CLEAN GROUND: say plainly that it runs 20 minutes long

Found while revising the Contingency 2027 prep deadlines. The house standard
(docs/house-standards.md in the convention repo) allows 3h30 of play inside the
four-hour slot plus a ten-minute break -- about 3h40 wall clock against roughly
3h15 of content. This document has always budgeted 4h00, which is the whole
slot with nothing either side, and never said that was over.

Worse, the Pacing Note's ~25 minutes of cuts read as slack and are not: desk
pass 1 ran 4:25, so taking every cut lands at 4:00, still 20 minutes past the
house budget. A GM reading "4h00 including a break" alongside "the Pacing Note
carries cuts" would reasonably conclude there was room to spare. There is none.

STATUS now carries the overrun, and the two honest ways out are written down
rather than left implicit: find another 20 minutes, most likely in Act Two's
65, or declare it a deliberate exception and run it where nothing follows --
which at Contingency 2027 it does, Sunday afternoon with only a reserve behind
it. Not decided; that is Tim's call.

Until then the instruction is explicit: assume an overrun and take the cuts
from the start rather than deciding at the break.

npm run check: 17 guards, exit 0.

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

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md

@@ -15,9 +15,29 @@
 | **Playtesting** | Three desk passes, all fixes applied: `CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md` (GM chair, seed 4271), `_2.md` (Act Four stress, seed 9314), `_3.md` (player chair, contrarian, seed 5580). Twenty-three fixes plus one post-pass. |
 | **What it is** | A **convention one-shot**, decided 13 September 2026. It ends in the slot; there is no second session and the text must not promise one. |
 | **Where it runs** | **Contingency 2027 — Sunday 31 January 2027, afternoon** (slot 9), Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton. |
-| **Runtime** | 4h00 including a break. Desk pass 1 ran 4:25; the **Pacing Note** carries ~25 minutes of pre-written cuts. Take them as the default. |
+| **Runtime** | 4h00 including a break. Desk pass 1 ran 4:25; the **Pacing Note** carries ~25 minutes of pre-written cuts. Take them as the default. **⚠ That is 20 minutes over the house budget** — see below. |
 | **Players** | 4–6 from the duty roster. The cast is declared in the Casting section and the build enforces it. |
 
+### ⚠ It runs 20 minutes long against the house budget
+
+The house standard is **3h30 of play** inside the four-hour slot plus a ten-minute
+break — about **3h40 wall clock**, against roughly 3h15 of actual content. This
+document budgets **4h00**, which is the whole slot with nothing either side.
+
+**Taking every pre-written cut in the Pacing Note lands it at 4:00, not 3:40.** So the
+cuts are not optional slack, they are the baseline, and there is still no margin for a
+table that talks. Desk pass 1 ran 4:25 uncut.
+
+Two honest ways out, and it has not been decided which:
+
+- **Find another 20 minutes.** Act Two is 65 minutes and is the likeliest source; the
+  Pacing Note already knows where its own fat is.
+- **Declare it a deliberate exception** and run it in a slot with nothing after it —
+  which, at Contingency 2027, it has: Sunday afternoon, with only a reserve behind it.
+
+Until that is settled, **a GM running this to time should assume they will overrun**
+and should take the cuts from the start rather than deciding at the break.
+
 ### The three things that are not obvious
 
 Read GM ESSENTIALS in full — this is only what a GM most often discovers too late.