diff --git a/art/maps/bellhouse-section.svg b/art/maps/bellhouse-section.svg index 53b55c6..8e8c4e8 100644 --- a/art/maps/bellhouse-section.svg +++ b/art/maps/bellhouse-section.svg @@ -147,23 +147,27 @@ BELOW - 1 · Wetherlaw farm — ash in the yard for four years - 2 · The ash edge — straight 400 m, then a right angle - 3 · Ventilation head — painted, and warm to the hand - 4 · Postal pipe — 4-inch pneumatic, sealed 1974 - 5 · Service adit — 400 m of 1962 concrete, lit + 1 · Wetherlaw farm — coal soot in the yard + 2 · The soot edge — straight 400 m, then a right angle + 3 · Vent head — warm, smells of a coal fire; the crossing + 4 · Postal pipe — 4-inch pneumatic; Centre answers + 5 · The adit — backfilled 1975 - 6 · Blast door and lobby — never locked - 7 · Control Room — the map, the tannoy, the desk - 8 · Registry — fifty-two years of files - 9 · Sick bay - 10 · Crèche and school - 11 · Pipe room — the outgoing tray - 12 · Plant floor — generators and the relay + 6 · Lobby and Enquiries — no form for visitors + 7 · Control Room and studio — the tannoy, the safe + 8 · Registry — the Order and the Establishment + 9 · Sick bay and maternity + 10 · Crèche and school + 11 · Pipe room — Centre's in-tray + 12 · Plant floor — boilers, coal face, transmitter + 13 · Vigil hall * + 14 · Allotments and Buffer Depot * + 15 · The Sump * + * pit galleries, not drawn SO-H04 · SECTION · STANDING ORDER - ISSUE 1 · NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THE SEAT + ISSUE 2 · NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THE SEAT diff --git a/art/maps/bellhouse-section.webp b/art/maps/bellhouse-section.webp index 4c09086..76b6be2 100644 Binary files a/art/maps/bellhouse-section.webp and b/art/maps/bellhouse-section.webp differ diff --git a/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER.md b/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER.md index b7218b4..b76c8d4 100644 --- a/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER.md +++ b/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER.md @@ -1,47 +1,53 @@ # Crossing case — The Custodians: STANDING ORDER -> *Two hundred and six people went underground in 1974 to govern the country after the -> war. There was no war. They have been governing it for fifty-two years, the order that -> put them there renews itself every ninety days, and the next renewal is on Thursday.* +> *A thousand people are waiting under Sheldon Moor for the all-clear from a war that never +> happened. Every ninety days, somebody writes to tell them to keep waiting. It is not +> the government.* ## STATUS — read this before anything else | | | |---|---| -| **Version** | **v0.7**, 15 September 2026 — absorbs desk playtests 1–5; the slot is 3h15 | -| **Can it be run?** | **Yes, from this document alone,** with the compendium for sheets and the three bestiary creatures. | -| **Is it convention-ready?** | **Nearly — what is left is a run with human beings.** Five desk passes, no human runs. `_1.md` (GM chair, 5291) · `_2.md` (Act Three stress, 8143, creatures run through the real fight harness) · `_3.md` (player chair, contrarian, 3307, reached ending 1) · `_4.md` (the clock, cuts taken as written, 6620) · `_5.md` (the retry fix, verified). Every content defect the five passes found is fixed, and the budget question they raised is decided: **the slot is 3h15.** | -| **What it is** | A **three-act one-shot**. It ends in the session; there is no second part and the text must not promise one. | +| **Version** | **v1.0**, 16 September 2026 — the rewrite. Same site, same people, same art; a new case inside them | +| **Can it be run?** | **Yes, from this document alone,** with the compendium for sheets, the two cast actors, and the three bestiary creatures. | +| **Is it convention-ready?** | **No. It needs desk passes again.** `_PLAYTEST_1.md` to `_5.md` tested v0.7, which was a different plot: 231 people, no crossing, no Mr Smith, no broadcast. Their structural lessons are carried forward below and marked where they are; their timings are not evidence for this version. | +| **What it is** | A **three-act one-shot** and the second appearance of **Mr Smith**, who was planted in THROUGH TRAIN. It ends in the session. The thread does not. | | **Players** | 4–6 from the duty roster. The cast is declared in Casting and the build enforces it. | -| **Runtime** | **2h50 of play in three acts of 45 / 75 / 50 plus a ten-minute break — 3h00 wall, in a 3h15 slot.** Act Two is budgeted at its **uncut** base, which is the figure passes 1, 3 and 4 all reconcile to. The fifteen minutes of slack are deliberate. **The Pacing Note's cuts are not defaults; plan to take none of them** — and the budget above is the no-cuts budget, which is the pair v0.6 briefly got wrong. | +| **Runtime** | **Three acts of 45 / 75 / 50 plus a ten-minute break — 3h00 wall, in a 3h15 slot.** These are v0.7's measured budgets, kept because the shape is the same. **They are unmeasured for this plot.** | -### The three things that are not obvious +### The things that are not obvious -1. **Nobody in Bellhouse is a monster and almost nobody is hostile.** The population are - civil servants doing an appalling job impeccably, and they will offer the agents tea - before they ask them anything. The GM reflex under pressure is to make the underground - people sinister. Do not. The horror is that they are correct. -2. **The apocalypse is not a bomb, it is a reconciliation.** When the site's population - record exceeds the surviving population of the region it governs, the record resolves - the contradiction by making the region match. That is the threat, it is arithmetic, - and Act Two is where the players are shown the sum. -3. **Act Three is a decision, not a fight.** All three endings are real and all three - cost something. If the table reaches for violence the scenario still works, but see - EXPOSURE — the quarantine unit will kill them and is meant to be argued with. -4. **Nothing in Act One is hidden, and that is load-bearing.** Joan Wetherlaw points at - every clue the party misses, because she has been trying to show somebody for four - years. Desk pass 1 failed six of ten rolls in Act One and lost nothing. **A GM who does - not notice this will start gating clues behind the dice and the act will die.** The - rolls buy speed and detail. They never buy access. +1. **The brief is a rescue, and it is a diplomatic one.** The department wants these + thousand people brought home and wants to know who has been keeping them down there. + Nobody below is expendable, and the agents are told so in writing. **A party that solves + Bellhouse with violence has failed the brief even if it wins the fight.** +2. **The people below are not a cult and do not know they are becoming one.** They are a + council: minutes, rotas, a housing list, a complaints procedure that takes eleven weeks. + The occult is in the *procedures* — a form of words at the bulletin, a lullaby on the + crèche intercom, a dream everyone born below has had. **Never put an altar in this + building.** If a player can point at it and say "cult", the GM has overplayed it. +3. **Mr Smith is never met.** He is a hand on the letters, a mark on the franking, and a + face nobody can picture. He is the thread between this case and THROUGH TRAIN and he + must still be a thread at the end. **Do not stat him, do not describe him, and do not let + the table corner him.** +4. **Releasing them is not the hard part. The broadcast is.** Cancelling the Standing Order + takes one warrant card and no roll. But the order says that when the Seat surfaces it + *speaks* — and what it will say is Mr Smith's, not the government's. **The table must + neutralise the broadcast before, or while, they let the Seat go.** Act Three is that + order of operations. +5. **Detention is a scene, not a defeat.** The wardens can put the party in the Sump. The + real danger of being held is being *entered on the Establishment*, and Pennyfeather is the + person with the pen. Carried forward from v0.7's first desk pass: **no failure below + ends the case — it costs a scene.** ### Still to do -- **A run with human beings.** Five desk passes have been run; no human table has. -- **Handout production.** The three handouts are in the Foundry compendium (STANDING - ORDER — Player handouts) but have no print pack. CLEAN GROUND's - `CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html` is the model. -- **A decision on Kit Marlow** — see Open questions. She is the cost of the tidiest - ending and the draft may be leaning on a seventeen-year-old too hard. +- **Desk passes.** Minimum three, in the house order: GM chair, Act Three stress with the + detention fight run through the harness, then a player-chair contrarian. +- **Art.** Joan Wetherlaw still has no portrait. Mr Smith must never have one. Nothing else + is needed; the eight plates and the section map carry over. +- **Handout production.** Six handouts are written here and are in the compendium. No print + pack. --- @@ -49,868 +55,866 @@ - **System:** d100 roll-under a percentage skill. **Special** under a fifth of the skill, **critical** under a twentieth; 96–99 always fail and 00 always fumbles. -- **Opposed rolls: a tie goes to whoever is being acted upon.** Resisting is stronger than - the numbers look. Two beats in Act Two depend on this. -- **Coherence runs 10 → 0** and measures how well-filed an agent is. Spending it is how - the supernatural works, and **nothing in this scenario gives any of it back.** -- **Borrowed Authority:** a named credential with a scope. Inside its scope there is no - roll — it costs 1 Trust and it works. One tier beyond is a roll at −20 per red flag - broken. Two tiers beyond is impossible at any skill. **Act Three's best ending is a - Borrowed Authority problem,** so read that section of the rules before you run this. -- **A warrant card is a named authority.** This matters more here than in any other case - in the corpus, and Act Three turns on it. +- **Opposed rolls: a tie goes to whoever is being acted upon.** +- **Coherence runs 10 → 0.** Crossings, the tape, and the cancellation all cost it, and + **nothing in this scenario gives any back.** +- **Panic is live** in Act Two's detention and Act Three's broadcast. Triggers are marked. +- **Standing Order 9 is live.** Nothing modern goes through; charge for *using*, never for + carrying. Down here a modern object is also **evidence** — the first thing a warden will + ask about. +- **Borrowed Authority:** a named credential with a scope. Inside scope, no roll: it costs + 1 Trust and works. One tier beyond is a roll at −20 per red flag broken. **A warrant card + of the Department is inside scope at Bellhouse** — the Standing Order names it. +- **Content warnings:** confinement underground; a detention and a beating if the table + resists it; children as the object of an occult procedure (never on screen); a birth; an + elderly woman's shame; the possibility of a whole region being subsumed. --- ## Overview -The department commissioned Regional Seat of Government 12 — **Bellhouse**, under -Sheldon Moor in the Peak District — in 1962, and staffed it in 1974 during a genuine war -scare. Its Standing Order says: *on execution, the site assumes the government of Region -12 and does not surface until this order is cancelled by the named authority.* +The department commissioned Regional Seat of Government 12 — **Bellhouse** — in 1962, cut +into the worked-out galleries of Sheldon Colliery under Sheldon Moor in the Peak District. +It was built for four hundred staff and dependants, stocked as a Buffer Depot for the whole +region's reconstitution, and fed by the pit's own coal seam and a lead-miners' drainage +level that runs clean limestone water. -The order was executed on 4 November 1974 **as a drill**. Deputy Controller Edith Marlow -filed the drill as live, on purpose, because she believed a real one was coming inside -the year and wanted the site already running when it did. +In November 1974, during an exercise, a man calling himself **Mr Smith, for Centre** +delivered a live execution order. Deputy Controller **Edith Marlow** knew it was exercise +week. She signed it anyway, and she has never been able to say why. -Reality took the filing. Two hundred and six people went down. Down there the war -happened, and they have been governing its aftermath for fifty-two years: issuing ration -books, logging fallout that nobody up here can measure, answering correspondence from -towns that are perfectly fine. +**Reality took the filing.** Four hundred and twelve people went down on 4 November 1974 +and the war happened — on paper, which is where this setting keeps the truth. The pit was +"closed" in 1975. The adit is backfilled rubble. **Bellhouse is struck from the surface +record, and the only way in is a crossing.** -The order renews every ninety days by standing instruction. Each renewal writes a little -more of the "after" into the moor above, which is why a farm at Wetherlaw has been -sweeping ash off its yard for four years. **Renewal 211 is due on Thursday, and Registry -has done the sum: at 211 the site's population record exceeds Region 12's surviving -population on paper.** A record cannot hold both. It resolves by correction. +Fifty-two years later there are **nine hundred and ninety-nine** people below: a hundred +and eighteen of the 1974 intake, and eight hundred and eighty-one born there. They run a +functioning, exasperating, 1970s council: ration books, a housing list, a Parks and +Allotments committee that meets in a coal gallery under sodium lamps. **Every ninety days a +renewal arrives by pneumatic pipe from Centre** with radiation readings and one instruction: +*remain*. Centre has never missed one. + +**Centre is Mr Smith.** He has spent fifty-two years using the most obedient population in +England as an experiment: can a people be *filed* into a congregation without ever being +told? The Seat's procedures have drifted, renewal by renewal, into observances. Its +children dream the same dream. Its establishment has been steered to a number. + +**On Thursday the thousandth person is born below.** Annex D of the Standing Order puts the +Seat at reconstitution strength, and a Seat at strength surfaces and **broadcasts the +Reconstitution Address** to the region it governs. The tape in the studio safe is not the +1974 recording. Centre replaced it in 2019. **Anyone who hears it to the end is entered on +the Establishment**, and Region 12 has a million people in it. ### Design intent -1. **The end of the world is a document, and the people administering it are kind.** This - is a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the apocalypse is entirely clerical and every - person responsible for it believed they were doing their duty. -2. **It is an arrangement case, not a fight.** Two of the three endings involve no - violence at all, and the one creature that can wipe the party is there to be talked - down. The bestiary entries are load-bearing but the dice are not the point. -3. **The cost is named and not softened.** The tidy ending kills sixty-one children who - have no record above ground. The text says so plainly and does not offer the GM a way - to make it painless. If the table finds a fourth way out, let them have it. -4. **It is deliberately NOT CLEAN GROUND.** That case is a filed valley of people walking - north forever, found by accident, resolved by cancellation. This one is a filed - institution that works, that the department built on purpose, and that can be *amended* - rather than cancelled. -5. **Three things stay unresolved.** They are named in the GM notes as *do not resolve*. +1. **A post-apocalypse that is a council meeting.** The end of the world is administered + kindly, badly and in triplicate. The horror is that it works. +2. **The occult is procedural and it is quiet.** Six small wrong things, none of which is a + pentagram. The table assembles them; the document never announces them. +3. **A rescue with a deadline and a brief.** The department wants the people alive, the + site's story on file, and Mr Smith's hand identified. It does not want a body count, and + the brief says so before anybody crosses. +4. **One fight, and it is a detention.** The wardens are sent to bring the agents in, not + to kill them. The fight is real, measured, and avoidable, and losing it costs a scene. +5. **The thread survives.** Mr Smith is identified and not caught. Three things stay + unresolved and the GM notes name them. --- ## Session Timing -**The slot is 3h15.** Decided 15 September 2026, after four desk passes measured Act Two's -floor at about 66 minutes against a budget that said 55. The alternative was cutting twelve -minutes out of the sick bay, which is where Revelation 3's best route lives. **The slot -moved instead, because 3h00 was an assumption and the sick bay is not.** +**The slot is 3h15.** The acts keep v0.7's measured budgets because the shape — an outside +approach, a long investigation below, a decision at a fixed hour — is the same. **They have +not been measured for this plot**, and desk pass 1 must record them. | | Act | Budget | GM checkpoint | |---|---|---|---| -| 1 | **The Returns** — Wetherlaw farm, the vent head, getting in | 45 min | They are at the blast door by 0:40 | +| 1 | **The Crossing** — the Bureau, Sheldon Moor, through, and the Enquiries counter | 45 min | They are through the crossing by **0:25** | | — | *Break* | 10 min | | -| 2 | **Bellhouse** — the population, the Registry, the sum | **75 min** | Pennyfeather has shown them the sum by **1:50** | -| 3 | **Renewal** — Thursday, the signing, the decision | 50 min | Sowerby has the folder open by **2:20** | +| 2 | **The Establishment** — the site, the wardens, Centre's hand | **75 min** | They know about **Annex D** by **1:50** | +| 3 | **The Address** — Thursday, the thousandth, the broadcast | 50 min | They are at the tape or the transmitter by **2:40** | | | **Total** | **3h00** | against a **3h15** slot | -**Running times, so the checkpoints mean something:** Act One 0:00–0:45 · break to 0:55 · -Act Two 0:55–2:10 · Act Three 2:10–3:00. **A checkpoint is a point you can still correct -from**, which is why the sum is wanted at 1:50 with twenty minutes of Act Two left, and why -Act Three's is ten minutes in rather than at the signing. If you pass one, take cuts. - -### The fifteen minutes of slack are the point - -**3h00 of content in a 3h15 slot, and the difference is deliberate.** The house playtest -standard says a scenario that lands on schedule to the minute with zero slack is a *fail* -for a real table of strangers, and every figure above was measured on desk passes with a GM -who already knew the document. A real table asks more questions, takes longer to decide, -and loses five minutes finding the right page. - -**What the acts are budgeted at is what they measured**, not what would fit: - -| Act | Pass 1 | Pass 3 | Pass 4 *(19 min cut)* | Budgeted | -|---|---|---|---|---| -| One | ~50 | ~30 *(Joan skipped)* | ~45 | **45** | -| Two | **~75** | ~70 | ~66 | **75** | -| Three | ~45 | ~50 | ~50 | **50** | - -⚠ **Act Two's 75 is the UNCUT base, and it is the number three passes agree on.** Pass 4's -66 is that same 75 with nineteen minutes cut and ten handed back by a retry — the three -measurements reconcile exactly, and desk pass 5 did the arithmetic. - -**Read this before you re-budget anything.** v0.6 briefly set Act Two at 65 — pass 4's *cut* -figure — while also instructing the GM to take no cuts, which is a ten-minute overrun -written in on purpose. The retry fix that prompted it is real and worth having, but **it -moved the act's worst case, not its typical one**: it removes up to twenty minutes of -variance when filed clues fail, and changes nothing when they do not. Variance is not the -base. **If the slot ever moves again, budget the configuration you are actually going to -run.** +**Running times:** Act One 0:00–0:45 · break to 0:55 · Act Two 0:55–2:10 · Act Three +2:10–3:00. **The broadcast begins at 2:45 on the session clock** — thirty-five minutes into +Act Three — unless the table has stopped it. ### Pacing Note — the cuts, written in advance -⚠ **These are no longer defaults. Take none of them unless you are actually late.** - -They were defaults when the slot was 3h00 and Act Two had to lose twenty minutes it did not -have. At 3h15 the act is budgeted at what it measures, so **the correct number of cuts to -plan for is zero** — and that matters most for the second one in the table below, which desk -pass 4 proved costs the price of the likeliest ending rather than "the drawings". - -Keep them for the room that runs hot: a table that talks, a GM who is behind at the break, -a six-hander that splits three ways. **In that order, and stop as soon as you are level.** +**Take none of them unless you are actually late.** In this order, and stop when level: | Cut | Saves | What it costs | |---|---|---| -| **Fold the pipe room into Registry** — Pennyfeather's office backs onto it and she walks them through on the way to the stacks | ~8 min | Nothing. Revelation 4 still arrives from the relay or from her | -| **Kit Marlow in the corridor, not the crèche** — she is carrying a drawing somewhere and stops to talk | ~7 min | ⚠ **More than it looks — read the note below before taking this cut** | -| **The census** (see Act Two) | ~4 min | Atmosphere only | -| **Skip the Vigil** (Countdown step 4) | ~5 min | The Revelation 3 emergency backstop. Only take this cut if they already have it | -| **Teague off-screen in Act Three** — he stands down when Sowerby tells him to | ~6 min | The script break, which is the best beat in the act. **Last resort** | +| **The Bureau in two lines** — hand over SO-H01 and SO-H06 and cut to the moor | ~6 min | Bewley's line about the frank. **Give the frank to them on SO-H01 anyway** | +| **The Allotments by report** — Kowalczyk hears about the yields rather than walking the galleries | ~6 min | The Buffer Depot clue (supporting) | +| **The census** | ~4 min | Atmosphere, and the enumeration risk | +| **The Vigil** (Countdown step 5) | ~5 min | Revelation 3's last backstop. Only if they already have it | -**Do not cut Pennyfeather's sum, the arrival, or the signing.** They are the act, the tone -and the decision. - -⚠ **The Kit Marlow cut costs more than "the drawings", and desk pass 4 proved it.** That -pass took the cut, then reached the **narrow** row of ending 3 — the likeliest one, because -it needs only a single dossier item — whose entire price is *the sixty-one stay unrecorded*. -Kit **is** the sixty-one made into a person, and her own entry says she should be a person -before she is a price. Cut her scene and the price is an abstraction the table has no -feeling about. - -**If you take this cut, the corridor version must still do her one job.** She is carrying a -drawing, she shows it to them without being asked, and she asks the question from her entry: -**whether she got the blue right.** Fifteen seconds, and the narrow ending keeps its cost. +**Never cut:** the Enquiries counter, Pennyfeather's return, the crèche, or the studio. --- ## Plot Summary (GM truth) -Bellhouse is real, it is where the map says it is, and everyone in it is alive. +**1962.** RSG 12 is built into Sheldon Colliery's worked-out galleries: three upper levels +of Seat (Control, Registry, studio, quarters, school, sick bay) and the pit below them +(plant floor, the coal face, the Allotments, the Mill, the Buffer Depot, the Sump). The +Standing Order is drafted with its annexes. **Annex D, as drafted, says the Seat +broadcasts a recorded address from the Home Office on reconstitution.** It says nothing +about who hears it. -In 1962 the department built RSG 12 into the limestone under Sheldon Moor, as one of a -dozen regional seats. In October 1974 the scare was severe enough that the site was -staffed and exercised. The exercise order and the live order are the same document with a -different box ticked. +**3 November 1974.** Exercise week. A pleasant man in a grey coat arrives at the lobby with +a sealed envelope on Centre's paper, franked with a mark Marlow has never seen — a small +circle with a short stroke through the top of it. It is the live execution order, and it +has a new Annex D. He waits while she reads it. She asks him whether it is real. **He says, +"Then it had better be."** She signs. She cannot picture his face and has tried for +fifty-two years. -**Edith Marlow ticked the other box.** She was Deputy Controller, she was fifty, and she -had read the same traffic as everyone else and drawn a harder conclusion. Her reasoning is -in her own hand in the file: a site that begins governing *after* the event is a site that -spends its first fortnight arguing about whether it is allowed to. She removed that -fortnight. +**4 November 1974.** The order executes. Four hundred and twelve people go down — two +hundred and sixty-eight staff and a hundred and forty-four dependants, seventy-one of them +children. The blast door shuts. Reality files a war. -Reality keeps a record of what belongs where. The record now said Region 12 had been -attacked, and so it had. Not up here — down there, and in the ground between. +**1975.** Above, Sheldon Colliery closes overnight. Its foreman, Joan Wetherlaw's father, is +told to stop digging and backfill the adit, and does. Below, the first child is born: +**Alice Pennyfeather**, establishment number 413. -**What the last fifty-two years have been.** Two hundred and six went down; the -population below is now two hundred and thirty-one, of whom sixty-one were born there and -have no record anywhere else. They govern a region they have never seen. They receive -correspondence — it arrives — and they answer it, and their answers go up a pipe that -does not come out anywhere. Their fallout readings are real readings of a real -contamination that exists only inside the order. +**How they have lived.** The Buffer Depot held twenty years' stock for a thousand — flour, +tins, sugar, blankets, army-surplus bales. The Seat's plant section works the pit's live +seam for the boilers; the drainage level turns a turbine and fills the reservoir. From 1979 +the Parks and Allotments committee grows food hydroponically in the old galleries under +sodium lamps: potatoes, beans, mushroom beds on spent straw, trout in the sump tanks, hens in +the pit-pony stables. The Mill makes cloth from flax and recycled bales. **It should not +quite be enough, and it has always been exactly enough** — the Depot's ledger ran out in +1996, and since then its issue book has recorded stock *received from Centre* every ninety +days. Nobody has seen a delivery. The pipe is four inches wide. -**What changed four years ago.** Renewals began pushing the boundary outward. Ash that is -not ash falls on Wetherlaw farm, three-quarters of a mile from the vent head. Joan -Wetherlaw's dog went out into it in 2024 and came back with an extra week of life in its -records and none in its body. +**Why nobody has looked.** The periscope head and the external instruments were sealed in +1974 by order, against flash blindness, and the seal lifts only on Centre's authority. +Centre's renewals carry radiation readings. They have never once been good enough. -**Why the department is here now.** Four months ago one of Bellhouse's returns came out of -the pipe onto a real desk in Registry — franked 1974, answering a question nobody had -asked. Bhattacharya's section traced it. In doing so they found the renewal schedule and, -in the site's own establishment returns, the sum. +**The experiment.** Mr Smith is a messenger — a clerk of the far side's higher orders, the +things the department files under *Vesh*. He is not one of them and he does not command +them; he carries their correspondence, and this is his proposal to them. **A population +that obeys paper perfectly can be filed into anything.** So he has written to them for +fifty-two years, and every renewal has moved them one word: -**The sum.** Region 12's surviving population, as the order records it, decays a little -each renewal. Bellhouse's population grows. At **renewal 211 — Thursday — the second -number passes the first.** A governing record whose government is larger than the governed -is a contradiction, and this one resolves the way records do: it corrects the region. +- **The bulletin** closes with a response the whole site speaks: *We hold. We count. We + answer.* It was *Message ends* until 1983. +- **The Continuity of Establishment Scheme** licenses marriages "per Centre guidance" and + has steered the establishment to a number. +- **The Vigil**, the annual remembrance for the surface dead, reads a *Region* aloud. The + last places on the list are not in Derbyshire, or anywhere. +- **The crèche intercom** plays a tone at three in the morning "to settle the young" (Centre + Circular 88/4). It is the interval signal from the 2019 tape. +- **Everyone born below has had the same dream** — a long corridor, a counter, a pleasant + man who asks their name and writes it down. Nobody from the 1974 intake has. +- **The children draw the sun** as a circle with a stroke through the top. + +**What he wants from Thursday.** Annex D, as he rewrote it, reads: *the Seat at +establishment one thousand shall surface and address the Region, and those who hear the +Address are entered on the Establishment.* **The Address is a working.** Heard to its end, +it enrols the listener — they hold, they count, they answer — and the census, which has +been counting below for fifty-two years, goes up to count the rest. Region 12 is a million +people. **That is the threat to the outside world**, and it is why the department cannot +simply open the door. + +**Why the department is here now.** In May a Bellhouse return came out of a Registry +in-tray at the Bureau, franked 1974, addressed *to Centre*. Registry traced the frank. **The +same mark is on the letter of instruction a Mr Smith gave a surveyor named Elias Vane in +1881**, in the Mercy Draw file. Registry's file on Mr Smith has two entries and no face. ### Timeline | When | What | |---|---| -| 1962 | RSG 12 "Bellhouse" commissioned under Sheldon Moor. Standing Order drafted. | -| Oct 1974 | War scare. Site staffed and exercised; 206 personnel go down. | -| **4 Nov 1974** | **Marlow files the drill as live.** The order executes. | -| 1974–2022 | Fifty-two years of government. 61 children born below. Marlow, now 101, is in the sick bay and has not spoken plainly since 2019. | -| 2022 | Renewals begin to push the boundary. Ash starts falling at Wetherlaw. | -| 2024 | Joan Wetherlaw's dog goes out into the ash and comes back wrong. | -| May 2026 | A Bellhouse return arrives in Registry, franked 1974. | -| **Thursday** | **Renewal 211.** The sum crosses. | +| 1881 | Mr Smith instructs Elias Vane at Mercy Draw *(THROUGH TRAIN)*. | +| 1962 | RSG 12 "Bellhouse" commissioned in Sheldon Colliery. Standing Order drafted. | +| **3 Nov 1974** | Mr Smith delivers the live order. Marlow signs. | +| **4 Nov 1974** | 412 go down. The order executes. | +| 1975 | The pit closes; the adit is backfilled. Pennyfeather, the first birth below. | +| 1983 | The bulletin's closing words change to *We hold. We count. We answer.* | +| 1988 | Centre Circular 88/4: the crèche intercom. | +| 1996 | The Buffer Depot's own stock runs out. Issues "from Centre" begin. | +| 2019 | Centre replaces the Reconstitution tape: *12/R, revised.* Marlow stops speaking plainly. | +| May 2026 | A Bellhouse return arrives in Registry at the Bureau. | +| **Wednesday** | **Play begins.** Establishment: 999. Ruth Cotter is due. | +| **Thursday, 06:00** | Renewal assembly. The thousandth is born. **07:00: the Address.** | -### Revelations (5, and that is all) +### Revelations (6) -1. The site is live and the people in it are alive. *(Act One)* -2. They believe the war happened, and by their record it did. *(Act Two, first ten minutes)* -3. It was a drill, and one person filed it wrong on purpose. *(Act Two, Marlow)* -4. The renewal is what pushes the boundary out. *(Act Two, Kowalczyk or Pennyfeather)* -5. At 211 the sum crosses and the region is corrected to match. *(Act Two, Pennyfeather)* +1. **Bellhouse is inhabited and governing** — a thousand people. *(Act One, automatic)* +2. **They believe the war happened, and Centre tells them every ninety days to stay down.** + *(Act One/Two, automatic)* +3. **The live order was brought by a stranger in 1974, and Marlow signed it knowing it was + the exercise.** *(Act Two, three routes)* +4. **Centre is Mr Smith** — the frank on every renewal is the frank on Vane's letter. + *(Act Two, no roll once SO-H05 is in their hands)* +5. **The site is being made into a congregation.** *(Act Two, cumulative, supporting — the + table assembles it)* +6. **Annex D: at a thousand the Seat broadcasts the Address, and the Address enrols + whoever hears it.** *(Act Two, four routes)* --- ## The Countdown — what Bellhouse does on schedule -The site does not react to the agents. It runs its day. Print this and run it off the -clock whether or not the players are anywhere near it. - -⚠ **The clock starts when they come through the blast door**, not at the start of the -session, and **every step lands inside Act Two's sixty-five minutes.** That is deliberate -and it used to be wrong: steps 3 and 4 were written at +1h20 and +2h00, which under any -budget this scenario has ever had fired *after the act they belong to had ended* — and both -of them are backstops for Essential revelations, so both were arriving too late to back -anything up. **If you re-time this table, keep them inside the act.** +The site runs its day. **The clock starts when Act Two starts.** Every step lands inside the +act — carried forward from v0.7, where two steps fired after their act had ended. | Step | When | What happens, whatever the players are doing | |---|---|---| -| 0 | On arrival | Shift change. The corridors are briefly full. Nobody is looking for intruders because there has never been one. | -| 1 | **+15 min** | **The broadcast.** Sowerby reads the daily regional bulletin over the tannoy — casualty figures, ration adjustments, a weather report for a sky nobody has seen. It is four minutes long and the whole site stops to listen. | -| 2 | **+35 min** | **Teague is told there are strangers below.** From here he is looking for them. He is not yet hostile; he is a policeman with an anomaly. *(Act One's Stealth roll moves this — see there.)* | -| 3 | **+45 min** | **The establishment return is posted.** Pennyfeather files the population count that makes Thursday's sum what it is. **This is clue 13c**, the second road to Revelation 5: the number is on the front and anybody watching her post it can read it. Stopping her does not stop Thursday — the number is already true — but a player who tries has understood the case. | -| 4 | **+60 min** | **Vigil.** The site's fifty-two-year remembrance for the surface dead. Everyone attends. It is genuinely moving and it is for nothing. **It is also Revelation 3's last backstop** — somebody reads the 1974 roll of honour and there are no names on it. | -| 5 | **Thursday, 06:00** | **Renewal 211.** Sowerby signs, Teague countersigns, Pennyfeather files. Act Three. | +| 1 | **+15 min** | **The bulletin.** Sowerby reads the daily bulletin over the tannoy — rations, a housing list update, radiation readings from Centre. The whole site stops. It ends, and nine hundred and ninety-nine people say *We hold. We count. We answer.* **Panic trigger** for any agent who hears it in a corridor full of people. | +| 2 | **+30 min** | **Centre Circular.** The pipe delivers SO-H05 to the Control Room. Sowerby reads it twice. | +| 3 | **+45 min** | **The detail.** Teague and his wardens are sent to bring the agents in. See *The detention*. | +| 4 | **+55 min** | **The establishment return.** Pennyfeather posts SO-H03 on the Registry board. The number is on the front. **This is clue 13c.** | +| 5 | **+65 min** | **Vigil.** The Reading of the Region. **Revelation 3's last backstop** — the 1974 roll of honour is read, and there are no names on it. | +| 6 | **+75 min** | **Ruth Cotter goes into labour.** Larkhall is called. Thursday is tomorrow and the act is over. | --- ## Handouts -### SO-H01 — The return that came out of the pipe +The section map is **SO-H04** and is a plate in the compendium, not text. -*A4, buff, typed on a manual machine, franked 4 NOV 1974. Give it in the briefing.* +### SO-H01 — The return that came out of the in-tray + +*A4, buff, typed on a manual machine, franked 4 NOV 1974 with a small circle cut by a stroke +at the top. Give it in the briefing.* > REGION 12 — SEAT RETURN — WEEK 1 -> ESTABLISHMENT: 206. CASUALTIES THIS PERIOD: NIL. +> ESTABLISHMENT: 412. CASUALTIES THIS PERIOD: NIL. > REGIONAL SURVIVING POPULATION (EST.): 1,140,000. -> SUPPLY: 11 YEARS AT CURRENT SCALE. -> QUERY TO CENTRE: CONFIRM AUTHORITY TO ISSUE RATION DOCUMENTS IN OWN NAME. -> QUERY TO CENTRE: CONFIRM DISPOSAL OF SURFACE REMAINS AT SHELDON. +> SUPPLY: 20 YEARS AT CURRENT SCALE. +> QUERY TO CENTRE: CONFIRM THE GENTLEMAN WHO BROUGHT THE ORDER IS KNOWN TO YOU. > SIGNED: E. MARLOW, DEPUTY CONTROLLER. -**What it is for.** Two hidden things. *Casualties this period: nil* is wrong for week one -after an attack and right for week one of a drill. And the second query asks about bodies -at Sheldon, which is where the vent head is — the first hint the boundary was always -touching the surface. +**What it is for.** *Casualties nil* is wrong for week one of a war and right for week one of +an exercise. The query is Marlow's only protest, and Centre answered it: the return came +back with the frank on it. **The frank is the thread.** Bewley points it out. ### SO-H02 — Standing Order 12, extract -*A4, foolscap, two paragraphs and a signature block. Registry supplies it on request.* +*Foolscap, three clauses and an annex. Registry supplies it on request.* > 4. On execution this Seat assumes the government of Region 12 and shall not surface > until this Order is cancelled by the named authority or by an officer holding a warrant > of the Department in person at the Seat. > -> 5. This Order renews at ninety days by the signature of the Controller, countersigned, -> and is thereafter filed. Renewal is not a decision and shall not be minuted as one. +> 5. This Order renews at ninety days on instruction from Centre, and is thereafter filed. +> +> 6. On cancellation the Seat shall surface and proceed under Annex D. +> +> ANNEX D. The Seat at establishment one thousand shall surface and address the Region by +> the recorded Address held at the Seat. Those who hear the Address are entered on the +> Establishment. > > NAMED AUTHORITY: SIR HUGH ELLERBY-STANNARD, PERMANENT UNDER-SECRETARY. -**What it is for.** It is the whole of Act Three. Ellerby-Stannard died in 1981 — but -clause 4 offers a second door, *an officer holding a warrant in person at the Seat*, and -every agent at the table is holding one. Clause 5 is the other half: renewal is not a -decision, which is exactly why nobody down there has ever reconsidered it. +**What it is for.** Clause 4 is the release: every agent holds a warrant. Clause 6 is the +trap: **cancelling the order sends the Seat up under Annex D**, so releasing them without +dealing with the Address starts the broadcast. Annex D's last sentence is the threat, in +plain civil-service English, and nobody below has read it as anything but a filing note. -### SO-H03 — Pennyfeather's working +### SO-H03 — The establishment return -*A single sheet of squared paper, pencil, in a clerk's hand. She gives it to whoever asks -her a straight question.* +*A Registry form, typed, initialled A.P. Posted on the board at Countdown step 4, or handed +to anyone who asks Pennyfeather a straight question.* -> RENEWAL 209 — SEAT 229 — REGION 1,140,000 → 231 est. decay applied -> RENEWAL 210 — SEAT 231 — REGION 242 -> RENEWAL 211 — SEAT 231 — REGION 219 -> ———————— -> SEAT EXCEEDS REGION AT 211. -> *I have taken this to the Controller three times. It is not minuted because renewal is -> not a decision. — A.P.* +> ESTABLISHMENT RETURN — WEEK 2,707 +> INTAKE 1974: 412. OF WHOM LIVING: 118. +> BORN AT THE SEAT: 1,176. OF WHOM LIVING: 881. +> ESTABLISHMENT: 999. +> EXPECTED: 1 (COTTER, R., DUE THURSDAY). +> NOTE: ANNEX D IN FORCE AT 1,000. +> *Controller — I have asked Centre what Annex D is for. Centre says it is for Thursday. — A.P.* -**What it is for.** This is Revelation 5 in a player's hands. Note the last line: she has -already tried, through the proper channel, and the proper channel is the problem. +**What it is for.** Revelation 6 in a player's hands, with the date on it. The last line is +Pennyfeather's own unease, and it is the cheapest way into Annex D. + +### SO-H05 — Centre Circular 26/33 + +*A flimsy, franked with the circle and stroke. Arrives by pipe at Countdown step 2. The +agents see it if they are in the Control Room, if Sowerby shows it to them, or if they take +it from his desk.* + +> CENTRE TO SEAT 12. CIRCULAR 26/33. +> UNACCOUNTED PERSONS AT THE SEAT ARE TO BE ENUMERATED OR REMOVED. +> ENUMERATION IS PREFERRED. +> THE ESTABLISHMENT WILL BE COMPLETE ON THURSDAY IN ANY CASE. +> THE SEAT WILL SPEAK AT THE HOUR. +> J. SMITH, FOR CENTRE. + +**What it is for.** Revelation 4, no roll: **the frank matches SO-H01's, and the name is the +one on Vane's letter.** It is also the order that sends the wardens, and the word +*enumerated* tells the table what detention really risks. + +### SO-H06 — Terms of engagement + +*A single typed sheet from the Bureau, signed by the Deputy Director. Give it in the +briefing and let them keep it.* + +> CASE SO-012 — BELLHOUSE. +> 1. The persons at the Seat are to be brought home. None is expendable. +> 2. Force is authorised in self-defence only. You are guests in a functioning +> administration and will conduct yourselves accordingly. +> 3. You will not tell the Seat what it believes is untrue until you can replace it with +> something it can file. +> 4. Establish who has been corresponding with the Seat as Centre, and bring back +> everything in his hand. +> 5. The Seat is to be released under clause 4 of its Order. Read clause 6 first. + +**What it is for.** The brief, in writing, so that a table reaching for its weapons has +already been told what that costs. Term 5 is a hint and it is meant to be one. --- -## Act One — The Returns *(~45 min)* +## Act One — The Crossing *(~45 min)* -**Where:** Wetherlaw farm and the vent head on Sheldon Moor, a wet afternoon in -September. **What it is for:** establish that the boundary is real, expanding, and has a -door in it. +**Where:** the Bureau, then Sheldon Moor at dusk, then the lobby of a place that is not on +any map. **What it is for:** the job, the door, and the first test of the brief. > *Read aloud or paraphrase:* -> *The ash starts about a mile before the farm. It lies on the verges and it does not -> wash off in the rain, which has been falling on it for four years. Joan Wetherlaw meets -> you at the gate with a yard brush in her hand and says: "You're not from the council."* +> *Registry smells of floor polish and old paper. Mr Bewley has laid a single buff envelope +> on the table between you as if it might go off. "This came out of my in-tray in May," he +> says. "It was posted in 1974. And somebody answered it."* ### Hooks — how the table gets here -Use whichever fits the group; all three are live and the department used all three. +The department sends them. There is one brief and it is SO-H06. What each agent carries +into it: -⚠ **Whichever hook you use, the party meets Joan Wetherlaw.** Desk pass 3 took the grid -reference and drove straight past the farm, which is what a professional team with a map -does — and two of these three hooks let them, because only the second one involves her at -all. Act One without her ran fifteen minutes short and had nobody in it, **and both of its -Essential clues lost their stated failure case, which is "Joan points at it within the -minute."** +- **The return.** Bhattacharya's section logged SO-H01 when it surfaced. The frank is his + find. +- **The dog.** Nkemdirim has a vet's referral from Bakewell: a farm dog came home from + Sheldon Moor coated in coal soot, from a moor with no chimney on it for fifty years. +- **Mercy Draw.** If the table played THROUGH TRAIN, whoever asked Vane about Mr Smith is on + this case because they did. If not, Bewley has the file and the name anyway. -**So she is at the farm when they arrive, and she walks up with them.** She has been -walking up there for four years, which is precisely what the woman in her own NPC entry -would do, and it means the forty-minute moor walk has somebody in it instead of being -terrain. **A party who skip the farm entirely meet her at the vent head**, sitting on the -concrete with a flask, and nothing else changes. Either way she is present for clues 1–5 and -she goes no further than the adit mouth. +### Beat 1 — The Bureau *(~10 min)* -- **The return in Registry.** Bhattacharya's section has SO-H01 on a desk. It is - fifty-two years old, it is answering a question nobody asked, and it arrived in May. -- **The farm.** Joan Wetherlaw wrote to DEFRA about her yard in 2023 and was sent a - leaflet. The letter reached the department by the route those letters take. -- **The dog.** A veterinary practice in Bakewell submitted tissue it could not classify. - It is on Nkemdirim's bench in the briefing, and it is nine days older than the animal. +**Mr Bewley, Registry**, gives SO-H01 and SO-H06 and says, if asked: + +- **Bellhouse was RSG 12.** It was staffed for an exercise in November 1974 and the whole + intake is on the file as *not returned*. The file was closed in 1975 by an instruction + nobody can trace. +- **There is no way in on the ground.** The adit is backfilled; the survey says so; three + engineers confirmed it in May. **The site is only reachable across.** The crossing is at + the vent head, and it opens at dusk when the moor cools and the warm air comes up. +- **The frank.** *"I have seen this mark once before. It was on a letter of instruction in + the Mercy Draw file, signed Smith, in 1881."* He does not speculate. He wants the letters. + +**Mr Prosser, Stores**, lays out the 1974 issue. **Standing Order 9 is live**, and down there +a modern object is also a question the wardens will ask: + +| Instead of | They get | +|---|---| +| handset | **nothing** — out of contact once across | +| torch | **Home Office pattern hand lamp** | +| service pistol | **service revolver**, issued, and Prosser asks them not to need it | +| scanner | **a 1974 Geiger counter** — *"the one thing down there that might change a mind"* | +| stab vest | **Civil Defence greatcoat** | +| everything else | **warrant cards**, which are good in any year | + +### Beat 2 — Sheldon Moor *(~15 min)* + +> *Read aloud or paraphrase:* +> *The soot starts a mile before the farm. It lies black on the verges in the rain. Joan +> Wetherlaw meets you at the gate with a yard brush and says: "You're not from the Coal +> Board. They stopped coming in 1975."* + +**Joan is at the farm and walks up with them** — carried forward from v0.7's third desk +pass, which drove straight past her and lost Act One's failure case. A party who skip the +farm meet her at the vent head with a flask. ### Clue trail — Act One | # | Clue | Where | How found | What it gives | Type | |---|---|---|---|---|---| -| 1 | The ash is not ash | The verges, the yard | `[CUS: Knowledge — it is not combustion product and it is not mineral; it has a grain structure, like something milled]` | The boundary is a *place*, not a contamination | Essential | -| 2 | The ash has an edge | Walking the field boundary | `[CUS: Navigate — the line is straight for 400 m and then turns exactly 90°, which weather does not do]` | It is surveyed. Somebody drew it | Supporting | -| 3 | The dog's records | Joan's kitchen, the vet's note | `[CUS: Insight — the vet's note is hedged in a way a vet's note never is; nine days of healing in an animal that was gone overnight]` | Time runs differently **in the ash**, not in the site | Supporting | -| 4 | Joan's fifty-two years | Joan herself | `[CUS: Persuade — she has a box of her father's papers she has never shown anyone]` | Her father was a Sheldon works foreman in 1974 and was told to stop digging | Supporting | -| 5 | The vent head | Sheldon Moor, 3/4 mile up | `[CUS: Spot — a mushroom vent in the heather, painted to lose itself, warm to the hand]` | The site is **live** — something down there is breathing | Essential | -| 6 | The postal pipe | Beside the vent head | `[CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — a sealed 4-inch pneumatic line, pressurised, and the seal is 1974 and unbroken]` | The route in, and where SO-H01 came from | Essential | -| 7 | The blast door | End of the service adit | `[CUS: Engineering (Field Systems) — it is not locked. It has never been locked. It opens from this side]` | Nobody built this to keep anyone out | Essential | +| 1 | The frank | SO-H01, the briefing | `[CUS: no roll — Bewley points at it]` | The thread to Mercy Draw, and Mr Smith's name | Essential | +| 2 | The soot is fresh | The verges, the yard | `[CUS: Knowledge — bituminous coal smoke, burned this week, from a moor with no chimney]` | Something below is burning coal *now* | Supporting | +| 3 | The soot has an edge | The field boundary | `[CUS: Navigate — a straight line for 400 m and a right angle; it follows the old colliery lease, not the wind]` | The site's footprint is filed, not weathered | Supporting | +| 4 | Joan's father's box | The farmhouse | `[CUS: Persuade — the colliery's closure notice, 1975, and an instruction to backfill the adit "by order of Centre", franked with the circle and stroke]` | The frank again, on the surface, in 1975 | Supporting | +| 5 | The parcel | Joan herself | `[CUS: Insight — she is not frightened of the soot; she is frightened of the man who came in 2022 and asked her to sign for a parcel for Bellhouse]` | Mr Smith is still active above ground, and nobody can describe him — not even Joan, an hour after she tried | Supporting | +| 6 | The vent head is breathing | Sheldon Moor | `[CUS: no roll — a painted mushroom vent in the heather, warm to the hand, smelling of a coal fire]` | Revelation 1 begins: something down there is alive | Essential | -**Clues 1–5 share one failure case and it is deliberate: nothing out here is hidden.** On a -failure the agent does not find it *yet*; Joan, who has lived with all of it for four years, -points at it within the minute. She is not being mysterious. She has been trying to show -somebody for four years. **A special** on any of them gets the same fact plus the detail -that it has been like this since 2022 and not before. +**Failure cases.** Clues 2–5 fail to *Joan points at it within the minute*; she has been +trying to show somebody for decades. **The parcel (5) is the exception**: on a failure she +does not mention it today, and the Act Two routes to Mr Smith do not need it. -⚠ **Clues 6 and 7 are the exception, because Joan is not there.** She walks up to the vent -head; she has never gone down the adit and she is not going to start. Desk pass 4 failed the -blast door and the blanket rule named a woman standing four hundred metres behind them. -**Their failure case is time, never access** — the postal pipe is pressurised and audible -and the blast door is a door. Ten minutes of looking and both open. **Nothing in this -scenario is gated on getting inside; the door has never been locked.** - -### The three beats - -1. **The yard.** Joan, the brush, the ash. She is sixty-seven, she is tired of not being - believed, and she will talk for as long as anyone lets her. - `[CUS: Insight — she is not frightened of the ash; she is frightened of being told - again that there is nothing there]`. *Success:* she produces her father's box - unprompted. *Failure:* she produces it anyway, later, when somebody is kind to her. - Nothing is gated on this roll — it changes when, not whether. -2. **The walk up.** Forty minutes of moor in the wet. Use it for the ash edge (clue 2) and - for whatever the table wants to talk about. `[CUS: Athletics — average; only a fumble - is a fall, and a fall here is a twisted ankle and nothing worse]`. -3. **The vent head and the adit.** The way in. `[CUS: Stealth — they can be inside without - being seen, which matters at Countdown step 2]`. **This roll buys *when* Teague finds - them, and nothing else.** *Success:* Countdown step 2 moves to **+55 min** — they get - most of Act Two before he appears. *Failure:* step 2 moves to **+15 min** and he is - looking for them while they are still in the lobby. *Special:* he is not told at all - until they introduce themselves. **All three stay inside the act**, which is the point — - a Teague who arrives after Act Two has ended is a roll that bought nothing. The door opens either way; it has never been locked. - -### Time, ruled — because the table will ask in Act One - -Joan's dog healed nine days overnight. The lore-digger will immediately ask what an -afternoon below costs them up here. **The answer is nothing.** - -**The ratio is in the ash, not in the site.** The boundary band is where the "after" is -being written, and time inside *it* is thick — the dog lay in it for a night. The party -crosses that band in thirty seconds, twice, and the site beyond it runs at 1:1 with the -surface, because the site is a place with clocks in it that people have been winding for -fifty-two years. Thursday is Thursday in both directions. - -**Say this when it is asked and do not leave it vague** — Act Three is on a deadline and a -table that thinks time is elastic will not believe the deadline. - -> ⚠ **Do not put a fight in Act One.** The scenario has one creature above ground and it -> is not here. If the table needs something to do with their hands, give them the adit: -> it is four hundred metres of 1962 concrete and the lights still work. ---- - -## Act Two — Bellhouse *(~75 min)* - -**Where:** the site. **What it is for:** the players meet a functioning civil service at -the end of the world, and are shown the sum. +### Beat 3 — The crossing *(~5 min)* > *Read aloud or paraphrase:* -> *The corridor is warm and smells of floor polish and soup. A woman in a cardigan and a -> department lanyard steps out of an office, sees four strangers, and says — with no alarm -> whatever — "Oh, are you from Centre? Only we've been writing."* +> *At dusk the warm air over the vent head goes wrong — not shimmering, creased, like a page +> folded and opened again. Behind it, somewhere below you, a tannoy is announcing the evening +> shift.* + +**Everybody crosses. Nobody rolls to cross.** A fumble on anything they do in the next +minute costs 1 Coherence (*fumble on crossing*). They come out **inside**, in the lobby +behind a blast door that has been shut since 1974. Joan does not come. She has never been +further than the vent and she is not starting now. + +### Beat 4 — Enquiries *(~15 min)* + +> *Read aloud or paraphrase:* +> *The lobby is warm and smells of floor polish and soup. A man in a cardigan behind a +> counter marked ENQUIRIES looks up from a ledger, looks at the blast door behind you, and +> says, very carefully: "Name and section, please."* + +**Nobody has arrived since 1974.** There is a procedure for *unaccounted persons* and the +clerk, **Mr Ogden**, follows it to the letter: he rings the Controller's Office, he offers +them a seat, and he does not let them past the counter. **Teague and one warden** arrive in +three minutes. Nobody is hostile yet. Everybody is frightened. + +**How they present themselves is the first test of SO-H06.** + +- **"We are from the Department."** Show a warrant card and it is **Borrowed Authority + inside scope**: 1 Trust, no roll, and the Seat accepts them as Department officers. + *It does not accept them as Centre's*, and Ogden says so: *"Centre didn't say."* +- **"We are from Centre."** A cover story. `[CUS: Tradecraft — the Seat's own forms, the + right words, the right patience]`. *Success:* Sowerby sees them as visitors pending + verification. *Failure:* the lie is noticed at once, because Centre never sends anybody — + they are **held pending Centre's instruction**, which is Act Two's step 2 arriving early in + spirit. +- **"There was no war."** Said to Ogden, it is filed and forwarded. Said to Teague, it is the + most dangerous sentence in the building — move Teague straight to hostile and play Act Two + with him following them. +- **Modern kit on show.** Every item is a question, and a phone is a thing nobody below can + explain. **Panic trigger** for Ogden, not the agents. + +**Sowerby interviews them** in the Controller's Office to close the act. +`[CUS: Persuade — he is courteous, lonely and procedural; give him something he can file and +he will give them the run of the Seat with an escort]`. *Success:* **visitors pending +verification**, escorted by a junior warden, and Sowerby writes to Centre about them. +*Failure:* **held in the interview room** until Centre replies — Act Two opens with them +confined, and the first scene is getting out of it (Kit Marlow brings the tea, and +the door is not locked because nobody below has ever needed it locked). **Either way +Sowerby writes to Centre**, and Centre answers at Countdown step 2. + +`[CUS: Insight — Sowerby is not suspicious of them; he is afraid of what Centre will say +about them, and that is a stranger thing for a Controller to be afraid of]` + +> ⚠ **Do not put the fight in Act One.** Teague and one warden will not start anything at the +> counter, and the harness agrees it would be no contest: against the four-player cut, that +> pair detains the whole party in **4%** of fights. +> The fight belongs to Act Two, when the detail is sent. + +--- + +## Act Two — The Establishment *(~75 min)* + +**Where:** the Seat and the pit below it. **What it is for:** a thousand people, how they +live, who has been writing to them, and what Thursday is. + +> *Read aloud or paraphrase:* +> *The main corridor is full. Shift change: overalls and cardigans, a child on somebody's +> shoulders, a noticeboard with a housing list, a rota, and a poster for the Allotments +> Show. Everybody looks at you, and then — because they were brought up to — everybody +> looks politely away.* ### How to run the population -**Nobody attacks. Nobody is suspicious. Everybody is delighted.** Fifty-two years of -posting returns into a pipe and somebody has finally come. The agents will be offered -tea within ninety seconds and it is real tea, rationed, and giving it to them costs -somebody their allowance. +**A council, not a bunker.** People queue, complain, minute things, and are kind. They offer +tea. **Say this in three mouths over the act:** *Centre will tell us when.* It is the +load-bearing line. -**If they refuse the tea** — and a contrarian table will — **the offer is not withdrawn.** -It is set down on the side, and it is still there, cold, when they come back through. Say -nothing about it. Somebody gave up their allowance for it and nobody is going to mention -that either. +**Suspicion is procedural, not violent.** Nobody below attacks strangers; they report them. +Every conversation the agents have is noted by somebody and reaches Sowerby within the +hour. **The GM should mention the notes** — a warden writing in a pocketbook, a clerk on a +telephone — so the detail in step 3 feels earned rather than sprung. -**Say this three times over the act, in three different mouths:** *we were told Centre -would come when it could.* That is the load-bearing line. They are not mad, or trapped, -or cursed. They were told to hold on, and they held on. +**The occult is never announced.** Six wrong things are placed below. **Show at least two +before the detail arrives**; the table does the rest. If a player says *cult* out loud, +nobody below understands the word. -**The one instruction that matters:** if the GM feels the act sagging, do not introduce a -threat. Introduce a *person* — the man who has run the site's library for forty years and -wants to know whether the National Theatre reopened; the woman who is teaching children -the geography of a county she has never stood in. The act's engine is grief, not danger. +### When the players tell them the truth -### When the players tell them the truth — and they will, in the first five minutes +**To Sowerby.** He files it. *"I'd like that to be true. Centre says otherwise, and Centre +has never been wrong about the readings."* **What moves him is not a fact but a hand**: put +Mr Smith's letter beside the genuine 1974 Home Office paper in Marlow's file (clue 11c) and +they are not the same office. That is his script break, and it is available from the moment +they hold both. -Desk pass 1's talker said *"Controller, there was no war"* four minutes into the act. This -is the likeliest opening move at every table and it needs a printed answer, not a GM's -improvisation. +**To Pennyfeather.** She asks one question: *"Then who has been answering the post?"* This +tips her from unease into action. -**Told to Sowerby.** He is courteous, he does not believe it, and — this is the important -part — **he files it.** A written statement from a Centre officer goes in the record, which -means it is still there in Act Three when it matters. He says: *"I'd very much like that to -be true. We had it put to us in 'seventy-nine by a man who'd got in through the -ventilation. He believed it as well."* **He is not lying and there was such a man.** Do not -resolve who. - -**Told to Pennyfeather.** She goes quiet, then asks one question: *"Then what has the -region been doing?"* She already suspects — this is what tips her from arithmetic into -action, and it is the cheapest way to get SO-H03 into their hands if the Insight route was -missed. - -**Told to Teague.** **This is what makes him dangerous**, and the GM should know it before -it happens. Everything in his Act Three paragraph arrives early, without the signing to -contain it. If they tell him in Act Two, move Countdown step 2 to *now* and play the rest -of the act with him following them. - -**Taking a resident to the surface.** They will ask. **The answer is yes, it works, and it -is the worst thing they can do before Act Three.** A resident who crosses the ash sees a -moor with no craters on it, and one of three things happens — GM's choice by who it is: - -- **Sowerby** looks for a long time and says *"I'll need to see the region."* He is asking - for proof of a million people, and nobody can give it to him inside the session. -- **Larkhall** believes it instantly, because she is a scientist and a sky is evidence, and - is then **no use to anybody for the rest of the case.** -- **Teague** decides it is an anomaly and not a sky, and goes back down certain. **Do not - use him for this unless the table insists** — it removes the script break. - -⚠ **Nobody is harmed by crossing.** There is no trap here. The scenario is not punishing -the humane move; it is showing that proof does not solve an administrative problem. - -**And if they bring proof back down instead** — a photograph, a newspaper, a phone — desk -pass 3 did exactly this and the text had no answer. It does now, and it is Sowerby's, and -he is kind about it: *"That's a photograph of a moor with nothing on it. I've got four -hundred of those in the survey file."* **A picture of an uncratered hillside is a picture -of somewhere else**, and the man has spent fifty-two years administering a region he has -never seen on the strength of documents. One more document does not move him. **What moves -him is an order.** +**Taking a resident to the surface.** The crossing works both ways at dusk. **Do not let it +solve the case**: a resident who sees an uncratered moor sees *a* moor, and Centre's readings +say the region is poisoned beyond sight. Sowerby: *"That is a photograph of a hillside. I have +four hundred of those."* **The Geiger counter is different**: it reads clean below and +clean above, and it is 1974 equipment, and Kowalczyk or Larkhall can vouch for it. +`[CUS: Repair (Electronics) — prove to a Seat engineer that the counter is sound]`. +*Success* gives Sowerby a reading he cannot file under Centre's — a dossier item for Act +Three. ### Locations below | Location | What is there | Why the players come here | |---|---|---| -| **The blast door and lobby** | A visitor book, opened 1974, three entries, all from that week | First proof anybody has ever thought about the outside | -| **The Control Room** | Sowerby, the tannoy, the regional map with 1974 pins | The broadcast (Countdown 1); the man who signs | -| **Registry** | Pennyfeather, the establishment returns, fifty-two years of files | **The sum** — the act's destination | -| **The sick bay** | Dr Ivy Larkhall; Edith Marlow, 101, in the end bed | Revelation 3 — it was a drill | -| **The crèche and school** | Nineteen children under eleven; Kit Marlow, 17, teaching them | The cost of Act Three, made a person | -| **The pipe room** | The pneumatic head, the outgoing tray, fifty-two years of unanswered post | Where SO-H01 came from; Kowalczyk's route to Revelation 4 | -| **The plant floor** | Generators, the renewal relay, Teague's office | How the renewal physically happens | +| **Lobby and Enquiries** | Ogden, the ledger, the blast door | Arrival; the visitor book with three 1974 entries and one in 2026 | +| **Control Room and studio** | Sowerby, the tannoy, the regional map, **the studio safe** | The bulletin; Centre's letters; **the tape** | +| **Registry** | Pennyfeather, fifty-two years of files, the census in the stacks | **Annex D** and the Establishment | +| **Sick bay and maternity** | Dr Ivy Larkhall; Edith Marlow, 101; Ruth Cotter, due | Revelation 3; the dream | +| **Crèche and school** | Nineteen under-elevens; Kit Marlow, 17, teaching them | The drawings; the intercom | +| **Pipe room** | The pneumatic head; Centre's in-tray | SO-H05; the frank | +| **Vigil hall** | The site's chapel-that-is-not, rows of chairs, a lectern | The Reading of the Region | +| **The Allotments** | Coal galleries under sodium lamps; trout tanks; hens | How a thousand people eat | +| **Buffer Depot** | Stores, the issue book, a quartermaster | Stock *received from Centre* | +| **Plant floor** | Boilers, the coal face, **the transmitter rack** | The mast feed | +| **The Sump** | The old sough-side cells, dry, clean, rarely used | Where the detail takes them | ### Clue trail — Act Two | # | Clue | Where | How found | What it gives | Type | |---|---|---|---|---|---| -| 8 | They think it happened | Anywhere, first ten minutes | `[CUS: no roll — the tannoy bulletin does it for you]` | Revelation 2 | Essential | -| 9 | The visitor book | The lobby | `[CUS: Spot — three signatures in one week in 1974 and nothing after]` | Nobody has ever come back | Supporting | -| 10 | The order itself | Registry, on request | `[CUS: Research — SO-H02, filed where it should be, because everything here is]` | Clause 4's second door | Essential | -| 11 | The drill | The sick bay, from Marlow | `[CUS: Insight — she is not confused, she is ashamed, and those present differently]` | Revelation 3 | Essential | -| 11b | CASUALTIES NIL | Registry, from Pennyfeather | `[CUS: Insight — ask her what week one looked like and she fetches the 1974 return]` | Revelation 3, by a second road | Essential | -| 11c | Marlow's file | The sick-bay day room | `[CUS: Research — a box of her papers on the shelf where the ward keeps its old files]` | Revelation 3, in her own hand | Essential | -| 12 | The relay | Plant floor | `[CUS: Repair (Electronics) — the renewal is wired to a relay that also drives the perimeter survey]` | Revelation 4: renewal *is* the expansion | Essential | -| 13 | The sum | Registry, from Pennyfeather | `[CUS: no roll — ask her a straight question and she produces SO-H03; she has been waiting fifty-two years to be asked one]` | Revelation 5 | Essential | -| 13b | What she did about it | Registry, from Pennyfeather | `[CUS: no roll — it is written at the bottom of SO-H03 in her own hand, and she will say it aloud to anybody who reads that line]` | *Why* the proper channel failed | Supporting | -| 13c | The establishment return | Anywhere, Countdown step 3 | `[CUS: Spot — she posts the population count herself and the number is on the front of it]` | Revelation 5, by a second road | Essential | -| 14 | Sixty-one | Registry, the birth register | `[CUS: Research — sixty-one born below, no NHS number, no birth certificate above ground]` | The cost of cancellation | **Supporting** | -| 15 | What Teague has decided | Plant floor, or he finds them | `[CUS: Listen — he asks each of them separately where they were on the day]` | He is testing a theory he cannot afford to be wrong about | Supporting | +| 7 | They think it happened | Anywhere | `[CUS: no roll — the bulletin does it]` | Revelation 2 | Essential | +| 8 | The response | The bulletin | `[CUS: Listen — nine hundred and ninety-nine people say the same six words at the same pace, and the children say them best]` | Revelation 5 (a) | Supporting | +| 9 | The Order | Registry | `[CUS: no roll — Pennyfeather supplies SO-H02 to anyone who asks for the Order; it is filed where it should be]` | Clauses 4 and 6, and Annex D | Essential | +| 10 | Centre's hand | Pipe room or Control Room | `[CUS: no roll — SO-H05, at Countdown step 2]` | Revelation 4 | Essential | +| 10b | The Controller's file | Sowerby's desk | `[CUS: Research — fifty-two years of Centre letters, all in one hand, all franked; the early ones are Home Office typescript, then from 1974 they are not]` | Revelation 4, by a second road | Essential | +| 11 | The stranger | Sick bay, from Marlow | `[CUS: Insight — she is not confused, she is ashamed, and when she is asked kindly about November 1974 she says "he said, then it had better be"]` | Revelation 3 | Essential | +| 11b | CASUALTIES NIL | Registry | `[CUS: no roll — Pennyfeather fetches the week-one return for anyone who asks what the first week was like; it is SO-H01's twin]` | Revelation 3, by a second road | Essential | +| 11c | Marlow's file | Sick-bay day room | `[CUS: Research — her box on the shelf with the ward files: the genuine 1974 exercise order on Home Office paper, whose Annex D says only that the Seat broadcasts a Home Office address, and her note: "I knew. I signed."]` | Revelation 3 in her hand, **and the dossier item that breaks Sowerby** | Essential | +| 12 | The dream | Sick bay, from Larkhall | `[CUS: Insight — ask her what is wrong with the born-below and she shows you her unpublished paper: eight hundred and eighty-one people, one dream]` | Revelation 5 (b) | Supporting | +| 13 | The drawings | Crèche | `[CUS: no roll — Kit shows them the children's pictures of the sun; every one is a circle with a stroke through the top]` | Revelation 5 (c), and the frank again | Supporting | +| 13b | The intercom | Crèche | `[CUS: Listen — the speaker is wired to the studio, not the Control Room; Kit says it plays at three in the morning]` | The tape is played to the children nightly | Essential | +| 13c | The establishment return | Registry board, Countdown step 4 | `[CUS: no roll — SO-H03 is posted where anyone can read it]` | Revelation 6, with the date | Essential | +| 14 | The Reading | Vigil hall, Countdown step 5 | `[CUS: Occult — it is not a gazetteer, it is a litany; the last names are the kind a far side answers to]` | Revelation 5 (d) | Supporting | +| 15 | Received from Centre | Buffer Depot | `[CUS: Knowledge — twenty years of stock ran out in 1996; thirty years of ninety-day issues since, and nothing that size fits a four-inch pipe]` | Revelation 5 (e): Centre feeds them | Supporting | +| 16 | The Allocations | Registry | `[CUS: Research — the Continuity Scheme's register, "per Centre guidance", steering births toward one number]` | Revelation 5 (f) | Supporting | +| 17 | The tape | Studio | `[CUS: Research — the studio log: RECONSTITUTION ADDRESS 12/R, REVISED, RECEIVED FROM CENTRE 2019; and a line nobody has queried: PLAYED NIGHTLY, CRÈCHE, INTERVAL SIGNAL ONLY]` | Revelation 6: where the Address is, and that it is Centre's | Essential | +| 18 | The feed | Plant floor | `[CUS: Repair (Electronics) — the transmitter valves are warmed every day, and the feeder runs up the old shaft to a mast that is still on the moor]` | The Address can reach the region | Essential | -**Failure cases. A failed roll on a filed clue costs a SCENE, not ten minutes.** This is -the most orderly place in the world and nothing here is lost — but desk pass 4 measured what -the old rule did to the clock. Act Two asks for six rolls whose failure case was *"ten -minutes and a second attempt"*, roughly two of them fail in an average session, and **a -single failure handed back ten of the nineteen minutes the Pacing Note had just cut.** The -cuts were sized against the act's length and not against its variance, so they could not -hold. +**Revelation 6 has four roads and none is gated on a single roll:** Annex D itself (9, no +roll), the return (13c, no roll), the studio log (17), and the feed (18). **The table needs +the Annex and one of the others.** If they reach the end of the act with only the Annex, +Pennyfeather says it for them: *"Annex D says those who hear it are entered. I always thought +it meant we'd write them down."* -**So:** a failed Research or Insight on clue 10 or 14 means **Pennyfeather goes and fetches -it while the party are doing something else**, and it arrives a scene later. The roll still -mattered — they did not get it when they wanted it, and they owe her — and it costs nothing -on the clock. **Never make the table stand in Registry waiting.** Clue 12 failed means the relay reads as ordinary plant and Revelation 4 arrives -instead from Pennyfeather, one scene later. +**Revelation 3 has three roads**, carried forward from v0.7 exactly: Marlow (11), which is +allowed to close; Pennyfeather (11b), which cannot; the file (11c), in a room they have a +reason to be in. **All three failed means the Vigil gives it to them.** -⚠ **Revelation 5 is not behind a roll at all, and that is the fix.** Desk pass 3's -contrarian split put the wrong agent in Registry — Insight 40 instead of 63 — and one -failed roll lost the sum, so the party cancelled the Standing Order having never learned -why it was urgent. **Pennyfeather's own roster entry already said she hands SO-H03 to -anybody who asks her a straight question, and the clue said to roll Insight; those could -not both be true.** The roster line wins: she gives it to anyone who asks. Desk pass 4 then -lost **13b** the same way on a 98, so that came off the dice too — it is written at the -bottom of her own sheet. **13c is a second road for a table that never thinks to ask her -anything**: she posts the establishment return at Countdown step 3 whether or not anybody is -talking to her, and the number is on the front. +**Failure cases. A failed roll on a filed clue costs a scene, not the clue** — carried forward +from v0.7's fourth desk pass. A failed Research is Pennyfeather or a clerk fetching it while +the party does something else. **Clue 18 failed** means the rack reads as ordinary plant and +Kowalczyk hears about the mast from the plant foreman a scene later. **Clue 13b failed** +means Kit mentions the three o'clock tone in passing, without the wiring. -⚠ **Revelation 3 has three independent routes, and this is deliberate.** Desk pass 1 failed -the roll with Marlow *and* the fallback with Larkhall, and the party finished the case -never learning it was a drill — because the only route left was a file in Marlow's private -quarters that nothing had told them existed. **A fallback that requires the revelation it -is a fallback for is not a fallback.** So: - -- **11 · Marlow herself.** Fail and she does not say it today; she is old and ashamed and - there is no second attempt. **This route is allowed to close.** -- **11b · Pennyfeather.** She has the 1974 return in a drawer and *casualties this period: - nil* is on it. She fetches it for anybody who asks what week one was like. **This route - cannot close** — she is helpful, and she is already the act's destination. -- **11c · The file, in the sick-bay day room** rather than in private quarters. They have a - reason to be there (it is where Larkhall talks to them) and a reason to look at a shelf - of old ward files. - -**If all three somehow fail, give it to them at the Vigil (Countdown step 4):** somebody -reads the 1974 roll of honour aloud, and there are no names on it. - -⚠ **Clue 14 is Supporting on purpose, and it used to be Essential.** Desk pass 3 failed it -and the case got *better*: the sixty-one arrived in Pennyfeather's mouth at the moment of -decision instead of in a register an hour earlier, and it was devastating. **Do not steer -the party into the birth register.** If they find it, fine. If they do not, she tells them -when it counts. - -**Specials.** A special on clue 11 gets Marlow's own memo in her hand — the fortnight -paragraph, the single most damning object in the case. - -⚠ **Neither 13 nor 13b is behind a roll, on purpose.** The sum is the destination of the act -and the reason the proper channel failed is the thematic centre of the whole case, and desk -passes 3 and 4 lost one of them each to an ordinary failed die. **Pennyfeather hands over -SO-H03 to anyone who asks her a straight question, and the line about taking it to the -Controller three times is written at the bottom of it in her own hand.** What a good Insight -buys — at the GM's discretion, no roll called for — is her saying the thing she has never -said aloud: *I think we should not be here.* +**Revelation 5 is the table's to build.** Bhattacharya's Occult 63 is the one sheet that +names it: `[CUS: Occult — any two of the six wrong things, put side by side, are the same +procedure; it is an enrolment, and it has been running for decades]`. *Failure* is not a +lost clue; it is a lost *name*. The table can still act on what it has seen. ### The census, in the Registry -There is one creature in this act and it is in the stacks behind Pennyfeather's desk, -counting. **It has been counting for fifty-two years and it is nearly finished.** +**It has been counting for fifty-two years and it has reached nine hundred and +ninety-nine.** It is in the stacks behind Pennyfeather's desk. `[CUS: Spot — something between the shelves is keeping a tally, and the tally is people]` -It does not attack. It **counts** — one round, no roll, it simply looks — and an agent it -has counted is on a list on the far side for good. See the bestiary entry; the department -cannot get anybody off that list. +It does not attack. **When it counts an agent — one round, no roll, it simply looks — that +agent is ENUMERATED** (see the bestiary): on a list on the far side for good. **Here it also +means they are on the Establishment**, and an enumerated agent who hears the Address in Act +Three is enrolled with no resistance roll. -**This is the scenario's one cheap lesson and it should be cheap:** the players will want -to fight it. Fighting it is legal and survivable. It changes nothing about Thursday, -because the tally is not the cause of the sum — it is a symptom of the same filing. Let -them learn that by doing it. +**Tell the table what just happened when it happens.** It is optional and it is cheap, and +it is the clearest way to make SO-H05's word *enumerated* mean something. -> ⚠ **Do not let the census kill the act's tone.** It is two minutes of cold in a warm -> place. Get back to the tea. +### The detention — Countdown step 3 -⚠ **The census is optional and missing it costs nothing.** Desk pass 1 failed the Spot and -never found it, and no later beat noticed. It is atmosphere and a cheap lesson, not a clue -— do not give it a second route and do not steer the party into the stacks. **If the act is -running hot, it is the first thing to lose.** +SO-H05 tells Sowerby to enumerate or remove. **He chooses enumeration**, because it is +preferred and it sounds like paperwork. He sends **Teague and a detail of wardens** to bring +the agents to Registry to be entered. + +> *Read aloud or paraphrase:* +> *Teague comes round the corner with his hat on and three men behind him, and he is holding +> his truncheon the way a man holds something he hopes not to use. "The Controller asks you to +> come to Registry," he says. "I'm asked to say it's a formality. I'd like you to come +> quietly. I'll ask you twice."* + +**Scale the detail to the table.** Four players: **Teague and three wardens**. Six players: +**Teague and five.** Their sheets are in the compendium; the wardens are one actor. + +**What the fight is, measured.** The harness ran each detail 2,000 times against this +scenario's declared cast. It does not model restraint, so read the detention figures as +sound and the death figures as a ceiling — the fight with nobody holding back and nobody +treating the fallen, which is not the fight the wardens are ordered to have. + +| Detail | Against | Agents hurt | Agents down | Whole party detained | Deaths *(ceiling)* | +|---|---|---|---|---|---| +| Teague and three | the four-player cut | **3.5** | **2.89** | **60.3%** | **1.31** | +| Teague and three | the declared six | **2.71** | **1.16** | **0.3%** | **0.59** | +| Teague and five | the declared six | **4.75** | **3.51** | **15.7%** | **2.07** | + +**What that means at the table.** The four-player cut has no fighter in it and **loses this +fight more often than it wins it.** The six have Okonkwo and win it — and a win is a +corridor of beaten neighbours, which SO-H06 forbids and which ends every conversation below. +**Either way the fight is the worst option, and the brief already said so.** + +**The ways through, all live:** + +- **Go quietly.** They are walked to Registry to be entered. **This is the real jeopardy** + — see *In Registry* below. +- **Talk it down.** `[CUS: Persuade — Teague is asking to be given a reason; a Department + warrant and a straight account are a reason]`. *Success:* he escorts them instead of + detaining them, and reports that they came willingly. +- **The script break.** Say **Nell**. His daughter is nine and in the crèche, and anybody + who has been there knows her name. He stands the detail down and becomes their strongest + voice below. `[CUS: Insight — he is not threatening anyone; he is asking to be argued out + of it]` tells them to try. +- **Run.** `[CUS: Stealth — through the Allotments galleries, where the lamps hum and + nobody looks up]`. *Success:* they are loose until Act Three and wanted. *Failure:* they + are cornered at the Sump gate and it becomes the fight or the quiet walk. +- **Fight.** It is legal and it is measured above. **Panic trigger** at the first agent down. + A warden stops hitting a downed agent and cuffs them. **Every resident who saw it stops + helping.** Larkhall treats the injured on both sides, without being asked. + +**In Registry.** Pennyfeather has the pen. **Entering them takes the establishment past a +thousand before Thursday** — she has read Annex D and she does not like it. + +- **If they have treated her as a person** — asked her a straight question, told her the + truth, or brought her SO-H01's query — **she stalls with no roll.** She finds the form is + the wrong one. She needs Centre's reference. It is teatime. +- **Otherwise** `[CUS: Persuade — ask her not to, and tell her why]`. *Failure:* she enters + them, and each entered agent is **on the Establishment** exactly as if the census had + counted them. +- **Then the Sump.** Held agents wait in the dry cells by the drainage level. It costs **one + scene**: Teague lets them out after the Nell break, or Kit brings the key, or + `[CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — a 1962 lock, and nobody has oiled it since]`. --- -## Act Three — Renewal *(~50 min)* +## Act Three — The Address *(~50 min)* -**Where:** the Control Room, Thursday, 06:00. **What it is for:** the decision, and its -price. +**Where:** the Vigil hall at 06:00 Thursday, then the studio and the plant floor. **What it +is for:** the order of operations — silence the Address, then let them go. > *Read aloud or paraphrase:* -> *Sowerby has shaved. The renewal folder is squared to the edge of the desk, the pen is -> the one his predecessor used, and there are eleven people standing along the back wall -> because they always come. He looks up and says: "You'll want to watch. It's quite short."* +> *The whole Seat is in the Vigil hall. Sowerby has shaved. He reads Centre's renewal aloud, +> as Controllers have done two hundred and eight times, and his voice changes at the last line: +> "Establishment complete on issue. Annex D is in force. The Seat will speak at the hour." +> Down the corridor, a baby starts to cry.* -⚠ **Pennyfeather is in this room and she stays in it.** She is the Registrar, she files the -renewal, and she is the only person present who knows what cancellation costs. Desk pass 1 -put the decision in the Control Room while she was two corridors away in Registry, and the -party cancelled the order without ever being told about the sixty-one — which left the GM -choosing between teleporting her in and letting them choose blind. **Neither is acceptable. -Put her at the Controller's elbow from the first line of the act.** +**Ruth Cotter's child is the thousandth.** If the census or Pennyfeather already put the +agents on the Establishment, the thousand was reached yesterday and the baby is simply a +baby. **Either way Annex D is in force, and at 07:00 — the session's 2:45 — Sowerby goes to +the studio to broadcast.** He believes he is telling the region the Seat is coming up. -### The three endings, all real +### What has to happen, in order -**1. CANCEL — clause 4, the warrant in the room.** -Any agent may cancel the Standing Order in person. There is no roll. It works, it has -always worked, and it is what a warrant card is *for*. +**1. Silence the Address.** Three ways, any one of them enough: -- **What happens:** the "after" un-files. Region 12 was never attacked, and Bellhouse was - never executed. The 206 who went down in 1974 become people who went down for a drill - and came up on the Friday. -- **The cost, and do not soften it:** the sixty-one born below have no record above - ground and never had one. **They stop.** Kit Marlow stops. -- ⚠ **This must be said out loud, by Pennyfeather, before the pen moves.** Not in a GM - aside and not after the fact. She says: *"Sixty-one of us were born here. I have their - entries in front of me and there is no other copy. I want you to say the number back to - me before you do it."* **If the agent cancels anyway, that is the scenario working.** - What it must never be is a surprise afterwards. -- ⚠ **If they never got the sum, they are cancelling for the wrong reason, and that is - fine.** Desk pass 3's party never learned about the reconciliation threshold and - cancelled anyway, because the amendment had failed and the warden had thrown them out. - **Do not withhold the ending from them and do not have anybody explain first.** Afterwards - — only afterwards — Pennyfeather works out what they prevented, and tells them, and she - is the only person who will ever know. **A party who do the right thing by accident is the - best possible ending for a case about people doing the wrong thing correctly.** -- **Coherence:** the cancelling agent spends **2 Coherence**, permanently, because they - are the authority that makes it true and reality now records them that way. +- **The tape.** It is in the studio safe; Sowerby has the key on his chain. + - **He hands it over** if his script break has landed: Marlow's genuine 1974 order beside + Centre's letters (11c + 10b). No roll. He opens the safe himself and asks them not to + play it. + - `[CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — a 1962 Chubb safe; a special opens it in a minute, a + success in ten, a failure costs the scene]`. + - `[CUS: Tradecraft — take the key off his chain while he reads the renewal]`. + - **Destroying it** is easy once held: the studio's bulk eraser, or fire. +- **The feed.** On the plant floor. `[CUS: Repair (Electronics) — pull the output valves and + the transmitter is a cabinet of warm glass]`. *Failure:* the rack is live and the attempt + costs a scene. `[CUS: Demolition — cut the feeder where it enters the shaft]` works on a + failure too, loudly, and the plant foreman will not forgive it. +- **The Annex.** A **Borrowed Authority** stretch — the credential is Ellerby-Stannard, one + tier beyond scope because he is dead. `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — Annex D as it stands was never + drafted by the Home Office, and a correction of a 1974 clerical error restores the 1962 text]` at −20 + per red flag broken. *Success:* **Centre's Annex D was never part of the order**; the tape is a tape. **The dossier buys scope, not the roll** — carried forward from v0.7's second desk + pass: -**2. LET IT RENEW.** -Sowerby signs. Nothing visibly happens. Then the correction begins, and the **overwriter** -arrives to perform it — five bodies, correcting one fact the party relies on every round, -retroactively and truly. It is not *trying* to fight anybody. It is doing the filing. - -⚠ **This is not a fight and the party cannot stop it by force. Say so.** Desk pass 2 ran it -through the real harness: one of them cannot meaningfully hurt anybody, five of them ground -for forty rounds and finished nothing, and the party experienced the end of the world as an -inconclusive scuffle. Each body destroyed slows the corrections by 10% and that is the -entire return on shooting it. **The threat is THE CORRECTION and the dice will not deliver -one word of it — the GM has to.** - -**The four corrections, in order. Read them; do not improvise at the climax.** - -1. **The adit is not where they left it.** It never was. The way they came in comes out - four hundred metres further down the moor, and always has. -2. **The warrant card names somebody else.** Hand the card back to its player and tell - them the name on it. It has always been that name. *(Use the agent who has spent the - least Coherence — they have the furthest to fall.)* -3. **There was never a dog.** Joan Wetherlaw has always lived alone, and the tissue on - Nkemdirim's bench is a sheep's, and the vet's note is in a hand nobody recognises. -4. **Bellhouse has always had two hundred and thirty-two people in it.** Let the table do - the arithmetic themselves. Then tell whichever agent is standing nearest the wall that - one of them is wearing their coat. - -**After the fourth, stop.** The case is over and the region is being corrected; anything -further is the GM enjoying it, and this ending is not for enjoying. - -- **What happens:** Region 12 is corrected to match the record. This is the end of the - world and the scenario does not flinch from letting the table choose it. -- **This option must stay available.** A choice with one acceptable answer is not a choice - and the players will smell it. - -**3. AMEND — the arrangement, and the best ending in the case.** -The order does not have to be cancelled. Its **scope** can be changed. Bellhouse governs -*Region 12 after the war*; amend the scope so that it governs somewhere genuinely empty -and always was, and the site keeps running, the people keep existing, and the ash stops. - -This is a **Borrowed Authority** problem and is run by those rules: - -- **The credential is Ellerby-Stannard**, who is dead, which is why it is a stretch rather - than routine — one tier beyond scope. -- **It is assembled from up to three dossier items, each a separate scene, using a - different skill, at most one of them at a keyboard.** The three that exist here: - - Marlow's own memo `[CUS: Research — her hand, her reasoning, in the sick-bay day room]` - - The 1962 commissioning survey naming an unpopulated alternate seat area - `[CUS: Knowledge — Sheldon was the second choice; the first had nobody on it]` - - Pennyfeather's counter-signature as Registrar `[CUS: Persuade — she has been waiting - fifty-two years for somebody to ask her to do something about it]` -- **The roll:** `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — the amendment has to be filed as a correction of a - 1974 clerical error, which is what it is]`, at −20 per red flag broken. Each dossier - item makes the credential better, never the roll easier. -- **Success — and what the dossier bought.** ⚠ **The number of dossier items does not - change this roll and never did.** Borrowed Authority is explicit: items make the - *credential* better, not the roll easier. Desk pass 2 assembled one item of three and - rolled exactly the same 62 against 63 it would have rolled with all three, which made - the act's best three scenes mechanically invisible. **So the items buy scope. Same roll, - three different worlds:** - - | Items | What the amendment grants | + | Items | What the correction grants | |---|---| - | **One** | **Narrow.** Bellhouse keeps running and the ash stops by the weekend — but the scope covers the *ground*, not the people. The site stays sealed. Nobody ever comes up, and the sixty-one stay unrecorded | - | **Two** | **The seal lifts.** The order no longer requires the Seat to stay under it. They can come up, and some of them do, and Sowerby is not among the first | - | **Three** | **The sixty-one get records.** Kit Marlow can leave, and there is a birth certificate with her name on it dated 2009, and reality has always had one | + | **One** | Annex D reverts to its 1962 wording — a Home Office address that enters nobody. **The tape still exists** and the enumerated are still on the list | + | **Two** | As one, and **the crèche intercom goes silent**; the dream stops for the youngest | + | **Three** | As two, and **the Establishment is only a headcount again** — nobody below is enrolled in anything | - Read the row they earned. **Do not read the better one because it is kinder.** -- **Failure:** the amendment does not take. **Do not fall straight through.** Sowerby's - pen stops *above the paper* and stays there for one full round of table talk — he has - been handed a reason to hesitate and he is a man who has never been allowed one. Play - that silence. Pennyfeather says *"Controller."* - - **If Teague stood down**, he says nothing and does not leave. - - **If Teague did not** — if he threw them out, or they fought him, or they told him the - truth in Act Two and he has been against them since — **he is in the doorway, he has - won, and he does not look like a man who has won.** Desk pass 3 failed the script break - and the beat lost its second voice; this is that voice. He says nothing either. The - difference is what the players can see on him. - **Then** the renewal proceeds unless somebody cancels under clause 4. Desk pass 1 fell - through in ninety seconds and resolved a fifty-minute act in eight, because the failure - state is so much worse than the alternative that nobody deliberated. **The pause is what - makes it a decision rather than a reflex — it is not optional staging.** -- **Coherence:** widening a scope with Coherence is legal here and it always works. It - costs 1 per widening and the agent's file and Bellhouse's converge one step. Nothing in - this game converges them back. **A table one item short can buy the next row up this - way**, and should be told the price before they spend it, not after. + The items: Marlow's file (11c), the Geiger counter reading Sowerby could not file, and + Pennyfeather's counter-signature `[CUS: Persuade — she has wanted to sign something against + Annex D since she read it]`. -**What the good ending actually looks like, to read at the table.** Desk pass 2 earned this -ending and found it was three sentences long — less scenario than the failure branch got. -It is what the whole case is for, so play it out: +**2. Let them go.** Clause 4: any agent holding a warrant cancels the order in person. **No +roll. It works. The cancelling agent spends 2 Coherence**, permanently, because they are the +authority that makes it true. -> *Sowerby reads the amendment twice. He asks one question — "and the region?" — and -> Pennyfeather says "not ours any more, Controller," and he puts the pen down without -> signing the renewal, which is the first time in fifty-two years anybody has done that.* +- ⚠ **Clause 6 sends the Seat up under Annex D.** Cancel with the Address still live and + Sowerby broadcasts *at once*, not at 07:00. **Say this out loud if a player reaches for the + warrant first** — SO-H06 term 5 already told them to read clause 6. +- **Or Sowerby withholds the renewal himself**, if his script break landed and they ask him + to. It is the first decision he has ever been allowed to make, and it releases them without + costing anybody Coherence. **This is the best version of the release and it is his, not + theirs.** -Then, in this order, because the order is the point: +**What release costs, said plainly.** Eight hundred and eighty-one people born below have no +record above ground. **They do not vanish** — the department is here to bring them home, and +they are real. But they come up without names on anything, and the only record of them is +Pennyfeather's register. **If the register comes up with them, they have lives. If it does +not, the department spends a decade proving they exist.** Pennyfeather will carry it herself +if anyone asks her to. -1. **The tannoy.** He broadcasts it himself, because he broadcasts everything. Two hundred - and thirty-one people hear that the war is over in the only sense that was ever going - to be available to them. -2. **Nobody cheers.** Give the table the silence. These people have been *right* for - fifty-two years and have just been told they were right about the wrong thing. -3. **Pennyfeather files it**, because it is not real until it is filed, and she is the one - who has always known that. -4. **Then the row they earned, above.** If the seal lifted, somebody goes up. Let it be - Larkhall, and let her not say anything at all. -5. **The ash.** By the weekend Joan Wetherlaw sweeps her yard and it stays swept. **She is - the last image of the case** — she does not know what happened and nobody will ever - tell her, and she goes inside. +### If the Address goes out + +At 07:00 the bell tone plays on the tannoy and on a mast on Sheldon Moor. **The Address is +eleven minutes long** and it works on anyone who hears it to the end. + +- **Any agent in earshot** resists with POW×5; *failure* costs **1 Coherence** and they are + enrolled — they hold, they count, they answer — until the case is closed and the debrief + can get them back. **Enumerated agents do not roll.** **Panic trigger** for every agent who + hears the tone. +- **It can still be stopped.** Eleven minutes is enough to reach the plant floor from the + studio. The feed at `[CUS: Repair (Electronics) — with the rack live and under load]` −20, + or the feeder with Demolition, or the tape pulled from the machine by hand in the studio + with Sowerby between them and it. **Stopped before the end, it has enrolled only the + building.** +- **If it finishes,** the **overwriter** arrives to correct the region to match the record. + It is not a fight — see the bestiary — and the harness cannot deliver its threat; the GM + must. **Read these four corrections, in order, then stop:** + 1. **Joan Wetherlaw says "We hold."** She says it on the phone to the Bureau, and then she says the other four words. + 2. **The warrant card names somebody else** — it has always been an Establishment card. + *(Use the agent with the most Coherence left; they have the furthest to fall.)* + 3. **Registry at the Bureau has always had Bellhouse on its establishment.** Bewley's + in-tray has a renewal in it. + 4. **Region 12 has always had one million, one hundred and forty-one thousand people in + it, and every one of them is waiting for Centre to tell them when.** + + The case is over. **This option must stay available** — a choice with one acceptable + answer is not a choice. + +### The endings + +| Ending | What it takes | What the register says | +|---|---|---| +| **Silenced and released** | One neutralisation, then clause 4 or Sowerby | A thousand people come up over a week. The Bureau opens files on all of them. **The dream persists in the born-below** unless the Annex correction reached row two. | +| **Silenced, Sowerby's release** | His script break, and his choice | As above, and nobody spends Coherence. Sowerby is the last up and stands on the moor for an hour. | +| **Silenced, not released** | The Address stopped but nobody cancels | The Seat stays down, safely. The department returns next month with better paper. **Mr Smith writes again in ninety days.** | +| **Released, not silenced** | Clause 4 first | The broadcast, at once. See above. | +| **The Address goes out** | Nobody reached the tape or the feed | See above. | + +**Whatever the ending, the letters come up.** Sowerby's file is the department's first +evidence of Mr Smith with more than a name on it. **Read this last, to close the case:** + +> *Three days later a buff envelope arrives in Registry, in Bewley's in-tray, franked with a +> circle and a stroke. It is addressed to the agents by name. Inside is a single line: "With +> thanks for the count. — J. Smith, for Centre."* ### Teague Warden Michael Teague, thirty-eight, born below, is the only person in Bellhouse who has -decided the surface is a lie — because if it is not a lie then his whole life was an -administrative error, and that is unbearable. He is the act's only violence and he is -avoidable. +decided the surface is a lie — because if it is not, his mother died down here for a filing +and his daughter was born into one. **He is the case's only violence and he is avoidable.** -**His one paragraph, printed so the GM can read it aloud:** *"I've read the same file you -have. I've read it more times than you have. And what it says is that on the fourth of -November 1974 this country was attacked and two hundred and six people did their duty. If -that's wrong then my mother died down here for nothing and my daughter was born down here -for nothing, and I'm not able to hold that. So I'm going to ask you to leave, and then I'm -going to ask you again."* +**His paragraph, printed to be read aloud:** *"I've read what Centre sends. I've read it more +times than you have. It says the region's dead and we're what's left. If that's wrong then +everything I've done is wrong, and I'm not able to hold that. So I'm going to ask you to +come with me, and then I'm going to ask you again."* -**The script break:** say his daughter's name. He has one — Nell, nine, in the crèche — -and any agent who has been to the school knows it. Naming her puts him back in the room -as a father instead of a warden, and he steps aside. `[CUS: Insight — he is not -threatening anyone; he is asking to be argued out of it]`. *Success:* he stands down and -becomes the strongest voice for ending 3. *Failure:* he escorts them out of the Control -Room and they must find another way back in before 06:00 — which costs them the dossier -scene they had least secured, not the act. - -**If it comes to a fight:** he is one man with a 1974 service pistol against field agents -and he will lose, quickly, in front of his colleagues and his daughter's teacher. The -scenario does not stop the table doing this. It does not reward it either. **Everyone in -Bellhouse who was going to help them stops helping them.** - -**Containment's beat, and it is the only one they get.** Teague has to get past somebody to -reach the folder, and the somebody is the party's heavy. **Give that player the choice out -loud:** put him down, or stand still and let him come. Standing still is the stronger play -and the scenario should say so — a warden who walks into a man who will not hit him has -nowhere to put what he is carrying. Desk pass 1's heavy scored his own session 3/10 and -said "I carried a chair"; this is the fix, and it costs the act nothing. +**His script break is Nell**, and it works in Act Two or Act Three. After it he is the +strongest voice below for letting them go, and **he stands at the studio door on Thursday** +if the table asks him to. ### EXPOSURE — the one thing that will kill the party -If the agents call the incident in as a containment failure rather than an arrangement, the -department sends a **quarantine unit**, and it gets there first. +If the agents call the Seat in as a containment failure rather than a rescue, the department +sends a **quarantine unit**, and it gets there first. **SO-H06 exists so that nobody does this +by accident.** -**Read the bestiary entry before you put it on the table.** Desk pass 2 ran it against -this scenario's own declared six — not the four-player baseline — and it **wiped all six in -fifteen rounds, five of them dead**, *without the sterilisation blast firing at all*, -because that power is out of the fight harness. The recorded figure against the frozen four -is a wipe rate of **87.4%**. **The -real encounter is worse than the number, and the number is already a party-killer.** +**Read the bestiary entry before you put it on the table.** v0.7's second desk pass ran it +against this cast and it wiped all six without its sterilisation blast firing, because that +power is out of the fight harness. The recorded figure against the frozen four is a wipe +rate of **87.4%**. -**Run it as a clock, not as a fight. All three of these go on the table, out loud:** +**Run it as a clock, out loud:** -- **The countdown is six rounds and the GM tracks it openly.** It is in the bestiary entry - and nowhere else, and a GM who has not read that entry will not run it — which removes - the only thing that makes this survivable. **Count down out loud from six.** -- **The argue-down is a Borrowed Authority stretch**, one tier beyond scope, using the same - Ellerby-Stannard credential as ending 3: `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — a standing authorisation - outranks a containment order, and the unit knows it]`, at −20 per red flag broken. **Each - dossier item they assembled for ending 3 counts here too.** *Success:* the unit stands - down where it is and waits for Centre, which takes days. *Special:* it stands down and - its officer gives them a name to call. -- **Failure is not the end of the attempt.** The countdown continues and they may try once - more before it expires, at −20. If it runs out they are in a BLAST of 6d6 with a radius - of the whole location, and so is everybody in Bellhouse. **Five rounds is enough to reach - the adit and it is not enough to reach the crèche, and the players should be told that.** +- **Six rounds, counted openly**, then the site is rendered — BLAST 6d6, the whole location, + and a thousand people in it. +- **The argue-down** is the same Borrowed Authority stretch as the Annex correction: + `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — a Seat under a standing order outranks a containment instruction]` at + −20 per red flag broken, and the same dossier items count. *Success:* the unit stands down + and waits for the Bureau. +- **One more attempt** at −20 if the first fails. **Five rounds reach the lobby. They do not + reach the crèche.** Tell the players that. -**This is the scenario telling the truth about its own setting:** the fight is the failure -state, and the paperwork is the way out. Do not spring the unit as a twist. If a player -says the words that summon it, say plainly what they have just done. --- ## NPC Roster — GM quick sheet -Every NPC gets one line of essence first. That line is what to play if you have five -seconds and the table is looking at you. - ### Below -**Controller Edwin Sowerby, 61** — *the man who has done his duty for fifty-two years and -needs it to have been worth doing.* -Went down aged nine with his mother, which makes him the oldest person in Bellhouse who -remembers the sky, and he does not talk about it. Signs the renewal because renewal is not -a decision (SO-H02, clause 5) and he has never been offered the chance to make it one. He -is courteous, precise and lonely. **If the players give him a decision he will take it -seriously** — he is not a wall, he is a man who has never been asked. Supports ending 3 -if Pennyfeather and Teague both back it. +**Controller Edwin Sowerby, 61** — *has obeyed Centre for fifty-two years and is afraid, +for the first time, of what Centre will say.* +Went down aged nine with his mother, a Registry clerk. Controller since 2011. Reads Centre's +letters aloud at every renewal and keeps the rest in a file on his desk. Courteous, lonely, +procedural. **He sends the wardens because Centre prefers enumeration and it sounds like +paperwork.** Break: Mr Smith's hand beside the real Home Office paper. -**Registrar Alice Pennyfeather, 52** — *the clerk who has already done the sum and is -waiting for somebody to ask her.* -Born below. Has taken the arithmetic to Sowerby three times and been told, correctly, that -renewal is not minuted as a decision. Hands over SO-H03 to anybody who asks her a straight -question. **She is the act's destination and the case's conscience**, and in ending 1 she -is the one who tells the agents what it will cost the children, because she has worked -that out too. +**Registrar Alice Pennyfeather, 51** — *establishment number 413, the first child born +below, and the only person who has read Annex D as a sentence.* +Hands SO-H02 and SO-H03 to anyone who asks a straight question. **She holds the pen in +Registry**, and whether she enters the agents is the act's hidden hinge. She will carry the +birth register up if asked. -**Dr Ivy Larkhall, 44** — *the doctor who has never had a patient with sunlight in their -history, and has written the best paper nobody will ever read about it.* -Born below. Curious rather than frightened, and the first person to ask the agents an -intelligent question. Half-knows about the drill: Marlow has said things in the night for -years. Will not break a confidence, but will say *ask her, and ask her kindly*. +**Dr Ivy Larkhall, 44** — *the doctor who has found that eight hundred and eighty-one people +share one dream, and has nobody to publish it to.* +Curious, not frightened. Delivers Ruth Cotter's baby on Thursday. Treats anybody hurt in the +detention, on either side, without being asked. -**Deputy Controller Edith Marlow, 101** — *the woman who filed a war because she thought -it would save a fortnight.* -In the end bed in the sick bay. Has not spoken plainly since 2019 and is not confused — -she is ashamed, and Insight tells those apart (clue 11). Her own memo — in the sick-bay -day room, on the shelf with the old ward files, where the party can find it without being -told it exists — carries the fortnight paragraph and is the most damning object in the -scenario. **She will -confirm it was a drill if she is asked kindly and will deny it if she is pressed.** +**Deputy Controller Edith Marlow, 101** — *the woman who signed for a stranger because he +asked her to.* +In the end bed in the sick bay. Not confused; ashamed. **She is the only person alive who +has seen Mr Smith** and she cannot picture him. Kindly asked, she says it was the exercise. +Pressed, she denies it. Her box is on the day-room shelf. -**Warden Michael Teague, 38** — *the only man down here who has decided the surface is a -lie, because the alternative is unbearable.* -Born below. Head of the site's eleven-person police. Widower. His daughter Nell is nine -and in the crèche. Full paragraph and script break in Act Three. **Not a villain, and the -scenario should never call him one.** +**Warden Michael Teague, 38** — *the only man below who has decided the surface is a lie.* +Head of the site's eleven police. Widower. Daughter **Nell, 9**, in the crèche. Leads the +detail himself. Leaves his pistol in the armoury on purpose. **Not a villain.** -**Sub-Officer Kit Marlow, 17** — *a girl who has drawn the sky four thousand times from -one photograph and wants to know if she got the blue right.* -Edith's great-granddaughter, born below, oldest of the children, teaches the little ones -their regional geography from a 1971 atlas. **She is the cost of ending 1 and she should -be a person before she is a price** — give her a scene in Act Two, doing something -ordinary and competent, before Act Three asks anybody to decide anything. +**Sub-Officer Kit Marlow, 17** — *draws the sun the way the little ones do, and has started to +wonder why.* +Edith's great-granddaughter. Teaches the under-elevens geography from a 1971 atlas. Shows the +agents the drawings without being asked; knows about the three o'clock tone. **Give her a +scene doing something ordinary before anybody decides anything.** -**The site, as a character** — two hundred and thirty-one people, warm corridors, floor -polish, soup, a library, a remembrance service for the surface dead held every year for -fifty-two years. *They were told Centre would come when it could.* +**Mr Ogden, Enquiries** — *has waited fifty-two years for somebody to come through that door +and has no form for it.* + +**Ruth Cotter, 24** — *due on Thursday, and would like everybody to stop calling her baby +"the thousandth".* + +**The Seat, as a character** — a thousand people, warm corridors, soup, a housing list, an +Allotments Show, and six words at the end of every bulletin. *Centre will tell us when.* ### Above -**Joan Wetherlaw, 67** — *has been sweeping ash off her yard for four years and has -stopped telling anybody.* -Farms three-quarters of a mile from the vent head. Her father was a works foreman at -Sheldon in 1974 and was told to stop digging; his papers are in a box she has never shown -anyone. Not a mystic and not a crank — a tired woman with a brush who has been right the -whole time. +**Joan Wetherlaw, 67** — *has swept coal soot off her yard her whole life and signed for a +parcel she should not have.* +Her father closed the pit in 1975 on Centre's order. His box has the frank in it. A man in a +grey coat came in 2022; she cannot describe him and it frightens her more than the soot. -**Nell Teague, 9** — *has one question about horses and will ask it at the worst possible -moment.* In the crèche. Her name is the script break. +**Mr Bewley, Registry** — *wants the letters.* *"Bring me everything in his hand."* -### Creatures used — all from the bestiary, nothing new to build +**Mr Prosser, Stores** — *nineteen years of telling agents what they may take.* + +### Never met + +**Mr Smith, for Centre** — a grey coat, the right paper, a pleasant manner, and a face nobody +can picture. A messenger for the far side's higher orders, not one of them. **He has no +sheet, no portrait, and no scene.** He is the thread from Mercy Draw and he outlasts this +case. + +### Creatures used — all from the bestiary | Creature | Where | What it is for | |---|---|---| -| **The census** | Act Two, the Registry stacks | Counting, for fifty-two years; ENUMERATED is permanent and the department cannot undo it | -| **The overwriter** | Act Three, ending 2 only | The correction, performing itself; cannot be dropped and is not trying to fight | -| **Quarantine unit** | EXPOSURE, if the agents call it in as containment | The failure state; argue it down with the ending-3 credential or die | +| **The census** | Act Two, the Registry stacks | Counting the Establishment; ENUMERATED is permanent and here it also enrols | +| **The overwriter** | Act Three, only if the Address finishes | Correcting the region to match the record | +| **Quarantine unit** | EXPOSURE, if the agents call it in | The failure state; argue it down or die | + +### Cast actors — in the compendium + +| Actor | Where | What it is for | +|---|---|---| +| **Bellhouse warden** | Act Two, the detail | Detaining, not killing; one actor for all of them | +| **Warden Michael Teague** | Act One and Act Two | Leads the detail; the Nell script break | --- @@ -918,38 +922,28 @@ moment.* In the crèche. Her name is the script break. -> ⚠ **THE DECLARED CAST IS LOAD-BEARING ON THE BUILD.** The `` comment above -> is read by `check-rollable`, which holds every skill this document names to being -> reachable at 25% or better by somebody in that list. Change the cast and re-run the -> guards before trusting a single clue route. - -Deliberately **not** CLEAN GROUND's six, so the two cases exercise different sheets. +> ⚠ **THE DECLARED CAST IS LOAD-BEARING ON THE BUILD.** The marker above is read by +> `check-rollable`, which holds every skill named here to 25% or better on somebody in the +> list, and by `detention-tables`, which measures the Act Two fight against these six and +> the four-player cut. Change it and re-run both. | # | Agent | Why they are here | The routes they own | |---|---|---|---| -| 1 | **Marta Holloway** — Senior Field Officer, lead | Signs for it and reads it first | Navigate (the ash edge), Stealth (the way in), Tradecraft | -| 2 | **Arun Bhattacharya** — Registry Officer | The return landed on his section's desk | Research (SO-H02, the birth register), Knowledge (the 1962 survey), Anomaly Lore (**the ending-3 roll**) | -| 3 | **Kate Renshaw** — Interview Officer | Because everyone down there wants to talk | Insight 63 (**Marlow**, Teague, Pennyfeather — all three), Persuade (Joan, and Pennyfeather's counter-signature), Listen | -| 4 | **Marek Kowalczyk** — Probationary, engineering | Somebody has to read the plant | Repair (Electronics) (**the relay**), Repair (Mechanical) (the pipe), Engineering (Field Systems) (the blast door) | -| 5 | **Dr Chidi Nkemdirim** — Probationary, medicine | The dog tissue is on his bench | Insight 58 and Knowledge 58 — **he reads the dog and the ash with those**, so the clues survive the four-player cut; Listen, Persuade | -| 6 | **Ben Okonkwo** — Field Officer, containment | In case it is the other kind of case. It is not | Athletics, Brawl, Firearm (Rifle) — **and the scenario is built so he never needs them.** His beat is Teague in Act Three: stand still and let him come | +| 1 | **Marta Holloway** — Senior Field Officer, lead | Signs for the case and carries SO-H06 | Navigate 63 (the soot edge), Stealth 63 (the Allotments), **Tradecraft 63 (Enquiries, and Sowerby's key)** | +| 2 | **Arun Bhattacharya** — Registry Officer | The return was his section's find | Research 63 (10b, 11c, 16, 17), Knowledge 63, **Occult 63 (Revelation 5)**, **Anomaly Lore 63 (the Annex correction)** | +| 3 | **Kate Renshaw** — Interview Officer | Everyone below wants to talk | **Persuade 63 (Sowerby, Teague, Pennyfeather, Joan)**, Insight 63 (Marlow, Larkhall), Listen 63 (the response, the intercom) | +| 4 | **Marek Kowalczyk** — Probationary, engineering | Somebody has to read the plant | **Repair (Electronics) 58 (the feed, the Geiger counter)**, Repair (Mechanical) 58 (the safe, the Sump lock), Demolition 58 | +| 5 | **Dr Chidi Nkemdirim** — Probationary, medicine | The sooty dog is on his bench | Insight 58 and Knowledge 58, backing Renshaw and Bhattacharya; he helps Larkhall with the birth | +| 6 | **Ben Okonkwo** — Field Officer, containment | In case it is the other kind of case | Athletics, Brawl — **the detention**, and the studio door on Thursday. His best play is to stand still | -**Casting note for Okonkwo's player, given before the game:** this case has no fight the -party has to win. He is not wasted — he is the one who carries Marlow's chair, holds the -adit, and stands beside Teague without raising anything. Tell his player that up front, the -way CLEAN GROUND tells Ashcroft's. +**Casting note for Okonkwo's player, given before the game:** SO-H06 forbids him the easy +answer, and the scenario is built so that he is the reason the detail does not become a +beating. Tell his player that up front. -**At four players,** cut Okonkwo and Nkemdirim. **No clue needs reassigning** — desk pass 2 -audited the four remaining sheets and found that Science (Biology) and Medicine were the -only two skills that vanished with them, so clues 1 and 3 were rewritten onto Knowledge -and Insight for every table size and the scenario no longer calls for either. - -⚠ **Why that matters more than it looks.** `check-rollable` holds this document to its -`` declaration, which names six. **A four-player cut written as prose is -checked by nothing.** The old version worked only because one sentence reassigned two -clues correctly; edit that sentence, or add a Medicine call to Act One, and four-player -tables silently lose two clues with every guard still green. Nkemdirim still reads the dog -tissue — he just reads it with Insight. +**At four players,** cut Okonkwo and Nkemdirim. **No essential clue needs either**: every +roll they own is backed by Renshaw or Bhattacharya at 63, and Medicine is never called for — +Larkhall delivers the baby. **The detention is harder at four** and the table above says how +much harder. --- @@ -957,54 +951,45 @@ tissue — he just reads it with Insight. | # | Location | Act | One line | |---|---|---|---| -| 1 | Wetherlaw farm | 1 | Ash on the yard for four years, and a woman with a brush | -| 2 | The ash edge | 1 | A straight line for 400 m, then a right angle | -| 3 | Sheldon Moor vent head | 1 | A painted mushroom in the heather, warm to the hand | -| 4 | The postal pipe | 1 | Four-inch pneumatic, pressurised, sealed in 1974 | -| 5 | The service adit | 1 | Four hundred metres of 1962 concrete; the lights still work | -| 6 | Blast door and lobby | 1/2 | Never locked. A visitor book with three entries | -| 7 | Control Room | 2/3 | The tannoy, the 1974 map, the desk where it gets signed | -| 8 | Registry | 2 | Fifty-two years of files, the sum, and something counting in the stacks | -| 9 | Sick bay | 2 | Larkhall, and Edith Marlow in the end bed | -| 10 | Crèche and school | 2 | Nineteen children, a 1971 atlas, and Kit Marlow's drawings of the sky | -| 11 | Pipe room | 2 | The outgoing tray, and fifty-two years of unanswered post | -| 12 | Plant floor | 2/3 | Generators, the renewal relay, Teague's office | +| 1 | Wetherlaw farm | 1 | Coal soot on the yard, and a woman with a brush | +| 2 | The soot edge | 1 | A straight line for 400 m, then a right angle | +| 3 | Sheldon Moor vent head | 1 | Warm to the hand, smelling of a coal fire; the crossing | +| 4 | The postal pipe | 1/2 | Four inches wide, and Centre answers through it | +| 5 | The adit | 1 | Backfilled rubble since 1975 | +| 6 | Lobby and Enquiries | 1 | Mr Ogden, and no form for visitors | +| 7 | Control Room and studio | 2/3 | The tannoy, Centre's file, the safe, the tape | +| 8 | Registry | 2 | The Order, the Establishment, and something counting | +| 9 | Sick bay and maternity | 2/3 | Marlow, Larkhall, Ruth Cotter | +| 10 | Crèche and school | 2 | The drawings, and a tone at three in the morning | +| 11 | Pipe room | 2 | Centre's in-tray | +| 12 | Plant floor | 2/3 | Boilers, the coal face, the transmitter rack | +| 13 | Vigil hall | 2/3 | The Reading of the Region; the renewal assembly | +| 14 | The Allotments and Buffer Depot | 2 | Sodium lamps, trout, and stock received from Centre | +| 15 | The Sump | 2 | Dry cells by the drainage level | --- ## GM notes — three things that do not get resolved -Name these as *do not resolve* so a helpful GM does not answer them. - -1. **Where the answered post went.** Fifty-two years of returns went up the pipe. One came - back out, in May, on a real desk. Nothing in this case explains the other ten thousand. -2. **What the census was counting for.** It has been tallying since 1974 and it is nearly - finished. The scenario never says finished *for what*. -3. **Whether Marlow was right.** She thought a real one was coming inside the year. The - department's own 1974 traffic is not in this file and the players cannot get it. +1. **What Mr Smith is.** A messenger. For whom, exactly, and what he reports, the case does + not say. His next letter is the next case. +2. **Where Centre's stock comes from.** Thirty years of issues through a four-inch pipe. Do + not explain it. +3. **Whether the dream stops.** Row two of the Annex correction silences the intercom. It + does not say the born-below stop dreaming, and they will be asked about it for the rest of + their lives. --- ## Open questions for Tim -- **Kit Marlow.** She is the cost of ending 1 and the draft may lean on a seventeen-year-old - too hard. The alternative is to put the weight on the whole sixty-one and never give one - of them a name — colder, and possibly better. -- ✅ **Runtime — superseded.** The 45/55/50 estimate was replaced by the measured 45/75/50 - below. -- **Is ending 3 findable?** It depends on the players reading clause 4 *and* clause 5 and - thinking about scope rather than cancellation. It may need a nudge written into - Pennyfeather. -- **Does this want a fourth act?** CLEAN GROUND has one and uses it well. Three is the - brief and three is what this is. **Four passes say the signing carries its fifty minutes - comfortably** — passes 3 and 4 both landed Act Three on the nose — so this is probably - settled as a no. -- ✅ **THE BUDGET — decided 15 September 2026. The slot is 3h15.** Act Two ran 75, 70 and - then 66 with every cut taken. The alternative was taking twelve minutes out of the sick - bay, which is the only non-load-bearing block that size — but Revelation 3's first route - lives in it and it is the one that plays best. **The slot moved instead.** Three things - follow and they are all improvements: the acts are budgeted at what they measured rather - than at what would fit, there are fifteen minutes of genuine slack for a real table, - and **the Pacing Note's cuts stop being defaults** — which is the proper answer to desk - pass 4's finding that the cheapest default cut gutted the likeliest ending, rather than a - workaround for it. +- **Mr Smith's register.** He is written here as a messenger for the Vesh. If the campaign + wants him to answer to something else, the only text that names it is the Plot Summary and + the roster. +- **The dream persisting.** The best ending still leaves the born-below dreaming unless the + Annex correction reaches row two. That is deliberate — the thread — but it may read as a + punishment. +- **Kit Marlow.** She was the cost of v0.7's tidy ending. Here she is a witness, not a price. + Check she still earns her scene. +- **Runtime.** 45/75/50 is inherited, not measured. Act Two has more locations than v0.7 and a + fight in it. **Desk pass 1 should time it before anything else.** diff --git a/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER_ART.md b/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER_ART.md index 7fbaf50..f338f3b 100644 --- a/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER_ART.md +++ b/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER_ART.md @@ -10,6 +10,10 @@ regeneration is possible; per house convention the prompt is part of the documen and the **quarantine unit** — are bestiary entries and their prompts live in `BESTIARY_ART.md`, not here. Everything in this sheet is new work. +**v1.0 (16 September 2026) reused every plate.** The rewrite kept the site, the people and +the art; only the uses below changed. **Mr Smith must never be drawn** — a face is the one +thing the case says nobody can recall — and no prompt for him belongs in this sheet. + --- ## Art direction for this scenario @@ -64,12 +68,12 @@ regenerate it** — a picture that contradicts a clue is worse than no picture. |---|---| | `so_01_cover.webp` | Cover plate | | `so_02_wetherlaw.webp` | Act One — the farmyard | -| `so_03_ash_edge.webp` | Act One — clue 2, the surveyed line | -| `so_04_adit.webp` | Act One — the service adit portal | +| `so_03_ash_edge.webp` | Act One — clue 3, the soot edge (the file keeps its old name) | +| `so_04_adit.webp` | Act One — the adit mouth, backfilled; the crossing is above it | | `so_05_corridor.webp` | Act Two — arrival below | -| `so_06_control_room.webp` | Act Two / Three — the broadcast and the signing | -| `so_07_registry.webp` | Act Two — the stacks, and the thing counting in them | -| `so_08_creche.webp` | Act Two — the school, and the cost of ending 1 | +| `so_06_control_room.webp` | Act Two / Three — the bulletin, Centre's file, the studio | +| `so_07_registry.webp` | Act Two — the Establishment, and the thing counting in the stacks | +| `so_08_creche.webp` | Act Two — the school, the drawings, the intercom | **Shared prefix.** Every plate prompt begins with this and it is not optional: @@ -171,8 +175,10 @@ trusting the exit code. ## Not generated — draw these -**The Bellhouse section drawing.** A cutaway of the site with the seven Act Two locations -numbered, and a key below the drawing. **This must be hand-built SVG and must not be +**The Bellhouse section drawing.** A cutaway of the site with the Seat's locations +numbered, and a key below the drawing. Issue 2 (v1.0) relabels the key for the rewrite and +lists three pit-gallery locations as *not drawn*; re-render with +`rsvg-convert -w 2400 -h 1700` then `cwebp -q 88`. **This must be hand-built SVG and must not be prompted.** Midjourney will not hold legible text or accurate geography, and this drawing's whole job is labels. Two rules from AFTERIMAGE v3.1: numbered callouts with a key beneath rather than labels sprayed across the plan, and **the drawing says only what the site says** diff --git a/packs/standingorder/000003.log b/packs/standingorder/000003.log index 42fc31e..d1e9368 100644 Binary files a/packs/standingorder/000003.log and b/packs/standingorder/000003.log differ diff --git a/tools/build-packs.mjs b/tools/build-packs.mjs index e59ec38..f3fadb9 100644 --- a/tools/build-packs.mjs +++ b/tools/build-packs.mjs @@ -1023,13 +1023,20 @@ function cullandScene() { + `${showJournal.pages.length} plates to show`); } -// STANDING ORDER — the three-act crossing case. Journals, plates and the section map; -// no cast actors, because nobody in it has a stat block. The GM pages are read from the +// STANDING ORDER — the three-act crossing case. Journals, plates, the section map, and +// the two cast actors the Act Two detention needs. The GM pages are read from the // scenario document itself at build time (see scenario-standingorder.mjs). Played on // the duty-roster sheets in the Pregens pack. { const SO = await import("./scenario-standingorder.mjs"); + const castDocs = []; + for (const spec of SO.SO_CAST) { + const { actorDoc, itemDocs } = buildActor(spec, "npc"); + actorDoc.items = itemDocs; + castDocs.push(actorDoc); + } + const showJournal = imageJournal("STANDING ORDER — Show the players", "so_show", SO.SO_PLATES); const facesJournal = imageJournal("STANDING ORDER — The people", "so_faces", SO.SO_FACES); const gmJournal = journalDoc("STANDING ORDER — Run the case", "so_gm", SO.SO_PAGES); @@ -1057,18 +1064,20 @@ function cullandScene() { _id: advId, name: "STANDING ORDER — The Bellhouse Seat", img: IC("journal") ?? ICON.journal, - caption: "A three-act crossing case. A seat of government, and a war that never came.", + caption: "A three-act crossing case. A thousand people underground, and the man who writes to them.", description: - "

Two hundred and six people went underground in 1974 to govern the country " - + "after the war. There was no war.

" - + "

They have been governing it for fifty-two years, the order that put them there " - + "renews itself every ninety days, and the next renewal is on Thursday. The site's " - + "record now counts more people than the region it governs, and the record is about " - + "to make the region match.

" - + "

Three acts, 3h00 of play in a 3h15 slot. Nobody below is a monster, and the last " - + "act is a decision rather than a fight. Played on the duty-roster sheets from the " - + "Pregens compendium.

", - actors: [], + "

A thousand people are waiting under Sheldon Moor for the all-clear from a war " + + "that never happened. Every ninety days, somebody writes to tell them to keep " + + "waiting. It is not the government.

" + + "

The agents cross into a sealed 1974 Regional Seat of Government that has run " + + "itself like a council for fifty-two years. The brief is to bring its people home, " + + "diplomatically. The Seat does not trust newcomers, its Controller has been told to " + + "count them, and on Thursday it will surface and speak to the region in words that " + + "are not the government's.

" + + "

Three acts, 3h00 of play in a 3h15 slot. One detention, one broadcast, and the " + + "second appearance of Mr Smith. Played on the duty-roster sheets from the Pregens " + + "compendium.

", + actors: castDocs, items: [], journal: [ { ...gmJournal.doc, pages: gmJournal.pages }, @@ -1081,7 +1090,7 @@ function cullandScene() { }; await writePack("standingorder", [[`!adventures!${advId}`, adventure]]); - console.log(` standing STANDING ORDER — ${SO.SO_PAGES.length} GM pages, ` + console.log(` standing STANDING ORDER — ${castDocs.length} cast, ${SO.SO_PAGES.length} GM pages, ` + `${SO.SO_HANDOUTS.length} handouts, ${showJournal.pages.length} plates, ` + `${facesJournal.pages.length} faces`); } diff --git a/tools/scenario-standingorder.mjs b/tools/scenario-standingorder.mjs index db3ee7d..0a5ed12 100644 --- a/tools/scenario-standingorder.mjs +++ b/tools/scenario-standingorder.mjs @@ -8,8 +8,10 @@ * house format uses and throws on nothing — an unknown construct comes through as a * paragraph, which is visible in the journal rather than silently dropped. * - * No cast actors: nobody in this case has a stat block. The people below are not meant - * to be fought, and the three creatures are the bestiary's own. + * Two cast actors, and only two: the wardens the Controller sends in Act Two, and the man + * who leads them. Everybody else below is there to be talked to, and the three creatures + * are the bestiary's own. The detention fight is measured by tools/detention-tables.mjs + * against the declared cast, and the document cites that artifact. */ import { readFileSync } from "node:fs"; import path from "node:path"; @@ -117,8 +119,8 @@ const section = re => { they are what a stand-in GM needs before anything else. */ const tagline = MD.split("\n## ")[0].split("\n").filter(l => /^>/.test(l)).join("\n"); const notObvious = section(/^STATUS\b/).body.split(/^### /m) - .find(b => b.startsWith("The three things")); -if (!notObvious) throw new Error(`${SOURCE}: STATUS has lost "The three things that are not obvious"`); + .find(b => /^The .*things that are not obvious/.test(b)); +if (!notObvious) throw new Error(`${SOURCE}: STATUS has lost "The things that are not obvious"`); const ART = (id, alt) => `
${alt}
`; @@ -159,8 +161,8 @@ export const SO_HANDOUTS = section(/^Handouts\b/).body.split(/^### /m).slice(1). export const SO_PLATES = [ { name: "1 · Sheldon Moor — the vent head", src: "art/scenes/so_01_cover.webp" }, { name: "2 · Wetherlaw farm", src: "art/scenes/so_02_wetherlaw.webp" }, - { name: "3 · The ash edge", src: "art/scenes/so_03_ash_edge.webp" }, - { name: "4 · The service adit", src: "art/scenes/so_04_adit.webp" }, + { name: "3 · The soot edge", src: "art/scenes/so_03_ash_edge.webp" }, + { name: "4 · The adit mouth", src: "art/scenes/so_04_adit.webp" }, { name: "5 · Bellhouse — the corridor", src: "art/scenes/so_05_corridor.webp" }, { name: "6 · The Control Room", src: "art/scenes/so_06_control_room.webp" }, { name: "7 · The Registry", src: "art/scenes/so_07_registry.webp" }, @@ -168,6 +170,46 @@ export const SO_PLATES = [ { name: "9 · Bellhouse — section", src: "art/maps/bellhouse-section.webp" } ]; +/* The detention detail. Truncheons, not firearms: the Seat's armoury is locked and the + Controller holds the key, and the order that sends them says DETAIN. Tactics are written + for the GM; the harness does not model restraint, so its figures are the ceiling. */ +export const SO_CAST = [ + +{ key: "so_warden", name: "Bellhouse warden", + role: "ACT TWO. One of the site's eleven police, born below. Use for all of them.", + chosenStyle: "reflex", naturalArmour: 0, species: "baseline", + ch: { str: 13, siz: 13, con: 13, int: 10, pow: 11, dex: 12, cha: 10, edu: 10 }, + skills: [{ fam: "melee_weapon", spec: "club", val: 50 }, + { fam: "brawl", spec: "", val: 50 }, + { fam: "dodge", spec: "", val: 30 }, + { fam: "spot", spec: "", val: 45 }], + weapons: ["punch", "cudgel"], + tactics: "A wooden truncheon, issued 1974 and oiled every Friday since. They have " + + "arrested drunks and a man who stole from the Allotments; they have never fought anybody " + + "who fights back. They come in pairs, ask once, and take hold of arms. THEY ARE " + + "DETAINING, NOT KILLING: a warden stops hitting an agent who is down and puts the " + + "cuffs on instead. A warden who is hurt badly steps back and calls for Teague. If an " + + "agent draws a firearm, every warden in sight stops and stares, because nobody below " + + "has seen one used, and the next thing they do is run for the Controller." }, + +{ key: "so_teague", name: "Warden Michael Teague", + role: "ACT TWO. Head of the site's police. The man sent to fetch them.", + chosenStyle: "reflex", naturalArmour: 0, species: "baseline", + ch: { str: 14, siz: 14, con: 14, int: 12, pow: 13, dex: 13, cha: 12, edu: 12 }, + skills: [{ fam: "melee_weapon", spec: "club", val: 60 }, + { fam: "brawl", spec: "", val: 60 }, + { fam: "dodge", spec: "", val: 40 }, + { fam: "insight", spec: "", val: 50 }, + { fam: "spot", spec: "", val: 55 }], + weapons: ["punch", "cudgel"], + tactics: "The only man below who has decided the surface is a lie. He leads the " + + "detail himself because he will not send anybody where he would not go. His " + + "service pistol is in the armoury and he leaves it there on purpose. He asks them to " + + "come quietly, twice. SCRIPT BREAK: his daughter Nell, nine, is in the creche; an " + + "agent who names her puts a father in the corridor instead of a warden, and he " + + "stands the detail down." } +]; + /* The people, for showing. Joan Wetherlaw has no portrait yet — see STANDING_ORDER_ART. */ export const SO_FACES = [ { name: "Controller Edwin Sowerby", src: "art/portraits/so_sowerby.webp" },