portraitSvg read `spec.species` for both the silhouette and the hit-location
table. Every creature with a non-human body carries `species: "baseline"` and
says what it is in `bodyPlan`, so the guildhall gryphon's own generated
portrait described it as "baseline, 7 hit locations" and drew a human figure
for an eagle-lion with wings. 48 creatures were affected — 32 quadrupeds and
16 winged.
It is the same defect, in the same shape, as the anatomy clause in
mj-queue.mjs: that one read `species` where the shape lives in `bodyPlan`,
and drew a wingless gryphon. I fixed it there earlier tonight and did not
look one file over, in the other tool that draws a creature from its
statblock. R-264 settled this rule for the harness — `bodyPlan ?? species` —
and build-packs:294 writes it to the actor's speciesProfile.
Only two files change on disk, because 46 of the 48 already have hand-drawn
plates and are correctly skipped. Those two are martlet and moor_cat, whose
Midjourney art has now failed twice, so they are exactly the creatures
falling back on the generated figure: martlet is winged with 10 locations and
moor_cat quadruped with 8, where both were human before.
The other 139 rewrote byte-identically, which is what a deterministic
generator should do and is worth knowing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CREATURE_FORGE_PLAN Part 5. A third button on the Actors sidebar, beside New
agent and New NPC. Pick what it does, how big it is and how bad it is; the
card underneath describes what those settings will actually produce, because
the argument for a derivation over a form is that it can be interrogated, and
choosing between "brute" and "sentinel" from two nouns is not interrogating
anything. The card is itself forged rather than written, so it cannot
describe a creature the derivation would not make.
generateCreature reads the catalogues out of the packs and calls the same
forgeCreature the CLI calls. Natural attacks carry their body-plan
declarations into flags.ringbrp.plans so the engine can read them.
The plan asks that the panel and the CLI cannot diverge, and importing one
derivation was most of that guarantee but not all of it: the two feed it from
DIFFERENT catalogues — content.mjs on one side, the built compendium on the
other. check-forge now builds the engine's view straight out of packs/weapons
and requires both to forge the same creature.
It found a divergence on its first run, in 40 of 90 pairs. The fallback took
the first usable natural attack from the caller's list, and that list arrives
in declaration order from content.mjs and in id order from the pack, so a
tiny vesh brute was punching for the CLI and constricting at the table. The
derivation may not depend on its caller's iteration order; it imposes its
own now.
Not yet verified in a running Foundry. The pure derivation is covered by 450
guarded combinations and the catalogue seam by the agreement check above, but
Actor.create, the pack reads and the dialog itself are the part
check-behaviour says outright it cannot reach. They need a world open, and
that has not happened yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The illustrations were sitting in art/creatures/, where nothing looked for
them. build-packs resolves a creature's picture by stem under art/portraits/,
so none of the 47 reached the game.
tools/make-art.py (was make-tokens.py) now derives both from one plate:
art/portraits/<key>.webp and art/tokens/<key>.webp. Same drawing, so the
token cannot disagree with the portrait — the argument mj-queue already makes
for deriving prompts from statblocks.
Webp because every one of the 309 art files already here is one, at 160-220
KB. The raw Midjourney plates are 2.3 MB each; 47 of them would have put 93
MB into a 29 MB repository permanently, for pictures nothing renders at that
size. At quality 88 a plate is ~300 KB with the pencil hatching intact. The
plates stay on disk as working files and are gitignored.
The token lookup in build-packs was a hardcoded `.png`, so the first webp
token would have silently fallen back to the portrait and Foundry would have
gone back to cropping a 2:3 plate into a circle. Portraits and tokens now
share one resolver and one extension list.
146 of 147 npcs carry a portrait and 46 a derived token.
Also: the gryphon came back as a mech a second time. The first fix branched
the armour SIMILE on era while both arms still opened with the word
"armoured", and that word is what Midjourney draws — changing the reasoning
is not the same as changing the cause. No natural creature's prompt contains
"armour" now, and negativesFor() asks for plate, machinery and worn armour to
be left out, because a word choice is an argument and a --no is closer to a
guarantee.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three faults, all in how an actor reaches the table.
THE TOKEN WAS THE PORTRAIT. prototypeToken.texture pointed at the portrait
file, which is a 2:3 field-guide plate — full figure on plain ground.
Foundry draws a token square, so it was squeezing a tall plate into it and
showing a torso. tools/make-tokens.py now derives a 512px circular RGBA
token from the same illustration: not a second Midjourney pass, because
that would double the spend and still give a token that does not quite
match its own portrait. Sized by the subject's DIAGONAL, since these
creatures are tall and narrow and padding by the longest side wasted a
third of the circle. Padded, never cropped — cropping to a square clipped
the first gryphon's head off.
EVERY TOKEN WAS 1x1. A hearth hob, a carthorse and a SIZ 32 dun cow all
held one square. Footprint now comes from SIZ, cut at 21 and 30: 132 at
1x1, 14 at 2x2, 1 at 3x3.
THE 100 CREATURES WERE IN NO COMPENDIUM. build-packs reads NPCS directly
rather than collectSpecs(), so the bestiary validated, was drawn, had
prompts written, and did not exist in the game. The npcs pack held 47
actors; it holds 147 now.
That is the fourth consumer found bypassing all-specs.mjs, whose own header
calls one-definition-only "this repository's one standing law" —
bestiary.mjs and check-lethality.mjs still do. check-lethality is the one
that matters: it cannot see the new creatures, so it is measuring 47 of
147 while reporting OK.
All 23 guards pass. npm run build is red at update-readme for an unrelated
pre-existing reason: the README advertises a guard list that package.json
no longer matches.
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>
The man who told Vane what the chart had to say now has a name: a Mr Smith,
with the company's paper, whom the company never employed. Vane names him if
asked and cannot picture his face. A "do not resolve" line says who he is not
to be explained here: he is the thread into STANDING ORDER.
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>
cdbb2e3 added "When two people want opposite things" to the rules text but did
not rebuild packs/rules, so the compendium has been a section behind the
source since. Content-checked against HEAD: this is the only page that differs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
R-254 shipped the belly rule and called +6.4 points "modest on purpose". That read the
wrong statistic. +6.4 measured whether grounding helps; the question was whether the
borough still matters, and the gap between fighting the supporter on borough ground and
off it had fallen from 60.6 points to 44.9. Half damage from every departmental weapon is
meant to be the fight's central problem, and I had quietly taken sixteen points off it
while reporting a small number about something else. Same error as R-251.
Three changes that only work together:
- hide 7 -> 9, restoring the weight on the axis that should hurt
- grounded still halves it, 9 -> 4, which an ordinary round beats
- exposedHideFor now takes the location's kind and leaves `vital` unhalved: a beast on
its belly is not presenting its chest to the floor
Measured: 28.4% on borough ground flying, 68.4% grounded, 84.6% off it — a 56.2 point gap
against 44.9 before. Predicted 28.4 / 84.3 / 55.9 before building.
The composition of the three hide functions lives in prepareDerivedData where no test
could reach it, and check-anatomy's guard 6 is deliberately one-sided so it would not
have caught the vital losing its exemption. check-behaviour now composes the same
expression from the real supporter spec and the real tables. Negative-tested four ways:
removing the exemption, un-baring the wings, removing the halving, and inflating the hide
past what a round can beat each fail it with the right message.
Cost: the supporter goes from fifth to second deadliest creature in the book (2.84 -> 3.38
down, 46.8% -> 69.3% wiped). check-lethality refused the build until that row was
deliberately re-recorded.
BESTIARY.md printed the new hide and said nothing about it halving, because the body-plan
blurb predates the rule. The README said "eight guards" in three sentences above a
generated block listing nine. Both are the signature defect in prose: a number written
down that nothing reads. Both now generate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Option H, measured before it was built. Losing a wing already mattered
once it happened — a grounded supporter was 40.5% to be killed against
9.3% for one still flying, a swing of thirty points. It almost never
happened: the wings carried the creature's own six points of heraldic
hide, so folding one meant beating armour six eight times over, and it
occurred in 9% of fights. The rule was reachable, not weak, and every
option that made grounding HURT more moved the win rate by under five
points because you cannot spend a state you never reach.
So the lever is the wing, not the consequence. A location may now be
`bare`: worn armour still covers it — barding a wing works exactly as
before — but the animal's own hide stops at the edge of the membrane.
The supporter's wings are bare, and it gets the toughness back where a
six-hundred-year-old record should carry it: hide 6 -> 7, CON 20 -> 36,
so 22 hit points become 30. STR and SIZ are untouched, so the damage
modifier stays +2d6.
Measured over 20,000 fights against the same four agents:
grounded on borough off borough
before 9% 12.5% win 85.6% win / 14.4% wiped
after 67% 22.1% win 83.5% win / 16.5% wiped
The wing shot becomes the play. Fighting it on borough ground stays a
losing proposition, so ARGENT AND GULES is still the real answer and
grounding improves a bad fight rather than replacing the solution — and
the fight off borough ground keeps its teeth, marginally more lethal
than before rather than less. Bare wings ALONE was the trap: it made
grounding routine and turned the off-ground fight into a 96% walkover
with a 3.8% wipe rate, buying the text at the cost of the encounter.
check-anatomy gains the property this whole thread was about: a plan
whose behaviour turns on losing a wing must not armour that wing with
the creature's own hide, or the rule is decoration. Negative-tested by
putting the hide back.
Also re-records the lethality baseline, which was ALREADY stale: HEAD's
own code reproduced 27 of its 47 entries differently, because the
supporter joined NPCS in ddc4f99 and shifted the shared random stream
for every creature measured after it. Every drift sat under the guard's
six-point tolerance, so it passed while being wrong. Worth knowing that
the file's claim — "the only thing that can move the number is a change
to the rules or to the creature" — is not currently true: adding any
creature perturbs the rest. Seeding per creature would fix it and is
not done here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE DEFECT. locationFor had ONE caller in the engine, hitLocationRoll, and
hitLocationRoll was called from fall, burn, detonate and burstAttack. Falling,
fire, explosions and automatic fire. Nothing else. rollWeaponDamage rolled dice,
printed a number and returned it, so the chat Damage button, the character
sheet's damage button and the item sheet's all stopped there.
A grenade knew which arm it took off. A sword did not.
Every individual piece was already correct - the tables, per-location armour and
coverage, disable and destroy thresholds, Major Wound, dying, death, the figure
on the sheet. They simply were not joined up, which is why this reads as a wiring
change rather than a new subsystem.
- rollWeaponDamage now carries through to hitLocationRoll: it rolls the location,
applies that location's armour, applies the wound, and handles the rest through
the machinery that already owned it. Nothing here re-implements any of that
- locationModeFor picks the melee or ranged column from the weapon's class. The
two columns have always differed and nothing was choosing between them
- with no target it does exactly what it did before and SAYS SO on a card, rather
than failing quietly
- burstAttack opts out with locate:false - it rolls its own location per round,
and letting both fire would have applied every round of a burst twice
BODY PLANS. Two new tables: quadruped (four legs, fore/hindquarters, neck, a head
that is hard to reach) and winged (that, plus wings). Forequarters are the vital.
DISABLE EITHER WING AND IT CANNOT FLY, which is the fight a party can win.
Barghest, Kelpie and Church grim were all species "baseline" - a black dog, a
horse and a grave-hound, each hit-located with two arms and a chest. Fixed. Added
"The supporter", a winged heraldic beast, so the new table is exercised by real
content instead of existing unused.
Body plan is a NEW FIELD, not a species. A bear is not a playable people with
characteristic dice and talents, so creature specs take bodyPlan and the playable
species list is untouched.
THE NPC SHEET had no hit locations at all - 102 lines against the character
sheet's 627 - while every NPC in the game had them derived and wired to
consequences. It now carries the body-plan selector, the figure, the per-location
table, the condition and a GROUNDED flag. The sheet class already extended the
character sheet, so it already HAD the context; the template never used it.
FOUND IN PASSING, by the new guard: kind "body" - the abdomen, the trunk, the
hindquarters - did nothing whatever. Its printed effect has always promised "-30%
to all Physical actions and bleeding 1 hit point per round until First Aid" and
the code delivered none of it, on every body plan including the humanoid default.
It now bleeds 1, or 2 destroyed, exactly as bodyX says.
NEW GUARD: check-anatomy. Every body plan must cover 1-20 exactly once in BOTH
modes, every location must be drawn and every drawn shape must be a location, and
every kind must be one locationEffectsFor acts on, has effect text for, and has a
destruction outcome. Verified it fails on a d20 gap, a shapeless limb and an
unhandled kind before wiring it in. Ninth guard.
VERIFIED IN A RUNNING FOUNDRY, not just unit-tested: melee bar reads the Melee
column and the rifle reads Ranged on the same creature; forequarters graded as a
vital hit; a maxed wing set flightLost and the sheet said GROUNDED; the real chat
Damage button rolled 1D20 15, found the right foreleg, applied 12 through armour,
disabled the leg and took the dog from 16 to 4; and with nothing targeted nothing
was touched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Forty-six creatures and no way to look at them. They live in content.mjs, which is
source code, and in the compendium, which shows one actor at a time behind two clicks.
A GM prepping a case can browse neither, so in practice the bestiary was whatever the
GM happened to remember writing.
docs/BESTIARY.md is generated, never hand-written, for the reason the rules journal is
generated from rules.mjs: a reference that can disagree with the thing it references is
worse than no reference. It opens with a one-page table sorted by how much of a party
each creature puts on the floor - the part that gets printed - then an entry each with
characteristics, attack, the POWER line pulled out of the tactics, and the measured
figure read straight from the lethality baseline. Every number is derived, so the
document cannot drift, and check-lethality already refuses the build if the measurements
move.
IT FOUND SOMETHING IN ITS FIRST RUN. The generic heavy natural attack is keyed `grasp`
and was NAMED "Vesh grasp limb". Twenty-two creatures carry it and five are Vesh, so the
at-a-glance table cheerfully printed "Vesh grasp limb" against a black dog, a kelpie, a
church grim and an apple tree. Renamed to "Grasping limb"; the key is untouched, so
every kit reference and every built pack still resolves. That defect was invisible for
as long as nobody could see the bestiary in one place, which is the argument for the
document.
The caveats are given more room than the numbers, deliberately. The measured column is
SOLO against ONE frozen party, and the document says so three times: encounter lethality
moves with how many there are and, much harder, with who the players brought - the same
fight runs 0% to 100% across party choice. It points at --spread rather than pretending
a single figure is an answer.
Also records the real remaining gap: 21 creatures fight with nothing but their own
bodies and still carry human anatomy, so the barghest can be shot in the left arm. The
machinery to fix that is built and measured; what is missing is anatomy tables for the
shapes they actually are - a quadruped, an immobile object, a swarm.
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>
LOG is LevelDB's diagnostic text — "Delete type=3 #1" and compaction notes — and it is
rewritten every time a pack is OPENED. Not rebuilt: opened. So all eighteen went dirty
whenever anything merely read the compendia, Foundry and any verification script
alike, and pack churn kept turning up in commits that had not touched any content.
Verified disposable before ignoring rather than assumed: a copy of packs/npcs with LOG
and LOG.old deleted opens cleanly, reads back all 21 actors, and LevelDB writes itself
a fresh LOG on open.
CURRENT and MANIFEST-* stay committed, deliberately. They are how a fresh clone finds
the data, and ignoring them would ship compendia nobody can open.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
76 of 76, up from 16. The npcs pack goes from every creature on the generic silhouette
to all 21 with art, and each token carries the same face as its sheet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Roster agents carry no talents of their own; they expand from their posting at build
time, so changing the pools left the compendia a version behind the register.
Rebuilt with Foundry stopped. Verified by reading the built pack back: 36 packed actors,
none carrying Unblinking, Distributed or Quorum. No lost/ directories, so the packs took
the write without needing repair.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The talent fixes changed source without the compendia following, so the packs said
Braithwaite had Unblinking while roster.mjs said Clean Scene. Rebuilt with Foundry
stopped. Verified in the built pack: no agent carries a vesh talent, and Ashcroft keeps
Out of Step beside Borrowed Hour and Not Quite Here, which is now legal because it is
anomalous rather than species.
The README's guard box regenerated with the new totals, and its prose said "five guards"
in three places when there are seven.
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>
Reversed experience. A skill is marked when it FAILS - failure or fumble - and
never when it works, and the improvement roll is the same reversal: roll OVER
your rating and the skill goes up 1d6. Nobody learns anything from the lock that
opened first time.
The two halves pull against each other on purpose, so ratings converge instead of
running away. Simulated over 2000 campaigns: a 10% and an 85% skill start 75
points apart and are 11 apart after 60 cases.
- rules.mjs owns it: DEVELOPMENT, developmentMarksOn, developmentImproves,
developmentCeiling, developmentGainFor
- trainingCap has been on the skill schema and the item sheet since it was
written and nothing has ever read it. Development reads it now: a skill stops
at its own cap, and everything else stops at DEVELOPMENT.ceiling, because a
d6 gain could otherwise push a 98% skill past 100
- GM opens the phase from a GM-only toggle in the token controls; it posts a
card naming every agent and their marked count, and puts a Development button
on each sheet. Players press their own
- the toggle re-reads the setting on change, since getSceneControlButtons only
fires at load and the button would otherwise lie if the phase were opened by
the API or a second GM
- rules journal and player primer rewritten from the tables; the old text
described the pre-reversal rule on both halves
- 7 spot-checks, 4 behaviour tests; verified end to end in a running Foundry
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
At two, the closing beat of a hard case broke four agents in five at the same
moment. A whole party freezing or bolting on the final scene reads as arithmetic
rather than grief, which is the opposite of what the trigger is for. Found by
playing THROUGH TRAIN end to end.
Replayed the same beat from the same party state — Holloway 3, Okonkwo 2,
Bhattacharya 4, Nkemdirim 3, Finch 2 — with the new cost: one agent breaks, the
rest carry it at 3 and 4 with the penalties that implies. That is the shape it
wanted.
"It said your name" stays at two, and is now the only two-point trigger in the
list, which is right — it should be the singular worst thing that can happen to
somebody.
The rules journal and the player primer both generate their trigger tables from
PANIC_TRIGGERS, so both already print the new number.
Version 1.4.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ran the whole case with five agents — briefing, kit swap, Mercy Draw, the
crossing, Cordera, the water tower, the four minutes, the locomotive, the
brakes, the register. It completed, and it exposed one serious defect and two
smaller ones. All three are the same shape: the scenario put dice in front of
things the fiction says should simply happen.
1. THE ENDING WAS UNREACHABLE. Convincing Kell to stop was gated on Persuade
or Status. Only THREE of the ten duty-roster agents have either trained —
the Field Lead has Persuade 15 and Status 15. Three separate attempts on
him all failed and the scenario had no way to end; I narrated it as working
because otherwise there was no ending, which is exactly the improvisation a
scenario is supposed to prevent.
It now takes NO ROLL if the party can tell Kell one true thing about his own
train — the coal, the four minutes, the north bench. He has waited a
hundred and forty-five years for somebody who knows what is wrong to say
so. Only a party that knows nothing rolls, at average, and a failure costs
a pass rather than the ending.
2. THE PAPERS NEEDED PERSUADE. Showing one side the other's document is the
move the scenario is proudest of, and it sat behind Persuade at −30%:
15% became 1%. Both men WANT their paper read — Merritt is proud of his
letter, Ambrose's whole grievance is that nobody has looked at his writ.
No roll, between passes.
3. THE BOARDING SORTED ITSELF BADLY. Athletics runs 25–60% across the roster.
Putting all five on the water tower left the doctor and the Registry officer
missing twice each, carried across on the department's plank, passengers in
their own set-piece, two passes gone. The text now names which route suits
whom before they choose.
What worked, and is worth recording: the automatic clues absorbed two failed
rolls in Act One without the trail stalling; Standing Order 9 caught Okonkwo
checking a wristwatch in an 1881 street and cost a Coherence and a clock tick;
the fumble-is-a-fall rule fired on a 100 at the tower for five damage; the
exposure table held — one hit across the whole fight, on the agent who left
cover to work on Doyle; and the reset landed exactly as intended, with Doyle
standing up at the top of the car and Nkemdirim's hit staying where it was.
Version 1.4.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
LevelDB LOG timestamps only — no content change. Committed so the tree matches a
build made with Foundry stopped, which is the state the published archive should
carry.
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>
Ran THE HOLLOW ROAD with five agents — approach, crossing, contact, the thing on
the road, extraction, debrief — with panic and Coherence both live. It ran clean
and it found one thing that mattered.
ANOMALY LORE 0. Marta Holloway, Field Lead, Senior Field Officer, could not roll
the department's signature skill. Nor could Okonkwo. Induction was gated to
TRADES on the reasoning that a career posting is itself the agency training —
but 17 of the 25 postings do not list anomaly lore, its printed base is 0 on
purpose, and nothing else supplies it. So the people who joined the department
straight out of school were the only ones who never received its basic training,
which is exactly backwards.
Induction is a FLOOR for everybody now, posting or trade, in the live generator
and the pack builder both. It never demotes: Bhattacharya keeps Registry's 63,
Holloway goes 0 → 43, Okonkwo 0 → 33. All twenty built agents verified non-zero.
Two GM tools the case showed were missing, both found by feeling the friction
rather than by reading anything:
- clearPanic(actors). Panic clears when the scene does — one line in the book
and, until now, five sheets edited by hand while the table waited. It leaves
Coherence alone, which is the whole point of having two tracks.
- partyState(). Everybody's hit points, panic and Coherence in one card. With
five agents the alternative is asking "what are you on?" five times a scene,
which is friction a table absorbs silently and then blames on the game.
And the player-facing gap: the primer never mentioned panic. Players got a
one-page aide-memoire for a track they now meet in the first scene. It has a
page of its own and a row on the cheat sheet, both generated from the same
tables as the rules.
One thing I reported as a bug and withdraw: Okonkwo's "Firearm (Pistol) 5%" was
me rolling the wrong weapon. He carries a marksman rifle at 53%. check-kits was
right.
Version 1.2.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ran the east corridor again with fresh dice and every relief attempt routed
through easePanic, fumbles included.
The rule did not fire this time. All three attempts failed cleanly — Psychology
58 against 40, and two POW×5 rolls at 66 and 76 — so nobody was punished for
trying. That is worth reporting as loudly as a hit would have been: two
play-throughs in and a fumbled relief has come up once, which is about right for
something meant to be a memorable disaster rather than a tax.
Braithwaite still broke at 5 on "it said your name" and fled. Marrow went down
in a single round to a special with the entry bar — 19 through armour — against
the 4.5-round average the thirty-run tuning gave, so that was dice, not balance.
Then the question the rule actually raises. Relief rolls are made at your own
panic penalty, so the worse you are the worse your odds AND the wider your fumble
range — and now a fumble adds a point. That is a feedback loop, so I measured it
rather than trusting it, 300 runs per row:
from 2, POW×5 60% 280 calm · 0 broke
from 3, POW×5 60% 227 calm · 2 broke
from 4, POW×5 60% 138 calm · 31 broke
from 4, POW×5 50% 96 calm · 35 broke
from 4, POW×5 85% 267 calm · 5 broke
Recovery dominates everywhere. The worst case — overwhelmed, weak POW, no help —
spirals into breaking about one time in eight, which is a bad night rather than a
trap. No change needed.
Also: panicReliefFor and panicAfter were missing from the API, which I only
noticed because measuring the loop needed them and the alternative was
re-implementing the rule in the test — the exact duplication check-rules exists
to forbid. Both exposed.
Version 1.1.3.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Trying to steady somebody and making it worse is the most familiar thing on that
list, and until now it was the only outcome that cost nothing.
Done as a NEGATIVE relief rather than a second code path: panicReliefFor returns
-1 on a fumble, and easePanic already subtracts what it is given, so subtracting
a negative raises the track. One number, one direction, no branch that could
drift from the other. The clamp still holds — fumbling at 5 stays at 5.
The chat card had to be told, because otherwise it prints the word "Psychology"
over a number that has just gone UP and the table reads that as a bug rather than
as the rule. It now leads with a red FUMBLED tag.
Guarded three ways: a spot-check in check-rules for the -1 itself, and two
behaviour tests — one that the sign survives easePanic's subtraction and
actually raises the track, one that it cannot push past the top. A test on the
constant alone would have passed even if easePanic had healed on a fumble.
Verified live: 2 → fumble → 3 → success → 2 → special → 0, and a fumble at 5
staying at 5, with the cards reading correctly.
Version 1.1.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ran LAST ADMISSION's east corridor with the six civilians and real dice. The
track works end to end and, more importantly, the penalty REACHES things:
Ferriby at panic 3 swung at Old Marrow with Brawl 25% printed and 15% effective,
while Sharrock at panic 1 rolled his full 58%. That is the whole point of the
track and it is the part that is usually decoration.
The arc played well. Lights out took four of them to 1. The body took Braithwaite
and Ferriby to 2. Enderby counting took three of them again. Braithwaite fumbled
his Psychology roll trying to talk Colin down, then it said his name — 5, broke,
fled, came back at 3. Renshaw steadied herself on POW×5 and dropped to 1.
One thing I got wrong and one thing worth knowing:
- I flagged a 99 grading as a fumble as a bug. It is not. A 58% skill fumbles
on 98-00, and both the primer and the rules page say so in those words. The
"96-99 never succeed / 00 always fumbles" pair are floor rules, not the whole
fumble range. Only the quick-reference row was ambiguous — it now says
"never succeeds ... and is a fumble if it is inside your fumble range".
- The civilians cannot use two of the three new skills. Occult, Religion and
Psychology sit at 5% on the "(before)" sheets, so in the prologue the only
relief that works is POW×5 at 50-85%. That is correct — a site foreman is
not an occultist — but it means the skills are an AGENT'S tools, and the
prologue is deliberately the game without them. The agents have them where
they should: Bhattacharya Occult 63, Lindqvist 58, Renshaw Psychology 40,
Braithwaite Religion 35.
Version 1.1.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Deleted: the seven PNGs in dice/, tools/make-dice-textures.mjs, the `npm run
dice` script, the RB_DICE colourset and texture tables, diceSetFor, the
diceSoNiceReady hook, and rbDressDice — which was tagging ten roll sites with
coloursets that no longer existed. 99 lines of module, plus the assets.
README and DEPLOY updated; they still advertised all of it.
Recoverable with `git revert` if it is ever wanted back.
This also explains the 01-that-was-12. The RESULT was never wrong: skillRoll
rolls one 1d100 and grades on roll.total, and the chat card derives the tens and
units it prints from that same total. Checked all 100 values of percentileFaces
and 60 live rolls — the printed faces reconstruct the graded number every time,
with no mismatches.
What disagreed was the ANIMATION. The custom addDicePreset labels registered for
d100 and d10 remapped which physical face means what, so Dice So Nice could land
showing 01 while the roll behind it was 12. Nothing downstream ever read the
animated faces, so no roll was ever adjudicated on the wrong number — but a
table watching the dice had every reason to believe otherwise, which is its own
kind of wrong. Disabling the skins in 1.0.6 already removed it; deleting them
makes it permanent.
Verified in a running Foundry after removal: skill roll, weapon damage, hit
location, major wound and Coherence all resolve and post their cards, no errors,
and game.ringbrp.diceSetFor is gone from the API.
Version 1.0.7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Registering them with "preferred" made them the default for everybody in the
world, which overrides whatever dice a player had already chosen — the system
helping itself to a setting that belongs to the user. Off at the author's
request.
One named constant rather than a settings API: this codebase registers no game
settings at all, and adding that surface, its lang keys and its UI to switch one
feature off is more machinery than the job needs. Flip RB_DICE_ENABLED to true
and everything below it still works.
The textures in dice/ and the generator behind `npm run dice` are left alone.
Nothing reads them while this is false, and deleting work in order to turn a
feature off is a poor trade.
Verified in a running Foundry with Dice So Nice active: "custodians" is no
longer among the registered systems, and preferredSystem has gone back to
"standard" rather than ours.
Version 1.0.6.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three faults in 1.0.4, and the first was the serious one.
1. It never went away. Core hides the overlay with `#pause { display: none }`
and shows it with `#pause.paused { display: flex }`. 1.0.4 styled the BARE
#pause with display:flex, which wins on specificity, so unpausing removed
the class and changed nothing — GAME PAUSED sat over the table for the rest
of the session. Every rule here is now scoped to `.paused` and `display` is
not set anywhere.
2. It was off centre because I repositioned it. Core already centres it: a
full-width band at top calc(50vh - 100px), column flex, centred both ways,
pointer-events none. That layout was correct and 1.0.4 fought it with
left/bottom/transform. It is left alone now; only the height changes, and
the top moves up by exactly half the extra so the centring holds.
3. It was small: a 322x116 panel in the corner. It is now core's full-width
band at 300px with a 170px dial — against core's own 100px — and the
caption at 24px to match core's.
Guarded: check-behaviour now parses the stylesheet and fails any rule that sets
display on an unscoped #pause. Verified it bites. It strips CSS comments first,
because the first version of the guard reported the comment explaining the
guard — which is exactly what the template guard did last time, so that is twice
now and the lesson is written down properly.
Verified by driving the real toggle: running → display none, box 0x0, no class;
paused → display flex, 341x302, centre X exactly on the viewport centre;
unpaused again → display none, box 0x0.
Version 1.0.5.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Foundry's pause is a spinning d20 and a caption. This replaces both from CSS
alone, without touching the markup: figure#pause becomes a small navy panel with
a yellow rule along the top, and the <img> becomes the arm of a uniselector.
A uniselector is the stepping switch inside a telephone exchange — an arm that
clicks round one contact at a time, hunting for a free line. It is the right
object for this game. The department's whole business is a machine that says
where things belong, and OPEN DAY is set inside one. Eleven contacts, because
eleven minutes is the interval this setting keeps returning to.
It STEPS rather than sweeps: steps(11) over 7.7s, so a contact every 700ms. A
continuous spin reads as a loading throbber; a discrete click reads as a machine
working through a list, which is what the department is doing while the table is
out of the room. The arm carries a faint trailing sector, because without it a
700ms step is easy to miss and the stepping is the whole idea.
No new text. Foundry's caption is localised and this only restyles it — a string
hardcoded in a stylesheet would be one the lang file could never reach.
Two things the browser had to be asked rather than assumed:
- Core pins #pause with BOTH top and bottom, so an auto height stretched it to
180px for a 16px caption. It is pinned here instead and sized to content.
- The arm is rotated, so getBoundingClientRect returns the diagonal of its own
square (75px for a 52px element). The layout takes its size from the flex
basis and never from the measured box.
prefers-reduced-motion stops the movement and keeps the object — a stepping dial
in the corner of the eye is exactly what that preference is asking about.
Version 1.0.4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A third journal in the adventure — LAST ADMISSION — Show the players — holding
the seven scene plates and the floor plan as eight image pages at player
visibility. Right-click, Show Players, done.
title.show is false and there is no caption, on purpose: the table gets the
picture and nothing else. No heading telling them which room this is, no label
naming the thing on the stairs. The page NAMES exist only for the GM's sidebar
so the right one can be found in a hurry under pressure, and the players never
see them.
Ordered by when each comes up, not by asset number, for the same reason.
The builder throws if a plate is missing from disk, because a missing image is
a blank frame on a projector in front of six people.
Verified in Foundry: eight pages import at OBSERVER, the image loads, and the
rendered page contains no headings, no figcaption and no text at all.
Version 1.0.3.
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>
npc-sheet.hbs line 43 read
{{#if (lookup ../skillsByCategory key).length}}
and Handlebars cannot read a property off a subexpression. That is a PARSE
error, so the template never compiled, so every NPC sheet in the system threw
on click — Natives & Threats, the starter's enemy roster, and the whole LAST
ADMISSION cast. #if already treats an empty array as falsy, so the .length was
never doing anything in the first place.
It was invisible to all four existing guards, and the reason is worth writing
down: check-rules reads .mjs, check-behaviour says in its own header that it
cannot reach sheets, and every play-through in this project has driven the
system through its API rather than by clicking. Nobody had ever opened an NPC
sheet, including me, in any of the sessions that "played through" scenarios
full of NPCs.
So: check-templates.mjs, a fifth guard, compiling every .hbs in about a tenth
of a second, wired into the build ahead of check-behaviour. It also names the
specific shape — a property read off a subexpression — because the raw parse
error says only where. Verified it bites by reintroducing the bug. Handlebars
is a devDependency now.
Opening the sheet then showed a second thing nobody had seen: the NPC skill
rows carry four children and were using the character sheet's seven-column
grid, so the name landed in a 13px column and the whole list overlapped
itself. The NPC row now has its own four-column template.
Verified by opening all six LAST ADMISSION cast sheets with an error hook
attached: six rendered, no errors, and Old Marrow reads HP 20/20, major wound
10, armour 2, Brawl 60%, Melee Weapon (Polearm) 60%.
Version 1.0.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things were untidy, and one of them was a stale declaration of exactly the
kind this project keeps producing.
- packFolders named ten packs of seventeen. Talents, the Quiet Arts, the
primer, the rules and all three scenarios were sitting loose in the sidebar
because the declaration was written when there were ten packs and never
revisited. It now covers all seventeen in four subfolders under one parent
— Scenarios, Characters, Equipment, Rules & reference — and the build
asserts the folder list and the pack list are the same set, so it cannot
drift again.
- Labels were off-pattern in three places ("Transport", and the two prologues
reading "Custodians: Prologue — X"). Everything is "The Custodians · X".
- Thirty-six pregens in one flat list. The pack now carries three compendium
folders — Duty roster (16), Before the department (16), Original pregens
(4) — and every actor is filed. Nothing unfiled.
Worth knowing, and verified against Foundry's own source rather than guessed:
packFolders only assigns a pack that has NO existing entry in the world's
core.compendiumConfiguration, and the routine only runs when the set of active
packs changes. So a world that already has this system installed keeps whatever
layout it had; the new one applies to a new world. The local world was brought
into line by writing the configuration directly.
Version 1.0.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Played it through in Foundry with the six on their civilian sheets. Five
defects, all of the house's favourite kind — a number written down that nothing
reads.
1. Pollard and Agyeman were armed and armoured as CIVILIANS. The police trade
kit carries a revolver and a stab vest, which is right for a serving
officer and wrong for a British civilian, and it ended the scenario's only
fight in a single round. expandFromRegister's civilian mode now strips
firearms and body armour from trade kit as well as induction and standing
issue, and the build throws if one gets through. Wren Finch keeps her
knife — a knife is not an issued weapon.
2. Old Marrow's shears were a utility knife. The page said 1d8+1; the actor
in the pack held 1d4+2, so a GM running off the token had a different
fight from the one written down. He now carries a billhook — an actual
garden tool that is already in the catalogue — and the page says 1d8+2,
which is what a billhook does.
3. He was too soft to be the fight the scenario promises. At the original
numbers he died in an average of 2.4 rounds and in 6 runs of 20 he was
dead before he ever swung. Retuned over thirty runs to HP 20, armour 2:
about four and a half rounds, somebody hurt in 28 of 30, somebody dropped
in 9 of 30. The verification run took four rounds and left Pollard on
eight hit points.
4. Two stat lines disagreed with the generated sheets — Marrow 16 against 15,
Enderby 13 against 12.
5. Two rolls had no failure written: the body, and Sammy's ankle pull. The
body is now marked "no roll" outright, because there is no better answer
to buy. The pull has a fumble result.
New guard: check-behaviour parses the scenario's own fight line out of the page
HTML and compares it to the actor the build will generate — hit points against
hitPoints(CON,SIZ), armour against naturalArmour, and shear damage against the
catalogue entry for whatever he is actually holding. Verified it bites by
reverting the damage to 1d8+1.
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>
