Setting

Shards is a Dark Fantasy Adventure Game that takes place in a fictional world where memories are the only thing that keep existence from deteriorating into a place of decay without purpose.

You play as the ill fated adventurers on a quest to uncover the world's many mysteries and prevent a seemingly all but inevitable future.

You can not die... well sort of.

People do not die. As long as a person holds onto the smallest fragment of their identity they can essentially live forever. That being said, being forgotten is the greatest fear of most people. Forgetting one's identity causes a process called “wasting” to occur. This results in the individuals body losing it's very identity and forever becoming one of the vile creature known as a wastrel. Wastrels are mindless beings of no purpose that act on unknowable impulses, usually to violent effect. This to most is considered just as bad if not worse than being dead.

The concept of death however is not foreign to most. Death is possible, just not an inevitability. For one to truly die they must be physically slain and have their Shard burned in the ether, forever destroying any memory of that person. A Shard may instead be absorbed by another in a freakish form of soul cannibalism that strengthen the identity of the imbiber. An even more bizarre process is rumoured to exist that contorts a Shard into a weapon, magic or item resonant with the being it came from.

For these reasons there a great number who seek out these shards for varied reasons or harvest the weak in an attempt to procure more shards. This lifestyle is reviled by all good people, but acknowledged in some cases as a necessary evil.

Some people instead go to great lengths to become notable or infamous by as many possible to avoid “wasting”. As long as someone knows who you are, you are immune to wasting but survival and obtaining power is so much more than merely existing. Problems arise when these people start to have delusions as to who they are, more and more losing themselves to their flights of fantasy. These poor souls are the ones who become the Mad. The Mad are often warped by their twisted visions of themselves, becoming monstrous and horrible creatures that threaten to destroy much of what they once cherished and tried to build. It is too easily forgotten that from the greatest of the Mad, to the lowest of the Wastrels, all of them began as someone much like you.

These fates have driven the small pockets of humanity that exist to embrace a culture of storytelling in favour of wasting, shard hunting or going Mad. Historical facts, cultural snippets, cautionary tales and just about anything one could imagine to record is inscribed on all manner of items. Much can be gleaned about the world around you from reading the worlds many inscriptions maybe even more so than by talking to its denizens.
So your fate is up to you. Do you seek to slay the Mad that plague the lands? Do you seek shards for yourself in the name of power and fortune? Do you seek to compile and decipher all the secret knowledge of the land and it's people? Or is there another fate that awaits you amidst the Shards?

Shards takes inspiration from many Dark Fantasy Settings from a wealth of Video Games, Anime, and Fiction and ventures into it's own vision of a twisted dystopian fantasy that you help create.