Commit Graph
27 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
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>
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>
2026-08-18 22:34:23 +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>
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>
2026-08-18 00:25:19 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 37b4043746 Play a full case, then fix what it found
Ran THE HOLLOW ROAD with five agents — approach, crossing, contact, the thing on
the road, extraction, debrief — with panic and Coherence both live. It ran clean
and it found one thing that mattered.

ANOMALY LORE 0. Marta Holloway, Field Lead, Senior Field Officer, could not roll
the department's signature skill. Nor could Okonkwo. Induction was gated to
TRADES on the reasoning that a career posting is itself the agency training —
but 17 of the 25 postings do not list anomaly lore, its printed base is 0 on
purpose, and nothing else supplies it. So the people who joined the department
straight out of school were the only ones who never received its basic training,
which is exactly backwards.

Induction is a FLOOR for everybody now, posting or trade, in the live generator
and the pack builder both. It never demotes: Bhattacharya keeps Registry's 63,
Holloway goes 0 → 43, Okonkwo 0 → 33. All twenty built agents verified non-zero.

Two GM tools the case showed were missing, both found by feeling the friction
rather than by reading anything:

  - clearPanic(actors). Panic clears when the scene does — one line in the book
    and, until now, five sheets edited by hand while the table waited. It leaves
    Coherence alone, which is the whole point of having two tracks.
  - partyState(). Everybody's hit points, panic and Coherence in one card. With
    five agents the alternative is asking "what are you on?" five times a scene,
    which is friction a table absorbs silently and then blames on the game.

And the player-facing gap: the primer never mentioned panic. Players got a
one-page aide-memoire for a track they now meet in the first scene. It has a
page of its own and a row on the cheat sheet, both generated from the same
tables as the rules.

One thing I reported as a bug and withdraw: Okonkwo's "Firearm (Pistol) 5%" was
me rolling the wrong weapon. He carries a marksman rifle at 53%. check-kits was
right.

Version 1.2.0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 00:10:28 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 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>
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>
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>
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>
2026-08-12 22:55:11 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ab619f4b73 Remove the dice textures and the whole Dice So Nice path
Deleted: the seven PNGs in dice/, tools/make-dice-textures.mjs, the `npm run
dice` script, the RB_DICE colourset and texture tables, diceSetFor, the
diceSoNiceReady hook, and rbDressDice — which was tagging ten roll sites with
coloursets that no longer existed. 99 lines of module, plus the assets.
README and DEPLOY updated; they still advertised all of it.

Recoverable with `git revert` if it is ever wanted back.

This also explains the 01-that-was-12. The RESULT was never wrong: skillRoll
rolls one 1d100 and grades on roll.total, and the chat card derives the tens and
units it prints from that same total. Checked all 100 values of percentileFaces
and 60 live rolls — the printed faces reconstruct the graded number every time,
with no mismatches.

What disagreed was the ANIMATION. The custom addDicePreset labels registered for
d100 and d10 remapped which physical face means what, so Dice So Nice could land
showing 01 while the roll behind it was 12. Nothing downstream ever read the
animated faces, so no roll was ever adjudicated on the wrong number — but a
table watching the dice had every reason to believe otherwise, which is its own
kind of wrong. Disabling the skins in 1.0.6 already removed it; deleting them
makes it permanent.

Verified in a running Foundry after removal: skill roll, weapon damage, hit
location, major wound and Coherence all resolve and post their cards, no errors,
and game.ringbrp.diceSetFor is gone from the API.

Version 1.0.7.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 22:45:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
2026-08-12 19:02:18 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 02ec47a351 Fix every NPC sheet, which has never opened
npc-sheet.hbs line 43 read

    {{#if (lookup ../skillsByCategory key).length}}

and Handlebars cannot read a property off a subexpression. That is a PARSE
error, so the template never compiled, so every NPC sheet in the system threw
on click — Natives & Threats, the starter's enemy roster, and the whole LAST
ADMISSION cast. #if already treats an empty array as falsy, so the .length was
never doing anything in the first place.

It was invisible to all four existing guards, and the reason is worth writing
down: check-rules reads .mjs, check-behaviour says in its own header that it
cannot reach sheets, and every play-through in this project has driven the
system through its API rather than by clicking. Nobody had ever opened an NPC
sheet, including me, in any of the sessions that "played through" scenarios
full of NPCs.

So: check-templates.mjs, a fifth guard, compiling every .hbs in about a tenth
of a second, wired into the build ahead of check-behaviour. It also names the
specific shape — a property read off a subexpression — because the raw parse
error says only where. Verified it bites by reintroducing the bug. Handlebars
is a devDependency now.

Opening the sheet then showed a second thing nobody had seen: the NPC skill
rows carry four children and were using the character sheet's seven-column
grid, so the name landed in a 13px column and the whole list overlapped
itself. The NPC row now has its own four-column template.

Verified by opening all six LAST ADMISSION cast sheets with an error hook
attached: six rendered, no errors, and Old Marrow reads HP 20/20, major wound
10, armour 2, Brawl 60%, Melee Weapon (Polearm) 60%.

Version 1.0.1.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 18:42:05 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 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>
2026-08-12 18:29:44 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 d063b3c016 Add LAST ADMISSION, a two-hour haunted-house prologue
OPEN DAY was too complex for a first night: a fixed timetable the GM narrates
minute by minute, three things that must be left unresolved, ten serial approach
scenes, and no combat. This is the replacement opener — same premise engine,
a third of the moving parts, and something to hit.

A cheap scare attraction on the last night of its six-week run, in a real empty
hall, with paying public still inside. Three of the ghosts on the poster were
invented in an afternoon by a marketing agency, printed on the tickets and the
wall panel and the call sheets, and performed forty times a night to twelve
thousand people who agreed to believe them for eighteen pounds each. They are
in the building now. They are not ghosts, they are entries, and they have
exactly as much inside them as was written down — a page each, which they do,
and nothing else. That makes them simple to run and simple to stop: hurt them,
or break the script. Both work; the script is faster and cheaper, and a table
that finds it should feel clever.

The fourth name on the panel was copied off a memorial in the parish church
because the layout needed four. Edith Crane was real, died in a real fire here
in 1963, and nobody wrote her a page because nobody had to. She never attacks,
cannot be hurt, and will not speak until she is asked her name. She wants her
name off a poster. The night ends on whether it comes down tonight or on Monday
— and Monday is two performances away.

Written for the second intake specifically, on their civilian sheets, with each
one's job as their way in: Renshaw is IN the show and knows the running order,
Ferriby wired it, Sharrock built the sets, Pollard is on the door, Braithwaite
and Ashcroft paid to get in. Each shortcuts a different part of the middle and
none of them is required.

Art: eight plates commissioned, seven kept. The wall panel plate was cut after
two attempts both produced three frames instead of four — a picture that
contradicts a count the scenario turns on is worse than no picture, so the panel
is a handout the GM shows rather than describes. The freed green-room plate went
onto the Act One page, where the call sheet is.

OPEN DAY stays in the repo as the longer, quieter alternative; both scenarios
say plainly which is which and that nothing depends on the choice.

Verified in Foundry: the adventure imports, six cast, seven GM pages, five
handouts, plates load.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:50:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f185c92088 Add OPEN DAY, the recruitment prologue
Ten civilians, one decommissioned telephone exchange, and eleven minutes during
which the building went back to being on the street it was built on. Nothing
attacks anybody. Nothing wants anything. That is the horror, and it is the whole
design.

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

The reconciliation pass, which is most of the work:

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

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

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

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

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:03:49 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 7f8355f0d0 Add the player primer and cheat sheet, and brand every journal
Ten pages a player reads before session one, in their own compendium at OBSERVER
ownership: nine of setting, one cheat sheet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 00:08:07 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 49c2e9fc7b Add PAPER WINDOW as the starter scenario Adventure
The six-player introductory case ships as a Foundry Adventure in a new `starter` pack,
because a scenario that arrives as nine loose documents a GM has to assemble is a
scenario that gets read rather than run.

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

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

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

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 23:25:10 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 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 1734612c06 v0.7.0 — vehicles, Borrowed Authority, and a door for the case generator
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>
2026-08-10 20:23:52 +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