The Puppet Master's Court

Lore & Background

In the hollowed-out city of Kleos, where the Pinata's death left a wound that no one seems able to heal, the Puppet Master carries on a quieter, sadder kind of performance. His theatre in Pinewood is less a venue for public spectacle than a private workshop: a place of half-finished limbs, spools of thread, and the soft creak of joints being coaxed into motion. He does not rule Kleos in any political sense, but his creations walk its streets, and the strings he ties and unties ripple through the lives of those who cross his path.

The Puppet Master's art is inseparable from his grief. Each puppet he builds is, in a sense, a response to the absence that the Pinata's passing left behind—a way of filling silence with movement, of giving voice to a story that lost its central figure. P is his most significant creation, yet the relationship between maker and made is never simple. The Puppet Master speaks of P with a mixture of pride, distance, and aching tenderness, as though the puppet were a child he is not sure he has the right to let go.

The Court, in its broadest sense, is the constellation of puppets, unfinished figures, and stagehands that orbit this creative act. They are not a council or a senate; they are an audience of one's worth, a chorus that exists only while the show is running. When the Puppet Master sets P on the stage of Kleos, he is not merely deploying a tool. He is releasing a story he wrote into a world that may not follow his script, and the strings he left in place are the only thread connecting his vision to the puppet's own, hard-won will.

In Their Own Story

The Pinewood air smells of sawdust and cold tea. The Puppet Master stands at the edge of the stage, his long fingers trailing a single thread that vanishes into the dark beyond the footlights. Around him, half-built puppets sit in rows like a congregation waiting for a sermon that never comes. One of them—older, more worn than the rest—turns its head slowly, joints clicking, and watches the Master with eyes that are not quite eyes, but something stitched to look like them.

He does not turn. He never turns, not while the thread is still in his hand. "You will go where I point," he says, and his voice is the sound of a curtain being drawn. "Not because I command it. Because I made you to walk that way." The old puppet tilts its head again. The thread between them hums, faintly, like a plucked string in an empty theatre. Outside, the city of Kleos groans and shifts in the dark, and the show, as always, goes on without an audience.

Reader's Guide

The Puppet Master's Court serves as P's origin point and a recurring thematic anchor throughout the game. Its purpose is not governance but creation: the Puppet Master designs, builds, and directs puppets, with P being his most significant work. The Court's leadership rests solely with the Puppet Master himself; there is no council, no second-in-command. His authority is that of an artist over his medium.

The base of operations is the Pinewood district, centered on the Puppet Theatre. This location is where P first awakens and where the Puppet Master's influence is most concentrated. The area is characterized by its theatrical staging, workshop clutter, and a pervasive sense of a performance that has outlasted its audience.

The Puppet Master shapes the player's path by establishing P's identity, purpose, and the strings of obligation that bind the protagonist to Kleos. His guidance is paternal but distant, and his motivations are not always fully transparent. The lore hints at a deeper layer to his work—grief, loss, and a desire to keep a story alive after its central figure is gone—that may not align perfectly with the direction he pushes P to take.

Key figures in the Court include P (the protagonist and primary creation) and the various puppet figures that populate the Pinewood area. Internal tension is suggested by the gap between the Puppet Master's script and the puppet's own agency: the Court's "members" are, by nature, things that were made to follow, yet the game's core question is whether they can break the strings.

Players encounter the Court's influence early in the game and revisit its themes throughout, as the Puppet Master's presence haunts P's choices and the fate of Kleos.

Did You Know?

• The Puppet Master is the creator of P, making the protagonist's very existence a product of his art rather than a natural birth.
• The Puppet Theatre in Pinewood functions as both a workshop and a stage, blending the aesthetics of a craftsman's bench with a performance venue.
• The Puppet Master's relationship to P carries the weight of a parent-child dynamic filtered through the metaphor of maker and creation, a tension that runs through the game's central themes of free will.
• The Court is not a political or military faction; its 'power' is entirely creative and narrative, shaping the story P lives rather than governing the city through force.