5 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4dd72c6248 Generated NPCs draw their posting's kit
generateNPC read R.core, R.support and R.label. It never read R.kit, so the
role card's DRAWS FROM STORES promised a Containment officer nine items and
the actor arrived holding a utility knife with a flat naturalArmour standing
in for armour it was never issued.

postings.mjs now owns the decision — drawKitFor(role, tier, {classify}) plus
a draw table per tier — because the engine resolves kit keys against the
compendium and check-generator resolves them against content.mjs, and the two
cannot import each other. Classification comes from catalogue membership and
never from the key: climbing_kit is "Breaching charges" and prybar is "Entry
bar", so anything reading a key's spelling is wrong in that posting first.

The weapon↔skill pairing table is gone. Each weapon item already names the
skill that fires it, so the skill is granted from the weapon, and a generated
NPC cannot hold what it cannot use. THREATS.attacks is now creature-tiers
only; those two keep their natural attacks on top of what they drew.

Armour is an item. naturalArmour drops to 0 on the four human tiers, where
the number was standing in for the item, and stays on the two creature tiers,
where it stacks with drawn armour as locationArmourFor already intends.

check-generator (guard 25) was written first and observed failing on nine
counts against unchanged source. One of its assertions was itself wrong —
it read for the creature-tier restriction after the loop instead of before
it, and so reported the fixed code as broken; re-scoped, it passes on the fix
and still fails against git show HEAD:ringbrp.mjs.

Measured with the new tools/npc-cohort.mjs, 2000 runs, seed 11, against the
party check-lethality freezes. Apex · Containment 68.2% -> 88.5% wipe,
Anomalous · Containment 0.3% -> 19.2%, and Dangerous · Field Lead got weaker
because its posting carries one pistol where the tier used to hand it a
rifle. Full table and three incidental findings in R-310.

Two of those findings are guards, not content. check-rules failed on a
comment that quoted the pattern it hunts for, so comment-only lines are
skipped now. update-readme held the guard list as a hardcoded array whose own
comments recorded it going stale twice; it reads the check script instead,
and so does the count-word rewrite that was separately capped at sixteen.

Not changed, and flagged in R-310: breach_suit and riot_shield declare no
coverage, so they armour every location including the head. The location
counterplay NPC_KIT_PLAN.md relies on does not exist, and that is a balance
decision rather than a side effect of this one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-23 00:08:12 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 b0981008b3 No posting may grant a species
Eighteen postings offered vesh or cadence biology to any agent who took them: unblinking
nine times, quorum seven, distributed three. That is the root cause behind the six
characters check-creatures caught — they were not rogue, they had taken talents their own
postings advertised, and every newly generated agent would have done the same.

Unblinking is the clearest case. It is cat: species, species: vesh, and its own rule text
reads "A Vesh has no face to read and does not need to read yours". Nine postings offered
it, including Interview, Pathology and the doctor trade.

Each of the nineteen slots is replaced with a talent drawn from what the posting actually
does rather than from what was nearest alphabetically: Registry gets Requisition, the
Anchor gets Echo Sense, Disposal gets Clean Scene, Signals gets Chain of Custody and Dead
Reckoning. No pool gained a duplicate, and no talent is left unused — every legal talent
is now offered by at least two postings.

The guard lives in check-kits, which is the file that validates postings, and it imports
TALENT_SPECIES from creature-schema.mjs so there is one definition of which talents are
locked rather than two. check-creatures was looking at characters; nothing was looking at
the pools they were picked from. Verified by reintroducing unblinking on the doctor trade
and watching it fail, not merely by watching it pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:34:37 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 774e95dea8 THROUGH TRAIN — the crossing starter, and two more playtest fixes
A train has been running the same four miles of track since 3 November 1881. It
has never stopped. Sixty-one people are aboard and all of them are alive.

The supernatural is science fiction underneath, which is the point. A railway
company laid track to a filed survey instead of to the ground, then described the
line as being where it was not — ten thousand times, in timetables and waybills
and telegraph orders, for six months, at a constant speed. Reality keeps a record
of what belongs where, and that is the most patient argument there is. The record
gave way with No. 9 inside it, and the RUNNING is what holds the crossing open: a
standing wave sustained by its own motion the way a bow sustains a note.

So the players must board a train that cannot stop, and then find that sixty-one
people at six passes is four hours they do not have. The ending is what they
choose to do about arithmetic they cannot beat, in front of a conductor holding
the manifest. No roll resolves it.

It is also the case that teaches Standing Order 9: NOTHING MODERN GOES THROUGH.
Using a modern object across costs a Coherence and moves the clock; carrying it
costs nothing; anchors are exempt. The catalogue already had the 1881 issue —
Webley, Martini-Henry, oil lantern, brass compass, pocket watch, buff coat,
laudanum — so the constraint needed no new content and gives the table something
to feel in the first twenty minutes.

Ships as docs/scenarios/THROUGH_TRAIN.md and a Foundry Adventure: 7 GM pages, 6
handouts including the survey that started it and a manifest deliberately held
back to Act Three, the case file at Containment 6 / Resources 5 / Clearance 4
with its four legs loaded, four of the people aboard, and 7 plates to show.

Two fixes from playing it:

  - Bhattacharya's RESEARCH was 1%. Placing the new skills last night I swapped
    Occult into Registry's core and took Research out — a records office that
    cannot look anything up. Research is back in core; Antiquities gets its
    Knowledge back the same way.

  - The boarding was unrunnable. At halved skill the set-piece put four agents on
    12–31% and all four missed, which stalls the one scene the scenario is built
    around. It is an average roll now and only a fumble is a fall, with the
    reason written into the text so nobody "fixes" it back. Re-run: 3 of 4 aboard
    on the first pass and one waiting for the next, which is the shape it wanted.

Version 1.3.0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 00:25:19 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 cbad87ba98 Add Occult, Religion and Psychology, and the Panic track
From the first game's list. The three skills are not decoration — they are the
levers on the new track, which is why they arrived together.

PANIC, 0 to 5, up. It is the other half of Coherence and the rules page says so
in the first line, because a table that confuses them will make the wrong call
at the worst moment:

    Coherence   what knowing has cost you       weeks     10-0, down
    Panic       what is happening to you NOW    minutes    0-5, up

A trigger gives a point with NO ROLL. Asking for a die to find out whether you
are frightened slows the scene and tells the player how to feel; the die is for
getting rid of it, which is the interesting direction.

    0 steady · 1 rattled · 2 shaken -5% · 3 losing it -10%
    4 overwhelmed -20% · 5 broken

The first point is free on purpose, so the opening shock of a scene costs the
table nothing. At 5 you break — freeze, flee or fixate, choose fast — and come
back at 3, not at 0, because breaking is not a rest.

Relief is where the skills come in. A success takes one point, a special takes
two. Psychology is the only thing that steadies somebody who is NOT you.
Religion steadies you alone and does not care whether you are right. Occult is
the odd one: naming a thing correctly, out loud, helps everybody who can hear —
the department's actual work, and the only relief that reaches a room. Plus
POW×5 to steady yourself, and your anchor object once per case, which is what
that briefing scene was for.

The three skills are placed in six registers rather than left floating: Occult
to the professor and to Registry, Psychology to the doctor and to Interview,
Religion to Antiquities and Pathology.

Guards, because a track nothing reads is this project's oldest failure: the five
new rules carry spot-checks in check-rules, and check-behaviour gains nine tests
— the free first point, monotonic penalties, only 5 breaking, clamping at both
ends, breaking not clearing the track, special taking two, every band/trigger/
relief having a label, and every relief naming a skill the catalogue actually
has.

Verified in a live game: penalty reaches the roll (58 → 58 → 53 → 48 → 38 for
panic 0-4, criticals and specials recomputed with it), the full arc runs 0 → 2 →
4 → eased to 2 → pushed to 5 → breaks → 3 with no errors, the sheet shows the
band, and the rules journal has a Panic page generated from the same tables.

Version 1.1.0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 22:55:11 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 43508259ac Consolidation pass after a Codex review
Four real defects, each verified against the source before acting on it.

Trade expertise was coupled to agency rank. A probationary burglar came out at 35-50%
and a veteran at 65-80%, as though fifteen years of picking locks were something the
department conferred. TRADE_BANDS is now fixed at 50-65/30-50 at every rank, and
INDUCTION scales with service instead (20-32 probationary to 45-60 veteran) because
that half genuinely is the department's. The two axes were the wrong way round. This
is the thing I flagged myself after PAPER HARBOUR and then left alone — flagging a
defect is not the same as fixing it.

Bonus points were sprayed across every skill in the game. grantFullSkillList runs
immediately before the loop and puts all fifty-nine skills on the sheet, and the loop
picked from actor.items, so a veteran's ninety points landed anywhere. The comment two
hundred lines above has always said "over the core skills"; the code never did.

"Random species" passed "baseline" into generators that support random perfectly well.

No behavioural tests. The strongest point in the review: the three guards are static
and none of them can tell whether a rule is READ, which is the only kind of defect this
project has ever shipped. tools/check-behaviour.mjs now runs 28 deterministic tests,
gated into the build, covering R-231/232/243/245/246, graded defences and the lamp
rule. Proved it bites by re-breaking R-246.

The register moved to postings.mjs, a Foundry-neutral module the engine, rulebook,
guards and tests all import normally — they were previously pulled out of the engine
with a regex and eval, which worked and was a trap. My first version of that used
`export … from`, which re-exports without local bindings, so ROLES was undefined and
the system threw on init: node --check passes that, loading it in Foundry does not.

Also: the contact doc comment still said "only OFFER moves standing"; check-kits
accepted mas/app, which are the DISPLAY names of siz/cha, so a posting declaring one
would have passed and produced an undefined characteristic; package.json disagreed with
the manifest; README counts were three revisions stale and are now generated at build.

Deferred with reasons: splitting the 6,700-line engine into modules. Right, and a
multi-session refactor whose risk is exactly the silent breakage demonstrated above.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 22:57:20 +01:00