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Setting

The World of Sawbone Shuffle​

By the year 3000 AD, humanity had spread across the stars. A cold, authoritarian regime known as the Galactic Terran Empire, ruled dozens of star systems. To maintain control, citizens were fed a relentless stream of algorithm-generated media: vapid dramas, endless ads, and professional sports so optimized they had devolved into choreographed performances with pre-planned outcomes. Winning no longer mattered. It was all spectacle.

In 3035 AD, the Empire began terraforming a mineral-rich planet in the Tau Ceti system named Del’Ket. Originally designed as a resort paradise for the elite, it boasted a stable climate and lush engineered biomes. By 3384 AD, the planet housed over 18 billion people.

Then came disaster.

In 3385 AD, a temporal anomaly destabalaized the planet’s core. Del’Ket split open. A continent-sized fault belched lava and toxic gas into the skies, burying cities in ash and flooding the atmosphere with poison. Over the next two decades, most of the inhabitants fled while the planet was reduced to a smoldering ruin. The survivors renamed the hellworld "Cinder".

Centuries later, the Empire found a new use for the wrecked world: a prison. Domed labor colonies were built near mining outposts. Inmates were sentenced to short, brutal lives mining and refining ore under impossible conditions.

Cut off from civilization, the prisoners created their own forms of culture, including a brutal new form of entertainment: Arena Combat. Deprived of access to Data Pads or broadcast media, they organized fights in the wastes and undercity. Part survival, part performance, the Games showcased raw violence, resourcefulness, and charisma. Fighters became local legends.

When the footage of these underground matches was eventually smuggled off-world, the impact was immediate. In contrast to the sterile, scripted slop of galactic entertainment, the Cinder Games were real. Unfiltered. Profitable.

Emperor Arcadius II quickly seized the moment. He founded the Cinder Sports Network, turned the Games into a mass-media franchise, and built massive Arenas across the planet. To encourage participation, he began granting an Imperial Pardon to the winning team each season. This drove even the most cowardly inmates to risk life and limb in the arena.

To add to the spectacle, team managers began modifiying fighters with cybernetic implants and gene therapies, producing bizzare and terrifying characters. Robotics companies won the rights for synthetic combatants to participate, allowing them to advertise thier latest killing machines. Even the piles of death and destruction leftover from the battles were exploited in the name of ratings. From the debris, mad scientists crafted terrfying amalgomations of meat and machine known as "Abominations".

In 3732 AD, for Arcadius's 500th birthday, the Empire commissioned a digital card game based on the Arena Fighters:
Sawbone Shuffle.

Playable on every citizen's Data Pad, it served both as propaganda tool and a monetized gateway into the world of gladiatorial violence. Players across the galaxy began collecting cards, building teams, and competing online, romanticizing a world they would never survive in.

Cinder’s Modern Inhabitants​

  • Ex-Citizens — criminals dumped on Cinder with no way home
  • Cindarians — descendants of inmates, legally gray, sometimes tolerated
  • Imperials — elites who exploit the chaos for control and profit
  • The Forsaken — descendants of the original colonists who live beyond the domes and reject the Empire’s control

Game Setting​

The First Edition of Sawbone Shuffle, playable at SawboneShuffle.com, represents the official government-commissioned card game based on the Cinder Games.

Later expansions will explore the darker corners of the planet, showcasing black market decks, illegal mods, and rogue broadcasts that defy the Empire’s clean narrative.