helps you shape and hone your synopsis to what you want your story to be about, and as a parting side-note...
I really do like the setting. It screams film-noir style blended with The Dresden Files against a more modern-fantasy backdrop, and is definitely one that I'd be invested in if the stakes for the characters were clearer.
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