The Claim of the Shards
Stakes Whoever controls the ley lines can tax travel, claim ancient resources, and decide which isolated communities receive aid or protection.
World Atlas·Shattered·The world broke apart, but its roads still lead somewhere.
Campaign starting region and crossroads · Temperate farmland and broad river valleys
Hook
A prosperous market town sits beside an anchor that now opens onto a shard no chart records.
Veyra is the surviving half of a once-paired world, surrounded by the broken continents of its sister world. Hundreds of floating shards orbit overhead, carrying villages, monsters, ruins, and old grudges. Magic is woven into ordinary life, but safe travel between shards depends on ley-line anchors, trained navigators, and courage. Adventurers begin on Veyra as local problems reveal a larger question: is the shattered world truly dead, or merely gathering itself?
Themes
Form · Shattered
Veyra is a spherical living planet encircled by hundreds of floating shards, the broken remains of its former companion world. The shards range from city-sized rocks to continent-scale fragments, each held in unstable orbit by ancient ley forces.
Traversal
Travel within Veyra uses roads, rivers, ships, and mountain passes. Travel to the shards requires ley-line anchors, which open brief corridors between aligned locations. Navigators calculate shard drift, while crews cross hostile voids when routes collapse or storms interrupt the passage.

Shattered

Magic
Common

Technology
Medieval

Death & Souls
The First Age
The Paired Worlds
The Breaking Age
The Fall
The Present Age
The High Roads
The Claim of the Shards
Whoever controls the ley lines can tax travel, claim ancient resources, and decide which isolated communities receive aid or protection.
The Waking Fragments
Strange disturbances suggest the broken world is stirring, threatening to change the laws of magic and pull the remaining planet into the same ruin.
The Meridian Crown wants to register every stable crossing, place royal officers at major anchors, and turn shard travel into a regulated source of wealth.
The Free Captains protect independent settlements and profitable routes while resisting all permanent control by the Crown or the church.
The Lantern Church teaches that the Breaking was a warning and seeks to seal dangerous crossings before the dead world can influence Veyra.
The Deep Vaults seek to awaken the surviving engines of the shattered world, believing its restoration would end scarcity and reunite separated peoples.
Stakes Whoever controls the ley lines can tax travel, claim ancient resources, and decide which isolated communities receive aid or protection.
Stakes Strange disturbances suggest the broken world is stirring, threatening to change the laws of magic and pull the remaining planet into the same ruin.
Two living worlds shared one orbit, linked by visible ley lines and regular trade. Magic was common, travel was dangerous but understood, and both peoples built their calendars around the passage of the twin worlds.
The sister world shattered in a single night, scattering hundreds of continents into orbit around the surviving planet. The ley lines became wild, old routes vanished, and whole civilizations were stranded on drifting shards.
Generations have rebuilt on the surviving planet and the safer shards. Ley-line travel is returning, but every new route exposes forgotten settlements, rival claims, and signs that the shattered world may not be entirely dead.
A newly visible shard contains a town that vanished during the Breaking Age, and its people insist only three days have passed.
A ley-line anchor begins sending distress calls in the voices of dead heroes, each naming a different settlement as the next target.
The Meridian Crown offers a fortune for a relic that can stabilize drifting shards, while the Free Captains warn that using it could collapse an entire route.
A farming shard drops lower each night, revealing a buried fortress whose sealed doors are opening from within.
The Breaking was an engineered prison, not a disaster.
Discovery · Ley-line navigators find the same impossible landmark at the edge of several unrelated shards.
Impact · The sister world did not shatter naturally; someone redirected its core into the orbiting fragments to imprison a sleeping power.
The dead are slowly forming a shared consciousness.
Discovery · Some ghosts answer questions about places they never visited and remember the same unfamiliar sunrise.
Impact · The souls carried by ley lines are being gathered into a single mind that may soon speak through every anchor.
The two worlds were once a single living engine.
Discovery · Ancient machines on Old Veyra respond to living blood but reject anyone born after the Breaking.
Impact · The surviving world and the shards may be parts of one unfinished organism, and restoring it could erase the boundaries between them.