MTV sent us a mysterious box for its upcoming high-fantasy show The Shannara Chronicles

I received a wooden crate on my front doorstep today with my name emblazoned across it on paper and the symbol of the Terry Brooks books, soon-to-be-television-series, The Shannara Chronicles burned into one side.

While Shannara is a high fantasy tale, it has a neat take on that mythology, one that starts with civilization essentially destroying itself in a chemical and nuclear world holocaust. Much later, magic and science co-exist in a land that has been as reshaped by the destruction as the people and creatures that live in it. Dwarves, for instance, are a genetic offshoot of humans.

For those of you not up on the Shannara books, the series started out as three novels: The Sword of Shannara, The Elfstones of Shannara and The Wishsong of Shannara, written by Terry Brooks. Those early books, the first of which was published in 1977, were sort of bundled together as a trilogy, but Brooks has continued to write stories based on the land, mythology and characters of Shannara up through this year. There are 26 books in the series now.

The show kicks-off on MTV on January 5 at 10 p.m. ET. Make sure to check back for our impressions of the show and click play on the video below to see what was inside that mystery box.