The stuff between the numbered rooms, in the same 1974 two-ink screen print:
the blast door from inside, the stair, the exchange, the laundry, washroom,
stores, water gallery, cloakroom, kitchen, chapel, workshop, library, barber's
corner, mushroom beds, play space, a family cabin, battery room, ventilation
gallery, haulage incline and the memorial garden. All twenty ride in the
adventure's plate list as 21-40.
Six were regenerated for daylight or the wrong century, and so_27 needed three
attempts: 'changing room' is this scenario's blocked phrase. Both lessons are
in the art sheet.
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>
SO-H01 becomes the full Registry case brief: what the department knows
about Bellhouse, the 1974 return and the stamp, the orders, conduct,
access and the Stores issue. Nothing about the song, the children or
Centre's letters. STANDING_ORDER_HANDOUTS.html prints it on A4 with the
enclosed 1974 Seat return (SO-H02) and Mr Smith's mark.
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>
Cut the register mechanic, the census creature, the paperwork route and
half the clues. The under-twelves know Mr Smith's song from the nightly
creche speaker, so Act Three is a choice: burn the tape and take the
children into care, keep the families below, or cure them with a cut
tape first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tim's ruling. He comes from Outside and speaks for the powers that sleep
there, which the department has no heading for; the census in the Registry
is a Vesh working for him. The open question is marked decided.
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>
New pack ringbrp.standingorder, in the Scenarios folder. It holds the GM
journal (13 pages, one per section), the three player handouts, nine plates
to show, six faces and the Bellhouse section map as a scene. No cast actors,
because nobody in the case has a stat block.
The GM pages are read from docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER.md at build time
rather than transcribed, so the compendium cannot drift from the document the
desk passes ran against. STATUS and Open questions are left out as authoring
notes; STATUS's "not obvious" list leads page 1.
Doc fixes found on the way: the Act Two heading still said ~55 min against a
75-minute budget; STATUS said four passes and "no desk playtest run" after
five; the runtime open question still called 45/55/50 unbacked.
figures-baseline: generator enrolled at 0; STANDING_ORDER.md leaves the
uncited list because it cites.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A narrow verification pass rather than a session: does Act Two land where v0.6
budgets it now that a failed filed-clue roll costs a scene instead of ten
minutes? Seed 4471.
THE RETRY FIX WORKS AND DOES NOT DO WHAT v0.6 ASSUMED. Forced both filed clues
to fail — about one table in seven, since each is a 37% miss at these ratings.
Under the old rule that was twenty minutes and a party standing in Registry
waiting; under the new one Pennyfeather fetches each while they do something
else and it costs nothing, while the roll still means something. So the fix
removes up to twenty minutes of VARIANCE. It does not shorten the typical case,
and Act Two uncut is 75 minutes whether or not anybody fails a filed roll.
AND v0.6 CONTAINED AN ARITHMETIC CONTRADICTION I PUT THERE. The Runtime row
budgeted Act Two at 65 — pass 4's figure, measured with nineteen minutes of cuts
taken — while the Pacing Note two screens later said the correct number of cuts
to plan for is zero. Both cannot be true; it was a ten-minute overrun written in
on purpose. The three prior passes reconcile exactly (75 uncut, and pass 4's 66
is 75 − 19 + 10), so the number was never in doubt, only which configuration it
belonged to. I measured under one configuration, changed the configuration, and
kept the number.
Act Two is now budgeted at its uncut base of 75. Acts of 45 / 75 / 50 is 2h50 of
play, 3h00 wall with the break, in a 3h15 slot — fifteen minutes of real slack
rather than twenty-five claimed ones. The cuts stay optional, which keeps Kit
Marlow's scene, which pass 4 showed is the price of the likeliest ending.
The timing section now records that 75 is the uncut base three passes agree on,
and that the retry fix moved the worst case and not the typical one, so nobody
re-derives the same error the next time the slot moves.
All twenty-one guards pass. Five passes; what is left is human beings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Decided rather than worked around. Four passes measured Act Two's floor at about
66 minutes against a budget that said 55; the alternative was twelve minutes out
of the sick bay, which is where Revelation 3's best route lives. The slot moved,
because 3h00 was an assumption and the sick bay is not.
2h50 of play in three acts of 45 / 65 / 50 plus the break, in a 3h15 slot. Act
Two is budgeted at the 66 pass 4 actually measured with every cut taken, not at
the 56 the retry fix predicts, because nothing has measured the fix. The
twenty-five minutes of slack are deliberate: the house standard says a scenario
landing to the minute with zero slack is a fail for a table of strangers, and
every figure came off a desk pass run by a GM who already knew the document.
THE CUTS ARE NO LONGER DEFAULTS, which is the real answer to pass 4's finding
rather than a workaround for it. They existed because Act Two had to lose twenty
minutes it did not have. At 3h15 the correct number to plan for is zero — and
that retires the trap where the cheapest default cut hollowed out the price of
the likeliest ending.
AND THE REBUDGET EXPOSED AN OLDER DEFECT. The Countdown put step 3 at +1h20 and
step 4 at +2h00, measured from the blast door — so under every budget this
scenario has ever had, both fired AFTER Act Two ended. Both are backstops for
Essential revelations: step 3 is the second road to the sum and step 4 is
Revelation 3's last resort. They were arriving too late to back anything up. The
whole table is re-timed inside the act at +15 / +35 / +45 / +60, the reference
point is stated, and Act One's Stealth roll moves step 2 within that window
instead of pushing Teague past the end of the act.
The act checkpoints were trailing their own acts too — the signing one left five
minutes for the decision. A checkpoint is a point you can still correct from, so
the sum is wanted at 1:40 with twenty minutes of Act Two left, and Act Three's
is ten minutes in. Running times are printed so they mean something.
All twenty-one guards pass. What is left is human beings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pass three passes had not run: an honest session at six players, no
contrarian choices and no forced branches, with the Pacing Note's cuts taken
exactly as written. Seed 6620. Nineteen minutes cut — pipe room folded, Kit
Marlow to the corridor, census dropped.
THE CUTS DID NOT CLOSE THE GAP, AND ONE RETRY UNDID MOST OF THEM. Act Two asks
for six rolls whose failure case was "ten minutes and a second attempt", roughly
two fail in an average session, and a single failed Research handed back ten of
the nineteen minutes that had just been cut. The Pacing Note's arithmetic was
sized against the act's length and never against its variance, so it could not
hold. A failed roll on a filed clue now costs a SCENE instead — Pennyfeather
fetches it while the party do something else — which keeps the roll meaningful
and costs nothing on the clock.
THE CHEAPEST CUT GUTS THE LIKELIEST ENDING. The Pacing Note priced moving Kit
Marlow to a corridor at "the drawings". This pass took that cut and then reached
the narrow row of ending 3 — the likeliest one, since it needs a single dossier
item — whose entire price is that the sixty-one stay unrecorded. Kit is the
sixty-one made into a person and her own entry says she must be a person before
she is a price. The cut is re-costed honestly, and the corridor version now has
to do her one job: she shows them a drawing and asks whether she got the blue
right.
The blanket Act One failure case named Joan for all seven clues, and Joan does
not go down the adit. Clues 6 and 7 now have their own: time, never access,
because the door has never been locked. Joan herself is at the farm AND walks up
with them, so the moor walk has somebody in it. And 13b came off the dice after
a 98 lost the reason the proper channel failed — the thematic centre of the case
— which is now written at the bottom of Pennyfeather's own sheet.
Act Two's floor is about 66 minutes against a budget of 55, measured across
three passes at 75 uncut, 70 uncut and 66 fully cut. The retry fix should
recover most of that and nothing has measured it. THE REMAINING QUESTION IS A
BUDGET DECISION AND IT IS TIM'S: move the slot to 3h15, or take twelve minutes
out of the sick bay and lose Revelation 3's best route. Written up in Open
questions and deliberately not decided here.
All twenty-one guards pass. Four passes, every content defect they found fixed.
What is left is human beings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cadence's third pass: a full session choosing contrarily at every fork,
forced to the one ending nothing had reached. Seed 3307. The party skipped the
scenario's best NPC, told the antagonist the truth before anyone else, refused
the hospitality, split so the wrong specialist was in every room, took a
resident to the surface, and cancelled.
BOTH OF PASS 1'S HEADLINE FIXES WORK, AND ONE WORKS BETTER THAN WRITTEN. The pen
held above the paper converted the ending from pass 2's ninety-second reflex
into a real argument about whether a narrow amendment they could no longer reach
beat a cancellation they could. And Pennyfeather's spoken cost landed on a party
who had failed the birth register, so the sixty-one arrived as new information at
the moment of decision — which is better than knowing in advance, and clue 14 is
demoted to Supporting on the strength of it.
THE SUM HAD ONE ROUTE AND NO FALLBACK. Pass 1 found the Revelation 3 fallback
circular and it was repaired with three roads; nobody then asked whether the
other essential revelations had the same shape. The contrarian split put Insight
40 in Registry instead of 63, one roll failed, and the party cancelled the
Standing Order having never learned why it was urgent. Worse, the clue asked for
a roll that Pennyfeather's own roster line contradicted — she hands the sheet to
anybody who asks her a straight question. The roster line wins: the sum is no
longer behind a roll at all, the Insight now buys what she did about it, and the
establishment return she posts at Countdown step 3 is a second road for a table
that never thinks to ask her anything. Fixing an instance is not fixing a class.
TWO OF THREE HOOKS ROUTED THE PARTY AROUND THE ACT'S ENGINE. Only one hook
involves the farm, and a professional team with a grid reference drives past it
— so Act One ran fifteen minutes short with nobody in it, and both its Essential
clues lost their stated failure case, which is Joan pointing at them. She is now
at the vent head, where the woman in her own entry would be anyway, and no route
into the act can miss her.
Also: the pen pause was staged only for a Teague who stood down and now prints
the hostile version; a photograph brought back down is answered; refusing the tea
is answered; and an uninformed cancellation is written as the ending it deserves
to be, since a party who do the right thing by accident is the best possible
close for a case about people doing the wrong thing correctly.
All twenty-one guards pass.
Three passes and none of them a normal table: GM chair with bad dice, a branch
stress, and a deliberately contrarian run. Pass 3 landed on the 150-minute budget
only because one act collapsed and the other spent the difference. No pass has
run Act Two with its cuts taken. That, and human beings, is what is left.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The house cadence's second pass is a stress re-run of the weakest act. Pass 1
resolved Act Three in eight minutes of fifty and left three of its four branches
untested, so this forces each in turn on seed 8143 — and runs the three creature
encounters through tools/playthrough.mjs, the same runFight the lethality and
focus baselines come from, against this scenario's own declared six rather than
the frozen four.
THE THREE DOSSIER SCENES CHANGED NOTHING. The party assembled one item of three
and rolled 62 against 63 — exactly the roll they would have made with all three,
because Borrowed Authority says items improve the credential and never the roll.
Correct as a rule, catastrophic as staging: the act's best three scenes had no
effect any player could see, and pass 1 could not find it because there the
amendment failed and the question never arose. The items now buy scope instead.
Same roll, three different worlds: a narrow amendment that stops the ash and
leaves the site sealed, a lifted seal, or records above ground for the sixty-one
so Kit Marlow can leave.
ALL THREE CREATURES ARE INVISIBLE TO THE DICE. STERILISATION ORDER, THE
CORRECTION and ENUMERATED are all classified outOfCombat in powers.mjs, so every
measured number is a measurement of the creature's arms and legs and of nothing
that makes it frightening. That is correct bookkeeping, not a defect in the
guard, and it means the GM's text carries the whole threat at the climax. It
did not. The overwriter now comes with four printed corrections specific to this
case, and with the fact that force does not work: measured, one of them cannot
meaningfully hurt anybody and five grind for forty rounds finishing nothing, so
the end of the world was landing as an inconclusive scuffle.
EXPOSURE wiped all six in fifteen rounds with five dead, without the
sterilisation blast firing at all. The warning was right and understated. It now
prints the six-round countdown that lived only in the bestiary entry, the
argue-down as a named Borrowed Authority stretch, and what a failure costs —
five rounds reaches the adit and does not reach the crèche.
The best ending was three sentences, less than the failure branch beneath it,
and now plays out properly: the tannoy, nobody cheering, Pennyfeather filing it,
and Joan sweeping a yard that stays swept.
The four-player cut was one sentence from disaster. Science (Biology) and
Medicine are the only skills that vanish with Okonkwo and Nkemdirim, the cut
note happened to reassign exactly those two clues, and check-rollable never saw
any of it because the cast declaration names six and the cut is prose. Both
clues are now written on Knowledge and Insight for every table size, so nothing
load-bearing depends on an unguarded sentence.
All twenty-one guards pass, and the document has entered check-figures' strict
regime now that it carries citations.
Still untested: ending 1, and with it Pennyfeather speaking the cost and the pen
held above the paper — pass 1's two headline fixes. Pass 3 is the player chair,
contrarian, and should cancel.
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>
