Commit Graph
28 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4b718595fe check-lethality: guard eight, and the README stops advertising a subset
Seven guards checked that content is WELL FORMED. None checked what it DOES, so a
change to a damage modifier, a hit-point formula or the armour value on a service vest
could double a creature's lethality without touching one line of that creature - and
nothing in the build would notice, because the creature did not change.

Built as a regression test rather than the hand-declared bands the creature-forge plan
described. Bands are the wrong shape here: declaring "keepers: dangerous" across
forty-six creatures means inventing forty-six judgements, and after --spread it is
clear the interesting question is not "is this dangerous" - that has no single answer -
but "is this the same as it was". A recorded baseline answers exactly that, needs no
authoring, and cannot be argued with.

Every creature is measured solo against a FROZEN party of four, two armed postings and
two trades, at a fixed seed, so the only thing that can move a number is a change to
the rules or to the creature. Tolerances are 6 points of wipe rate and 0.35 agents,
which is outside the noise floor of 200 runs - a guard that cries wolf gets deleted.

Verified by tampering: told the baseline the nuckelavee was harmless and the guard
caught it at +16.5 points and +1.67 agents down, exit 1. Runs in half a second, so it
joins the pre-build checks rather than being something to remember to run.

Also: the README's guard block was a hardcoded list of four while the suite was seven.
It had silently stopped mentioning every guard added after it was written, including
check-creatures and check-scenarios. Now all eight, and the prose says eight.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:20:09 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 2d4f7f18be Twenty-four new creatures, and the anatomies finally get used
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>
2026-08-31 21:11:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 94479641b3 simulate: locate the damage
The harness measured a game in which every blow went to a general pool. That was
tolerable while every creature was a baseline human and merely wrong once the bestiary
had a Cadence in it: a creature whose entire mechanical identity is being whittled down
body by body was being measured as a person with an odd portrait, and the number it
printed was about nobody.

locationFor and resolveLocationHit move from ringbrp.mjs to rules.mjs, and the
category mapping inside woundPenaltyFor becomes woundPenaltyFrom beside them, for the
reason applyDifficulty and resolveBands moved before them: node cannot load the engine,
and the harness may not own a second copy of a rule. All three arrive with the
spot-checks they never had - 103 rules now, 346 formulas verified.

What the loop does now: 1d20 against the DEFENDER's own species table, melee finding
limbs and shooting finding centre of mass; damage to that location and to the general
pool, so the two agree; disabled at the location maximum and destroyed at twice it,
cumulatively. Then the consequences actually apply - a destroyed head is unconscious
immediately (conditionFor has always accepted that flag and was never passed it, so a
headshot used to leave the target swinging), a ruined arm costs -30 to every attack
including shooting, a ruined leg costs -30 to dodge, and each Cadence body lost costs
the whole creature -10 to everything.

Verified as mechanics rather than as numbers that moved: no species can return a
location it does not have across all 40 rolls; vesh and cadence have no head at any
roll and cadence has no vital either; a vesh ridge is hit 3/20 where a human head is
1/20, which is the "long target rather than a small one" the tables were designed for.
A built Cadence has five bodies at 4 points each and no vital; a built Vesh has six
locations with the ridge the largest.

Measured consequences, seed 11, 400 runs, four duty-roster agents:

  keepers x6      31.0% -> 36.5% wiped
  the_choir x11    0.3% ->  0.0% wiped, and now degrading as bodies go rather than
                   being a person who cannot be shot in the head
  long_walker      42.0% wiped, which nothing had ever measured

Still no bleeding, panic, Coherence, cover, range bands or fire modes. Still a floor.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:05:25 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f88c31649c The bestiary's first non-human creatures
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>
2026-08-31 20:57:17 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 77e9aadc79 Rebuild packs; every actor now carries a portrait
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>
2026-08-31 20:33:32 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 8d7508077c Rebuild packs, and correct the guard count in the README
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>
2026-08-30 21:15:45 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 973b4a53aa THROUGH TRAIN rewritten into five acts
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>
2026-08-19 19:25:20 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 24b1aaa682 Development: skills improve from what beat you, not what worked
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>
2026-08-18 23:23:03 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 774e95dea8 THROUGH TRAIN — the crossing starter, and two more playtest fixes
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>
2026-08-18 00:25:19 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 37b4043746 Play a full case, then fix what it found
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>
2026-08-18 00:10:28 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 5aaae186e0 A fumbled relief attempt puts a point on
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>
2026-08-17 23:25:46 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 cbad87ba98 Add Occult, Religion and Psychology, and the Panic track
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>
2026-08-12 22:55:11 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ab619f4b73 Remove the dice textures and the whole Dice So Nice path
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>
2026-08-12 22:45:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 0852427586 Fix the pause: it would not hide, it was off centre, and it was too small
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>
2026-08-12 19:31:35 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 51bd8e618a Audit every remaining sheet and dialog; add the Culland Hall scene
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>
2026-08-12 19:02:18 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 02ec47a351 Fix every NPC sheet, which has never opened
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>
2026-08-12 18:42:05 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 1bf8d7f6fb Playtest LAST ADMISSION: five fixes, one new guard
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>
2026-08-12 18:21:45 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 d063b3c016 Add LAST ADMISSION, a two-hour haunted-house prologue
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>
2026-08-12 17:50:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f185c92088 Add OPEN DAY, the recruitment prologue
Ten civilians, one decommissioned telephone exchange, and eleven minutes during
which the building went back to being on the street it was built on. Nothing
attacks anybody. Nothing wants anything. That is the horror, and it is the whole
design.

The premise was already in the pregens. Wren Finch's biography said she was
inside a building "on the night it stopped being on the street it was on", and
Soraya Rahimi's said she talked a caller down on air "for eleven minutes, and
the recording does not play back the same way twice". Those are two views of one
afternoon, so the scenario is built at the intersection and the other eight
"How they found her/him" lines are the same afternoon from eight more jobs.
Nothing in the prologue contradicts a sheet, because the sheets came first.

The reconciliation pass, which is most of the work:

  - Finch's line said "night". The open day is an afternoon. One word changed on
    the pregen, and both are true. Her line also says she was the only witness
    who could describe the inside, so she is the one who goes into number 11 —
    written into the location note rather than left to chance.
  - Rahimi's line says she was ON AIR. So the disconnected telephone that rings
    at 15:45 is patched through to her outside broadcast, which makes the canon
    line and the scene the same event instead of two coincidences.
  - Okonkwo carries two men out; Nkemdirim's patient has a forearm that healed
    crooked over a break he took six minutes ago. Both seams needed an injury in
    Act Two and there was none, so 15:50 and 15:51 now have one.
  - Sandoval's forty minutes of traffic sit inside an eleven-minute window. That
    is the anomaly, so it is on the handout in those words.
  - "Prine" collided with an NPC already in the world. The engineer is Kearsley.

Structure: 2h15 against the house 3h30, stated in the design intent, because a
prologue exists to make the first real case land. No combat, no antagonist, no
Coherence — the last one is thematic, not a simplification: Coherence is what it
costs to keep looking once you know what you are looking at, and these ten do
not know yet. The Briefing is the first time the word is said aloud.

Ships as docs/scenarios/OPEN_DAY.md (the full GM document) and a Foundry
Adventure in a new `prologue` pack: 8 GM pages, 7 handouts, 5 NPCs, and ten
generated plates. The PCs are the "(before)" pregens already in the Pregens
pack — a second copy here would give a GM two sets of the same ten people and
no way to know which one their notes were on.

Verified in Foundry: the adventure imports, both journals render branded, the
countdown table reads as a table, and all ten plates load.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:03:49 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 26ad00174f Add the same ten before the department found them
Ten civilian counterparts, one per roster agent: same person, same
characteristics, same face, no induction and nothing ever issued to them. A
player can hold the two sheets side by side and read exactly what the job did.

Keyed off ROSTER rather than written out again, so the pair cannot drift apart.
The five who joined straight into a posting get the trade they came out of, and
between them the ten now cover all ten trades exactly once — which makes this
set a demonstration of the whole trade half of character creation as well as a
set of characters.

expandFromRegister grows a `civilian` mode: no induction skills, no standing
issue, no tier issue, no trade cant, and nothing anomalous or Coherence-costing.

Three things the build guard caught, each of which would have shipped:

  - Holloway was "carrying issued kit: notebook". Wrong: an interpreter owned a
    notebook long before anyone issued her one. The rule is now kit that could
    ONLY have come from the department.
  - Same again for skills — the linguist's core list contains trade cant,
    because it is a language and she is a linguist.
  - Wren Finch was carrying the black mirror, which is era "anomalous", from a
    transposed tradition, and costs Coherence to look into twice. That is
    something you acquire after the night the department notices you, not
    before. It is the only anomalous item in any trade kit.

The guard runs over the built objects rather than trusting the flag that made
them, because the flag is three call-frames away from the result.

Verified in Foundry: 24 pregens, the before sheets show the civilian job in
place of rank, no armour, nothing readied but fists, and the right face.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 16:19:50 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c15b13c3b9 Add the duty roster: ten ready-to-play agents with generated portraits
Five postings and five trades, so a group choosing from this sheet meets both
halves of character creation without anyone having to explain them.

Skills and kit are not written out per agent. They are expanded from the
register at build time by the same helper the starter scenario uses, which is
hoisted out of the BLACK PLATFORM block for the purpose — two copies of that
expansion is two places for the induction rule to drift. Ratings sit at the
middle of each band rather than being rolled, because a pregen that varies
between installs is not a pregen.

Portraits are generated art, resized to 512 and stored as webp (12MB of PNG
became 210KB). buildActor now takes a portrait and gives the same face to the
prototype token: a pregen you can recognise on the map is worth more at a
convention table than a correct one you cannot tell apart. It throws on a
portrait that is not on disk, because a broken image on a pregen sheet is the
sort of thing that is first noticed on a projector.

Guard: check-behaviour gains a test that every roster agent names a real
posting or trade and has its portrait on disk, verified to bite. It caught
"archive", which is not a posting — Bhattacharya is Registry.

Verified in a running Foundry: 14 pregens in the pack, sheets render with the
portraits, coherence and hit points fill from the template, no system errors.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 11:06:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 7f8355f0d0 Add the player primer and cheat sheet, and brand every journal
Ten pages a player reads before session one, in their own compendium at OBSERVER
ownership: nine of setting, one cheat sheet.

The draft called the organisation "the Bureau"; everything else in the game calls it
the department or the agency, so that is what it is called. Thin areas filled rather
than padded: the seven character principles as a list, the real Coherence band table
instead of a paragraph describing one, and "what continuity is not" pulled out of the
middle of a page because it is the most important sentence for a new player.

The cheat sheet's numbers are computed from rules.mjs and lang/en.json at build time.
A hand-typed one would have been the sixth time this project shipped a number that
disagreed with the code, and the one the players were holding.

R-250: the design tokens were never on :root. Journals rendered as default parchment,
and four things were wrong in sequence — v14's hook is renderJournalEntrySheet; its
`element` is the node, so `[0]` returns the first CHILD and put the class on a header
button; there is no .journal-page-content in v14; and then the real one: with the
selector matching, font-size, line-height and padding all applied while every colour
did not, because the palette is declared on .ringbrp-sheet/.ringbrp-chat/.ringbrp-window
and never on :root. A journal inherited no tokens, so every var() silently became
nothing. A rule that HALF applies is not a specificity problem — I spent three attempts
treating it as one, including a version bump on a cache theory that was wrong.

Branded: primer, rulebook, starter GM text and handouts. Scoped by flag, so other
modules' journals are untouched. Version 0.9.0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 10:19:41 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 d9bce12c27 Replace the starter with BLACK PLATFORM, and make the dialogs ask questions
The starter is now an action case: a train running through a station whose rails were
lifted in 1976, two engineers aboard, eleven minutes until it returns. Descend, take the
platform, board, rescue, fight forward along a moving train, stop it.

Simpler than PAPER WINDOW on purpose — one clue scene, no social subsystem — which also
means it cannot reproduce R-248, because there are no groups or standings to leave
unwired.

Every agent can fight, deliberately: floors of firearm 42%, melee 40%, Brawl 40%,
Dodge 40% so nobody is a spectator on their first evening. Floors only RAISE, so a
posting already better stays better — Callum's shield lands at 53, not the floor's 45.

The builder now handles combat floors, extra weapons issued for a case, and a scenario
with NO Borrowed Authority at all; the last was assumed to exist and would have thrown.
Two new tests: every floor names a real skill, and every agent clears the fighting
floors the handout promises.

Sixty-two dialog strings reworded. They were naming mechanics at people: "Situational
modifier %" is now "Anything else helping or hurting? (%)", "Target cover" is "Is the
target behind anything?", "Difficult (÷2)" is "Difficult — half your skill". Labels ask
the question; hints say what it does to the number; notifications say what to do next
rather than what went wrong.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 00:08:07 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4e28de2a64 Play PAPER WINDOW with the shipped pregens; fix four silent defects
Ran the starter end to end. It closed, and it found four defects in what I shipped an
hour earlier — all in the scenario data, all silent.

R-247: the Borrowed Authority did not work. I wrote scope "operate", which is not one
of the five scope tiers; an unrecognised scope ranks 0 and every action came back
"impossible" with no error. The first scene of the starter is the Borrowed Authority
tutorial. Fixed, guarded in check-kits, and covered by a test that documents the
failure mode.

R-248: the contact subsystem was unreachable in the scenario built around it. The case
file carried a standing for the Returned Clerks and no GROUP ITEM; resolveContact
returns null without one, so READ, SIGNAL and OFFER did nothing. Groups are data now,
and a test asserts every standing on a shipped case file has a group behind it.

R-249: legs wrote `kindId` where resolveLegDialog reads `leg.kind`. It worked only
because the terrain text happens to begin with "Extraction".

Not a defect: phase four went Difficult because Resources hit 0 and destitution makes
every remaining phase Difficult. Best beat in the session.

All four phases failed and the case still closed — Containment 8 to 2, Resources 8 to
0 — which is what the scenario is built to survive. Two of six closing requirements
succeeded and the settlement still completed. The Cancellation Man opened with a
critical against a raised riot shield and went through 10 points of armour, teaching
the shield and graded-defence lessons in one roll.

Also documented: nobody on the starter team can aim the return, because only the Anchor
Officer trains Transposition. The extraction page now says to narrate it rather than
roll six dice that will all fail.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 23:39:43 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 49c2e9fc7b Add PAPER WINDOW as the starter scenario Adventure
The six-player introductory case ships as a Foundry Adventure in a new `starter` pack,
because a scenario that arrives as nine loose documents a GM has to assemble is a
scenario that gets read rather than run.

One import brings in: the GM scenario in twelve pages; the seven player handouts as
their own journal at OBSERVER ownership so they can be revealed one at a time without
the GM editing permissions first, while the GM text stays hidden; the six pregens built
through the same buildActor path the shipped pregens use, so they arrive with full skill
lists, kit, hit points and linked tokens; the cast, including the Cancellation Man; the
Borrowed Authority as a real credential with scope, Trust 2 and its three red flags; and
the case file already at Containment 8 / Resources 8 / Clearance 6 with its four phases
loaded at the stated difficulties and modifiers.

Pregen ratings are fixed at mid-band rather than rolled — a pregen that varies between
installs is not a pregen. The expansion from posting or trade into a sheet reuses the
register and the induction rule rather than restating them, so the starter cannot drift
from the generator.

Verified by importing it: no errors, the roster resolves through stable keys, handouts
arrive player-visible, Nia has the team's highest Tradecraft as the text requires,
Callum's shield is slung so raising it is still a decision, the three probationers show
the trade/induction split, and phase one runs out of the box.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 23:25:10 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 43508259ac Consolidation pass after a Codex review
Four real defects, each verified against the source before acting on it.

Trade expertise was coupled to agency rank. A probationary burglar came out at 35-50%
and a veteran at 65-80%, as though fifteen years of picking locks were something the
department conferred. TRADE_BANDS is now fixed at 50-65/30-50 at every rank, and
INDUCTION scales with service instead (20-32 probationary to 45-60 veteran) because
that half genuinely is the department's. The two axes were the wrong way round. This
is the thing I flagged myself after PAPER HARBOUR and then left alone — flagging a
defect is not the same as fixing it.

Bonus points were sprayed across every skill in the game. grantFullSkillList runs
immediately before the loop and puts all fifty-nine skills on the sheet, and the loop
picked from actor.items, so a veteran's ninety points landed anywhere. The comment two
hundred lines above has always said "over the core skills"; the code never did.

"Random species" passed "baseline" into generators that support random perfectly well.

No behavioural tests. The strongest point in the review: the three guards are static
and none of them can tell whether a rule is READ, which is the only kind of defect this
project has ever shipped. tools/check-behaviour.mjs now runs 28 deterministic tests,
gated into the build, covering R-231/232/243/245/246, graded defences and the lamp
rule. Proved it bites by re-breaking R-246.

The register moved to postings.mjs, a Foundry-neutral module the engine, rulebook,
guards and tests all import normally — they were previously pulled out of the engine
with a regex and eval, which worked and was a trap. My first version of that used
`export … from`, which re-exports without local bindings, so ROLES was undefined and
the system threw on init: node --check passes that, loading it in Foundry does not.

Also: the contact doc comment still said "only OFFER moves standing"; check-kits
accepted mas/app, which are the DISPLAY names of siz/cha, so a posting declaring one
would have passed and produced an undefined characteristic; package.json disagreed with
the manifest; README counts were three revisions stale and are now generated at build.

Deferred with reasons: splitting the 6,700-line engine into modules. Right, and a
multi-session refactor whose risk is exactly the silent breakage demonstrated above.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 22:57:20 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 2e10ecced9 Fire modes, fitted sights and lamps, and a tab rail
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>
2026-08-11 08:56:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 d0144f744e The Custodians v0.6.1 — full system
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>
2026-08-10 18:09:07 +01:00