Anima: Beyond Fantasy Jump

Overview:
The default world for the Anima Beyond Fantasy Roleplaying game, and the world assumed by the Jump, is Gaia. This is one of those settings broken into the "visible" world, which most of the peasants know, and the "secret" world, which the important people know.

The visible world is, generally, somewhere around anime Dark Ages except in the regions that it's somewhere past the Age of Enlightenment. Guns are new, gunpowder only having appeared a century ago, and are very rare. Most people are peasants and the main power in the world, the Sacred Holy Empire of Abel, rules them with a standard nobility structure. The current leader, the Empress Elisabetta, is the Empress of the realm. Unfortunately, not everyone finds this agreeable. Her father had designated a woman as the first female pope, then attempted to murder Elisabetta before being stopped by a bodyguard. Worse, the new Pope promptly took as much power as she could, broke reality, and disappeared. Long story short, a few principalities have declared rebellion and formed the Azure Alliance. This all happened six months before the jump began.

The Empire has a national religion: Christianity. The religion has a significant amount of power in the land, and protects the world from the ravages of the supernatural, hunting down witches and diabolists, and generally protecting humanity from what goes bump in the night. It was founded by a man named Abel, who was born in the Age of Chaos, back when Gods, Fairies, and other such beings walked the earth. He founded his religion; with two goals. Unite the world under one flag, and banish the supernatural. Although things started peaceful, a group of wizards who took issue with his whole "banish the supernatural" bit tried to murder him. He murdered them back, and kick-started the War of the Cross.

The War of the Cross was long, but at the end of it, he had established a land for humans. One of his twelve Apostles, Judas Iscariot, promptly betrayed him to the technomagically advanced Empire of Solomon in return for 30 Blackened Silver Coins.

He did not revive. Instead, his eleven remaining apostles, emboldened by his death and empowered by God, declared vengeance, founding the eleven holy kingdoms, and crushed Solomon in return. Unfortunately, years later, they found that a 12th Kingdom had been forged- one lead by traitorous Iscariot. The Kingdom of Judas, founded by none other than the 12th apostle. Declaring itself leader of the rejected, it possessed some of Solomon's lost technology. It promptly declared the War of God, and after a long and grueling battle, lost. Being petty to the extreme, the leader of Judas and the descendent of its' founder, Rah Sith, decided to take everyone else with him by breaking the world.

This failed. Instead, the supernatural was locked away, banished from the world, which was split in three. One third to contain humanity, and the other two thirds cast into Hell.

Ten years later, the leader of the 11 Kingdoms, Zhorne Giovanni, forged them into the Sacred Holy Empire of Abel. The Empire lasted for centuries, before one of his descendents proved himself utterly insane and had to be overthrown in favor of his son. Rather than let that happen, he forced his son to kill him, thus removing the boy from the succession (Laws stating that patricide was not a valid method of gaining the throne). The leader of the rebellion, Elias Barbados, thus took over.

Things got worse.

He fell in love with a nun named Eljared, declared her to be the first female pope, and basically handed over all the power she could ever want. People objected to this, and he had them silenced. The new Pope then went ahead and declared war on everyone, ever, in order to provide cover for when she broke reality. At the same time, the Elias went insane and tried to murder his daughter, and was killed by her bodyguard.

His daughter, Elizabetta Barbados, took over, trying to bring peace. While some agreed, blaming everything on the former pope, other disagreed and have decided to rebel: Thus the Azure Alliance was formed. Which brings us to the time period of the jump- The Pope broke reality in the Fracture of the Heavens six months before the Jump begins.

The Shadows

On the 'secret' world side of things, there's the following. Back before the Age of Chaos, a bunch of gods came to a future-tech version of our earth, found it cool, and decided to create Sylvians from humanity's memories of Elves, Duk'Zarist from our memories of Drow, and basically all the other races from everyone else's memories. They then wiped everyones memories. A group known as the Imperium somehow managed to survive the mindwiping, and tried to defend humanity.

Unfortunately, analogues among the Sylvains and the Duk'Zarist showed up (the Illuminati and the Technocracy), thus throwing the three groups into a Mexican Standoff. All three would love dearly to annihilate each other, and all three are perfectly aware that they can't, and have thus formed an uneasy truce as the Powers in the Shadow. The Imperium is theoretically on humanity's side, protecting them from the other races that would exterminate them. They are very bad at this.

Their first attempt was to try and Ascend humanity until it could take care of itself. They granted a set of thirty silver coins to the Empire of Solomon, each of which contained highly advanced magitech. The Empire promptly started taking over the world. The other two Powers got nervous about this. The Imperium, worried that they would see to act, promptly spent about seven hours knocking Solomon back into something more acceptable. At this point, by the way, the Senators all had nanobots in their blood letting them control their technology, AI's running things, and orbital battlestations. They got knocked back to somewhere slightly more advanced than the dark ages.

Having decided that Humanity cannot be responsible for it's own welfare when given high technology and magic, the Imperium turned things around and did things differently. They genetically engineered a functional demigod, named him Abel, and manipulated the world into proclaiming him the "Anointed One", Christ. He then proceeded to do everything listed up in the setting overview section. Things continued without active interference until the War of God, at which point the three Powers in the Shadow looked at what was going on, agreed that the races could not coexist, and helped Judas break the world. They took advantage of the chaos and transported the magical races into the Hells they'd created, leaving only the humans on Gaia (theoretically. Unfortunately, they're bad at this, so a lot of supernatural races stayed.).

Then things continued without active interference on their part until Eljared broke reality, punched them in the nose, broke a bunch of their stuff, then disappeared.

What Now?

Magic is returning. The supernatural is returning. And worse, the Empire is about to fall into a civil war. Normally, the Inquisitors of the Church would be able to help (what with actually being wizards, ki users, and psions, except with the Church telling everyone, "No, these dudes are definitely Saints who are blessed by God, not evil wizards!"), but the Civil War that's about the shred the country is probably going to make that somewhat hard.

Each of the starting locations have been chosen with Adventure in mind. While you are, of course, perfectly free of ignore this, be aware that the stuff is going on in the background.

Archangel: This is the Capital of the Sacred Holy Empire of Abel. Calista: Basil Octavius is, in fact, a wizard, and in touch with the Black Sun, who are basically the black market, except for magic items. They also have access to a high level tome of necromancy that enjoys fucking with them while convincing them that they totally have it under control.

Fathia: Some idiot's trying to wake up a "Fuck your kingdom" level dragon nearby.

Grafthon: Heretics, a singing contest, and an ancient elven city in the middle of a nearby lake are the main attractions here. Also, there's a shitton of enchanted forests.

Karh: There's a slave girl running around. That wouldn't normally be that important, except she was promised to a demon, and now it wants her back, so it's running around searching for her. The mayor of the nearby city of Londure is also convinced that his wife is a werewolf, and keeps feeding her innocent people every month. She's actually possessed.

Bastel: Yeeeeah. This place? It's a prison. For supernatural creatures. It's guarded by giant black serpents who serve as its wardens, so unless you feel like fighting whatever's been locked up for a few millennia, try to avoid killing them.

Graven: Okay, straight up: You're in a ghost town. Like, it's a town populated by literal nightmares, and only half-exists in the real world, since it half-exists in dreams. It's ruled by the Lord of Crows, Malekith, who wants to turn that section of Gaia into a fusion of reality and the Wake. There's a bunch of lesser gods hanging around here.

Powers

Powers are broken into 3 main subtypes in the Jump. Mage powers are slow, but relatively flexible and powerful. It's split into 2 subsets- The Gift, which is typical magic, and Summoning, which is, well, summoning.

The Gift is basically typical spellcasting, except High Magic starts getting absurd, and Divine Magic does stuff like let you rewrite the laws of reality, or unmake something from ever having existed, or convert everything within an astronomical unit into pure elemental light with no fucks given about things like immunity, or reanimate everything that's ever died as a zombie under your control, oh and about 1/10000 has its full abilities. Yeah. Fortunately, Divine Magic can only be used by gods or people plugged into a Power Node, which is basically a part of reality where the Afterlife touches it really hard. Magic works even in antimagic fields, which makes it very hard to stop people from accessing, but recharges very slowly, which means that no one's really willing to burn through it unless they absolutely have to anyway.

Summoning is Summoning. You summon a creature, bend it to your will, bind it inside some random object, then send it out to murder whatever needs murdering later on. If that's not to your liking, you can also do Final-Fantasy style one-and-done summons, or temporarily fake being a Fate/Stay Night style demiservant by summoning an ancient hero and letting him possess you and thus let you use his powers.

Ki Users are basically DBZ Ki users, but lower powered. They can fly, hit things hard, and MURDER HARDER.

Nemesis Users are basically, "Fuck everyone else." They can learn techniques to make everyone else no longer be supernatural (basically.)

Psions have psychic powers. This is stuff like teleporting, railguns, lightning, mind-rape, self-buffs, etc. Not quite as expansive or over-the-top as Divine Magic, but still way up there and fucking terrifying to go against.

TO BE CONTINUED