From 748e061b56e5b9b0ec8c9bbe05c2a51c412fb29d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: slaguru666 <111923774+slaguru666@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:25:44 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] CLEAN GROUND: an outline where the department authored its own monster MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit 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 --- docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md | 314 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 314 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md diff --git a/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md b/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..46815b6 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md @@ -0,0 +1,314 @@ +# 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.