CLEAN GROUND v0.14: pass 4's fixes, and one finding corrected in the applying

Five fixes from desk playtest 4. One of them was wrong and the correction is
the more useful half.

1. A SPECIAL ON THE COLUMN PERSUADE NOW BUYS SOMETHING PORTABLE. It bought
   more conversation, which the line's rest clock then took away -- a player
   in pass 4 said "I rolled a 7 and got less time", which is a good roll
   punished by a timing device. It now buys the almanac early, or a name from
   1962, or "the six at the back don't eat". Each travels out of the scene, so
   the line still stands up on schedule and the roll still paid.

2. ACT THREE'S TWENTY-MINUTE BOMB IS NOW BUDGETED -- and this is the finding
   that was wrong. The pass said the re-cut-the-peg fumble had "no duration and
   no ender". It has both, and always did: the text says a table will spend
   twenty minutes on it and to let them try it exactly once. What was missing
   is that ACT THREE IS BUDGETED AT 50 AND THE TEXT PREDICTS 50 + 20, with
   nothing connecting the fumble to the cut that pays for it. Act Three now
   opens with that warning and makes the northern-seam cut compulsory the
   moment the fumble lands. The clause itself is untouched; it was already
   right.

3. A FUMBLED PERSUADE ON SWINBURNE HAS AN ANSWER. She does not produce the
   photocopy -- she produces the dog, walks them to the stump in silence, and
   H01 reaches them later from the coroner, confirming rather than revealing.
   Better staging than the drawer, and the GM should not regret the fumble.

4. THE SLACK CLAIM IS HONEST NOW. The Pacing Note said ten minutes. Pass 4 on
   a hostile seed finished at ~3:46 with one cut unspent: four minutes and a
   cut. Ten is the friendly-seed number and is what a GM would have planned
   against.

5. THE OFFER'S STAGING ACCIDENT IS NOW DELIBERATE. Moving it inside the column
   scene was purely a time saving; the side-effect is that the offer has no
   audience and Ashcroft returns to a conversation that carried on without him.
   Written down so nobody moves it back.

The correction to 2 is recorded in the playtest document as its own lesson: a
reading made while looking for faults finds faults that are not there about as
readily as ones that are. Apply fixes against the source, not against the notes.

npm run check: 17 guards, exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md

@@ -9,10 +9,10 @@
 
 | | |
 |---|---|
-| **Version** | **v0.13**, 13 September 2026 |
+| **Version** | **v0.14**, 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** | Three desk passes, all fixes applied: `CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md` (GM chair, seed 4271), `_2.md` (Act Four stress, seed 9314), `_3.md` (player chair, contrarian, seed 5580). Twenty-three fixes plus one post-pass. |
+| **Playtesting** | **Four 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). Twenty-eight fixes plus one post-pass. Pass 4 is the only one that describes the current timings; 1–3 ran against a 65-minute Act Two. |
 | **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. |
@@ -176,9 +176,14 @@ written.** See Act Two's budget table.
 | **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, and only if the line's rest has already overrun |
 
-**Running total: 65 minutes of cuts available against a 55-minute problem**, so there is
-ten minutes of genuine slack for a table that talks — which is the first time this
-scenario has had any.
+**Running total: 65 minutes of cuts available against a 55-minute problem.** On paper that
+is ten minutes of slack. **Plan against four.**
+
+Desk pass 4 ran v0.13 on a deliberately hostile seed — two fumbles, eight failures — took
+two of the three cuts, and finished at **~3:46 against 3:40**, with the hospitality cut
+still in hand. That is four minutes of margin plus one unspent cut, and it is the honest
+number. Ten is what you get on a friendly seed, and a GM who plans against ten will find
+out at the Close that they were planning against the wrong one.
 
 **Do not cut:** telling Ivy, the almanac pair, or the Close. They are the scenario.
 
@@ -354,6 +359,20 @@ ever able to tell me.
   the players understand that an ordinary professional has been left holding this.
 - **Failure case:** if nobody asks for the note, Swinburne has a photocopy of it in a
   drawer because she was not satisfied with what she was told, and she will produce it.
+- **On a FUMBLED Persuade with Swinburne** — she has buried a dog and been fobbed off once
+  already, and the above is written for a party who never asked, not for one that asked
+  badly. **She does not produce the photocopy. She produces the dog.**
+  - She walks them out to the stump and shows them where it died, and she does not speak on
+    the way. Handing a rude stranger a document is a favour; showing them the thing that
+    actually happened to her is not, and she is owed neither.
+  - **This is better staging than the drawer and the GM should not regret the fumble.** It
+    puts them at the stump early, on foot, in silence, with a woman who is not helping
+    them — and the felled oak is the scene the act is walking toward anyway.
+  - **H01 still reaches them, later and from the coroner.** It arrives in Act Two or at the
+    break as a faxed copy Registry forwards, by which point it **confirms rather than
+    reveals** — which costs the party nothing except the pleasure of having found it.
+  - *Desk pass 4, seed 6142: Renshaw fumbled this roll and the GM had to improvise
+    Swinburne helpfully producing the note anyway, which worked and was flat.*
 
 ---
 
@@ -590,7 +609,13 @@ agents got what they wanted.
 - **THE OFFER — the anchor's beat, and it is not optional.** **Run it DURING the line's
   rest, while the other players are talking to Ivy** — that is where the twenty minutes
   came from, and it costs nothing because the table is occupied. Take Ashcroft's player
-  aside for one minute. The record offers him the cleanest version of the
+  aside for one minute.
+  - **Do not move this back to a quiet moment, and here is why.** It was originally its own
+    beat and was rescheduled in v0.13 purely to save time. The side-effect is better than
+    the reason: run mid-scene, **the offer has no audience**, and Ashcroft's player comes
+    back to a conversation that carried on without him. A man being quietly told he could
+    put the weight down, while the people he holds the door for do not notice he has gone,
+    is the whole character in one staging accident. **Keep it.** 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, 2 Coherence at the Close, and one more thing he
@@ -614,6 +639,18 @@ agents got what they wanted.
     that; let it be noticed or not.
   - **Say nothing further until a player speaks.** They offer water they cannot spare.
     `[CUS: Persuade — they will believe almost anything except that it is 2026]`
+    - ⏱ **On a SPECIAL or better, give something PORTABLE — never more conversation.**
+      This is a timing rule and a fairness rule at once. The rest has a clock (above), so a
+      good roll that buys extra talking is a good roll the clock then takes away, and desk
+      pass 4 found a player saying *"I rolled a 7 and got less time."* Hand over one of:
+      - **The almanac now** rather than at the line's departure — H03a early, which moves
+        Act Three's reveal forward and buys the GM room later.
+      - **A name from 1962** — Ivy's mother, or the man who carried the tent poles — which
+        Bhattacharya can look for in the depot paperwork in Act Three.
+      - **"The six at the back don't eat."** Said flatly, as a housekeeping detail, by
+        somebody who has stopped finding it strange.
+    - Each of those travels out of the scene. **The line still stands up on schedule and
+      the roll still paid** — which is the only arrangement where both are true.
 - **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.
@@ -632,7 +669,20 @@ carelessness — this column has done this before, and it has lost people doing
 
 ---
 
-## Act Three — There is no north *(~50 min)*
+## Act Three — There is no north *(~50 min, and read the next line before you trust that)*
+
+> ⏱ **This act has a twenty-minute bomb in it and the 50 does not include it.** If anybody
+> fumbles Anomaly Lore on the depot entry, the text below sends them chasing the re-cut
+> peg, and it says in terms that *a table will spend twenty minutes on it*. That is a real
+> instruction and it should be obeyed — the silence of that failure teaches more than a
+> correct roll. But 50 + 20 is 70, and the act is budgeted at 50.
+>
+> **So if that fumble happens, the northern-seam cut is no longer optional.** Take it the
+> moment the fumble lands, not at the break. With the cut, a fumbled act runs ~55 and the
+> session absorbs it. Without it, Act Three runs 70 and the Close pays.
+>
+> Desk pass 4 hit this fumble and came out even only because the cut had already been
+> taken. Nothing in the act previously said the two were connected.
 
 **Beats**
 - **The evidence of the loop — three routes, with the almanac behind all of them.**

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_4.md

@@ -289,3 +289,31 @@ Numbered, prioritised, nothing rewritten here.
 
 **Not a fix, recorded as a result:** the unsettled countdown outcome, written blind in
 v0.12, fired on its first test via an aggressor fumble and needed nothing. Leave it alone.
+
+---
+
+## POST-PASS — a correction to finding 2, found while applying it
+
+**Fix 2 above says the re-cut-the-peg fumble has "no timing guidance" and needs "a duration
+and an ender". That was wrong, and I only found out by going to the text to change it.**
+
+The clause already carries both. It reads: *"a table will spend twenty minutes on it. **Let
+them try it exactly once.** Cutting the notch does nothing whatsoever."* Twenty minutes is
+the duration and trying it once is the ender. Both were there before this pass ran, and my
+own simulation costed the chase at ten minutes — half what the document predicts.
+
+**So the finding was right about the symptom and wrong about the cause.** The problem is
+not that the fumble is unbounded. It is that **the document knows the fumble costs twenty
+minutes and the timing table does not**: Act Three is budgeted at 50, the text predicts
+50 + 20, and nothing connects the fumble to the northern-seam cut that would pay for it.
+
+Applied as that instead: a timing warning at the head of Act Three saying the twenty
+minutes exist, are deliberate, and make the seam cut compulsory the moment the fumble
+lands. The clause itself is untouched — it was already right.
+
+**Kept as the pass's own lesson.** Pass 4 read that clause, formed a view about what it
+lacked, and did not re-read it before writing the finding down. The finding then sat in a
+committed document until the fix went to apply it. A playtest is a reading of the text, and
+a reading made while looking for faults finds faults that are not there as readily as ones
+that are — which is an argument for applying fixes against the source rather than against
+the notes.