Folklore of the isles, water and the drowned, anomalous far-side, and
beasts and heraldry — 25 each, in four source files wired into
collectSpecs(). check-creatures passes at 204 specs across 13 sources and
the full 23-guard suite is green.
The population this was meant to fix:
non-human body plan 4 -> 48 (29 quadruped, 15 winged)
vesh / cadence 5/5 -> 13/13
creatures 47 -> 147
CREATURE_FORGE_PLAN.md called the unused location tables the reason to
build any of this; the quadruped and winged plans now carry a bestiary
rather than three dogs and a heraldic beast.
Art is procedural: 102 SVG portraits composed from each creature's own
body geometry, so a cadence portrait has five headless bodies because its
location table has five. The 17 hand-made portraits are untouched.
BESTIARY_ART.md carries 204 derived Midjourney prompts for the ones worth
illustrating properly later.
Known and unfixed, reported by three of the four authors independently:
WEAPONS has no bite, claw, gore, hoof or talon, so every creature that
kills with its mouth carries `grasp` and states its real damage in prose.
simulate.mjs measures the grasp. Next commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four new portraits (Joan Wetherlaw at last, Ruth Cotter, Nell Teague,
Mr Ogden) and eleven interior plates, one for each underground location
that had none, in the two-ink civil defence style. Bewley and Prosser
reuse their THROUGH TRAIN portraits. Journals now show 20 plates and 12
faces. The art sheet corrects the v1.0 diagnosis: Joan's prompt was
being refused, not the account out of hours.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The section now shows 13, 14, 15 and 18 on a third level with the
incline from the plant floor, instead of footnoting them as not drawn,
and the key runs 6-18 in number order in two columns. Sheet 6 moves the
incline to the plant's north end to match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five more blueprint sheets: the 1962 dormitories and laundry (240
berths), the canteen, kitchen, bakery and officers' cabins (20), and
three sheets of the Estate, 213 family dwellings on three coal roads
(737). With Edith and Kit Marlow that is the 999; the scenario now
shows the sum. Section map issue 3 adds 16-18, and sheet 6 is mirrored
so the pipe room lies south of the plant as the section draws it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eight sheets laid out to match the section: north to the left, Level 1
lobby to sick bay, Level 2 creche to plant, an incline to the pit
galleries, and every corridor end naming the sheet it reaches. Rooms
now share walls (the corridor gap had doors opening onto rock); adds an
armoury, a pipe room beside the plant, and a Vigil hall sized for 999
standing. bellhouse-plans.mjs --check holds doors, swings, furniture,
lettering and reachability, and runs in npm run check.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Drawn by tools/bellhouse-plans.mjs from declared rooms: lobby, control
room, registry, sick bay, creche, vigil hall and plant, coal roads and
the Sump. 2800x2000 at 5 ft to the square, added to the Adventure and
keyed in the Locations table.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The agents now cross into Bellhouse on a diplomatic brief to bring its people
home. A thousand people (118 of the 1974 intake, 881 born below) run the Seat
like a 1970s council, kept down by ninety-day renewals from "Centre", which
is Mr Smith, planted in THROUGH TRAIN. His experiment is procedural and
quiet: a bulletin response, a crèche lullaby, a shared dream, the children's
drawings, a steered establishment. Act One is the briefing, the moor and the
crossing into Enquiries. Act Two is the site, and the detention the Controller
orders on Centre's circular, measured and cited. Act Three is Annex D: at a
thousand the Seat broadcasts an Address that enrols whoever hears it, and the
table must silence it before or while they release the Seat under clause 4.
Same site, people and plates. Two cast actors (the wardens, Teague). New
handouts SO-H05 (Centre's circular) and SO-H06 (terms of engagement). The
section map's key is relabelled (issue 2). Status is honest: v0.7's five desk
passes tested a different plot, and this needs its own.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
GM chair, all six cast pregens played as archetypes, every beat rolled on a
seeded roller (mulberry32, seed 5291, rolls consumed in printed order) so the
run is re-checkable rather than remembered. Fourteen plates and portraits too.
The pass found three things worth the afternoon.
REVELATION 3 WAS NEVER DELIVERED, AND ITS FALLBACK WAS CIRCULAR. The Psychology
roll with Marlow failed, the Larkhall fallback failed, and the only route left
was a file in Marlow's private quarters that nothing in the scenario told the
players existed — findable only by knowing the thing it reveals. A fallback that
requires the revelation it is a fallback for is not a fallback. The file now
lives in the sick-bay day room where they already have reason to be, there is a
second independent route through Pennyfeather and the 1974 return's CASUALTIES
NIL, and the Vigil is an automatic backstop under all three.
Psychology was the wrong skill anyway: the audit put the best in the cast at 40,
a coin flip on the moral centre of the case, while the Casting table credited
Renshaw with it as a strength. It is Insight now — 63, genuinely hers, and a
better fit for a woman who is ashamed rather than confused.
THE MOST OBVIOUS PLAYER MOVE HAD NO PRINTED ANSWER. The talker told the
Controller there had been no war, four minutes in, and the document said
nothing. Now printed in three mouths, plus what happens when they take a
resident up to see the sky — which works, harms nobody, and solves nothing.
ACT THREE RESOLVED IN EIGHT MINUTES OF A FIFTY-MINUTE ACT. The amendment failed
and the party cancelled inside ninety seconds, because falling through to the
end of the world is so much worse than the alternative that nobody deliberated
— and they cancelled without knowing it kills the sixty-one children, because
Pennyfeather was two corridors away. She now stands at the Controller's elbow
and says the number out loud before the pen moves, and a failed amendment holds
Sowerby's pen above the paper for one full round.
Also: Act Two ran 75 against 55 and now has a real Pacing Note; the Act One
Stealth roll bought nothing and now buys when Teague finds them; time inside
versus outside is ruled in the text; the census is marked optional because
missing it cost nothing; and Containment gets the one beat the heavy's 3/10
verdict asked for.
All twenty-one guards still pass, and check-figures still records this document
at zero bare figures.
Untested: ending 2, a successful amendment, the quarantine unit, four players.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two hundred and six people went underground in 1974 to govern the country after
the war. There was no war. The Deputy Controller filed the drill as live, on
purpose, to save the site a fortnight of arguing about whether it was allowed to
start — and reality took the filing.
The apocalypse in this one is clerical. At renewal 211 the site's population
record exceeds the surviving population of the region it governs, and a record
that cannot hold both resolves by correcting the region. Act Two shows the
players the sum; Act Three is the decision, and all three endings cost
something. Cancelling the order kills the sixty-one children born below, who
have no record above ground. The text says so and does not offer the GM a way to
make it painless.
Deliberately not CLEAN GROUND. That case is a filed valley found by accident and
resolved by cancellation; this is a filed institution the department built on
purpose, and its best ending amends the order's scope rather than cancelling it
— a Borrowed Authority problem, which is the setting's own thesis about
arrangements beating fights.
Three existing bestiary creatures, nothing new to build: the census counts in
the Registry, the overwriter performs the correction if the renewal goes
through, and the quarantine unit is the failure state you argue down.
Cast declared as a different six from CLEAN GROUND's so the two cases exercise
different sheets. All twenty-one guards pass: check-scenarios resolves 115 tags,
check-rollable holds every route to the declared cast, and check-figures records
the document at zero bare figures — it cites no measured number because it
prints none, the quarantine unit's lethality included.
The section drawing is hand-built SVG and must stay that way: every label on it
is load-bearing and no generator holds legible text. Numbered callouts with a
key beneath, per AFTERIMAGE v3.1.
NOT playtested. Not once, desk or human. Every timing in it is a guess.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
cg_05_column re-rolled and replaced. It now has Ivy a half-step ahead of the
line with both hands held open and visible, which is the beat the read-aloud
actually describes — "one woman walks forward with her hands held where you can
see them". The line behind her is still drawn uniformly, so the six at the back
remain indistinguishable, which is the one hard rule in the notes.
cg_04_crossing is unchanged. Seven attempts did not beat the original: the
plate has to be grey and dead and empty, and the generator supplies any two.
The original's livestock are confirmed real rather than rocks — a crop of the
hillside shows grazing animals and a barn — so the defect stands, recorded in
STATUS rather than quietly kept.
What the failures taught is now in CLEAN_GROUND_ART.md, because it is worth
more than the plate:
- Naming a thing to exclude it puts it in. "No birds, no sheep, no movement"
and "the grey is dust and not snow" produced, respectively, livestock and
snow. Both negations summoned what they forbade.
- Steering off snow steers into summer: the moor comes back green and alive,
which is worse than either.
- A long --no list stalls the job outright. Four consecutive prompts with ten
or more exclusions never produced a grid; the same prompt with four returned
in two minutes.
- Filter words costing a 30-minute timeout each: wound, dead ground, lifeless,
smothered, and shot — including in "nobody in shot".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Seventeen assets through the Midjourney bridge: six NPC portraits at 512x512 in
art/portraits/cg_*.webp and eleven scene plates at 1024x682 in
art/scenes/cg_*.webp, matching the dimensions every other scenario in the
system already uses. CLEAN GROUND had none; LAST_ADMISSION has 8 plates,
OPEN_DAY 10, THROUGH_TRAIN 13.
The art direction holds: 1962 Ministry drawing-office hand, pen and ink with
pencil shading, dyeline blue-grey wash, buff card grain and a ruled margin, so
the far side is drawn on the same paper as the Registry corridor. Ivy reads as
competent rather than frail, and cg_05_column obeys the one hard rule in the
notes — the six at the back are drawn exactly like the other thirty-five.
Three prompts had to be reworded around Midjourney's filter, which declines
ephemerally and leaves mj-gen waiting out its full 30-minute timeout on
silence. "An empty dog lead WOUND twice round one fist" cost 23 minutes before
the pattern was recognised; "nobody in SHOT" and "nothing behind its face" were
found by scanning the remaining prompts rather than by hitting them.
Two misses recorded in STATUS rather than quietly kept:
- cg_04_crossing appears to have livestock on the hillside, and the point of
that scene is that every sheep is gone.
- cg_05_column has no Ivy; the line is uniform where the text has one woman a
half-step forward with her hands open.
Neither stops the scenario running. Eight of the seventeen were inspected
against their briefs in detail, including every plate carrying an explicit rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The bestiary goes 22 to 46: eight more FOLKLORE, eight more HORROR, eight more
FORWARD. Ten of the forty-six are now Vesh or Cadence, up from two.
That ratio is the point. Both anatomies have had complete hit-location tables, body
geometry, species talents and location effects for the whole life of this project and
nothing used either, so none of it ran outside the character generator. They are now
written to be WORTH the anatomy rather than to wear it:
- The relay is five Cadence bodies holding a crossing open, and the crossing closes
as they are destroyed. No vital, no head, 10% off everything per body lost - it
cannot be dropped and cannot be ignored, which is the species argument entire.
- The courier is a Vesh that fights at half rating while its one grasp limb is full.
Disable the limb and it drops the consignment and fights properly. The whole
encounter turns on a trade the party has to work out.
- The census cannot be usefully fought at all: no head means no killing shot, so the
fight lasts until somebody opens the ridge, by which time it has counted everyone.
- Knockers are the only folklore Cadence, and the committee is a Cadence because a
committee IS several bodies and one decision.
The rest is written to the house line that most of these are arrangements rather than
fights, because a bestiary where every answer is a gun has one page. The washer at the
ford will not fight and cannot be made to; the apple tree man wants a drink it has been
owed since 1961; the waiting room's exit was never locked and nobody stands up.
Measured, 250 runs against four duty-roster agents, seed 11. Nothing accidental turned
up: the non-combat entries sit at 0.0-0.1 agents hurt, the fighters at 1.4-2.3, and the
only creature over a 10% solo wipe is the stanchion at 14.4% - which is a fixed object
with 12 armour whose own tactics say it is a demolition problem and not a fight. The
harness can only force a fight, so read that number as "the party punched the pillar".
Art regenerated: 24 new portraits, and the eight new non-humans verified to draw
exactly as many body parts as their location tables have entries.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
vesh and cadence have had complete hit-location tables, body geometry, species talents
and location effects since they were written, and no creature had ever used either. So
none of that had run outside the character generator, and the whole bestiary was
hit-located as a person - including a black dog and a stack of paper.
THE CHOIR IS A CADENCE. It always was: its tactics say "run them as ELEVEN separate
bodies with one initiative between them", which is Distributed and Quorum described in
prose because the species that models it had no users. Retagged, and given the two
talents. No scenario prose refers to it, so nothing else moves.
PRECEDENT is new, and is a Vesh - the first. Built to exercise what makes the species
different rather than to be another sack of hit points: no head, so no fight against
one ends on a lucky roll, and a sensory ridge for a vital that runs the length of its
back and is correspondingly easy to hit. It is also not hostile, which is the point;
the encounter is a conversation with something that answers questions about an event
that has not happened yet.
Two things left deliberately unfixed and written down rather than fudged:
- The choir is eleven in the fiction and five in the location table. Reconciling it
properly means giving cadence a per-creature body count, which stops the table being
a constant and makes the paper doll follow it. That is the right fix and it is not a
small one. A note on the spec says so.
- Precedent gets unblinking but not out_of_step, though SPECIES.vesh grants both. An
npc actor has no Coherence track, and out_of_step costs 1 to use.
Also corrects a comment in creature-schema.mjs claiming Out of Step is vesh-locked. It
is not - five postings and a roster agent offer it to humans, and locking it would take
it off all six. SPECIES[x].talents is what a species is GRANTED; TALENTS[].species is
what only that species may HAVE. Two different fields, and only the second locks.
Simulated: Precedent 0.68 of 4 hurt over 3 rounds, no wipes. The choir alone is
trivial; at the eleven its own tactics call for, 3.05 of 4 hurt, median 18 rounds, 0.3%
wipes. Read both as floors - the harness does not model hit locations, so a Cadence's
entire mechanical identity is exactly what it cannot yet measure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixty of the seventy-six actors had no portrait. The sixteen that did are the
hand-made duty roster; the whole bestiary and every scenario NPC fell back to a
generic silhouette.
The point is not that this is free. A portrait composed from anatomy.mjs cannot
contradict the statblock, because it is drawn from the numbers the hit-location roll
uses: silhouette from BODY_ART, height from SIZ, build from STR against SIZ, plating
from naturalArmour, a mark for the primary weapon's class. A Cadence would get five
bodies because its table has five. Nothing has to be kept in step.
Colour carries what a GM wants off a thumbnail — whether the thing is a person,
folklore, recovered machinery, or the far side. That reads the shouted category the
role lines already carry (FOLKLORE, HORROR, FORWARD), which nothing was using, and
falls back to structure for the ones with no tag.
build-packs resolves portraits by stem and extension rather than an exact .webp
filename, so a creature gains art without an edit to content.mjs and a hand-made
raster always beats the generated diagram. A spec that NAMES a portrait and has none
is still a hard build failure.
These read as diagrammatic field-guide plates and will not match the Midjourney agent
portraits. That split is deliberate: the agents are the cast, the bestiary is case
material.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Midjourney read "bench" as furniture in the first version. Regenerated with the
word removed and "no furniture" stated: two coated figures from behind, empty
ground, a dry gully, the town's water tank on the far horizon. Emptiness is the
subject, which is what the scene is for - they arrived where the paperwork says
the railway is.
All thirteen plates are real art and there are no placeholders left.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tt_11_bureau regenerated after the first attempt timed out, converted to the
house plate format. All thirteen plates are now real art.
A version of tt_12_northbench without the word "bench" in the prompt is still
rendering; the current one is good apart from the park bench Midjourney put in
the desert.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tt_12_northbench and tt_13_standoff replace the placeholder copies. Converted to
the house plate format, 1024x682 webp, to match the other ten.
The Bureau plate timed out in Midjourney at 1800s waiting for a grid and is still
a placeholder; it is regenerating.
Known flaw in tt_12_northbench: Midjourney read "bench" as furniture and put a
park bench in the Nevada scrub. Everything else about the plate is right - two
coated figures, empty ground, no railway, the town smoking on the horizon - so it
ships while a version without the word regenerates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act One is now an induction at the Bureau, Act Two puts the players through the
crossing and makes them find the train, Act Three is a town-side obstacle, Act
Four is the boarding, Act Five is the four minutes. 4h00 in five acts, was 3h30
in three.
The restructure earns one thing the old shape could not: THE CROSSING OPENS WHERE
THE RECORD SAYS THE LINE IS, which is an empty bench of scrub on the wrong side of
the wash. The agents arrive where the paperwork put the railway, not where the
railway is, so the fraud is the ground under their feet and finding the train is
real work. Registry's file has this wrong and Bewley believes the file.
- Act Three: Rance Doyle and five unpaid miners take the agents for company
detectives, and they are not wrong to. Resolves on what the players SAY - no
roll makes it go away, no roll makes it a fight. Losing costs them the 1881
issue, not their lives. His brother Tom is aboard and dies at minute two of
every pass, which is the wiring between the acts
- new cast: Bewley, Prosser, Rance Doyle, Shard, Tom Doyle, Cordera man
- new handouts: the company notice, and the six names in Ambrose's hand
- 8 GM pages, 10 handouts, 15 actors, 13 plates
MEASURED, 400 runs each: the Act Three standoff is 0.4/4 hurt from cover and
1.25/4 in the open, both ending early - but FOUGHT TO A FINISH it puts 1.75 of 4
down and wipes the party in 24% of runs. The early stop is what makes the act
survivable, not the miners being weak. My first draft of that table was guessed
and wrong in all three rows.
FOUND AND FIXED: there is no Ride skill in this game and never has been. The
boarding set-piece has asked for "[CUS: Ride, then Athletics]" since it was
written, through a playtest, which is an instruction to roll a thing nobody has.
Horses are now handled by a local and the agent rolls Athletics.
NEW GUARD: check-scenarios resolves every [CUS: Skill] tag in every scenario
against SKILL_CATALOGUE and fails the build on a skill that does not exist.
Verified it fails on the real bug before wiring it in. Sixth guard.
NOTE: the three new plates (Bureau, north bench, standoff) are placeholders in
this commit - Midjourney is still rendering them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The loop is no longer just a train going round. It is FOUR MINUTES with a
gunfight in it, and those four minutes have run about two million times.
Two sides, and neither is the villain. Cass Merritt and three hired men have a
signed letter of engagement from the company telling them to surrender the
payroll to nobody "upon any pretext whatsoever, including the presentation of
any paper". Josiah Ambrose and four Cordera miners have a sealed writ of
attachment from a territorial judge naming that same payroll against eleven
weeks of unpaid wages. Both documents are genuine. Neither man has seen the
other's. The company sold the same money twice and is not aboard. Both are
handouts now, and they only mean anything held in the same hand.
The mission is restated everywhere it appears — briefing page, case brief, GM
essentials: CLOSE IT. Closing the crossing does not kill anybody, it lets them
go. The loop ends, 3 November 1881 resumes from 11:44, and everyone aboard walks
forward into the life they would have had — including Ambrose and a miner named
Doyle, who did not survive the real four minutes. The agents are not choosing
who lives; they are choosing to stop holding history still, having met the
people it lands on.
The standing order is louder in three places: NOTHING MODERN GOES THROUGH.
Two things the playtest found, both now written into the text:
- THE FIGHT WAS A TPK GENERATOR. Modelled with all nine shooters firing at the
party it wiped them 171 times in 200. The model was wrong — the two sides
are shooting at EACH OTHER — so the scenario now carries a measured exposure
table: head down draws nothing, acting from cover costs half a party member
and no wipes over 300 runs, moving in the open costs one, and going for the
payroll box wipes more than half of all parties. The GM is told to say that
last row out loud BEFORE anybody commits to it.
- THE LOOP RESETS AND THE AGENTS DO NOT. Everyone who belongs to 1881 is back
up unhurt on the next pass. The agents keep their wounds. Nothing said so,
and a player who assumes otherwise takes risks that kill them. It is now
stated in capitals in both documents, with the played pass that prompted it
— two of four down at 0 hit points, one untouched because he stayed on the
floor.
Nine cast members, eight handouts, ten plates.
Version 1.4.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Opened all of it this time, rather than driving the system through its API.
Two more defects of the same family as the NPC sheet, and in the same place —
the types added last:
- Talent and Art had no TYPES.Item.* label, so their sheets printed the raw
key "TYPES.Item.talent" under the name.
- Neither had a branch in item-sheet.hbs or an isTalent/isPower flag, so the
Detail tab rendered EMPTY over a document holding category, rule, uses per
case, Coherence cost, push cost and origin. Eleven of thirteen types were
handled, which is exactly the shape an eye skips.
Both now have a header statline and a full Detail section, and a guard walks
template.json: every declared type must have a label, a flag set in ringbrp.mjs,
and an {{#if isX}} section in the sheet.
One hardening fix: loseCoherence applies the cost and THEN announces it, so
anything that throws in between leaves the actor quietly poorer with no message.
localize() throws on a non-string, which an unrecognised reason key is.
Everything else came back clean, and it is worth recording what was checked so
the next audit knows what "checked" meant: 13 item types opened, all render; the
expedition sheet (4 tabs); all 7 chat cards driven through their real entry
points — roll, coherence, reaction via Combat.rollAll, hit location, weapon
damage, major wound, and contact through a case file that actually has a group;
all 3 dialogs opened by clicking the controls a player clicks. No errors, no raw
localisation keys anywhere.
Also: Culland Hall as a playable Scene. Drawn as SVG rather than generated,
because a room count, a door position and a label are all load-bearing here and
a generator cannot be trusted with any of them — three label-collision passes in
the browser before it was clean, which is the documented cost of doing it this
way. 2800x2000 at 100px to the square so the Foundry grid lands on the grid
drawn into the image; 5ft squares; no walls, because half-done walls are worse
than none and a GM who wants vision can add them in ten minutes.
Verified in Foundry: the scene imports, activates, and draws.
Version 1.0.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
OPEN DAY was too complex for a first night: a fixed timetable the GM narrates
minute by minute, three things that must be left unresolved, ten serial approach
scenes, and no combat. This is the replacement opener — same premise engine,
a third of the moving parts, and something to hit.
A cheap scare attraction on the last night of its six-week run, in a real empty
hall, with paying public still inside. Three of the ghosts on the poster were
invented in an afternoon by a marketing agency, printed on the tickets and the
wall panel and the call sheets, and performed forty times a night to twelve
thousand people who agreed to believe them for eighteen pounds each. They are
in the building now. They are not ghosts, they are entries, and they have
exactly as much inside them as was written down — a page each, which they do,
and nothing else. That makes them simple to run and simple to stop: hurt them,
or break the script. Both work; the script is faster and cheaper, and a table
that finds it should feel clever.
The fourth name on the panel was copied off a memorial in the parish church
because the layout needed four. Edith Crane was real, died in a real fire here
in 1963, and nobody wrote her a page because nobody had to. She never attacks,
cannot be hurt, and will not speak until she is asked her name. She wants her
name off a poster. The night ends on whether it comes down tonight or on Monday
— and Monday is two performances away.
Written for the second intake specifically, on their civilian sheets, with each
one's job as their way in: Renshaw is IN the show and knows the running order,
Ferriby wired it, Sharrock built the sets, Pollard is on the door, Braithwaite
and Ashcroft paid to get in. Each shortcuts a different part of the middle and
none of them is required.
Art: eight plates commissioned, seven kept. The wall panel plate was cut after
two attempts both produced three frames instead of four — a picture that
contradicts a count the scenario turns on is worse than no picture, so the panel
is a handout the GM shows rather than describes. The freed green-room plate went
onto the Act One page, where the call sheet is.
OPEN DAY stays in the repo as the longer, quieter alternative; both scenarios
say plainly which is which and that nothing depends on the choice.
Verified in Foundry: the adventure imports, six cast, seven GM pages, five
handouts, plates load.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Written for the group that actually plays. Three postings and three trades
again, and none of the six repeats a posting or a trade already on the sheet,
so the roster now covers sixteen different jobs and no two players can pick the
same character by accident.
Gareth Pollard Night Warden Field Officer
Dominic Ashcroft Anchor Officer Senior Field Officer
Neil Braithwaite Pathology Officer Field Officer
Kate Renshaw Interview Officer Senior Field Officer
Danny Sharrock Construction Worker Probationary
Colin Ferriby IT Specialist Probationary
Each also gets a before-the-department entry, because without one they cannot
play OPEN DAY — the prologue builds its civilians off the BEFORE table, and the
build throws on a roster agent that has no entry in it. Two of the six were
already trades, so their civilian self is the same job with none of the kit.
Two guards had to be corrected rather than satisfied, both for the same reason:
they had encoded an accident of the roster being exactly ten.
- "the ten cover all ten trades exactly once" cannot survive a sixteenth
agent. The property that actually matters is that no trade is missing, so
that is what it asserts now.
- "the roster should be half trades" would mean picking characters to satisfy
a ratio. It now asserts both halves are present and neither dwarfs the
other, and separately that no job appears twice — which is the check with
real teeth, and it passes.
The portrait pass caught an arithmetic slip of mine: Sharrock came back looking
early forties against a sheet that said 35, and his biography says twenty years
on sites, which would have him starting at fifteen. He is 42.
Verified in Foundry: 36 pregens in the pack, all twelve import, sheets render
with their portraits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ten civilians, one decommissioned telephone exchange, and eleven minutes during
which the building went back to being on the street it was built on. Nothing
attacks anybody. Nothing wants anything. That is the horror, and it is the whole
design.
The premise was already in the pregens. Wren Finch's biography said she was
inside a building "on the night it stopped being on the street it was on", and
Soraya Rahimi's said she talked a caller down on air "for eleven minutes, and
the recording does not play back the same way twice". Those are two views of one
afternoon, so the scenario is built at the intersection and the other eight
"How they found her/him" lines are the same afternoon from eight more jobs.
Nothing in the prologue contradicts a sheet, because the sheets came first.
The reconciliation pass, which is most of the work:
- Finch's line said "night". The open day is an afternoon. One word changed on
the pregen, and both are true. Her line also says she was the only witness
who could describe the inside, so she is the one who goes into number 11 —
written into the location note rather than left to chance.
- Rahimi's line says she was ON AIR. So the disconnected telephone that rings
at 15:45 is patched through to her outside broadcast, which makes the canon
line and the scene the same event instead of two coincidences.
- Okonkwo carries two men out; Nkemdirim's patient has a forearm that healed
crooked over a break he took six minutes ago. Both seams needed an injury in
Act Two and there was none, so 15:50 and 15:51 now have one.
- Sandoval's forty minutes of traffic sit inside an eleven-minute window. That
is the anomaly, so it is on the handout in those words.
- "Prine" collided with an NPC already in the world. The engineer is Kearsley.
Structure: 2h15 against the house 3h30, stated in the design intent, because a
prologue exists to make the first real case land. No combat, no antagonist, no
Coherence — the last one is thematic, not a simplification: Coherence is what it
costs to keep looking once you know what you are looking at, and these ten do
not know yet. The Briefing is the first time the word is said aloud.
Ships as docs/scenarios/OPEN_DAY.md (the full GM document) and a Foundry
Adventure in a new `prologue` pack: 8 GM pages, 7 handouts, 5 NPCs, and ten
generated plates. The PCs are the "(before)" pregens already in the Pregens
pack — a second copy here would give a GM two sets of the same ten people and
no way to know which one their notes were on.
Verified in Foundry: the adventure imports, both journals render branded, the
countdown table reads as a table, and all ten plates load.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five postings and five trades, so a group choosing from this sheet meets both
halves of character creation without anyone having to explain them.
Skills and kit are not written out per agent. They are expanded from the
register at build time by the same helper the starter scenario uses, which is
hoisted out of the BLACK PLATFORM block for the purpose — two copies of that
expansion is two places for the induction rule to drift. Ratings sit at the
middle of each band rather than being rolled, because a pregen that varies
between installs is not a pregen.
Portraits are generated art, resized to 512 and stored as webp (12MB of PNG
became 210KB). buildActor now takes a portrait and gives the same face to the
prototype token: a pregen you can recognise on the map is worth more at a
convention table than a correct one you cannot tell apart. It throws on a
portrait that is not on disk, because a broken image on a pregen sheet is the
sort of thing that is first noticed on a projector.
Guard: check-behaviour gains a test that every roster agent names a real
posting or trade and has its portrait on disk, verified to bite. It caught
"archive", which is not a posting — Bhattacharya is Registry.
Verified in a running Foundry: 14 pregens in the pack, sheets render with the
portraits, coherence and hit points fill from the template, no system errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
