Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells - "Fragments"

This mini, but still deep setting, will be my attempt to provide a **sinister world for a sinister game. 

It's not low fantasy or particularly tied to a specific era; you will find tons of dark fantasy reference, clear inspiration to some videogames, books, comics and movie. It's a sandbox, themepark world that I'll like to play in and that will hopefully help you to create your base setting.

Recently I'm mosty play FATE Accelerated and it is a storytelling based game with tons of dramatic and pulpy elements… well, Ss&Ss is one of the few games still grabbing my attention and brings that kind of freedom (complications, vocation, story-based abilities, etc) that I love.

Take this sense of freedom, mix it with a very strange world that find its roots in the concept of macro isolation and boom: you will have a perfect framework to weave some good stories with your players!

Last but not least, I wanted to give each of the game's options a place and I will try to achieve this in a natural way.

"FRAGMENTS" is more like a flavorful box, at this stage and the experiment I wanna make, is to play it like that, a place where people kill for unknown (at best) reasons, where powerful (but still mortal) organization struggle to control the rare places of power, where Fragments are the true core of everyone's life.

What are fragments? It's curious, but nowadays, people don't care. Are they crystallized tears of the unnamed gods? Are they physical representations of memories? Are they parts of condensed reality?

The answer is not as good as the result: fragments are power. Fragments are rare and raw fragments are dangerous. 

The tecniques to tame the raw power of a raw fragment is kept as a deadly secret from the few knowing a tecniques to do that actually exist.

The world was born with fragments colliding and then blooming into creatures, plants, the sky, the pale sun and the two moons. 

Consider fragments as crystal/ice with many color, reflecting the pale light of the sun and the moons, covering a huge part of the known word… Guess it? Known world is divided into land-fragments, where mines full of this common, but still untamable material spring as water does from mountain rivers.

Each fragments brings an element of life and death with it: chrono-fragments hide memories and glimpses about the future; pyro-fragments bring the power of fire and heat; cryo-fragments hides the power of cold and stasis.

Fragments can be read for omens, collected ans reworked to create itema, places and even some form of life, like golems. 

Magi-fragments can be worked to reveal ancient spells and arcane secrets, so keep out the way if some sorcerer or occultist are on the way.

The blind monks of the Crystal Tower, a weird monastery where these priests sacrifice their mundane view to slot their empty cavities with fragments allowing them to see more…

The weird Crimson Realm is the biggest power in the world we'll tell about and it is lead by Venkar, a blood mage (specific archetype variation making good use of Blood Magic and vitae-fragments) with no remorses, no regrets, a secret plan and many enemies, putting in a constant state of war the surrounding isle.

The corsaires travel the landscape as merchant, while some of them just try to spot free fragment isles and hoard a bit of the precious material, charmed by its many colors, not always ready to tame their power…

The landscape is a huge landmass dotted with crystal-like formation, some of them covered by fragment dust, similar to shiny snow. 

Around and above it, landmasses of small dimensions, similar in features, dot the indigo/weak violet sky, where the lonely, pale fragment-plagued sun shines for a bunch of hours a day and the two moons conquer the sky with their red (the blood moon) and crystal/icy (the ice queen) lights, projecting everlasting auroras throughout the world.

In this fairy, creepy and fascinating landscape, selfish human nature, secret guilds and lodges, miners, a Realm lead by Blood Mages telling they are salvation, a Crystal Monastery with fragment-eyed monks telling they are truth, corsaires working for mysterious humans… all of these and more live together and struggle for control, wisdom or maybe for the cure of the dreaded fragment sickness, a neverending addiction to the raw power of fragments…

A dark and sinister world, sandoxy, full of secrets and untamed magic, where the weird and terrifying creature hunting your house's surroundings at night might be no more than your dead wife, now something "different", trying to come back, to spy you or worst...

Dead never rest. 

Fragments hold power. 

Humans struggle to unveil fragments secrets, to map out the world and discover what lies on the otherside of the endless crystal landscape. 

Magic is dangerous and Blood Mages make goos use of danger. 

Will you uncover the secrets and power of fragments? Will you play a fragment hunter, a mysterious collector, a noble knight hunting corruption or a sneaky assassin putting to "sleep" the others?

Choose your side in this surreal but still dangerous world, or stay in the gray area. Something will happen for sure, sooner or later. 

Just beware to stay awake when it happens.