The Book of Knots - Jags

Tell Me About
Actors and
Dramas
Imagine the office
of a Caretaker as
a castle (and if
you envision it as
Kafka’s Castle,
all the better).
Imagine that
around it is the
lands it rules: This
gives you have
an easily grasped
(and very, very
wrong) impression
of how a Caretaker
manifests itself.
For another
analogy, imagine
a super-storm
whose central eye
is a baleful sun
and each particle
caught up in the
cyclone around it
is both created by
the sun and given
an intellect by it
so that it believes
that in the exercise
Running Dramas
Running Dramas
For characters caught in Caretaker dramas the experience can be anything from demented horror (the
character is assigned the role of setting up a party at which the guests, Shadows of the people the character
knows and cares about, will be flamboyantly executed) to lighthearted adventure.
In our experience, running the Drama game involved the following:
1. A Caretaker who was at least moderately sympathetic to the characters and treated the characters
as though they were subjects or employees.
2. Fantastic terrain (the worlds of Chessboards five and six) to adventure in.
3. A task to which the characters were at least nominally suited.
Examples
In one game, a Caretaker (the Red Queen, a 9’ living chess piece) summoned an astronomer character
(and her escorts, the other PCs) to her court. A new constellation had been sighted in the sky and the Royal
Astrologers needed to know its name in order to properly read its portents.
The character was assigned to a fleet of sailing vessels (the Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod) to sail off the edge
of the world and into the sea of night to reach the constellation and ask it its name).
In another drama-based adventure a mountaineering character was asked by the Mad Hatter to carry a letter
(penned using tea as ink) to Time, who was imprisoned on a mountain across the Tulgy Wood.
In both of these adventures the characters weren’t sure if they were going nuts or not—but they were
motivated to work with the powerful (and fairly friendly) forms of these beings (who, in their turn were
able to do some things for the characters such as offer protection from other Wonderland dangers).
Timing
A drama may be played out in one descent but the above dramas took place over many days and weeks of
game-time. The ongoing action in the drama simply ended when the characters went back to Chessboard
Zero and resumed more or less where it left off when they had their next Episode.
In our games deep Descent dramas were played out interspersed with shallow Descent Episodes.
of its free will, it dances and swirls according to its designs while the
greater perspective shows that is merely part of a larger vortex.
That’s a little better. Now expand it out to eleven dimensions and
pretend that virtues and vices were actually physical forces like
electromagnetism and gravity. Still got that? Good.
The particles caught up in the storm are actors. They are not (directly)
servants of the Caretakers. They are not (exactly) subjects either
(although they may perceive themselves as such—or not even be aware
such things as Caretakers exist). In their realms (Chessboards Five
and Six) time is not a linear thing: existence over any great period is
dreamlike. The present always seems sensible to you—but mad to
someone with even a minor variant of perspective. Everything within
this world moves with a plan—but not a conscious plan by some
authorial director.
Instead it is a script or a story because the bedrock nature of reality in
Wonderland is stories … stories and knots. To the actors, things such as
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Book of Knots - The Caretakers