The world

Aethermere is a crumbling kingdom whose defense towers are semi-sentient magical constructs, powered by wardstones and neglected since the Warden Age. Its capital broke in that age. That is the event the game is named for: the Shattered Crown.

The enemy is not from the sky. The enemy is history. The Pale Host walks home across the acts: the Heartland is what still grows and is worth saving, the Hollowmere is the kingdom’s cruelty in architecture, and the third act is the reckoning in the ash where the crown actually broke.

The company

The heroes are not the kingdom. When the crown shattered and the lords below retreated behind their own walls, the ones who kept fighting were outcasts: a paladin without an order, a necromancer no city would house, a tinkerer whose patents the guilds burned. The crown’s remnant brands them deserters, freebooters, rebels. They took the name and kept it.

They live in the sky because they answer to no lord below. They fly down to defend the land because nobody else will.

The Anchorage

When the capital shattered, the wardstones in one district refused to fall. That drifting shard of the old city hung in the sky for a generation until the company caught it, moored it with great blackened anchor chains, and built their haven on top of the ruin’s bones. Rope bridges run out to watch-islets carrying the company’s towers. A timber sky-dock with a catch-net waits for the caravel to come home.

You live on a fragment of the reason the game is called what it is, and the last act ends at the rest of the ruin your home broke off from.