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>
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>
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>
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>
The starter is now an action case: a train running through a station whose rails were
lifted in 1976, two engineers aboard, eleven minutes until it returns. Descend, take the
platform, board, rescue, fight forward along a moving train, stop it.
Simpler than PAPER WINDOW on purpose — one clue scene, no social subsystem — which also
means it cannot reproduce R-248, because there are no groups or standings to leave
unwired.
Every agent can fight, deliberately: floors of firearm 42%, melee 40%, Brawl 40%,
Dodge 40% so nobody is a spectator on their first evening. Floors only RAISE, so a
posting already better stays better — Callum's shield lands at 53, not the floor's 45.
The builder now handles combat floors, extra weapons issued for a case, and a scenario
with NO Borrowed Authority at all; the last was assumed to exist and would have thrown.
Two new tests: every floor names a real skill, and every agent clears the fighting
floors the handout promises.
Sixty-two dialog strings reworded. They were naming mechanics at people: "Situational
modifier %" is now "Anything else helping or hurting? (%)", "Target cover" is "Is the
target behind anything?", "Difficult (÷2)" is "Difficult — half your skill". Labels ask
the question; hints say what it does to the number; notifications say what to do next
rather than what went wrong.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TRADES: ten ordinary jobs the department recruits from — construction worker, doctor,
professor, engineer, law enforcement, IT specialist, scientist, linguist, entertainer,
criminal. They are not postings. A posting is what the department made of you; a trade
is what you were before any of it.
A trade character is built in two halves. The trade is genuine expertise on the same
bands a posting's skills use — a doctor is a proper doctor. INDUCTION goes on top at
25-40%: Tradecraft, Anomaly Lore, First Aid, Firearm (Pistol), Dodge, plus a sidearm, a
vest, cordon kit, a cover identity and a ward. The band is low on purpose; six weeks is
not a career, and that gap is most of what it feels like to play one.
Induction never demotes: a former police officer keeps pistol 58 from the trade rather
than being re-taught it at 26.
The creation dialog gains a "Recruited as" switch with its own trade list and card
(which shows both halves), and check-kits now holds trades and induction to the same
standard as postings — both new guard paths verified by breaking them.
Rolling them yourself: a tickbox that walks the eight characteristics one at a time,
each roll announced to chat so the dice actually fall, "Take them" locked until all
eight are down. A hand-rolled character is taken exactly as it fell — no best-of-three
on the key stat, no species shift. Verified both ways.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A shield is the one piece of armour you hold, and it protects you exactly as much as
you are currently holding it up. Raised, its points apply to what it covers and it can
parry on a new Shield skill. Lowered, it is weight. The price of keeping it up is that
it occupies a hand and you are shooting around it: -20% to your own ranged attacks,
printed on the card like everything else. Only one shield goes up at a time.
Seven of them, 2-point buckler to 6-point ballistic shield; the pavise and barrier
plate cover legs too because they are walls you carry.
`degradation` finally does something — it has been on every armour item since the packs
were first built and was read by nothing. A blow costs the shield a point of wear for
every step it stood above an ordinary success, so an ordinary hit costs nothing, a
special 1 and a critical 2. At its limit it comes apart, drops, and will not be raised
again.
Two defects found by driving the real functions rather than reading the diff, both
introduced by this change:
- Every shield defence quietly rolled DODGE. "shield" passed through
defenceTypeAllowed unchanged, so neither parry branch matched and it fell through.
Invisible in the card; it showed up as eight rolls at a supposed 85% returning six
failures. Taking a blow on the shield IS a parry, so it is now a flag on a parry
rather than a defence type of its own.
- The wear rule was unreachable: it fired only on a clean stop, but under graded
defences only a critical fully stops a critical, so a shield would never have taken
a scratch. Wear is for what the shield ABSORBED — dragging a critical down to a
special is exactly when shields splinter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Asking for the type of armour per location turned out not to be a display request.
Every equipped piece added its points to EVERY location, so a Brodie helmet protected
your shins and a cuirass protected your skull — with a catalogue containing sallets,
lobster-tail helmets and three cuirasses, that could not be printed without the sheet
saying something visibly false.
Armour now declares coverage as a named set rather than a list of locations, because a
piece has to fit whatever body wears it: all, torso, torsoArms, torsoLimbs, head. The
sets expand to location KINDS, so a cuirass covers a baseline torso and a vesh trunk
and ridge without either knowing the other exists. Unstated coverage is `all`, so
anything that does not declare behaves as everything did before. Eighteen of the
twenty-five catalogue pieces are not whole-body and now say so.
The trap was double counting: hitLocationRoll subtracted the global worn total PLUS
the body's own armour at that location, which was right while armour was global and
becomes a double count the moment a location knows its own pieces. It reads the
location's total and nothing else, verified by firing fourteen hits of 10 damage
across every location and asserting damage applied == 10 - that location's armour.
A single ARMOUR number no longer exists, so the header shows the torso with "0-8 by
location" beside it when the rest of you is not that. This is a real difficulty
change: limbs are frequently bare and limbs are 12 of 20 on the melee table.
Coherence moves out of the derived strip into the vitals at hit-point size, with its
band under it and the box reddening as it falls.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
There was no way to ready a weapon. The strip under the characteristics reads
`equipped`, and the only toggle-equipped control on the sheet was on the ARMOUR list —
a weapon could only be readied by opening its item sheet and finding the tickbox
there. The weapons table now carries the same toggle, the row is tinted when readied,
and a line above the table says what the control does.
The tab runs in the order it is used: weapons, armour, defend, reaction, body last.
Weapons lead with 40px art and a display-face name, having previously sat below two
screens of anatomy and reaction arithmetic.
The figure is a partial, drawn in three places — header thumbnail, combat tab, anatomy
tab. Three inline copies would have been the template-layer version of the defect
check-rules exists to prevent: a location present in one drawing and missing from
another.
The header carries a 34px figure and every location with its damage and the armour
over it, so "how much armour is on the part that just got hit" is answered on the main
page without changing tab.
Also fixed: `.ringbrp-sheet a` outranks a bare `.rb-equip`, so an unequipped toggle was
painted white and read as lit — true of the armour toggle too, since it was added.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The goods yard fight made the case: three agents inside the same pool of light shot at
-50% while the fourth, four metres away, shot at -10%.
A lamp now has a reach, per item rather than global, because a weapon lamp and a
vehicle searchlight are not the same offer — 4 m for cold light strips, 6 m for a
weapon lamp, 10 m for the issue field lamp, 30 m for a roof searchlight. Anyone inside
it is in the light and the card names whose lamp it is, so both halves of the rule
travel together: the pool is one position and the whole group is standing in it.
Measured from the tokens. The shot that started this — no lamp of her own, four metres
from somebody else's, in pitch dark — goes from 20% to 60%, while an agent
twenty-five metres out still eats the full -50%.
An UNKNOWN distance is explicitly not lit: Number(null) is 0, so an unmeasured
distance would otherwise have read as standing on top of the lamp and lit any scene
with no tokens placed. The dialog carries a tick instead, pre-set when the canvas could
measure it and the GM's answer when it could not.
Note: template.json is read when Foundry loads the system, so a deployed server needs
a restart and not just a pull before the migration can stamp the new field.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Selectable fire, with the modifiers on the choice
Every weapon has carried a fireMode since the packs were first built and nothing
read it: a musket could rip a ten-round burst and "rapid" bought a weapon nothing.
FIRE_MODE now gates the burst rules and carries its own attack modifier — slow +10%
and then you work for the next one, fast a second shot at -20% to both, rapid
bursts, beam +5% and it can be held on the target for damage instead of hits. The
gate lives in burstAttack too, so no macro can route round it. `fast` was on five
catalogue weapons and was not in the system's list of modes at all, so re-saving one
of them silently blanked it; the list is derived from the rule now.
burstAttack shipped complete and was reachable from nothing. It is the resolution
path the selector chooses, and takes the dialog's whole stack rather than charging
the player twice for the same burst.
Sights and lamps that apply themselves
A sight is graded by range band, so a telescopic sight is a -10% liability inside
ten metres and worth +20% at extreme, and it only counts if it fits. The band is
already known when the modifier is wanted, so nothing is selected and nothing is
forgotten. The dark costs something now; a carried lamp buys it back to dim, never
to daylight, and the card says it shows them exactly where you are. A migration
fits gear that predates the fields, matched on the stamped key rather than by name.
The damage card
The last card still wearing Foundry's stock dice styling — it posted a bare Roll and
let the core template dress it. It renders through the module's own card now, with
the Roll still on the message so dice stay inspectable.
A rail instead of a strip
Eight tabs across an 820px sheet compressed to 11px type. They run down the side
now, one line each, with counts as badges; the sheet is 152px wider to pay for it.
Also fixed: any weapon with a Coherence cost could not be attacked with AT ALL — the
handler re-read the weapon after an await, when currentTarget is already null, and the
attack died on a TypeError with nothing shown. And the duplicate-rule guard failed an
honest table because FIRE_MODE and speedBands share two key names; it wants a majority
now, and prints partial overlaps rather than swallowing them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
R-228: Ambidextrous was a compulsory build. 0/-20 gave a full-strength main hand
AND a cheap second attack. It now buys consistency, not a free attack: -20 in both
hands against -20/-40 untrained.
R-229: full auto was a firing squad. Ten independent hits off one critical, each
with its own damage, location and Major Wound check. Hits capped at 3/5/7, and a
burst is ONE wounding event however many rounds connect.
R-230: Engines deleted the pressure it existed to create. Guns +2 and Helm +1
against a vent of 3 made a fighting round heat-neutral, so Heat only mattered when
the engineer failed. Venting is now 2/3/4.
Also: falling halving no longer stacks (soft + controlled quartered the drop);
blast has one formula floored once, so the answer no longer depends on call order.
And the structural note — "giving everyone a roll is not the same as giving
everyone a decision". Sensors, Damage Control and Medical now have mutually
exclusive modes that bite in the engine: mark/spoof/read, patch/brace,
restore/steady.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stress test first: 150 characters across every posting, tier and species against
fourteen invariants each, then the edges (characteristics at 1/3/21, every
location destroyed, twelve pikes carried, hp set to -99).
R-227: a destroyed head was a nap. The printed effect has always read "For
anything that keeps its brain there, this is death" and the code set unconscious
and stopped. destructionOutcomeFor() now says what destruction means.
THE WORLD: falling (a die per 3 m, armour does not apply), drowning (CON rounds
then a point a round, straight past the Major Wound threshold), fire (a condition
with a size; armour helps on the round you catch and never after), explosives
(one roll at the centre, shared by band, cover beats armour).
AUTOMATIC FIRE: one roll, the success level says how much of the burst arrived,
and the rounds are spent either way. TWO WEAPONS: -20/-40, or 0/-20 with the new
Ambidextrous talent; the off hand takes the lighter weapon and nothing over 2 kg.
BESTIARY: 21 entries in three families — folklore, horror, and what comes back
from further along — each with characteristics, natural armour, tactics and a
POWER written as a rule with a cost.
SPACE: eight stations, each on a skill somebody already has, so the Physician has
a chair. Range is a band; the helm moves one a round, in or out. Heat is the
pressure and took two rounds of playtest tuning to stop being a countdown.
64 rules, 198 spot-checked formulas, a 12-page rulebook in reading order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every case carries a "window closes" clock whose stated cost is THE WAY HOME and
whose steps are "the margin narrows / the return is Difficult / the return is
aimed at -30%". Nothing ever read it, so the phase whose job is getting out had
no consequence of its own and the GM had to invent one.
Extraction now advances that clock: failure and fumble narrow the window, a
critical opens it back up, and returnCrossing() applies the penalty alongside the
classification modifier and the Coherence band. 0/-10/-20/-30, Difficult from two
steps.
Also: legs now store their `kind`. The extraction check matched on the terrain
prose and worked only because the string begins "Extraction —".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
R-223: nothing happened at 0 hit points. An agent was marked down and lay there
forever; the only mention of death in the system was flavour text on a destroyed
head. Zero now starts a clock whose length is the agent's own Major Wound
threshold, ticked from the same hook that charges blood loss. First Aid or
Medicine stabilises and stops the count; healing above zero clears it; heal()
refuses the dead. On death, Coherence decides what the record says — from a
proper death in service down to not being recorded as dead at all.
Case generator: four phases instead of five (the arc drew two interchangeable
middles that read as padding). The brief now leads with Where / When /
Classification / Phases, states the opposition in full, and has a "How you get
back" section. place and duration were generated and never printed. The same
facts are on the case file itself. 300 seeds checked for object leaks; one found
and fixed (group taboo/desire are objects with .text).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Since 0.6.1:
- VEHICLES as their own Item type: crew, seats, cargo, hull, armour, range,
terrain and the skill that works them, with speed as a band. 14 of them, from
the pool car and the Custodian van to a sealed crawler and the carriage that is
already parked outside wherever you were going to go.
- STORES roughly doubled to 118 gear items across four eras — standing issue and
paperwork, transport stores, and the forward stores Registry will not hand a
probationary officer. Catalogue now 175 items, 231 icons.
- Agents leave creation properly equipped: standing issue, the posting's kit,
what seniority adds, and one personal effect that is theirs and not the
department's.
- All 25 postings now describe themselves in the creation dialog.
- BORROWED AUTHORITY, the access subsystem. No hacking skill and nothing to break
into: access is a named credential with a scope, a Trust that erodes, and red
flags describing how its real owner behaves. Inside scope there is no roll. Two
tiers beyond is impossible at any skill. Coherence widens a record, and pushing
one past what its Trust will carry merges your file with theirs.
- Defences graded by level, and damage now rolls at the level a blow landed at.
- Dodge's DEX x 2 base is finally evaluated; it read 0% for most postings.
- Brawl is a fallback rather than a peer of the weapon in hand.
- check-lang guard: one key that was both a value and a branch silently
un-localised the entire system.
- The case generator is reachable from the Actor Directory, and no longer puts
every character in the world on a new case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Foundry VTT game system: Basic Roleplaying d100 in a drab British agency that
deals with crossings, where reality keeps a record of what belongs where and can be
made to get it wrong.
Contents:
- rules.mjs as the single authority for every rule formula, with 40 rules and 132
spot-checked values. Nothing may restate a formula it defines.
- 25 postings, each with a key characteristic, trained skills, talents and its own
kit; a 175-item catalogue across four eras; 231 generated icons.
- Reaction Lanes initiative, re-rolled every round including the first.
- Coherence, and the Quiet Arts, which only ever arrive from a crossing gone wrong.
- Graded defences: only a critical stops a critical.
- Borrowed Authority — access as a record rather than a hacking roll.
- A case generator, and a rules journal generated from rules.mjs so the book cannot
drift from the code.
Built compendia are committed so a remote Foundry needs only the files.
node_modules is not; `npm install` restores it for rebuilding content.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
