The Book of Knots - Jags

Imagine a hundred disembodied hands trying a million combination
locks: that’s the Deconstructionists playing with humanity, trying to
find the combination of changes on Chessboard Zero that will give them
power in the coming storm.
Running the Caretakers
The entities at the bottom of Wonderland are paradoxical, complex,
and insane by human standards. They are extremely versatile and
may go from antagonist to monster to ally depending on how they are
approached and what role they are fulfilling.
Multiple Personalities
Caretakers are creatures of drama as much as they create their own
“drama vortex.” As such they may be encountered as implacable enemies
of humanity (and thus the PCs) or as benevolent royalty where they
assume the PCs to be their subjects, or as seemingly random travelers in
an insane land. This isn’t exactly contradictory: the mind of a Caretaker
is highly fractured and when they are acting as a regent they are not so
much playing a role as being it. A trip to the Queen of Heart’s castle
could be a bloody death-fest—or it could just be a fancy ball (albeit still
with a strong hint of execution, most likely).
Individual Caretakers may wish death or brutal “civilizing” on humanity
in general but they respond to PCs caught in their dramas the same way
the respond to human-like and non-human actors caught in their dramas:
as “people.” If a PC is summoned to The Factory as a “quality inspector”
the fact that The Factory’s ultimate aims for mankind are as part of its
machines won’t result in an ambush for the character—rather they, so
long as they play the role of “quality inspector” to some reasonable
degree, will only be in as much danger as that character would be in the
drama.
Differing Aspects and Incarnations
In addition to having more than one active personality, Caretakers may
have quite different appearances and physical attributes depending on
how they are approached. Sometimes versions of themselves will be
found traveling on the lower-chessboards and, although still formidable,
they are pretty much their physical incarnations there. When encountered
in their offices their abilities and knowledge may be quite expanded.
Often fragments of traveling Caretakers may even be seen as weak and
pathetic to human eyes (a Queen may be lost in the woods, Humpty
Dumpty may be broken, etc.) How the character relates to them will
have some bearing on how other incarnations of the Caretaker respond
to the character but often another incarnation’s memories of the event
may be indistinct or even different.
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Book of Knots - The Caretakers