Fate/Kaleid/World info
Short version (for those familiar with the Fate series)
For those of you familiar with the Fate series, Fate/Kaleid is a spin-off alternate history version of the world where the 2 Holy Grail wars that take place in Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night never happened. All the same magic and family ties still exist, but the lack of the Holy Grail wars have given certain people a chance at a much happier life, the Emiya/Einzbern family in particular.
Long Version
This is a world very much like Earth, but a society of mage craft has existed under secrecy for generations. Most mage craft in the world is held by the great mage families who pass down the secrets of magic from parent to child, however there are a few new mages with natural talent for magic that discover it on their own. It is usually the case that older mage families have more structured magic that is more versitile due to it having been perfected and passed down over generations, where as newer mage families are started by someone with great natural talent and large stores of mana, but their lack of structured knowledge greatly limits what they can do.
In this world, every few decades the Holy Grail appears and grants its power to the mage who wins a mage contest known as the Holy Grail war. Few people even in the Mage world know, but the holy grail being fought over is actually a creation of the Einzbern family, a family of powerful homunculi that are indistinguishable from humans and utilize powerful magic. They seek to obtain the holy grail themselves, but due to the grail's nature they are forced to invite 6 others into the contest in order to fight for the right to obtain it.
Those recognized by the grail are given the power to summon a heroic spirit, a great individual from any point in time who possessed magical or magically supported combat ability far exceeding that of a normal mage. This is how things normally work in this world anyway. However, in this alternate version of the world, the grail did not form and did not recognize any participant in the contest. As a result, instead of giving mages the ability to summon these heroic spirits, the spirits instead were summoned as cards that contained the essence of their spirits and magical energies to an alternate dimension that began effecting the magical energy of the real world.
When the mages' association learned of this going on, they sent investigators out to find out what was going on, including some of their best combat mages. Once the investigators found out, defeated 2 of the heroic spirits, and then obtained the cards that represented their magical energies, the investigation was called off and the cards brought back for examination. The task of collecting the remaining cards was then passed off as a test to 2 hopeful students of the association who wished to be recognized and taken in to study directly under the mage association's grand master himself.