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CLEAN GROUND: an outline where the department authored its own monster

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A v0.1 rough outline, freely adapted from A Hollow Tree (2023) — the walk
north that never arrives, and a predator that imitates. Everything else
comes out of the system: a 1962 reserve entry that was never cancelled,
forty-one people looping eleven duplicated miles, and Borrowed Authority
as a detector that can only tell filed from unfiled.

Uses existing bestiary entries only. Marked not-runnable: no pregens,
read-aloud, handouts, Act Four exposure model or playtest yet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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# Crossing case — The Custodians: CLEAN GROUND
> *In 1962 the department filed a spare valley, in case it was needed. It was needed.
> Forty-one people have been walking north across it ever since, looking for clean water
> and clean soil, and there is no north. Two weeks ago a contractor felled the tree the
> whole arrangement was pegged to.*
**Status:** v0.1 — **rough outline only.** Beats and truth are fixed; scenes, statlines,
handouts, pregens and playtest are not written. Do not attempt to run this yet.
**Source:** freely adapted from *A Hollow Tree* (Cathal Fitzpatrick, 2023, 23 min) —
post-nuclear survivors walking north for clean ground, and a fast thing that wears
people. Nothing of the film's plot or dialogue is used; the borrowed parts are the
premise (a walk north that never arrives) and the predator's method (imitation).
---
## GM ESSENTIALS
- **System:** d100 roll-under. Special under a fifth, critical under a twentieth.
96–99 never succeed; 00 always fumbles.
- **Panic is live** — 0–5, up. Triggers marked per act. Act Four is where it bites.
- **Coherence is the case.** The far side is a filed duplicate and it wants the agents
written into it. Coherence loss is the clock on the whole scenario, not a side effect.
- **Standing Order 9 is live**, and for once it is not a costume rule: the duplicate is
a 1962 valley plus sixty years of decay. Modern kit works and is exactly why the
column will follow the agents anywhere.
- **Borrowed Authority is the detector.** A person who belongs on this side has a file.
The thing wearing a face does not. Neither do any of the forty-one. **That is the
scenario** — the test cannot tell monster from refugee, only filed from unfiled.
- **Runs with 4–6 agents from the duty roster.** Not "(before)" sheets.
- **The mission as briefed is to cancel a 1962 contingency.** Cancelling it strands
forty-one living people. Nobody at the Bureau will say that out loud.
- **Content warnings:** nuclear war and its aftermath; radiation sickness; starvation and
a refugee column including children; body horror (a person worn); sustained paranoia
and player-on-player suspicion; a decision that abandons named people; a dog; dark
confined spaces; a felled tree as a scene of violence.
---
## Overview
- **Setting:** the Bureau, present day — then **Bewcastle Waste**, the forestry border
country north of Hadrian's Wall, and its 1962 duplicate.
- **Tone:** procedural, then cold, then unbearable. A filing contingency with forty-one
people inside it.
- **Runtime:** 4h00 including a 10 minute break.
- **The crossing:** the stump of a boundary oak on the Sike Head march. Open since the
felling, widest at dusk, and it will not close on its own.
### Design intent
1. **The department is the author of the monster.** No outside intrusion, no folklore,
nothing came looking for us. Agents are cleaning up a contingency their own service
filed and never cancelled, because the agency never abolishes anything.
2. **The horror is a category error, not a creature feature.** The understudy is
frightening because the agents' own instruments classify it identically to a child
who was born over there. If the table leaves thinking "we shot the skinwalker", it
has been run wrong.
3. **The column is not a threat and must never become one.** Forty-one people walking
north in a loop. They are polite, they are starving, and they will share. Any table
that opens fire on them should feel the floor go out.
4. **The swap lands on an NPC first, by design.** The party will spend Act Four
suspecting each other anyway; the scenario does not need to take a player's game away
from them to get there. If a PC *is* taken, that player gets handed the understudy —
a promotion, not a punishment.
5. **The ending is a decision priced on both sides, with no roll.** Cancel the
contingency and the duplicate collapses with everyone in it. Leave it filed and the
thing at the stump gets a second attempt, and a third, for as long as the file exists.
There is no third door and the GM must not invent one.
---
## Session Timing
| | Act | Clock | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | **One — Registry and the Sike Head** | 0:45 | Briefing, the felled tree, the first body |
| 0:45 | **Two — Over** | 1:05 | The crossing, the burnt valley, the column |
| 1:50 | *break* | 0:10 | |
| 2:00 | **Three — There is no north** | 0:50 | The loop, the 1962 file, what the walkers are |
| 2:50 | **Four — One of us** | 0:45 | The swap, and the test that does not work |
| 3:35 | **Close — Cancellation** | 0:25 | The decision, in front of somebody who will be cancelled |
**Hard rule:** at 2:50 on the clock, somebody at the table is not who they were.
---
## Plot Summary (GM truth)
**October 1962.** With the Cuban crisis running, a standing committee authorises
**RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN)** — a deliberate misfiling that teaches the record there are
*two* Bewcastle Wastes. Eleven miles of empty border ground, duplicated, so that if the
exchange came there would be somewhere unrecorded to put people. The arrangement is
pegged to a survey feature, as boundaries were before maps: **the hollow oak at Sike
Head**. The committee rises. Nobody cancels the entry, because cancelling it would mean
admitting in writing that it was made.
**The duplicate took the war the real valley did not.** Not because anyone sent it
there — because a spare place filed as *where the survivors go* is a place the record
then has to supply survivors for. Ninety-odd people arrived over four days in 1962 and
have been there since.
**There is no north over there.** The entry duplicated eleven miles. Walk to the
northern edge and the ground hands you back to the southern one, and the column has
never once noticed, because the record corrects them as they cross it. They have made
the same walk something over three thousand times. Forty-one are left.
**What the walking does to people.** Cross the seam often enough and you come back
thinner each time — **hollow men**, six of them now, still walking with the column and
no longer really in it. Past that is the **understudy**: what is left when the record
has been correcting a person so long that it is holding the whole person, and the person
has stopped. An understudy can only cross to our side inside somebody the record already
carries. It has never had one. It has been practising on the column for decades, which
is like a violinist practising on a photograph of a violin.
**Two weeks ago** a Forestry England clearance contractor felled the Sike Head oak. The
peg is gone; the entry is still filed; the seam is standing open on the march at dusk.
The first thing through was a hollow man, who walked four miles and died in a sheep
pen. The second was the understudy, wearing the contractor. It did not hold — the
contractor was casual labour, paid in cash, unfiled, and the copy came apart in a week.
It is now at the stump, waiting for somebody properly recorded to come and stand in
front of it. The Bureau is sending four.
### Timeline
| | |
|---|---|
| **Oct 1962** | RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) authorised and pegged to the Sike Head oak |
| **Oct–Nov 1962** | ~90 people arrive on the far side; the walk north begins |
| **1963–2026** | The column loops. Numbers fall to 41. Six become hollow men |
| **~1990s** | The understudy begins rehearsing in earnest |
| **26 Aug** | Contractor **Dean Corrigan** fells the oak; the peg is gone |
| **29 Aug** | A hollow man comes through, walks four miles, dies in a sheep pen |
| **31 Aug** | The understudy comes through wearing Corrigan |
| **6 Sep** | "Corrigan" comes apart in front of his foreman. Local police attend. Flag |
| **9 Sep** | Farmer's dog killed at the stump. Registry raises the case |
| **Today** | The agents arrive at 15:40. Dusk is 19:12 |
### Revelations (6, and that is all)
1. The tree was a survey peg, not a tree, and felling it opened something.
2. There is a second Bewcastle Waste and the department made it.
3. The people over there are alive, are real, and are walking in a circle.
4. The circle is doing something to them — the hollow men are the middle of a process.
5. The thing at the stump is the end of that process, and it needs a **filed** person.
6. The only way to close it is to cancel the entry, and the entry is the ground the
forty-one are standing on.
---
## The Countdown — rehearsal (0–6)
Advance one step per act, plus one whenever the agents spend Coherence on the far side.
| | |
|---|---|
| **0** | It watches from the treeline. Nothing happens that anybody can point at |
| **1** | Small mimicry — a voice from the wrong direction, a name only the Bureau uses |
| **2** | It has a posture and a limp right. Someone sees "a colleague" a field away |
| **3** | It takes an NPC. The NPC's file is still good, so the copy holds |
| **4** | The copy is fluent. It is inside the cordon and helping |
| **5** | It reaches for an agent — opposed POW×5, as the hollow man's swap but permanent |
| **6** | It leaves for the south road wearing a warrant card, and this is a campaign |
---
## Act One — Registry and the Sike Head *(~45 min)*
**Beats**
- Registry briefing. The case comes up as a livestock-and-labour nuisance: a dog killed,
a contractor who "had some kind of episode", a body in a sheep pen with no name.
`[CUS: Research — the sheep-pen body has no dental record, no NI number, nothing]`
- **Stores.** Standing Order 9 applies; period-clean kit, lamps, a Geiger they will be
told is precautionary and is not. `[CUS: Knowledge — why a Geiger for Cumbria]`
- The farm at Sike Head. The farmer, the dog, the stump.
`[CUS: Track — three sets away from the stump, one of them not walking upright]`
`[CUS: Science (Botany) — the oak was ring-counted in 1962 and the notch is a survey mark]`
- **The first body**, still in the pen. Thin in a way that is not starvation.
`[CUS: Medicine — bone density of a man of forty; everything else of a man of ninety]`
- The seam at dusk. It does not look like anything. It smells like a fire that has been
out for a long time.
**Clue trail (first pass)** — the three that must land: the stump is a peg; the felling
date matches the flag; the body is unfiled.
**Failure case:** if they never examine the stump, the farmer's dog turns up a boot that
belongs to nobody in Britain, and dusk comes anyway.
---
## Act Two — Over *(~65 min)*
**Beats**
- The crossing. Read-aloud, ≤4 sentences. Ash on wet grass; the same valley; no birds.
- **Coherence starts draining** — one per hour, and the record offers each agent a small,
correct-feeling detail about why they belong here. `[CUS: Insight — that memory is new]`
- First contact: **the column**, forty-one people, three generations, walking north in
good order at about two miles an hour. They stop. They offer water they cannot spare.
`[CUS: Persuade — they will believe almost anything except that it is 2026]`
- **Ivy Hetherington** (b. 1948, aged 14 when she arrived) leads by consent. She has
walked the valley since before the agents' parents were born and has an almanac of a
journey she has never completed.
- The six **hollow men** walk at the back. The column is kind to them and does not talk
about them. `[CUS: Spot — the same six at the back, and the same six yesterday]`
- Somewhere out on the flank, something is keeping pace at a distance and on all fours.
**Failure case:** if the party refuses contact, the column camps within sight and one
of the children is sent over with bread. That works on almost everybody.
---
## Act Three — There is no north *(~50 min)*
**Beats**
- The evidence of the loop, made findable. `[CUS: Navigate — the pole star has not moved
in four hours of walking]` `[CUS: Spot — their own boot prints, going the other way]`
`[CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — the same wrecked lorry, three times, with their chalk on it]`
- The seam at the northern edge. Walk it and you come out at the southern edge with an
hour missing and a memory of continuing. The column has never felt it.
- **The 1962 depot** — a buried reserve store with the entry's paperwork in it, which is
the only place the truth is written down. `[CUS: Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN),
authorised, pegged, never cancelled]` `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — what a peg is and what
losing one does]`
- Telling Ivy. Or not telling her. This is the act's real scene and it has no roll.
- **A hollow man tries the swap** — opposed POW×5, 2 Coherence. Survivable, and it is
the table's first sight of the mechanism the understudy will use properly.
**Failure case:** if they never find the depot, Ivy hands them a 1962 ration tin with a
requisition number on it and that number is enough to work the rest out from the Bureau.
---
## Act Four — One of us *(~45 min)*
**Beats**
- The understudy takes somebody. **Default: an NPC** — the Bureau liaison holding the
cordon on the real side, whose file is excellent. It comes back through with them.
- The tests the agents will reach for, and what each one actually proves:
- `[CUS: Insight — it is word-perfect, because it has had thirty years]`
- `[CUS: Psychology — it is not pretending to be human; it thinks it is the file]`
- **Borrowed Authority** — pull the record. The copy checks out; *the column does not*.
The instrument is working correctly and is useless.
- `[CUS: Scent — the only test that works, and it is a 5% skill on most sheets]`
- **REHEARSED** applies: it acts immediately before whoever it is copying, always.
- Panic triggers here: a voice from the wrong side of a door; two people answering to
the 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 more than twenty minutes.
**Failure case:** if the party kills it clean in the first ten minutes, it does not
matter — the entry is still filed, and the second one is already practising. Go to Close.
---
## Close — Cancellation *(~25 min)*
The decision, taken at the stump, at dawn, with Ivy Hetherington standing on the far
side of it because she has walked south for the first time in sixty-four years.
- **Cancel the entry.** The duplicate stops being a place the record has to supply. The
seam closes for good. The forty-one are not killed, exactly, which is the worst
available answer and the department will write it as a success.
- **Leave it filed.** Everyone lives. The peg is gone, the seam is open at dusk, and
something over there will keep rehearsing for as long as the file exists. The agents
will be the ones who come back for it, repeatedly, for the rest of their careers.
- **Bring them through** — the thing the table will try. It costs Coherence per person
at a rate no party can pay, and the record will not carry forty-one unfiled people.
Let them get four across and understand what that means about the other thirty-seven.
No roll resolves this. No NPC advises. Registry signs whatever they write.
---
## NPC Roster (sketch)
| Who | Essence |
|---|---|
| **Ivy Hetherington**, 78 | Fourteen when she arrived; leads the column by consent; has an almanac of a journey she has never completed |
| **Dean Corrigan** (deceased) | The contractor who felled the peg, and the coat the understudy tried on first |
| **Margaret Swinburne** | Sike Head farmer; her dog died at the stump; she wants a name for it and will not be fobbed off |
| **Sgt Aled Prichard** | Bureau liaison on the cordon; excellent file; default victim of the swap |
| **Registry clerk (unnamed)** | Knows RESERVE ENTRY exists, has never been cleared to say so, and will let one sentence slip |
## Creatures used (all from the bestiary — nothing new to build)
- **The understudy** — the case. REHEARSED. One only.
- **Hollow man** — six with the column. THE FILE IS YOURS NOW is the Act Three teaching scene.
- **The Quiet Neighbours** — reskin for the column's outriders if a fight is unavoidable.
- **Duplicate (of an agent)** — only if a PC is taken and the table wants the long version.
---
## What this outline does not yet have
1. **Pregens.** 4–6 duty-roster postings, each wired into the case — at minimum one who
can work a registry, one who can read ground, one who has crossed before and is
already a little thin.
2. **The read-aloud text.** Three blocks only: the crossing, the first sight of the
column, and Ivy at the stump.
3. **Handouts.** The 1962 authorisation, Ivy's almanac page, the coroner's note on the
sheep-pen body.
4. **A written exposure model for Act Four**, so the GM knows what a fight at the cordon
actually costs before the table starts one.
5. **Desk playtest**, twice, before any of this is called runnable.
## Open questions for Tim
- Is this a **convention 4-hour** or a **campaign opener**? The cancellation ending is a
one-shot ending; the "leave it filed" branch is a campaign spine.
- Which convention slot, if any — Contingency 2027 has room.
- Does the party get told about RESERVE ENTRY at Registry, or do they have to find it
over there? Telling them up front makes it a tragedy; withholding makes it a mystery.
- How hard do you want the PC-replacement? Default here is NPC-first.