The game got its name today. I wanted one word that told the whole premise, and Lastshard does.
Here is that premise, the way the people of Aldermere tell it.
One world, broken
Before the counting of years there was one world. Then it broke.
No one alive knows what broke it. The old songs say a light was shattered and every piece became a world of its own. The scholars call those pieces shards. Each shard was a mirror of the others, with its own people, its own kings and its own wars.
For an age the shards burned side by side, and none of them knew the others were there.
The going dark
Then the lights began to go out.
Nobody saw the first shard fall. The ones who study the night sky only noticed a gap where a light had been. Then another. Then a dozen. Every shard that went dark took its people with it. No one who stayed behind was ever heard from again.
Today there is one light left. It hangs over Highmarch, the walled river town at the heart of Aldermere, and it is the brightest thing in the sky.
The ones who got out
Some souls escape a dying shard. Nobody knows how. They arrive in Aldermere with nothing but the clothes they died in, and they wake at a tetherstone: a standing stone on the hills above Highmarch.
The tetherstone holds them. When one of these souls falls, it wakes at its stone again. Its body stays where it fell, along with everything it carried.
You are one of these souls.
What washes up
The dead shards don’t stay gone. Pieces of them wash up in Aldermere: a drowned castle on the coast, a hall of bones in the hills, beasts no one has a name for. Every dungeon in this land is a fragment of a world that ended.
The people of Highmarch know all this. What they don’t know is why the shards went dark, or whether their own light is next.
A note from me
That question is the spine of the optional storyline. You never have to follow it. You can chop trees and sell logs for a year and never wonder about the sky.
The lore is settled, but today’s build doesn’t match all of it yet. There’s no tetherstone in the game right now. You wake on the road outside the east gate. That will change.