A shield is the one piece of armour you hold, and it protects you exactly as much as
you are currently holding it up. Raised, its points apply to what it covers and it can
parry on a new Shield skill. Lowered, it is weight. The price of keeping it up is that
it occupies a hand and you are shooting around it: -20% to your own ranged attacks,
printed on the card like everything else. Only one shield goes up at a time.
Seven of them, 2-point buckler to 6-point ballistic shield; the pavise and barrier
plate cover legs too because they are walls you carry.
`degradation` finally does something — it has been on every armour item since the packs
were first built and was read by nothing. A blow costs the shield a point of wear for
every step it stood above an ordinary success, so an ordinary hit costs nothing, a
special 1 and a critical 2. At its limit it comes apart, drops, and will not be raised
again.
Two defects found by driving the real functions rather than reading the diff, both
introduced by this change:
- Every shield defence quietly rolled DODGE. "shield" passed through
defenceTypeAllowed unchanged, so neither parry branch matched and it fell through.
Invisible in the card; it showed up as eight rolls at a supposed 85% returning six
failures. Taking a blow on the shield IS a parry, so it is now a flag on a parry
rather than a defence type of its own.
- The wear rule was unreachable: it fired only on a clean stop, but under graded
defences only a critical fully stops a critical, so a shield would never have taken
a scratch. Wear is for what the shield ABSORBED — dragging a critical down to a
special is exactly when shields splinter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Asking for the type of armour per location turned out not to be a display request.
Every equipped piece added its points to EVERY location, so a Brodie helmet protected
your shins and a cuirass protected your skull — with a catalogue containing sallets,
lobster-tail helmets and three cuirasses, that could not be printed without the sheet
saying something visibly false.
Armour now declares coverage as a named set rather than a list of locations, because a
piece has to fit whatever body wears it: all, torso, torsoArms, torsoLimbs, head. The
sets expand to location KINDS, so a cuirass covers a baseline torso and a vesh trunk
and ridge without either knowing the other exists. Unstated coverage is `all`, so
anything that does not declare behaves as everything did before. Eighteen of the
twenty-five catalogue pieces are not whole-body and now say so.
The trap was double counting: hitLocationRoll subtracted the global worn total PLUS
the body's own armour at that location, which was right while armour was global and
becomes a double count the moment a location knows its own pieces. It reads the
location's total and nothing else, verified by firing fourteen hits of 10 damage
across every location and asserting damage applied == 10 - that location's armour.
A single ARMOUR number no longer exists, so the header shows the torso with "0-8 by
location" beside it when the rest of you is not that. This is a real difficulty
change: limbs are frequently bare and limbs are 12 of 20 on the melee table.
Coherence moves out of the derived strip into the vitals at hit-point size, with its
band under it and the box reddening as it falls.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The goods yard fight made the case: three agents inside the same pool of light shot at
-50% while the fourth, four metres away, shot at -10%.
A lamp now has a reach, per item rather than global, because a weapon lamp and a
vehicle searchlight are not the same offer — 4 m for cold light strips, 6 m for a
weapon lamp, 10 m for the issue field lamp, 30 m for a roof searchlight. Anyone inside
it is in the light and the card names whose lamp it is, so both halves of the rule
travel together: the pool is one position and the whole group is standing in it.
Measured from the tokens. The shot that started this — no lamp of her own, four metres
from somebody else's, in pitch dark — goes from 20% to 60%, while an agent
twenty-five metres out still eats the full -50%.
An UNKNOWN distance is explicitly not lit: Number(null) is 0, so an unmeasured
distance would otherwise have read as standing on top of the lamp and lit any scene
with no tokens placed. The dialog carries a tick instead, pre-set when the canvas could
measure it and the GM's answer when it could not.
Note: template.json is read when Foundry loads the system, so a deployed server needs
a restart and not just a pull before the migration can stamp the new field.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Selectable fire, with the modifiers on the choice
Every weapon has carried a fireMode since the packs were first built and nothing
read it: a musket could rip a ten-round burst and "rapid" bought a weapon nothing.
FIRE_MODE now gates the burst rules and carries its own attack modifier — slow +10%
and then you work for the next one, fast a second shot at -20% to both, rapid
bursts, beam +5% and it can be held on the target for damage instead of hits. The
gate lives in burstAttack too, so no macro can route round it. `fast` was on five
catalogue weapons and was not in the system's list of modes at all, so re-saving one
of them silently blanked it; the list is derived from the rule now.
burstAttack shipped complete and was reachable from nothing. It is the resolution
path the selector chooses, and takes the dialog's whole stack rather than charging
the player twice for the same burst.
Sights and lamps that apply themselves
A sight is graded by range band, so a telescopic sight is a -10% liability inside
ten metres and worth +20% at extreme, and it only counts if it fits. The band is
already known when the modifier is wanted, so nothing is selected and nothing is
forgotten. The dark costs something now; a carried lamp buys it back to dim, never
to daylight, and the card says it shows them exactly where you are. A migration
fits gear that predates the fields, matched on the stamped key rather than by name.
The damage card
The last card still wearing Foundry's stock dice styling — it posted a bare Roll and
let the core template dress it. It renders through the module's own card now, with
the Roll still on the message so dice stay inspectable.
A rail instead of a strip
Eight tabs across an 820px sheet compressed to 11px type. They run down the side
now, one line each, with counts as badges; the sheet is 152px wider to pay for it.
Also fixed: any weapon with a Coherence cost could not be attacked with AT ALL — the
handler re-read the weapon after an await, when currentTarget is already null, and the
attack died on a TypeError with nothing shown. And the duplicate-rule guard failed an
honest table because FIRE_MODE and speedBands share two key names; it wants a majority
now, and prints partial overlaps rather than swallowing them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
