Commit Graph
10 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ca040b7926 The belly is not armoured (R-254)
R-95 made losing a wing change the animal. R-96 took the hide off the
wing so losing one was possible. Separately each was right and each was
measured. Together they gave the party a soft target and deleted it the
moment the party hit it:

  winged     6/20 ranged faces land on armour 0 (a bare wing)
  quadruped  0/20

A service round on borough ground averages 3.75 after halving — 3.75
through a bare wing, 0 through hide 7 — so grounding the creature took
the party's chance of winning from 44.9% to 1.4%, while its own tactics
told the GM that grounding it was the fight they could actually win.

Found by measuring something else. Every aimed-shot configuration made
the party worse, and the most aggressive was the worst: aiming at a wing
at -20% grounds it in 99% of fights and HALVES the win rate to 10.1%.
Buying the objective reliably was the fastest way to lose, which only
makes sense if the objective is a trap. So no aimed-shot rule; the
problem was never the lack of one.

It also retires the "+31 points" I reported for grounding at 1.7.3. That
was win-rate-if-grounded against win-rate-if-not — selection bias, since
the parties that grounded it were the ones shooting well. Forcing the
grounding gives the causal value and it was -43. A correlation of +31
and a causation of -43 out of the same mechanic.

The fix: a heraldic beast is armoured the way it is drawn, across the
back and the flanks. On its belly half that hide is no longer in the
way, so exposedHideFor halves natural armour while system.grounded is
set. Hide 7 becomes 3.

                      flying   grounded   worth
  on borough ground    45.3%     51.7%    +6.4
  off borough ground   90.6%     97.9%    +7.3

Modest deliberately. Grounding should help, not decide — the borough is
still the real answer. Losing its damage modifier was worth +26.5 and
would have made the wing the whole fight.

check-anatomy gains a sixth property: a flyer must not be harder to hurt
on the ground than in the air. The first version probed at a single
4-point round and declared the fix broken, because 4 sits inside the one
band where a bare wing beats a halved hide — below 5 damage the creature
really is better off grounded, above it much worse. Integrating across
1-12 gives 2.83 flying against 3.75 grounded and reads it correctly.
Negative-tested against 1.7.8's behaviour, which it names.

The lethality baseline is unchanged: its simulation never grounds
anything, so system.grounded never comes up there.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:57:31 +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 c61700566c Shields: armour you raise, and the only armour you can defend with
A shield is the one piece of armour you hold, and it protects you exactly as much as
you are currently holding it up. Raised, its points apply to what it covers and it can
parry on a new Shield skill. Lowered, it is weight. The price of keeping it up is that
it occupies a hand and you are shooting around it: -20% to your own ranged attacks,
printed on the card like everything else. Only one shield goes up at a time.

Seven of them, 2-point buckler to 6-point ballistic shield; the pavise and barrier
plate cover legs too because they are walls you carry.

`degradation` finally does something — it has been on every armour item since the packs
were first built and was read by nothing. A blow costs the shield a point of wear for
every step it stood above an ordinary success, so an ordinary hit costs nothing, a
special 1 and a critical 2. At its limit it comes apart, drops, and will not be raised
again.

Two defects found by driving the real functions rather than reading the diff, both
introduced by this change:

- Every shield defence quietly rolled DODGE. "shield" passed through
  defenceTypeAllowed unchanged, so neither parry branch matched and it fell through.
  Invisible in the card; it showed up as eight rolls at a supposed 85% returning six
  failures. Taking a blow on the shield IS a parry, so it is now a flag on a parry
  rather than a defence type of its own.
- The wear rule was unreachable: it fired only on a clean stop, but under graded
  defences only a critical fully stops a critical, so a shield would never have taken
  a scratch. Wear is for what the shield ABSORBED — dragging a critical down to a
  special is exactly when shields splinter.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 18:25:30 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 6ed9ded362 Armour covers what it covers, and Coherence moves to the vitals
Asking for the type of armour per location turned out not to be a display request.
Every equipped piece added its points to EVERY location, so a Brodie helmet protected
your shins and a cuirass protected your skull — with a catalogue containing sallets,
lobster-tail helmets and three cuirasses, that could not be printed without the sheet
saying something visibly false.

Armour now declares coverage as a named set rather than a list of locations, because a
piece has to fit whatever body wears it: all, torso, torsoArms, torsoLimbs, head. The
sets expand to location KINDS, so a cuirass covers a baseline torso and a vesh trunk
and ridge without either knowing the other exists. Unstated coverage is `all`, so
anything that does not declare behaves as everything did before. Eighteen of the
twenty-five catalogue pieces are not whole-body and now say so.

The trap was double counting: hitLocationRoll subtracted the global worn total PLUS
the body's own armour at that location, which was right while armour was global and
becomes a double count the moment a location knows its own pieces. It reads the
location's total and nothing else, verified by firing fourteen hits of 10 damage
across every location and asserting damage applied == 10 - that location's armour.

A single ARMOUR number no longer exists, so the header shows the torso with "0-8 by
location" beside it when the rest of you is not that. This is a real difficulty
change: limbs are frequently bare and limbs are 12 of 20 on the melee table.

Coherence moves out of the derived strip into the vitals at hit-point size, with its
band under it and the box reddening as it falls.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 10:33:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4bfa7110d0 A lamp lights the people standing in it
The goods yard fight made the case: three agents inside the same pool of light shot at
-50% while the fourth, four metres away, shot at -10%.

A lamp now has a reach, per item rather than global, because a weapon lamp and a
vehicle searchlight are not the same offer — 4 m for cold light strips, 6 m for a
weapon lamp, 10 m for the issue field lamp, 30 m for a roof searchlight. Anyone inside
it is in the light and the card names whose lamp it is, so both halves of the rule
travel together: the pool is one position and the whole group is standing in it.

Measured from the tokens. The shot that started this — no lamp of her own, four metres
from somebody else's, in pitch dark — goes from 20% to 60%, while an agent
twenty-five metres out still eats the full -50%.

An UNKNOWN distance is explicitly not lit: Number(null) is 0, so an unmeasured
distance would otherwise have read as standing on top of the lamp and lit any scene
with no tokens placed. The dialog carries a tick instead, pre-set when the canvas could
measure it and the GM's answer when it could not.

Note: template.json is read when Foundry loads the system, so a deployed server needs
a restart and not just a pull before the migration can stamp the new field.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 09:49:30 +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 226f853ee6 Hazards, automatic fire, two weapons, a bestiary, and space combat
Stress test first: 150 characters across every posting, tier and species against
fourteen invariants each, then the edges (characteristics at 1/3/21, every
location destroyed, twelve pikes carried, hp set to -99).

R-227: a destroyed head was a nap. The printed effect has always read "For
anything that keeps its brain there, this is death" and the code set unconscious
and stopped. destructionOutcomeFor() now says what destruction means.

THE WORLD: falling (a die per 3 m, armour does not apply), drowning (CON rounds
then a point a round, straight past the Major Wound threshold), fire (a condition
with a size; armour helps on the round you catch and never after), explosives
(one roll at the centre, shared by band, cover beats armour).

AUTOMATIC FIRE: one roll, the success level says how much of the burst arrived,
and the rounds are spent either way. TWO WEAPONS: -20/-40, or 0/-20 with the new
Ambidextrous talent; the off hand takes the lighter weapon and nothing over 2 kg.

BESTIARY: 21 entries in three families — folklore, horror, and what comes back
from further along — each with characteristics, natural armour, tactics and a
POWER written as a rule with a cost.

SPACE: eight stations, each on a skill somebody already has, so the Physician has
a chair. Range is a band; the helm moves one a round, in or out. Heat is the
pressure and took two rounds of playtest tuning to stop being a countdown.

64 rules, 198 spot-checked formulas, a 12-page rulebook in reading order.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 08:02:21 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 22a5067153 R-225: the extraction spends the way home, not hit points
Every case carries a "window closes" clock whose stated cost is THE WAY HOME and
whose steps are "the margin narrows / the return is Difficult / the return is
aimed at -30%". Nothing ever read it, so the phase whose job is getting out had
no consequence of its own and the GM had to invent one.

Extraction now advances that clock: failure and fumble narrow the window, a
critical opens it back up, and returnCrossing() applies the penalty alongside the
classification modifier and the Coherence band. 0/-10/-20/-30, Difficult from two
steps.

Also: legs now store their `kind`. The extraction check matched on the terrain
prose and worked only because the string begins "Extraction —".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 22:33:49 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 89ce557355 Death at zero, and a case brief that answers the useful questions
R-223: nothing happened at 0 hit points. An agent was marked down and lay there
forever; the only mention of death in the system was flavour text on a destroyed
head. Zero now starts a clock whose length is the agent's own Major Wound
threshold, ticked from the same hook that charges blood loss. First Aid or
Medicine stabilises and stops the count; healing above zero clears it; heal()
refuses the dead. On death, Coherence decides what the record says — from a
proper death in service down to not being recorded as dead at all.

Case generator: four phases instead of five (the arc drew two interchangeable
middles that read as padding). The brief now leads with Where / When /
Classification / Phases, states the opposition in full, and has a "How you get
back" section. place and duration were generated and never printed. The same
facts are on the case file itself. 300 seeds checked for object leaks; one found
and fixed (group taboo/desire are objects with .text).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 22:13:21 +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