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CLEAN GROUND v0.6: the eight fixes desk pass 1 earned, and its log

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Desk pass 1 is committed alongside, seed 4271 and the roll stream printed, so
the run is re-checkable rather than remembered. It failed the scenario, which is
what it was for.

The pre-flight audit did the real damage before a die was rolled: Track, Navigate
and Science (Botany) were named by the acts and rollable by nobody in the cast,
and Botany is base 1 — the same unusable-test defect fixed in Act Four two
commits earlier and left standing in Act One. check-scenarios cannot see this; it
resolves skill names and has no opinion on whether anyone present can roll one.

Then the dice found the rest. Xenology (Baseline) failed and Act Four had no
route left, which is the concentration risk logged as an open question arriving
as a dead end on the first run. A fumbled Anomaly Lore had no written result and
I invented a ruling at the desk. Act One's failure case backstopped arrival
rather than the peg. The act ran 4:25 against 3:55 on three lucky rolls.

Fixed: the notch is automatic and the three broken routes moved onto Spot,
Knowledge and Anomaly Lore; every roll in the document now carries a written
miss; the Act Four tell is ungated, with Xenology buying it early and privately
instead of holding the only key; the fumble is answered by the re-cut delusion,
tried once, failing in silence; Act Four has a four-beat spine because with no
mechanical threat the structure has to be in the text; and THE OFFER finally
fires Ashcroft's seam, priced at 2 Coherence he must accept before being told.

Verified by re-running seed 4271 through the rewritten acts, so the identical
rolls that broke the run were put back through the fix. Every one now has an
answer, and Act One's three must-land clues all land despite two failures.

Timing is improved and NOT solved: cuts recover 20-25 minutes, landing near
4:00-4:05 on a 3:55 budget, and on-the-minute is a fail for strangers. A third
cut is likely needed and the candidate is named. Whether Act Four's spine holds
45 minutes, and whether THE OFFER plays as a decision, cannot be settled from a
desk and are recorded as such.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
slaguru666
2026-09-13 00:00:29 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 995f3fa94e
commit bf8db68383
2 changed files with 395 additions and 45 deletions
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docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md
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> 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.
**Status:** v0.6 — **absorbs all eight fixes from desk playtest 1**
(`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md`, GM chair, seed 4271). No clue is now behind a single roll,
every roll in the document has a written miss, Act Four has a spine and its tell is
ungated, and about 25 minutes of pre-written cuts are in the Pacing Note. **Still not
convention-ready:** it wants a stress re-run of Act Four, a player-chair pass, and a
print-ready handout pack.
**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
@@ -84,6 +88,19 @@ premise (a walk north that never arrives) and the predator's method (imitation).
**Hard rule:** at 2:50 on the clock, somebody at the table is not who they were.
### Pacing Note — the cuts, written in advance
Desk pass 1 ran 4:25 against this table, with three lucky rolls. **Take these cuts as the
default, not the emergency.**
| Cut | Saves | Costs |
|---|---|---|
| **Registry briefing capped at 10 minutes** — when the tenth minute arrives, Registry has another appointment | ~5 | Nothing. Every answer is in Act One anyway |
| **Act Three: drop the walk to the northern seam** | ~15 | Nothing. The lorry and the almanac already prove the loop |
| **Act Two: the column's hospitality, once rather than twice** | ~5 | A little warmth. Take this one last |
**Do not cut:** telling Ivy, the almanac pair, or the Close. They are the scenario.
---
## Plot Summary (GM truth)
@@ -349,24 +366,39 @@ Same hand, same ruled paper, eleven years apart.*
## 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.
- **Registry briefing — hard cap 10 minutes.** 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.
Six players will each ask one sensible question and that is the ten minutes gone.
`[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]`
*Missed:* Swinburne kept a photocopy of CG-H01 because she was not satisfied with what
she was told, and produces it unasked.
- **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]`
*Missed:* nothing. They carry it and find out in Act Two.
- **The farm at Sike Head.** The farmer, the dog, the stump.
- **The notch is automatic.** Anyone who walks up to the stump and looks sees a squared
notch cut deep into the heartwood — old, deliberate, and nothing to do with felling.
**No roll.** This is the clue the act cannot afford to lose, so it is not gated.
- `[CUS: Knowledge — a squared notch in a boundary tree is a survey mark, and the march
here was recorded to the tree before it was ever recorded to a map]`
*Missed:* they know the notch is deliberate without knowing what it means. Registry can
tell them later, and CG-H02 says it outright in Act Three.
- `[CUS: Spot — three sets of tracks leaving the stump, and one set is not walking
upright]` *Missed:* Swinburne says it for them. She has twice seen "something going
away on its hands" and has told nobody, because of how it sounds.
- **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.
*Missed:* CG-H01 carries the same finding in Corbridge's own words.
- The seam at dusk. It does not look like anything. It smells like a fire that has been out
for a long time. **No roll.**
**Clue trail (first pass)** — the three that must land: the stump is a peg; the felling
date matches the flag; the body is unfiled.
**Clue trail (first pass)** — three must land, and **none of them is behind a single roll
any more**: the notch is a peg (automatic), the felling date matches the flag (briefing
gives the date, Swinburne gives the felling), the body is unfiled (Medicine, or CG-H01).
**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.
**Failure case:** there is no version of this act that ends without the peg. If the party
never goes near the stump, **Swinburne takes them to it** — the dog died there and she
wants somebody official to look at the place.
---
@@ -386,6 +418,17 @@ belongs to nobody in Britain, and dusk comes anyway.
- Nobody rolls anything here. Let the silence sit until a player breaks it.
- **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]`
*Missed:* nothing yet, and quietly better — the record should be winning early without
being noticed.
- **THE OFFER — the anchor's beat, and it is not optional.** Somewhere in this act, take
Ashcroft's player aside for one minute. The record offers him the cleanest version of the
lie: that he has always been the anchor for *this* valley, that the three years his body
is older than his birthday were spent here, and that he may put the weight down now.
**Accepting costs nothing in the moment and 2 Coherence at the Close, and he has to
decide before he is told that.** `[CUS: Insight — it is being offered, not remembered]`
*Missed:* he takes it for a real memory, which is worse, and is the point.
- Run it for any agent whose player wants it, but **it is written for Ashcroft**: desk
pass 1 found that without this beat his sheet is a second Insight for five acts.
- **First contact: the column** — *read aloud or paraphrase:*
> They come over the shoulder of the hill in a line, forty-odd of them, walking at the
@@ -418,43 +461,86 @@ 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]`
- **The evidence of the loop — three routes, with the almanac behind all of them.**
`[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]`
`[CUS: Anomaly Lore — the sky has not moved in four hours of walking]`
*Missed, all three:* **CG-H03a and CG-H03b.** Laid side by side, the table finds the loop
with no die at all. The handouts are the primary route; the rolls only get there first.
- **The 1962 depot** — a buried reserve store with the entry's paperwork in it, the only
place the truth is written down. `[CUS: Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN), authorised,
pegged, never cancelled]` *Missed:* 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.
- `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — what a peg is, and what losing one does]`
**On a fumble:** the agent concludes, with complete confidence, that the peg can simply
be **re-cut** — a fresh notch in a fresh tree will hold the entry and nobody need be
cancelled. It is wrong, it is the most attractive wrong idea available, and a table will
spend twenty minutes on it. **Let them try it exactly once.** Cutting the notch does
nothing whatsoever, and the silence of that failure teaches more about what the record
cares about than a correct roll would have.
- 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.
- **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.
**CUT AS DEFAULT:** the walk to the northern seam. It was a fourth demonstration of a loop
the lorry and the almanac have already proved, and desk pass 1 lost fifteen minutes to it.
If the table insists on walking north, give them one sentence: they arrive at the southern
edge with an hour gone and a clear memory of never having turned round.
---
## 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: Xenology (Baseline) — the only test that works, and only one sheet carries it]`
**Not Scent.** Scent's base chance is 0 and the 1% floor is all anybody has, so it
is not a route, it is a joke at the table's expense. Xenology (Baseline) is the
skill for what a baseline human body is and is not, and Braithwaite has it at 53.
- **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.
**THE SPINE — four beats, in this order.** The act has no mechanical threat by design (see
EXPOSURE below), so the structure has to come from the text. Desk pass 1 found it sprawled
without one, and judged it equally likely to collapse in twenty minutes at a less patient
table.
| | Beat | Runs |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | It comes back through wearing somebody | ~10 min |
| 2 | The tests, and what each one proves | ~15 min |
| 3 | The tell surfaces, whether or not anyone rolled | ~10 min |
| 4 | What they do about it | ~10 min |
**Beat 1 — the swap.** The understudy takes somebody. **Default: an NPC** — Sgt Aled
Prichard, holding the cordon on the real side, whose file is excellent. It comes back
through with him.
**Beat 2 — the tests they will reach for**, and what each actually proves:
- `[CUS: Insight — it is word-perfect, because it has had thirty years]`
**A success yields no tell, and the GM must say so out loud:** *you read him carefully,
and there is nothing wrong with him.* The absence **is** the information. A player who
rolled well is owed that sentence rather than a shrug — desk pass 1 flagged this as
feeling like a bug from the player's chair when it is in fact the thesis.
- `[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.
**Beat 3 — the tell, which is NOT gated.** Close, unhurried physical examination finds it:
the hands are wrong, in the specific way of a thing that has learned hands by watching
them. **Anyone who examines him properly finds this, with no roll.**
- `[CUS: Xenology (Baseline) — buys the tell EARLY and PRIVATELY, before it is standing in
the middle of the cordon]` Braithwaite carries it at 53. Success is a quiet word in the
GM's ear during beat 2 instead of a discovery in front of everybody at beat 3.
*Missed:* only the timing and the privacy — which is quite enough to be worth rolling
for. **Desk pass 1 failed this roll and the act had no route left. That is what this fix
is: the roll no longer holds the only key.**
- If nobody examines him at all, **rehearsal step 5 arrives on schedule** and it reaches
for an agent in front of the whole cordon. The tell arrives as an event rather than a
finding, which is worse for them and perfectly playable.
**Beat 4 — what they do about it.** **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 past twenty minutes.
- **Not Scent.** Scent's base chance is 0 and the 1% floor is all anybody has, so it is not
a route — it is a joke at the table's expense.
### EXPOSURE — what a fight actually costs. Read before Act Two, not before Act Four.
@@ -764,7 +850,11 @@ twice.*
pack (A4, 11pt minimum) before a convention; the text is final.
4. ~~A written exposure model for Act Four.~~ **Done** — measured, 2000 runs a row at seed
11 against the named cast, reproducible from the command in the section.
5. **Desk playtest**, twice, before any of this is called runnable.
5. **Desk playtest.** Pass 1 done and **failed** — see `CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md`. The
eight fixes there come first; then a stress re-run of Act Four, then a player-chair
pass. A human-table pass is still a separate instrument from any of those, and fix 6
(whether Act Four holds for 45 minutes with no mechanical threat) is the one a desk
cannot honestly settle.
## Open questions for Tim
docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md
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@@ -0,0 +1,260 @@
# CLEAN GROUND — desk playtest 1 (GM chair)
**Scenario version:** v0.5, at commit 15da21d
**Date:** 12 September 2026
**Method:** full session from the GM chair, all six cast pregens played as distinct
archetypes. Every contested beat rolled with a seeded roller (mulberry32, **seed 4271**,
rolls consumed in the order printed below) so the run is re-checkable rather than
remembered. Banding per `rules.mjs`: critical under a twentieth, special under a fifth,
96–99 fail, 100 fumbles.
**Archetypes to sheets:** Bhattacharya = methodical note-taker · Renshaw = roleplay-first
talker · Pollard = quiet rules-literate tactician · Ashcroft + Braithwaite = lore-diggers ·
Okonkwo = the one who asks what the plan is and then does it.
**Verdict up front: not runnable. Three clue routes cannot be rolled by the cast, the one
working test in Act Four has no failure case, and the scenario is about five hours long in
a three-hour-forty-five budget.**
---
## Pre-flight audit (before any dice)
Every skill the acts name, against the six sheets actually cast:
| Called for | Where | Who in the cast can roll it | Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Track** | Act One, sets from the stump | **nobody** | 10 |
| **Science (Botany)** | Act One, the ring count | **nobody** | **1** |
| **Navigate** | Act Three, the pole star | **nobody** | 10 |
| Repair (Mechanical) | Act Three, the lorry | Okonkwo 35 | 25 |
| Psychology | Act Four | Renshaw 40 | 5 |
| Xenology (Baseline) | Act Four, the tell | Braithwaite 53 | 1 |
⚠ **Three of the scenario's clue routes are unrollable by the party it casts.** This is the
same defect class as the Scent line that was fixed in Act Four, and Science (Botany) is
literally identical to it: **base 1**, so the 1% floor is the whole of it.
⚠ `check-scenarios` cannot catch this. It resolves skill *names* against the catalogue; it
has no opinion on whether anybody present can roll one. The guard that would have caught
this does not exist.
---
## Play log
### Act One — Registry and the Sike Head · planned 0:45, actual **0:55** ⚠
```
Bhattacharya Research — body unfiled 76 vs 63 fail
Bhattacharya Knowledge — why a Geiger 18 vs 63 success
Pollard Track — sets from the stump 10 vs 10 success
Braithwaite Science (Botany) — ring count 99 vs 1 fail
Braithwaite Medicine — the bones 25 vs 53 success
Pollard Spot — the notch 63 vs 53 fail
```
- Research failed, and **the handout saved the act.** Swinburne's photocopy of CG-H01 is
written as the failure case and it worked exactly as intended. Keep that pattern.
- Medicine landed, so the body clue came through twice over. Braithwaite read the nine
resolings aloud and the talker asked who resoles boots nine times. That is the scene
working.
- **The peg clue survived on a 10% roll coming up exactly 10.** Track succeeded on the
nose. Had it failed — and it fails nine times in ten — the act's stated failure case
hands over a boot belonging to nobody in Britain.
- ⚠ **The failure case backstops the wrong clue.** A strange boot says *something came
through*. It does not say *this stump is a survey peg*, which is one of the three the
act says must land. With Track at 10, Botany at 1 and Spot failed, this run reached the
seam with the peg understood only by luck.
- Timing: the Registry briefing ran 15 minutes because six players each asked one
sensible question. Stores 10, farm and stump 15, body 10, seam 5.
### Act Two — Over · planned 1:05, actual **1:00** ✓
```
Ashcroft Insight — that memory is new 74 vs 63 fail
Renshaw Persuade — the column 48 vs 63 success
Pollard Spot — the same six at the back 89 vs 53 fail
```
- **The best act in the scenario, and the only one that came in under time.**
- The crossing read-aloud did its job. Nobody rolled anything, the silence held, and the
tactician broke it by asking for the Geiger — which is the Act One Knowledge success
paying off an act later. Good wiring.
- Insight failed, so the Coherence drain went unnoticed, which costs nothing yet and is
arguably better: the record should be winning quietly at this stage.
- **Spot failed and it did not matter**, because the read-aloud already says *six at the
very back are not quite keeping up*. The information was in the room without the roll.
**This is the design pattern the rest of the scenario should copy.**
- Renshaw spent 25 minutes with Ivy and would have spent forty. The talker's verdict: the
single best scene in the document.
### Act Three — There is no north · planned 0:50, actual **1:05** ⚠
```
Ashcroft Navigate — pole star 93 vs 10 fail
Pollard Spot — own boot prints 72 vs 53 fail
Okonkwo Repair (Mech) — the lorry 11 vs 35 success
Bhattacharya Research — RESERVE ENTRY 7 vs 63 special
Ashcroft Anomaly Lore — what a peg is 100 vs 63 FUMBLE
```
- **Two of the three loop routes were unavailable or failed; the third carried it.**
Okonkwo recognised the wrecked lorry on its third appearance with his own chalk on it,
and the tactician worked out the loop from that alone. Then CG-H03a and CG-H03b landed
side by side and the table did the rest out loud, exactly as staged. **The handout is
doing the work the three skill routes were supposed to do.**
- Research special put RESERVE ENTRY in Bhattacharya's hands, and the A.E.W. initials
landed — the note-taker went quiet and then asked whose slide rule he was carrying.
Best single moment of the run.
- ⚠ **Anomaly Lore fumbled on 100 and the scenario has no answer.** What does a fumbled
"what a peg is" do? Nothing is written. I invented a ruling at the desk (he concludes
the peg can be re-cut, which is wrong and wastes ten minutes) and an invented ruling is
a hole in the text by definition.
- Telling Ivy ran 15 minutes and was worth every one. No roll, as written. Correct.
- Timing: the act has five beats and needs four. It ran 15 over.
### Act Four — One of us · planned 0:45, actual **0:50**, and shapeless ⚠⚠
```
Renshaw Insight — the copy 70 vs 63 fail
Renshaw Psychology — it thinks it is the file 8 vs 40 special
Braithwaite Xenology (Baseline) — the tell 77 vs 53 fail
```
- Psychology's special was the reveal of the night: *it is not pretending to be human, it
thinks it is the file.* The talker repeated that line twice. Keep it.
- ⚠⚠ **THE CRITICAL DEFECT. Xenology (Baseline) failed and the scenario has no failure
case for it.** It is named as "the only test that works", it exists above the floor on
exactly one sheet, and when that sheet rolls 77 the act has no route left. I sat at the
desk with nothing written to fall back on. **This is the concentration risk that was
logged as an open question, arriving as an actual dead end on the first run.**
- Insight failing costs nothing, because the written result of succeeding is "it is
word-perfect" — i.e. no information either way. Fine, but note that a player who rolls
well gets nothing, which feels like a bug from the player's chair even though it is the
point.
- ⚠ **The act has no spine.** The exposure model correctly says there is no mechanical
threat, which is right — but the act is then 45 minutes of doubt with no written beat
structure and no clock of its own. It sprawled. With a less patient table it would
instead have collapsed in 20 minutes into "we shoot it", and the text has no answer for
how to fill the other 25.
### Close — Cancellation · planned 0:25, actual **0:25** ✓
- Ivy's read-aloud worked reported rather than quoted, as intended. *She asks whether
there is a north* stopped the table dead.
- The party tried **bring them through**, as the text predicts. Got four across, did the
arithmetic on the other thirty-seven, and chose to leave the entry filed. The costing
held up and needed no improvisation.
- No roll, no NPC advice, decision made in about nine minutes of real argument. **This act
is finished and should not be touched.**
---
## Timing summary
| Act | Planned | Actual | Drift |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | 0:45 | 0:55 | **+10** |
| Two | 1:05 | 1:00 | −5 |
| break | 0:10 | 0:10 | — |
| Three | 0:50 | 1:05 | **+15** |
| Four | 0:45 | 0:50 | +5 |
| Close | 0:25 | 0:25 | — |
| **Total** | **3:55** | **4:25** | **+30** |
⚠ And that is a **generous** run: a 10% Track landed, a 35% Repair landed, and a 63%
Research came up special. A table that misses those spends longer, not shorter, because
the GM starts improvising bridges. **Assume 4:45 to 5:00 for a real table of strangers in
a 4:00 slot.** There is no slack anywhere and the protocol is explicit that on-the-minute
is already a fail.
---
## Player-hat verdicts
| Archetype | Verdict | Score |
|---|---|---|
| **Methodical note-taker** (Bhattacharya) | Superbly served. RESERVE ENTRY and the A.E.W. initials are the best material in the scenario for this player. | 9/10 |
| **Roleplay-first talker** (Renshaw) | Two outstanding scenes, Ivy and the copy. Would happily have played only those. | 9/10 |
| **Quiet tactician** (Pollard/Okonkwo) | Got the loop and enjoyed it, but three of his natural routes were skills nobody had, and Act Four gave him nothing to do once violence turned out to be pointless. | 5/10 |
| **Lore-digger** (Ashcroft/Braithwaite) | Braithwaite owns two clues and that is good — until the one that matters failed and the text abandoned him. Ashcroft's Coherence material never came up mechanically at all. | 4/10 |
**Ashcroft is the weakest sheet in play.** His private seam is the best-written one in the
document and nothing in five acts forced it. He spent the session as a second Insight.
---
## Fix list
Nothing below is applied. Each states the problem, the change, and where it goes.
1. **CRITICAL — write a failure case for Xenology (Baseline).** *Text hole.* Act Four.
Recommended: make the physical tell **automatic on close examination** and let the roll
buy it *early and privately* instead. A failed roll then costs time and exposure rather
than the whole route. Alternative: Countdown step 4→5 forces the tell into the open
whether anybody rolled or not.
2. **CRITICAL — move the three unrollable clues onto skills the cast holds.** *Text hole.*
Acts One and Three. Track → **Spot** (Pollard 53). Science (Botany) → **Knowledge**
(Bhattacharya 63) or automatic on inspection. Navigate → **Spot** or **Anomaly Lore**.
Recasting instead — adding Sandoval, Lindqvist or Holloway — fixes the symptom and
leaves the trap set for the next GM who uses the recommended six.
3. **Rewrite Act One's failure case so it backstops the clue it claims to.** *Text hole.*
A strange boot proves arrival, not a peg. The stump needs a route that cannot be missed
— the notch itself, visible to anyone who looks, with the roll buying the 1962 date.
4. **Write the fumble result for Anomaly Lore.** *Text hole.* Act Three. Also audit every
other roll in the document for a written failure, since this is the second time this
class of bug has appeared in a Custodians scenario.
5. **Cut 30–45 minutes, pre-written, not improvised.** *Timing.* Act Three loses a beat
(the northern seam walk is redundant once the lorry and the almanac exist). Act One's
briefing needs a hard 10-minute cap written into it. Put both in a Pacing Note.
6. **Give Act Four a spine.** *Staging.* It needs its own short clock — three or four named
beats with an order — so it neither sprawls nor collapses. The exposure model says the
tension cannot come from threat, so the text must supply the structure instead.
7. **Force Ashcroft's seam.** *Missing option.* Add one beat where the record's offer to
him is explicit and costed, so the best private box in the document actually fires.
8. **Note that a successful Act Four Insight yields nothing** and say so in the text, so
the GM can tell the player that the absence of a tell *is* the information.
## What is already working and must not be lost
- **Handouts carrying the case when rolls fail.** CG-H01's photocopy, CG-H02 in
Bhattacharya's hand, and the H03a/H03b pair all did their jobs. The almanac trick worked
exactly as staged.
- **Seeding a clue in read-aloud so a failed roll is harmless** — the six at the back.
This is the pattern fixes 2 and 3 should imitate.
- **The Close.** Finished. Do not touch it.
---
---
## FIXES APPLIED — v0.6, verified against this same seed
All eight applied as a separate pass. Verification was a **re-run of seed 4271 against the
rewritten acts**, so the identical dice that broke the first run were put through the fixed
text. One beat was added (THE OFFER), so the stream diverges after Act Two's first Insight.
| The roll that broke it | Then | Now | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ring count | Botany 99 vs **1** — clue dead | Knowledge 99 vs 63 — still fails | **The notch is automatic.** Peg lands anyway; only its 1962 meaning defers to CG-H02 |
| Tracks from the stump | Track 10 vs **10** — survived on the nose | Spot 10 vs 53 — **special** | Found handsomely instead of by luck |
| Pole star / sky | Navigate 93 vs **10** — dead | Anomaly Lore 93 vs 63 — still fails | Almanac pair carries it; loop still found via Repair 11 |
| What a peg is | **FUMBLE 100** — no text, I invented a ruling | FUMBLE 100 — same roll | **Written now:** the re-cut delusion, tried once, fails in silence |
| The tell | Xenology 77 vs 53 — **act had no route** | Xenology 77 vs 53 — same fail | **Tell is ungated.** Roll now buys it early and privately; failing costs timing, not the act |
**Every roll in the document now has a written miss.** Act One's three must-land clues all
landed on this run despite two failures, one of them automatically.
**Timing is improved but not solved.** The cuts recover about 20–25 minutes against the
4:25 actual, putting a re-run near **4:00–4:05** on a 3:55 budget. That is still no slack,
and this protocol is explicit that on-the-minute is a fail for strangers. **A third cut is
likely needed** — the honest candidate is compressing beat 2 of Act Four, since the tell no
longer depends on getting through all three tests.
**Not verified by this pass, and not verifiable from a desk:** whether Act Four's spine
actually holds 45 minutes at a real table, and whether THE OFFER lands as a decision rather
than a formality. Both need the player chair.
*Next pass: stress re-run of Act Four (weakest act, most changed by the fixes), then a
player-chair pass playing contrarian — refuse the column, shoot early, skip the depot.*