Stress test first: 150 characters across every posting, tier and species against
fourteen invariants each, then the edges (characteristics at 1/3/21, every
location destroyed, twelve pikes carried, hp set to -99).
R-227: a destroyed head was a nap. The printed effect has always read "For
anything that keeps its brain there, this is death" and the code set unconscious
and stopped. destructionOutcomeFor() now says what destruction means.
THE WORLD: falling (a die per 3 m, armour does not apply), drowning (CON rounds
then a point a round, straight past the Major Wound threshold), fire (a condition
with a size; armour helps on the round you catch and never after), explosives
(one roll at the centre, shared by band, cover beats armour).
AUTOMATIC FIRE: one roll, the success level says how much of the burst arrived,
and the rounds are spent either way. TWO WEAPONS: -20/-40, or 0/-20 with the new
Ambidextrous talent; the off hand takes the lighter weapon and nothing over 2 kg.
BESTIARY: 21 entries in three families — folklore, horror, and what comes back
from further along — each with characteristics, natural armour, tactics and a
POWER written as a rule with a cost.
SPACE: eight stations, each on a skill somebody already has, so the Physician has
a chair. Range is a band; the helm moves one a round, in or out. Heat is the
pressure and took two rounds of playtest tuning to stop being a countdown.
64 rules, 198 spot-checked formulas, a 12-page rulebook in reading order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
My own R-221 fix overshot. A Containment Officer whose Tradecraft had caught a
stray bonus point sat at 12% against a base of 5 — technically trained — and led
every phase ahead of a Rigging Officer on 53% Navigate. Tradecraft still wins ties
and wins when genuinely better; it no longer wins when plainly worse. The
Containment phase went 6% -> 26% on the same team.
Found playing GLASS LANTERN with the historical gear: salvaged polearms and
slings correctly arrive at 5% because nobody trains them, and maille over
brigandine (AR 8) reduced four utility-knife hits to zero damage each.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The generator was already writing the timeline, the cast and the texture and
filing all of it behind the GM screen. New PLAYERS page: a read-aloud opening,
what it is like there, what is known so far, who is there and what they want —
but never what they lie about. Page ownership is now declared by the page rather
than guessed from its index, which would have hidden any second player page.
Historical range: 38 weapons (from 6) and 14 armours (from 2), each with its
period stated, from arming swords and longbows through matchlocks and Brown Bess
to the Lee-Enfield and a trench club. Five new skills to hang them on, including
Firearm (Muzzle-loader), because a muzzle-loader is not a rifle.
275 icons; every weapon maps to a real skill and every item has art. Catalogue is
206 items across four eras.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every case carries a "window closes" clock whose stated cost is THE WAY HOME and
whose steps are "the margin narrows / the return is Difficult / the return is
aimed at -30%". Nothing ever read it, so the phase whose job is getting out had
no consequence of its own and the GM had to invent one.
Extraction now advances that clock: failure and fumble narrow the window, a
critical opens it back up, and returnCrossing() applies the penalty alongside the
classification modifier and the Coherence band. 0/-10/-20/-30, Difficult from two
steps.
Also: legs now store their `kind`. The extraction check matched on the terrain
prose and worked only because the string begins "Extraction —".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four phases, no weapon drawn. The arrangement with the quiet neighbours (standing
0 -> 2) is the win condition on this case. Nobody lost a hit point. A fumbled
Transposition on 99 cost 3 Coherence and delivered an Art, which is the only way
one ever arrives.
Together with LOW VERGE this brackets the death rules honestly: they bite when
the fiction has already gone badly, not by default.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Hit points clamp at zero, so further damage to somebody already there changed
nothing — and a STABILISED agent absorbed it forever, because the count was held
and there was nothing else left to move. You could empty a magazine into someone
bleeding out and the system would not notice.
Damage at zero now breaks the stabilisation and costs a round of the count, and
hitLocationRoll calls died() when that meets the limit.
Found by playing LOW VERGE until it killed somebody: two agents who were
medically stable died in the water on a failed tidal extraction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
R-223: nothing happened at 0 hit points. An agent was marked down and lay there
forever; the only mention of death in the system was flavour text on a destroyed
head. Zero now starts a clock whose length is the agent's own Major Wound
threshold, ticked from the same hook that charges blood loss. First Aid or
Medicine stabilises and stops the count; healing above zero clears it; heal()
refuses the dead. On death, Coherence decides what the record says — from a
proper death in service down to not being recorded as dead at all.
Case generator: four phases instead of five (the arc drew two interchangeable
middles that read as padding). The brief now leads with Where / When /
Classification / Phases, states the opposition in full, and has a "How you get
back" section. place and duration were generated and never printed. The same
facts are on the case file itself. 300 seeds checked for object leaks; one found
and fixed (group taboo/desire are objects with .text).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phases read 41/36/31 before the fumble; the fight with the rival desk cost two
agents; the last two phases resolved at 11% and 1% and the card says why —
Wounded: -20%. The wound pipeline reaches case phases, which is correct and now
legible. Closed at Containment 6, Resources 3, Clearance 5.
Confirms R-222: every agent finished with experience ticks from phase and combat
work, where before the fix a case produced none.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ramp made every phase after the first Difficult (halving the lead's skill) and
stacked a cumulative -5% on top. Separated in phaseRampFor() in rules.mjs:
difficulty belongs to the phase (only Containment is Difficult, and it does not
also ramp), the modifier is attrition (-5 a phase, capped at -15).
lead 55% was 55 -> 22 -> 17 -> 12 -> 7 now 55 -> 50 -> 45 -> 27 -> 40
Over 20,000 simulated cases with destitution modelled, phases passed roughly
double and destitution incidence roughly halves.
R-222: resolveLegDialog passed no skillFamilyId, so the choke point could not
resolve the skill item and leading a phase never earned a tick — Tradecraft, the
skill the job most uses, could never improve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bestIn("tradecraft") ?? bestIn("navigate") never reached Navigate, because every
character carries every skill and skillRating() returns the printed base rather
than null — so the first lookup always found somebody. A team of postings that
train Navigate and not Tradecraft was led by whoever had the highest UNTRAINED
Tradecraft, which is 5%, putting phase three at 1%.
TRAINED now means above the printed base. Measured on a Pathology / Overwatch /
Warden / Materials team: lead 5% -> 34%.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Audited every exported rule in rules.mjs against what the rulebook says and closed
the gaps:
- Dodge starts at DEX x 2 — newly evaluated, and stated nowhere until now
- Encumbrance: free carry, and which skill categories it actually penalises
- Bleeding rates and what stops each kind
- The merge ladder for Borrowed Authority, as a table
- A new page listing all 25 postings, generated from ROLES
The rulebook is now 9 pages and every one is generated from the code it documents.
All packs, 231 icons and the dice textures rebuilt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Since 0.6.1:
- VEHICLES as their own Item type: crew, seats, cargo, hull, armour, range,
terrain and the skill that works them, with speed as a band. 14 of them, from
the pool car and the Custodian van to a sealed crawler and the carriage that is
already parked outside wherever you were going to go.
- STORES roughly doubled to 118 gear items across four eras — standing issue and
paperwork, transport stores, and the forward stores Registry will not hand a
probationary officer. Catalogue now 175 items, 231 icons.
- Agents leave creation properly equipped: standing issue, the posting's kit,
what seniority adds, and one personal effect that is theirs and not the
department's.
- All 25 postings now describe themselves in the creation dialog.
- BORROWED AUTHORITY, the access subsystem. No hacking skill and nothing to break
into: access is a named credential with a scope, a Trust that erodes, and red
flags describing how its real owner behaves. Inside scope there is no roll. Two
tiers beyond is impossible at any skill. Coherence widens a record, and pushing
one past what its Trust will carry merges your file with theirs.
- Defences graded by level, and damage now rolls at the level a blow landed at.
- Dodge's DEX x 2 base is finally evaluated; it read 0% for most postings.
- Brawl is a fallback rather than a peer of the weapon in hand.
- check-lang guard: one key that was both a value and a branch silently
un-localised the entire system.
- The case generator is reachable from the Actor Directory, and no longer puts
every character in the world on a new case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Foundry VTT game system: Basic Roleplaying d100 in a drab British agency that
deals with crossings, where reality keeps a record of what belongs where and can be
made to get it wrong.
Contents:
- rules.mjs as the single authority for every rule formula, with 40 rules and 132
spot-checked values. Nothing may restate a formula it defines.
- 25 postings, each with a key characteristic, trained skills, talents and its own
kit; a 175-item catalogue across four eras; 231 generated icons.
- Reaction Lanes initiative, re-rolled every round including the first.
- Coherence, and the Quiet Arts, which only ever arrive from a crossing gone wrong.
- Graded defences: only a critical stops a critical.
- Borrowed Authority — access as a record rather than a hacking roll.
- A case generator, and a rules journal generated from rules.mjs so the book cannot
drift from the code.
Built compendia are committed so a remote Foundry needs only the files.
node_modules is not; `npm install` restores it for rebuilding content.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
