Wonderland - Jags

Chessboard Two
Some of it looks like real life. There are a lot fewer people—erm, Shadows.
But a lot of it is desolate and abandoned and trashed. A lot of
Chessboard Two looks like it was ransacked and graffiti covered and
looted … years ago. Some of it is just plain flat-out crazy: like a deranged
mutation of the place it is on Chessboard Zero. There are monsters.
There are worse things than monsters.
Chessboard Three
Places here might be really weird—like giant floating islands inhabited
by overdressed dwarves. There are Victorian-style societies that live
in environments that you can barely imagine. Places that do resemble
their Chessboard Zero selves often show their inner natures. Imagine a
shopping mall on Chessboard Zero? On Chessboard Three it could be a
massive Cathedral to Consumption. Its pews are populated by six-foot
frozen chickens (like the kind you buy in the grocery store). They can
get rather testy if you don’t worship.
Chessboard Four
Down here, human concepts become physical objects. There are ways to
farm human vices and mine human virtues. Inspiration comes in crystal
and the things that live here are, well, bizarre in the extreme. The world
itself changes with every hour on the clock.
Chessboards Five and Six
Where the Wild Things Are. Here there be nightmares. You’re in Terra
Incognita. Reality is plastic—it ebbs and deforms. It’s dreamlike. There
are vast insane palaces. There are blood-soaked courts. There are worse
things. Chessboards Five and Six are the end of the line.
The Chessboard Deeper Games
Traditionally, when an average Infected person (without Survival Traits) visits the deeper levels it’s about over
for him (his life, his sanity, you know—that stuff). Usually it happens only in late-stage Unsanity.
However, that’s not to say that the PC’s first adventure couldn’t take place down the rabbit hole (after all,
Alice’s did). In fact, a lot of people have their first exposure by falling through a bleed down to a lower level.
When and if they come back up, they are Infected and confused.
If the game starts with Chessboard Zero weirdness and moves to Chessboard One conspiracies, it may, eventually,
get deeper. There are things down there that are also scheming. There are deeper secrets whose natures
lie at the bottom of reality.
Eventually the game may get there—or, you know, it might start there. There are all kinds of options.
Chessboard Seven
Babylon. Discordant energy. A vast expanse of change so rapid and
abrupt that nothing can be said to exist. No one goes here. There are
(said to be) machines (in a metaphysical sense, whatever that means) that
created the universe—and like the motor on one of those big “bounce
45
Deeper Mysteries - Overview