Commit Graph
88 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 54a759e057 Run the guards under bun, including the two new ones
Rebased onto the creature-forge work, which had added check-creatures
and check-lethality to the chain and had `check` back on node. Taking
either side whole would have been wrong: the node side loses bun, the
bun side silently drops the two new guards. So the runner is bun and the
guard list is upstream's, all eight of them.

Only `check` and `readme` move. build, icons, portraits, bestiary, mj
and simulate stay on node — they were never part of this change, and
build writes LevelDB packs through classic-level.

Verified before committing: each guard run individually under bun, then
`npm run check` end to end, exit 0.

  check-rules       103 rules, 33 files
  check-kits        OK
  check-lang        995 keys, no collisions
  check-templates   19 templates compile
  check-behaviour   67 behavioural tests
  check-scenarios   9 files, 62 mechanic tags
  check-creatures   101 actor specs across 8 sources
  check-lethality   46 creatures, none drifted more than 6 points

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-09 17:41:27 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 0c0996858f A GM screen taken from the rules that actually run
The figures a GM reaches for mid-scene, on one page: the order of
operations, the circumstance ladder, how a roll bands, reaction, the
combat round, hit locations, wounds and bleeding, both tracks, the way
home, the stations, and the environment.

Every number was checked by running the function rather than by reading
it — 58 of 58 against rules.mjs, including the eight that moved out of
ringbrp.mjs. That matters more than usual here, because `design/` still
carries four rulings the code has overtaken: hit points as CON+MAS, a
Major Wound at max(9, HP/3), "no hit locations, final", and marksmanship
style fixed by home-world gravity. rules.mjs is the authority and the
page says so at the top.

It is also written to drop straight onto a Loom board: 34 cards, 23
links, nothing swallowed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-09 17:18:51 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 322389bc8a A bestiary a GM can actually read, and the defect it found immediately
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>
2026-09-01 16:43:39 +01:00
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 414dbd7037 simulate --spread: one number was the wrong instrument
THROUGH TRAIN Act Three publishes a single figure for its standoff - "the party is
wiped in 24% of runs" - and tells the GM not to soften it. Measured against every party
the duty roster can field, that fight runs from 0% to 100%.

It is not that the published number is wrong. It is that no single number can be right
for this fight, because the answer was settled at character selection: four armed
postings walk it, four trades are massacred, and the GM reading one figure is reading
somebody else's session.

--spread measures the encounter against every C(16,4) party - 1820 of them, exhaustive
rather than sampled, about a minute - and reports the floor, the median and the ceiling
with the parties that produce them. Exhaustive on purpose: a GM planning a session
wants the actual worst case, not an estimate of it.

It also prints each agent's effect on the wipe rate averaged over every party they
appear in, which is the line that gets used at the table. For the Act Three standoff:

  okonkwo   -43.2 points        ashcroft  +16.1
  sandoval  -17.7               nkemdirim +13.5
  holloway  -15.9               ferriby   +12.4

Okonkwo is worth forty-three points of wipe rate on his own. That is a scene-shaping
fact about the encounter that no amount of re-measuring the median would surface.

The published tables are NOT rewritten here. What to do about a 100-point spread is a
design decision - constrain the party, print a range, or rebalance the fight - and it
belongs to whoever wrote the scenario.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:17:28 +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 bbe7b92459 Stop tracking LevelDB's LOG; it churns on read, not on change
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>
2026-08-31 20:44:38 +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 187a317a0a mj-queue: the illustrated upgrade path, without a self-bot
The Mac bridge posts /imagine to Discord with a user token. It is not ported here and
should not be: Midjourney's terms since 27 May 2026 forbid automated access, there is
no official API, and the bridge's own memory note records Discord silently dropping
its interactions from 22 July — which is what enforcement looks like from inside. A
Windows clone would be a second self-bot on the same account.

So this does everything except talk to Discord, which turns out to be most of the
work. `next` derives a prompt from the creature's spec and puts it on the clipboard;
you paste it yourself; `file` or `watch` renames the download to the canonical name
and retires the generated placeholder. One at a time, because the memory note is
explicit that concurrent jobs in one channel steal each other's grids.

Prompts are derived, not written — anatomy from the location table, scale from SIZ,
build from STR against SIZ, plating from naturalArmour — so they cannot drift from the
statblock. Three things learned by reading the data rather than assuming it:

- tactics is written for a GM, not an illustrator. "Advances by bounds, 15 m per
  round" put a rate of fire in an art prompt. role is the one-line essence and is
  already the sentence you would hand an artist. Sentences carrying mechanics are
  dropped; dates and ages are kept.
- era is the wrong test for whether something is a person. It classified Mr Bewley of
  the Registry and everyone in 1881 Cordera as monsters, because their kit is old.
- 18 creatures are species "baseline" and are not human-shaped — a black dog, a case
  file that eats case files, a machine that has decided it is the site. The prompt
  refuses to describe a body it cannot verify, and `list` names them. That is a
  statblock to write, not something to paper over here.

`sheet` emits a prompt sheet that the existing gen-art.mjs parses unchanged, so if the
bridge ever works again the whole bestiary drives from it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 20:33:16 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 9ddea43720 make-portraits: every creature gets art it cannot disagree with
Sixty of the seventy-six actors had no portrait. The sixteen that did are the
hand-made duty roster; the whole bestiary and every scenario NPC fell back to a
generic silhouette.

The point is not that this is free. A portrait composed from anatomy.mjs cannot
contradict the statblock, because it is drawn from the numbers the hit-location roll
uses: silhouette from BODY_ART, height from SIZ, build from STR against SIZ, plating
from naturalArmour, a mark for the primary weapon's class. A Cadence would get five
bodies because its table has five. Nothing has to be kept in step.

Colour carries what a GM wants off a thumbnail — whether the thing is a person,
folklore, recovered machinery, or the far side. That reads the shouted category the
role lines already carry (FOLKLORE, HORROR, FORWARD), which nothing was using, and
falls back to structure for the ones with no tag.

build-packs resolves portraits by stem and extension rather than an exact .webp
filename, so a creature gains art without an edit to content.mjs and a hand-made
raster always beats the generated diagram. A spec that NAMES a portrait and has none
is still a hard build failure.

These read as diagrammatic field-guide plates and will not match the Midjourney agent
portraits. That split is deliberate: the agents are the cast, the bestiary is case
material.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 20:32:53 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 24b183642f all-specs: one place that knows where the actors are
check-creatures collects every spec in the repo, including the rule that a scenario
cast is any exported array whose entries carry characteristics — so a new scenario is
covered the day it is written. That rule is a definition, and two more tools are about
to need it.

Lifted into tools/all-specs.mjs and imported back. check-creatures reports the same
76 specs across the same 8 sources; this is a move, not a change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 20:32:39 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 255b146753 Species anatomy moves where node can read it
RINGBRP.locationTables and RINGBRP.bodyArt lived inside ringbrp.mjs, which no tool
can import — it touches game, Hooks and foundry at load. So nothing outside Foundry
could ask how many hit locations a Cadence has, or what shape a Vesh is, which is
exactly what art generated from a statblock needs to know.

Moved byte for byte to anatomy.mjs and assigned back, the same move rules.mjs got
when the simulator needed the combat rules. One definition, two readers.

check-rules matched those tables with a regex against ringbrp.mjs and went blind the
moment they moved — it reported "could not read locationTables" and the species check
silently stopped running. It imports the value now. A guard that parses source text
breaks when the source is refactored; one that imports it cannot.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 20:32:30 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 0633589061 Rebuild packs for the posting talent pools
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>
2026-08-30 21:34:46 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 b0981008b3 No posting may grant a species
Eighteen postings offered vesh or cadence biology to any agent who took them: unblinking
nine times, quorum seven, distributed three. That is the root cause behind the six
characters check-creatures caught — they were not rogue, they had taken talents their own
postings advertised, and every newly generated agent would have done the same.

Unblinking is the clearest case. It is cat: species, species: vesh, and its own rule text
reads "A Vesh has no face to read and does not need to read yours". Nine postings offered
it, including Interview, Pathology and the doctor trade.

Each of the nineteen slots is replaced with a talent drawn from what the posting actually
does rather than from what was nearest alphabetically: Registry gets Requisition, the
Anchor gets Echo Sense, Disposal gets Clean Scene, Signals gets Chain of Custody and Dead
Reckoning. No pool gained a duplicate, and no talent is left unused — every legal talent
is now offered by at least two postings.

The guard lives in check-kits, which is the file that validates postings, and it imports
TALENT_SPECIES from creature-schema.mjs so there is one definition of which talents are
locked rather than two. check-creatures was looking at characters; nothing was looking at
the pools they were picked from. Verified by reintroducing unblinking on the doctor trade
and watching it fail, not merely by watching it pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:34:37 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 85c1062106 Pause overlay: tighten the caption, lift the field grid
Both found by looking at the thing render, which nothing had done before — the earlier
work on this overlay was verified through the CSSOM because the browser pane would not
composite frames, so the geometry and timing were confirmed and the LOOK was not.

Michroma is already a wide face, and .4em on top of it set GAME PAUSED at 176px against
a 190px field: 93%, running bracket to bracket, so the readout was competing with the
lock for the same width. .22em measures 154px, 81%, leaving 18px clear at each bracket.
text-indent moves with it so the word stays optically centred.

The field grid was drawn at opacity .3, which composited over the void band is 1.44:1
against its own ground. On a dark table map that is not a faint grid, it is no grid at
all. .45 measures 1.80:1 — present as texture, still far below the 3.1:1 --rb-line is
chosen for, so the amber lock stays the only thing asking for attention.

Both measured in a browser with Michroma confirmed loaded, not estimated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:27:17 +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 4ded53f9b5 Fix: npm run build has never worked on Windows
Both spawners built their argument with a file URL's .pathname, which on Windows is
"/C:/Users/...". Node resolves that against the drive root, so the build spawned
"C:\C:\Users\...\check-rules.mjs" and aborted on a module it could not find.

update-readme.mjs had the same bug and swallowed it in a bare catch, so instead of
failing it silently wrote a README whose guard box was empty — "0 guard lines" where
there should be four. A Windows build therefore could not happen, and if it had, it
would have quietly deleted the guard output from the README.

Same root as the packs/ CRLF bug: this repository has only ever been built on macOS and
Linux, where .pathname happens to be a usable path.

Also adds check-creatures to the pre-build guards, which it was missing, so the build
and npm run check now refuse the same things.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:15:33 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 2c547efe72 simulate: a lethality harness that uses the real rules
THROUGH TRAIN publishes "MEASURED, 400 runs each" and a 24% wipe rate; the starter
publishes its own table. Nothing in this repository could produce either number, so both
were claims rather than results and neither could be re-checked after a rule moved.

The harness knows no rules of its own. Everything comes out of rules.mjs, because a
harness with its own copy of the combat loop measures a game nobody is playing and
drifts silently the first time a rule changes. Two things had to move for that to be
possible:

  applyDifficulty, resolveBands and gradeRoll -> rules.mjs. The whole of d100 resolution
  lived in ringbrp.mjs, which node cannot import. All three are pure, so they moved and
  the engine re-exports them; no caller changes. check-rules then refused them for having
  no spot-check, so they now have fifteen, covering the 1% floor, the 96-99 rule and
  00-always-fumbles. They had none in their entire life inside the engine.

  expandFromRegister -> tools/expand-spec.mjs. A roster agent is written as a job and a
  rank and carries no skills or kit; everything it can do is derived at build time by a
  function locked inside build-packs.mjs, which cannot be imported because importing it
  runs the build. A simulated agent expanded by a second copy of that logic is not the
  agent that gets packed. Moved verbatim; both sides import one copy.

Deterministic throughout: same creature, party and seed, same numbers, which is what
lets a published table be verified rather than remembered.

What it finds: for the Act Three standoff the seed barely matters (0.5-2.8% wipe across
five seeds, eight rounds throughout) and party composition dominates everything. Four
support agents against the six miners wipe 92.8% of the time; swap in the heavy and the
warden and it is 0.3%. The published 24% is not a property of the encounter, and no
single figure can be.

Models Reaction re-rolled each round, banding, graded defences, the stacking defence
penalty, damage by band, major wounds and the dying clock. Does NOT yet model hit
locations, bleeding, panic, cover, range bands or fire modes, all of which make a losing
fight worse. Read the output as a floor, never a ceiling.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:10:05 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c3002e93c9 check-creatures: validate every actor spec, and fix the vesh talents it found
Nothing validated creature specs. check-kits validates postings and check-scenarios
validates prose; buildActor throws on an unknown skill or item key and is silent about
everything else, so species, marksmanship style, characteristic blocks, species-locked
talents and misspelt field names could all be wrong and still build, pack and play.
Every packed actor once shipped as species "hominid" and the whole cast was hit-located
as something the rules do not contain.

tools/creature-schema.mjs derives every allowed value from the catalogues rather than
retyping them: skills from SKILL_CATALOGUE, kit from the item catalogues, species from
SPECIES, stats from CHARACTERISTIC_DICE, and the two marksmanship styles out of the
language file. It reports every problem with a spec rather than dying on the first, and
names the nearest real key. It also reports fields buildActor never reads, because
"armours:" is not an error, it is an actor that silently equips nothing.

On its first run it found six baseline humans carrying vesh biology. "unblinking" is
cat: species, species: vesh, and its own rule text reads "A Vesh has no face to read".
Out of Step is reclassified as anomalous with a Coherence cost, which is what every
talent in that category has and what the Anchor who is three years older than his
birthday says always wanted to be; the other five are swapped to agency and field
talents that fit them.

Not fixed here: the root cause is upstream in postings.mjs, where twelve posting talent
pools still offer unblinking, distributed or quorum to any agent. Picking replacements
across those is a design decision, not a mechanical one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:09:43 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 10f588b666 Plan: the creature forge
Five parts - schema and validator, lethality harness, forge CLI, procedural portraits, Foundry importer - built on three findings: the species machinery (vesh, cadence) is fully implemented and completely unused, the published measured lethality tables cannot be reproduced by anything in the repo, and RINGBRP.figures already holds the per-species geometry procedural portraits would need.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:08:36 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c6924d6ea8 THROUGH TRAIN: art prompt sheet, and a runner for it
Prompts for all 43 assets - 16 duty-roster portraits, 14 NPC portraits from TT_CAST, and the 13 scene plates, none of which had a recorded prompt, so none of them could be regenerated.

Art direction is frontier newspaper engraving, and the present-day Bureau material is drawn in the same 1881 hand as Cordera with modern people composed as tintype portraits, so the two halves read as one document. Three rules are written into the sheet because they protect meaning rather than style: nothing modern is drawn on the 1881 side, the train is absence rather than a glowing spectre, and nobody is lit as a villain.

tools/gen-art.mjs parses the sheet rather than keeping a second copy of the prompts, expands the style tokens and drives mj-gen. Dry run by default, because --run fires paid generations.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:08:36 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 b31b1028a9 Rebuild the pause overlay as a containment hold
The uniselector rotated forever, which is the one thing a hunting stepping switch never does, and it was carrying two outright bugs: the motion trail pointed the way the arm was going rather than the way it came, because conic angles run clockwise from the origin and the tip was declared first; and the hub pip ran on a free 2.6s sine against a 7.7s arm, so the light drifted permanently out of phase with the mechanism and meant nothing.

Replaced with an instrument that acquires, locks, reports and lets go: a static field, four corner brackets that close and snap, a scan line reading down the field at exactly cycle/3 so its third pass always lands on the lock, and a readout welded to the same cycle. Every layer reads --rb-pause-cycle, so nothing can drift. The field offset is derived from the column rather than measured and pasted in.

Also ignores the impeccable hook cache and keeps its config, which records why broken-image is suppressed for a stylesheet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:08:23 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 2332b449ba Refresh package-lock
The committed lockfile predated the handlebars devDependency and carried the wrong name and licence metadata. Regenerated by npm install; no dependency actually changes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 21:08:22 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f0edd54e83 Mark packs/ binary so Windows checkouts stop corrupting the compendia
core.autocrlf=true rewrites packs/*/CURRENT from "MANIFEST-000002\n" to "MANIFEST-000002\r\n" on checkout. LevelDB then tries to open a manifest whose filename ends in a carriage return, fails with "The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect", and Foundry runs RepairDB across all eighteen packs on first launch.

The packs are therefore broken from the moment they are cloned, and the only visible symptom is a pile of lost/ directories in git status. Linux and macOS checkouts are unaffected, which is why this went unnoticed.

The committed blobs are already LF, so no renormalisation is needed: this only affects the smudge side.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-25 21:29:11 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 214e207cc6 THROUGH TRAIN: north bench plate without the park bench
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>
2026-08-19 19:34:51 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 8a4d093a13 THROUGH TRAIN: the Bureau plate, and no placeholders left
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>
2026-08-19 19:33:59 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 67b6f61c64 THROUGH TRAIN: two of the three new plates are real art now
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>
2026-08-19 19:32:55 +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 99e78f440a "Somebody you knew" costs one point, not two
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>
v1.4.2
2026-08-18 22:38:45 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c05d488b9d Play THROUGH TRAIN end to end; fix three scenes the dice could not reach
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>
v1.4.1
2026-08-18 22:34:23 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 391c6a3679 Rebuild packs cleanly
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>
2026-08-18 22:27:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 5bc46879c7 THROUGH TRAIN: put the gunfight inside the loop
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>
v1.4.0
2026-08-18 22:20:00 +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>
v1.3.0
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>
v1.2.0
2026-08-18 00:10:28 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 7ec7efd29b Replay the scene with the fumble rule; expose panicReliefFor
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>
v1.1.3
2026-08-17 23:31:35 +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>
v1.1.2
2026-08-17 23:25:46 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 20306d83d9 Play a scene with panic; tighten one reference row
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>
v1.1.1
2026-08-17 21:58:30 +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>
v1.1.0
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>
v1.0.7
2026-08-12 22:45:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 9b6c61ffcb Turn the custom Dice So Nice skins off
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>
v1.0.6
2026-08-12 20:34:22 +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>
v1.0.5
2026-08-12 19:31:35 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ad771ff2b5 A uniselector for the pause
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>
v1.0.4
2026-08-12 19:25:12 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 53481bdfc1 Ship the LAST ADMISSION plates as showable images
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>
v1.0.3
2026-08-12 19:12:35 +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>
v1.0.2
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>
v1.0.1
2026-08-12 18:42:05 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c595bf5a33 Tidy the compendium, and release 1.0.0
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>
v1.0.0
2026-08-12 18:29:44 +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