Developing the world: Shards

The world as we know it is gone, exploded in some grand catastrophe. Shattered into something unrecognizable. Artifacts of the old world can still be found in old ruins and buried in the rocks of large islands. How people survived, and possibly the reason for the catastrophe are one in the same.

The world of Airbags will be one of floating islands, seas of clouds and flying creatures. Skywhales and Storm-Krackens. Nevermind all the fly-crabs! Islands are suspended by a force generated from blue/white crystals known as Shards. Here I`ll lay out how shards work and how they`ll impact players lives. 

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Shards are the basis of all practical flight. Lighter than air gasses are hard to come by, and engines powerful enough for aircraft are unheard of (currently). A shard is a crystal of varying size, it generates an ability to resist and rise against gravity. More importantly it also creates a field to do this with all materials in a certain radius, the radius increasing with the size of the crystal. 

When submerged in water the crystal glows and greatly increases in power, more importantly, a crystal of sufficient size submerged in water can cause humans to materialize in proximity! These humans retain some of their knowledge of the prior world, but little of that can be put to use in the world as it is. No children or extremely elderly have ever materialized. Even more interesting is if a person is killed they re-materialize at the Shard they are attuned to, albeit slightly wetter. How long it takes to return depends on the state of the Shard. 

The shard bound sailing ships have at their core a shard, a water tank it's contained in, and a mechanical means to pump water through the chamber. Flowing water further amplifies the ability of the shard to levitate. It also generates a directional stablilizing force, effectively giving a ship a 'keel'. Without this force any ship simply drifts with the wind. 

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Shards also repel each other, exponentially increasing as they approach each other. Ships can usually approach the outermost edges of an island, but are unable to approach any closer except under extreme forces. Even then in such approaches, the smaller shard heats and loses much of it's physics defying properties.

The shard cycle is a process that creates the dynamic movement of islands and influences all aspects of life.

Shards lift up from deep below the deep clouds, where the sun never shines. Some are a massive pile of rock, others are unencumbered and rocket up rapidly. Shards either find an equilibrium between their mass, condition, and lifting force. Or they fly up to the stratosphere where they freeze and fall back down. When below freezing a shard has none of it's properties, if unsupported it becomes a falling rock. Often it will shatter, creating what is called a Shard-fall storm. While dangerous to anyone exposed outside, it is also the best time to collect very small shards for various applications.

Not all shard islands are capable of supporting life, more often they are simply floating rocks. Some crews hunt these shards, cracking open the rock and collecting the shard, then escaping the island before it crashes back to the depths below. Smaller rocky shard islands can sometimes form massive fields, all kept in place due to stronger shards keeping them from drifting. These are dangerous and widely avoided under normal conditions but can make for a place to elude pursuers.

Despite their impacts on the world and how ingrained they are to life Shard are not natural, those who remember know they were man made and were supposed to save the world. Some believe they were the reason the world ended. The process to make them is lost, but experiments continue to produce new strange results. 

*The pictures are not our own, mostly just from my idea board. Though they inspire me they are not part of the game.