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CLEAN GROUND v0.22 — pass 11's six fixes

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1. EXPOSURE's "what to do instead of a fight" said "use three". That predates
   the measurement and described a fight the party never has: three of the
   column alone is five rounds and 0.1% wiped, where the trigger's real force
   is a median 21 rounds and 0.97 deaths. It now points at the mixed-force
   table instead of carrying its own number, and keeps the good half of the
   sentence.
2. New "The valley at dawn" block: the count moves. H03a says forty-one and
   the players are holding it. Do not correct the handout — Ivy counts every
   morning, so tomorrow she writes a smaller number and the sheet becomes a
   record of what they did. The Close's arithmetic moves with it.
3. Ivy is ruled out of the target pool, explicitly, where the GM decides how
   many of the column join in. She walked toward the guns, which puts her in
   front of the column rather than in it, and the Close is hers.
4. A dead PC now has an answer where only a taken PC did: Registry sends the
   next name on the sixteen-name duty roster, through the seam inside the
   hour, knowing nothing — which buys the table a recap.
5. Act Three names what a fight costs rather than only that it costs: the
   northern seam and the depot go, and telling Ivy cannot (the Pacing Note
   lists it among the three never to cut), so it is compressed or it happens
   at the stump, which the Close already branches on.
6. The anchor block assumed cooperation in every line. It now answers the
   party that shoots: they are never stranded, because the crossing will not
   close on its own — they walk home with nobody holding the door and come
   back thin.

Also corrected two stale uncited figures found while applying fix 5: "median
24 rounds" at the Pacing Note and "24 if the column joins" in EXPOSURE. The
baseline says 21 at two joining and 25 at three; 24 is neither, and had no
citation marker to resolve. Both now read 21 and cite packs.line.hollow6col2.

And two stale STATUS counts: "seven desk passes" listed ten, and "three
post-passes" where there are nine. Counted rather than incremented.

20 guards green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
slaguru666
2026-09-13 17:34:07 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 78e92a2dc8
commit 65ae156477
1 changed files with 79 additions and 9 deletions
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| | |
|---|---|
| **Version** | **v0.21**, 13 September 2026 |
| **Version** | **v0.22**, 13 September 2026 |
| **Can it be run?** | **Yes, from this document alone.** A GM with this file and the compendium can run it end to end. |
| **Is it convention-ready?** | **Nearly.** The print pack is built (`CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html`, held by `check-handouts`). What is missing is a run with human beings, and a slot. |
| **Playtesting** | **Seven desk passes, no human runs.** `_1.md` GM chair (seed 4271) · `_2.md` Act Four stress (9314) · `_3.md` player chair, contrarian (5580) · `_4.md` **the clock, against v0.13's recut timings** (6142) · `_5.md` **the four-player cut, played** (8815) · `_6.md` **the four untested branches, forced** (3319) · `_7.md` **an honest session, nothing forced** (7742) · `_8.md` **the cold read, plus an honest session** (5108) · `_9.md` **the regression pass, every fix from 4–8 re-checked** · `_10.md` **the Close, and a twelve-seed census** (4417). Fifty-two fixes plus three post-passes, and pass 7's finding is now a guard: **`check-outcomes` reads every bracketed mechanic tag in the acts and holds what its beat states.** Pass 7 ran ~3:35 against 3:40 at six players with no cuts taken — the first honest pass inside the clock unaided. |
| **Playtesting** | **Eleven desk passes, no human runs.** `_1.md` GM chair (seed 4271) · `_2.md` Act Four stress (9314) · `_3.md` player chair, contrarian (5580) · `_4.md` **the clock, against v0.13's recut timings** (6142) · `_5.md` **the four-player cut, played** (8815) · `_6.md` **the four untested branches, forced** (3319) · `_7.md` **an honest session, nothing forced** (7742) · `_8.md` **the cold read, plus an honest session** (5108) · `_9.md` **the regression pass, every fix from 4–8 re-checked** · `_10.md` **the Close, and a twelve-seed census** (4417) · `_11.md` **the fight the players choose, and what it leaves** (7311). Sixty-five fix-list items and nine post-passes, and pass 7's finding is now a guard: **`check-outcomes` reads every bracketed mechanic tag in the acts and holds what its beat states.** Pass 7 ran ~3:35 against 3:40 at six players with no cuts taken — the first honest pass inside the clock unaided. **Pass 11 closed the last desk-reachable branch; the only untested thing left is a run with human beings.** |
| **What it is** | A **convention one-shot**, decided 13 September 2026. It ends in the slot; there is no second session and the text must not promise one. |
| **Where it runs** | **Contingency 2027 — Sunday 31 January 2027, afternoon** (slot 9), Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton. |
| **Runtime** | **3h30 of play plus a 10-minute break — 3h40 wall clock**, which is the house budget. Act Two was cut from 65 minutes to 45 in v0.13 to get there. The **Pacing Note** carries a further 65 minutes of cuts; take them as the default. |
@@ -200,8 +200,8 @@ is ten minutes of slack. **Treat it as somewhere between zero and ten, and take
early.**
⚠ **If a fight starts, none of this is enough.** EXPOSURE's sixth lesson has the figures:
the encounter the party is likeliest to pick runs a median 24 rounds, which is the best
part of an act. **The moment dice come out against the column or the six at the back, take
the encounter the party is likeliest to pick runs a median
**21**<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6col2.median --> rounds, which is the best part of an act. **The moment dice come out against the column or the six at the back, take
every remaining cut immediately and tell the table the Close is fixed at 25 minutes.**
Do not try to absorb a fight and the re-cut-peg fumble in the same act — desk pass 6 had
both and Act Three ran ~115 against a budget of 50.
@@ -891,6 +891,15 @@ carelessness — this column has done this before, and it has lost people doing
beat** — six at the back alone wipe nobody, with two of the column joining in they wipe
one party in twelve, and at four players the six alone wipe three in four. The
Pacing Note says what to cut if it starts.
- **A fight here does not shorten Act Three. It ends it.** Desk pass 11 measured the
likeliest version at a median **21**<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6col2.median --> rounds
— 70 to 93 minutes at three or four a round, against an act budgeted at fifty. **Know
which three things you are losing before the first die**: the walk to the northern seam
(already the default cut), the depot search, and the unhurried version of telling Ivy.
**The first two go. The third cannot** — the Pacing Note lists it among the three things
never to cut — **so it has to happen compressed, or it happens at the stump instead**,
which the Close already branches on. Decide which, and tell the table the Close is fixed
at twenty-five minutes.
- **It cannot touch an agent carrying an anchor that is genuinely their own** — that is
its own statblock's clause, and it rules **Ashcroft out of this beat entirely**. Aim it
at somebody else and let Ashcroft notice that he was skipped. He will draw the wrong
@@ -1005,6 +1014,10 @@ whoever it is copying, always.
same name; the run at the cordon on all fours.
- **If a PC is taken:** hand that player the understudy sheet and a private note. They keep
playing. Do not sideline them, and do not let it run past twenty minutes.
- **If a PC is simply dead** — far commoner, and the likeliest way is a fight in Act
Three — the answer is the same in spirit and is written out in EXPOSURE's "The valley at
dawn": Registry sends the next name on the duty roster, they are through the seam inside
the hour, and they arrive knowing nothing.
- ⚠ **IF THE PC IS ASHCROFT — and in the accepted branch it is him 48.7% of the time — THE
THING IS NOW WEARING THE WAY HOME.** Read this before running Act Four, not when it
happens. **Desk pass 10 was the first of ten to reach this and the document had no answer.**
@@ -1022,7 +1035,23 @@ whoever it is copying, always.
the table will say thank you. **That is the scene** — the horror this case is built on is
that it passed every test because it is doing the job properly, and here it arrives at the
moment they are most grateful to it.
- **The price is paid in the Close, and it is the same question with a second edge.** The
- ⚠ **If they shoot it — and they will — answer the question that comes thirty seconds
later.** Everything above assumes the party lets it hold the door. A table that has just
watched this thing take a colleague, and that knows REHEARSED means it moves before
whoever it copies, shoots it. **The question that follows is "can we just walk back
through the stump?" and the answer is yes.** The crossing is open since the felling and
**it will not close on its own**; the seam only closes if the entry is cancelled, and
that happens on our side after they are home. **They are never stranded.**
- **What it costs is the thing the document has said twice already without putting it
here.** *Cross the seam often enough and you come back thinner each time* — that is
what the six at the back are, and past that is what they have just shot. **They walk
home with nobody holding the door, and they come back thin.** Not a roll, not a
number: the GM says it, and the table works out for themselves that they have taken
one step onto a road with a known end.
- **And the man who would have held that door is the one person at that table who
already knew in his body what it costs.** *You have come back thin before.* It is on
his sheet. It is why the record's lie fitted him.
- **The price is paid in the Close, and it is the same question with a second edge.** The
thing crosses with them and is standing in Registry when the paper is signed. *Who is
standing where when it takes effect* now includes the possibility that the answer is
holding the pen. See the Close.
@@ -1039,8 +1068,8 @@ whoever it is copying, always.
> column joining in takes that fight from nobody dying to one wipe in twelve, and **at
> four players the six at the back wipe 74.9% on their own.**
>
> **A fight also costs the session** — a median 13 rounds, 24 if the column joins, which is
> most of an act. **So there is no version of a fight here that is good for anybody**, and
> **A fight also costs the session** — a median 13<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6.median --> rounds,
> **21**<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6col2.median --> if two of the column join, which is most of an act. **So there is no version of a fight here that is good for anybody**, and
> the reason to avoid one is the clock at least as much as the bodies.
>
> *Everything below is the measurement behind those four sentences, and the six numbered
@@ -1120,6 +1149,15 @@ twelve. Three takes it to nearly one in three.** Measured the same way as the ta
against a column that has met armed men before. **Two is the honest default** — not
because the column is brave, but because two people out of forty-one losing their heads
while their neighbours are shot is not a large number.
- ⚠ **Ivy is not in the target pool. Decide that here, not mid-scene.** She walked *toward*
the guns to stop this, which puts her in front of the column rather than in it. **She is
not shot at, she does not shoot, and she walks out of it.** That is not mercy and it is
not a GM's thumb on the scale: **the Close is hers**, and a firefight is the one scene in
this scenario that can delete the last twenty-five minutes by accident. A GM resolving a
firefight honestly should not have to decide, with dice in hand, whether the woman
standing between two armed groups is a legitimate roll. She is not. *(If the party shoots
**her**, deliberately, that is a different act and the Close's failure case already covers
it.)*
- **Say the price out loud before dice are picked up.** That is not a warning against the
fight; it is the information the party's own briefing would have given them.
@@ -1294,9 +1332,16 @@ finished, and the 99th percentile reads 40 because 40 is the wall.*
hand them the consequence: they have killed something wearing Sgt Prichard's face, the
entry is still filed, and something over there is already practising. That lands harder
than any wound.
- **If they fire on the column, do not soften it.** Use three, resolve it honestly, and
- **If they fire on the column, do not soften it.** Resolve it honestly with the force
actually in front of them — **"The fight above is not the fight the table will have" has
the rows, and two of the column joining the six at the back is the honest default.** Then
let the survivors keep walking north past them. Nobody at the Bureau will ask.
- ⚠ **Earlier versions of this line said "use three".** That predates the measurement and
it described a fight the party never actually has: three of the column alone is five
rounds and **0.1%**<!-- cite: packs line.column3.wiped --> wiped, where the mixed force
the trigger really produces is a median **21**<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6col2.median -->
rounds and **0.97**<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6col2.deaths --> deaths a run. Use the
table, not a number.
**If they kill it in the first ten minutes** — the likeliest contrarian branch, and desk
pass 2 measured what it costs: about ten minutes of act and thirty-five of dead air, if the
@@ -1314,6 +1359,31 @@ Prichard's face, and the act carries on as Braithwaite's:
That is twenty minutes of the best forensic material in the scenario, and they earned it by
refusing the scene. **Then** go to Close.
#### The valley at dawn — run this, because the party usually wins
**They survive it** — a mean of **0.97**<!-- cite: packs line.hollow6col2.deaths --> agents
die and the party takes the field about eleven times in twelve. **So the scene that matters
is the one after**, and it has two things in it nothing else in the document handles.
- ⚠ **The count moves, and the players are holding a piece of paper that says otherwise.**
H03a reads *Counted this morning: forty-one*, and it was given out in Act Two. Anyone the
party shot is no longer in that number. **Do not correct the handout and do not take it
back.** Ivy counts every morning — that is what the almanac is — **so tomorrow she writes
a smaller number, and the sheet in the players' hands becomes a record of what they did**,
without a word from the GM. It is the best accident in the scenario. Let it sit there.
- **The Close's arithmetic moves with it.** Cancelling no longer kills forty-one; it kills
what is left. A table that has already shot two of them arrives at *"the forty-one are
not killed, exactly"* having killed two themselves, and it is not the same scene.
- ⚠ **If a PC dies — and one does, most fights — the player is not done for the night.**
The document is careful about a PC who is *taken* and said nothing about a PC who is
simply dead, which is far commoner and far worse in a four-hour slot: ninety minutes left
and no character. **The scenario already has the answer and it is sixteen names long.**
Registry sends the next agent on the duty roster; the cordon is on our side; they are
through the seam inside the hour. **Hand the player a roster sheet and let them arrive
knowing nothing** — the table then has to say the case out loud to a stranger, which buys
the GM a free recap at exactly the hour a four-hour session needs one. Do not make them
watch.
---
## Close — Cancellation *(~25 min)*