The Fragments

These are the giant chunks of land that you live on. Each can host an ecosystem of plants and animals, farms and towns, though as their size ranges from a pebble to a mountain the amount of life each can support is very variable. Recent research has determined that somehow fragments store life energy, and this keeps them afloat. On emerging from the mists fragments tend to carry a lot of energy, this being used up by the development of life. Eventually there is insufficient life energy to keep the fragment up and it falls back into the depths of the mists.

Advances in the studies of fragments and their motion have led to methods now in common use around the Broken World, of interfering with the motion of the fragment through the careful placing, removal and shifting of mass around the fragment, resulting in a change in the height and direction of a fragment’s flight. Similarly, techniques are frequently put into practice to monitor the ‘health’ of fragments, to determine if the fragment is likely to return to the Mists soon.

Even in the immediate vicinity there is a great diversity of fragments, but there are also reports of many kinds of fragments very different to the norm, from giant crystals to fragments which seem to distort the laws of nature. The placement of the fragment makes a big difference as to what kind of life it can support; those too close to the storms and the mists will suffer blazing heat or energy-sapping cold respectively, not to mention all the other strange effects that getting close to either one will have.

• Fragments are the large chunks of rock people live on.
• Fragments rise out of the mist, full of life energy, and eventually fall back into it when this energy is drained.
• Even taking this into account, fragments can float seemingly at random through the world.
• Fragments rarely collide. They come gently together, then drift gently apart.
• Each Fragment has its own ecosystem of plants and animals.
• Geomancers are able to gauge the health of a fragment, and even steer them.