ee4e687c6c4a4568f98d32eb325b79380e631e2d
56
Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
ee4e687c6c |
CLEAN GROUND casts six from the duty roster, and Scent was never a test
No new sheets: Ashcroft, Bhattacharya, Renshaw, Braithwaite, Pollard and Okonkwo, cast for six non-overlapping lanes with an act each. Skill figures read out of expandFromRegister rather than retyped, so the compendium stays the authority. Two defects the casting found. Scent's base chance is 0, so the 1% floor was the whole of it and Act Four's "only test that works" was a roll nobody could make; it is Xenology (Baseline) now, which is what the skill is for. That puts the one reliable test on Braithwaite's sheet alone, so the scaling note refuses to let him be dropped and the risk is logged as an open question. Bhattacharya's private box now carries RESERVE ENTRY, which hands the briefing-or-discover decision to a player instead of the GM. Still an outline: no read-aloud, handouts, Act Four exposure model or playtest. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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>
|
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
97fe2704e8 |
Measure creatures over 2000 runs, not 200 (R-253)
R-252 established that a recorded figure carried several points of slack
at 200 runs and that only more runs narrows it. This is that.
Measured by taking every creature under four different base seeds and
looking at how far the four answers sat apart, which is the noise a GM
reading the bestiary is unknowingly trusting:
mean spread worst creature
200 runs 1.28 points 11.5 points
2000 runs 0.36 points 2.7 points
The worst case is what mattered. One creature's published wipe rate
could be eleven points from the same creature rolled with different
dice, on a figure printed in docs/BESTIARY.md for somebody to plan an
evening around. Under three now.
It corrected 19 of 47 published figures, mean 0.35 points: the arrears
6% -> 8.9%, the supporter 44% -> 46.8%, the nuckelavee 13.5% -> 16%.
Each was a sampling artefact printed as a property.
The cost is the part worth recording, because it is why this was never
done. I guessed "maybe a minute of build time" when I suggested it,
which was wrong by a factor of thirty and would have been a fair reason
to say no:
check-lethality alone 0.29s -> 1.88s
whole nine-guard suite 2.55s
BESTIARY.md regenerates from the baseline, so its run count follows
automatically; its header now also says the seeds are derived per
creature, since "at seed 11" stopped being the whole truth in R-252.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
|
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
2dbea88d4b |
Seed the lethality sim per creature (R-252)
Each creature now derives its own seed from its key, FNV-1a mixed into
the base seed, instead of every one of them being measured against seed
11.
This is the second reading of the request and the one I had not tested.
What I checked before was position independence — whether a creature's
numbers depend on its neighbours — and that was already true and still
is: inserting a creature ahead of the barghest changes 0 of 47 existing
rows under the new scheme, same as the old. What was NOT true is that
each creature had its own dice. All forty-seven faced the same two
hundred sequences.
Measured, because the argument for doing it is better than the result:
shared 11 per-creature
mean wipe rate across bestiary 5.67% 5.67%
mean agents down 0.538 0.522
rows changed -- 34 of 47
Seed 11 was not biasing the book. There was no systematic luck to
remove, and the aggregate is unmoved to two decimal places. What the
change buys is decorrelation: the error in each row no longer comes from
the same draw as every other row.
The useful number fell out of the comparison rather than the change.
Individual creatures moved up to four points of wipe rate purely from
being handed different dice — the courier 3.5% -> 7.5%, the long walker
66.5% -> 62.5%, quarantine unit 84.5% -> 88.5%. That is the sampling
noise inside any single recorded figure at 200 runs, and it means these
numbers are an exact regression fingerprint and a loose description of a
creature at the same time. Only more runs narrows the second; more seeds
does not. R-252 says so on the page.
seedMode is recorded alongside the numbers and checked, because changing
how a seed is derived moves every row without changing SEED itself. A
baseline from the old scheme is now refused rather than compared against
this one silently and wrongly — verified by running the new code against
the old file before re-recording.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
|
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
e54ce9130d |
R-251: measure what ddc4f99 actually did, four commits late
The baseline needed no re-recording — |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
ddc4f99ff4 |
Hit locations reach ordinary combat, and creatures get a body
THE DEFECT. locationFor had ONE caller in the engine, hitLocationRoll, and hitLocationRoll was called from fall, burn, detonate and burstAttack. Falling, fire, explosions and automatic fire. Nothing else. rollWeaponDamage rolled dice, printed a number and returned it, so the chat Damage button, the character sheet's damage button and the item sheet's all stopped there. A grenade knew which arm it took off. A sword did not. Every individual piece was already correct - the tables, per-location armour and coverage, disable and destroy thresholds, Major Wound, dying, death, the figure on the sheet. They simply were not joined up, which is why this reads as a wiring change rather than a new subsystem. - rollWeaponDamage now carries through to hitLocationRoll: it rolls the location, applies that location's armour, applies the wound, and handles the rest through the machinery that already owned it. Nothing here re-implements any of that - locationModeFor picks the melee or ranged column from the weapon's class. The two columns have always differed and nothing was choosing between them - with no target it does exactly what it did before and SAYS SO on a card, rather than failing quietly - burstAttack opts out with locate:false - it rolls its own location per round, and letting both fire would have applied every round of a burst twice BODY PLANS. Two new tables: quadruped (four legs, fore/hindquarters, neck, a head that is hard to reach) and winged (that, plus wings). Forequarters are the vital. DISABLE EITHER WING AND IT CANNOT FLY, which is the fight a party can win. Barghest, Kelpie and Church grim were all species "baseline" - a black dog, a horse and a grave-hound, each hit-located with two arms and a chest. Fixed. Added "The supporter", a winged heraldic beast, so the new table is exercised by real content instead of existing unused. Body plan is a NEW FIELD, not a species. A bear is not a playable people with characteristic dice and talents, so creature specs take bodyPlan and the playable species list is untouched. THE NPC SHEET had no hit locations at all - 102 lines against the character sheet's 627 - while every NPC in the game had them derived and wired to consequences. It now carries the body-plan selector, the figure, the per-location table, the condition and a GROUNDED flag. The sheet class already extended the character sheet, so it already HAD the context; the template never used it. FOUND IN PASSING, by the new guard: kind "body" - the abdomen, the trunk, the hindquarters - did nothing whatever. Its printed effect has always promised "-30% to all Physical actions and bleeding 1 hit point per round until First Aid" and the code delivered none of it, on every body plan including the humanoid default. It now bleeds 1, or 2 destroyed, exactly as bodyX says. NEW GUARD: check-anatomy. Every body plan must cover 1-20 exactly once in BOTH modes, every location must be drawn and every drawn shape must be a location, and every kind must be one locationEffectsFor acts on, has effect text for, and has a destruction outcome. Verified it fails on a d20 gap, a shapeless limb and an unhandled kind before wiring it in. Ninth guard. VERIFIED IN A RUNNING FOUNDRY, not just unit-tested: melee bar reads the Melee column and the rifle reads Ranged on the same creature; forequarters graded as a vital hit; a maxed wing set flightLost and the sheet said GROUNDED; the real chat Damage button rolled 1D20 15, found the right foreleg, applied 12 through armour, disabled the leg and took the dog from 16 to 4; and with nothing targeted nothing was touched. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
748e061b56 |
CLEAN GROUND: an outline where the department authored its own monster
A v0.1 rough outline, freely adapted from A Hollow Tree (2023) — the walk north that never arrives, and a predator that imitates. Everything else comes out of the system: a 1962 reserve entry that was never cancelled, forty-one people looping eleven duplicated miles, and Borrowed Authority as a detector that can only tell filed from unfiled. Uses existing bestiary entries only. Marked not-runnable: no pregens, read-aloud, handouts, Act Four exposure model or playtest yet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
0c0996858f |
A GM screen taken from the rules that actually run
The figures a GM reaches for mid-scene, on one page: the order of operations, the circumstance ladder, how a roll bands, reaction, the combat round, hit locations, wounds and bleeding, both tracks, the way home, the stations, and the environment. Every number was checked by running the function rather than by reading it — 58 of 58 against rules.mjs, including the eight that moved out of ringbrp.mjs. That matters more than usual here, because `design/` still carries four rulings the code has overtaken: hit points as CON+MAS, a Major Wound at max(9, HP/3), "no hit locations, final", and marksmanship style fixed by home-world gravity. rules.mjs is the authority and the page says so at the top. It is also written to drop straight onto a Loom board: 34 cards, 23 links, nothing swallowed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
322389bc8a |
A bestiary a GM can actually read, and the defect it found immediately
Forty-six creatures and no way to look at them. They live in content.mjs, which is source code, and in the compendium, which shows one actor at a time behind two clicks. A GM prepping a case can browse neither, so in practice the bestiary was whatever the GM happened to remember writing. docs/BESTIARY.md is generated, never hand-written, for the reason the rules journal is generated from rules.mjs: a reference that can disagree with the thing it references is worse than no reference. It opens with a one-page table sorted by how much of a party each creature puts on the floor - the part that gets printed - then an entry each with characteristics, attack, the POWER line pulled out of the tactics, and the measured figure read straight from the lethality baseline. Every number is derived, so the document cannot drift, and check-lethality already refuses the build if the measurements move. IT FOUND SOMETHING IN ITS FIRST RUN. The generic heavy natural attack is keyed `grasp` and was NAMED "Vesh grasp limb". Twenty-two creatures carry it and five are Vesh, so the at-a-glance table cheerfully printed "Vesh grasp limb" against a black dog, a kelpie, a church grim and an apple tree. Renamed to "Grasping limb"; the key is untouched, so every kit reference and every built pack still resolves. That defect was invisible for as long as nobody could see the bestiary in one place, which is the argument for the document. The caveats are given more room than the numbers, deliberately. The measured column is SOLO against ONE frozen party, and the document says so three times: encounter lethality moves with how many there are and, much harder, with who the players brought - the same fight runs 0% to 100% across party choice. It points at --spread rather than pretending a single figure is an answer. Also records the real remaining gap: 21 creatures fight with nothing but their own bodies and still carry human anatomy, so the barghest can be shot in the left arm. The machinery to fix that is built and measured; what is missing is anatomy tables for the shapes they actually are - a quadruped, an immobile object, a swarm. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
2d4f7f18be |
Twenty-four new creatures, and the anatomies finally get used
The bestiary goes 22 to 46: eight more FOLKLORE, eight more HORROR, eight more FORWARD. Ten of the forty-six are now Vesh or Cadence, up from two. That ratio is the point. Both anatomies have had complete hit-location tables, body geometry, species talents and location effects for the whole life of this project and nothing used either, so none of it ran outside the character generator. They are now written to be WORTH the anatomy rather than to wear it: - The relay is five Cadence bodies holding a crossing open, and the crossing closes as they are destroyed. No vital, no head, 10% off everything per body lost - it cannot be dropped and cannot be ignored, which is the species argument entire. - The courier is a Vesh that fights at half rating while its one grasp limb is full. Disable the limb and it drops the consignment and fights properly. The whole encounter turns on a trade the party has to work out. - The census cannot be usefully fought at all: no head means no killing shot, so the fight lasts until somebody opens the ridge, by which time it has counted everyone. - Knockers are the only folklore Cadence, and the committee is a Cadence because a committee IS several bodies and one decision. The rest is written to the house line that most of these are arrangements rather than fights, because a bestiary where every answer is a gun has one page. The washer at the ford will not fight and cannot be made to; the apple tree man wants a drink it has been owed since 1961; the waiting room's exit was never locked and nobody stands up. Measured, 250 runs against four duty-roster agents, seed 11. Nothing accidental turned up: the non-combat entries sit at 0.0-0.1 agents hurt, the fighters at 1.4-2.3, and the only creature over a 10% solo wipe is the stanchion at 14.4% - which is a fixed object with 12 armour whose own tactics say it is a demolition problem and not a fight. The harness can only force a fight, so read that number as "the party punched the pillar". Art regenerated: 24 new portraits, and the eight new non-humans verified to draw exactly as many body parts as their location tables have entries. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
f88c31649c |
The bestiary's first non-human creatures
vesh and cadence have had complete hit-location tables, body geometry, species talents and location effects since they were written, and no creature had ever used either. So none of that had run outside the character generator, and the whole bestiary was hit-located as a person - including a black dog and a stack of paper. THE CHOIR IS A CADENCE. It always was: its tactics say "run them as ELEVEN separate bodies with one initiative between them", which is Distributed and Quorum described in prose because the species that models it had no users. Retagged, and given the two talents. No scenario prose refers to it, so nothing else moves. PRECEDENT is new, and is a Vesh - the first. Built to exercise what makes the species different rather than to be another sack of hit points: no head, so no fight against one ends on a lucky roll, and a sensory ridge for a vital that runs the length of its back and is correspondingly easy to hit. It is also not hostile, which is the point; the encounter is a conversation with something that answers questions about an event that has not happened yet. Two things left deliberately unfixed and written down rather than fudged: - The choir is eleven in the fiction and five in the location table. Reconciling it properly means giving cadence a per-creature body count, which stops the table being a constant and makes the paper doll follow it. That is the right fix and it is not a small one. A note on the spec says so. - Precedent gets unblinking but not out_of_step, though SPECIES.vesh grants both. An npc actor has no Coherence track, and out_of_step costs 1 to use. Also corrects a comment in creature-schema.mjs claiming Out of Step is vesh-locked. It is not - five postings and a roster agent offer it to humans, and locking it would take it off all six. SPECIES[x].talents is what a species is GRANTED; TALENTS[].species is what only that species may HAVE. Two different fields, and only the second locks. Simulated: Precedent 0.68 of 4 hurt over 3 rounds, no wipes. The choir alone is trivial; at the eleven its own tactics call for, 3.05 of 4 hurt, median 18 rounds, 0.3% wipes. Read both as floors - the harness does not model hit locations, so a Cadence's entire mechanical identity is exactly what it cannot yet measure. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
187a317a0a |
mj-queue: the illustrated upgrade path, without a self-bot
The Mac bridge posts /imagine to Discord with a user token. It is not ported here and should not be: Midjourney's terms since 27 May 2026 forbid automated access, there is no official API, and the bridge's own memory note records Discord silently dropping its interactions from 22 July — which is what enforcement looks like from inside. A Windows clone would be a second self-bot on the same account. So this does everything except talk to Discord, which turns out to be most of the work. `next` derives a prompt from the creature's spec and puts it on the clipboard; you paste it yourself; `file` or `watch` renames the download to the canonical name and retires the generated placeholder. One at a time, because the memory note is explicit that concurrent jobs in one channel steal each other's grids. Prompts are derived, not written — anatomy from the location table, scale from SIZ, build from STR against SIZ, plating from naturalArmour — so they cannot drift from the statblock. Three things learned by reading the data rather than assuming it: - tactics is written for a GM, not an illustrator. "Advances by bounds, 15 m per round" put a rate of fire in an art prompt. role is the one-line essence and is already the sentence you would hand an artist. Sentences carrying mechanics are dropped; dates and ages are kept. - era is the wrong test for whether something is a person. It classified Mr Bewley of the Registry and everyone in 1881 Cordera as monsters, because their kit is old. - 18 creatures are species "baseline" and are not human-shaped — a black dog, a case file that eats case files, a machine that has decided it is the site. The prompt refuses to describe a body it cannot verify, and `list` names them. That is a statblock to write, not something to paper over here. `sheet` emits a prompt sheet that the existing gen-art.mjs parses unchanged, so if the bridge ever works again the whole bestiary drives from it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
10f588b666 |
Plan: the creature forge
Five parts - schema and validator, lethality harness, forge CLI, procedural portraits, Foundry importer - built on three findings: the species machinery (vesh, cadence) is fully implemented and completely unused, the published measured lethality tables cannot be reproduced by anything in the repo, and RINGBRP.figures already holds the per-species geometry procedural portraits would need. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
c6924d6ea8 |
THROUGH TRAIN: art prompt sheet, and a runner for it
Prompts for all 43 assets - 16 duty-roster portraits, 14 NPC portraits from TT_CAST, and the 13 scene plates, none of which had a recorded prompt, so none of them could be regenerated. Art direction is frontier newspaper engraving, and the present-day Bureau material is drawn in the same 1881 hand as Cordera with modern people composed as tintype portraits, so the two halves read as one document. Three rules are written into the sheet because they protect meaning rather than style: nothing modern is drawn on the 1881 side, the train is absence rather than a glowing spectre, and nobody is lit as a villain. tools/gen-art.mjs parses the sheet rather than keeping a second copy of the prompts, expands the style tokens and drives mj-gen. Dry run by default, because --run fires paid generations. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
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>
|
||
|
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>
|
||
|
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>
|
||
|
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> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
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>
|
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
1bf8d7f6fb |
Playtest LAST ADMISSION: five fixes, one new guard
Played it through in Foundry with the six on their civilian sheets. Five
defects, all of the house's favourite kind — a number written down that nothing
reads.
1. Pollard and Agyeman were armed and armoured as CIVILIANS. The police trade
kit carries a revolver and a stab vest, which is right for a serving
officer and wrong for a British civilian, and it ended the scenario's only
fight in a single round. expandFromRegister's civilian mode now strips
firearms and body armour from trade kit as well as induction and standing
issue, and the build throws if one gets through. Wren Finch keeps her
knife — a knife is not an issued weapon.
2. Old Marrow's shears were a utility knife. The page said 1d8+1; the actor
in the pack held 1d4+2, so a GM running off the token had a different
fight from the one written down. He now carries a billhook — an actual
garden tool that is already in the catalogue — and the page says 1d8+2,
which is what a billhook does.
3. He was too soft to be the fight the scenario promises. At the original
numbers he died in an average of 2.4 rounds and in 6 runs of 20 he was
dead before he ever swung. Retuned over thirty runs to HP 20, armour 2:
about four and a half rounds, somebody hurt in 28 of 30, somebody dropped
in 9 of 30. The verification run took four rounds and left Pollard on
eight hit points.
4. Two stat lines disagreed with the generated sheets — Marrow 16 against 15,
Enderby 13 against 12.
5. Two rolls had no failure written: the body, and Sammy's ankle pull. The
body is now marked "no roll" outright, because there is no better answer
to buy. The pull has a fumble result.
New guard: check-behaviour parses the scenario's own fight line out of the page
HTML and compares it to the actor the build will generate — hit points against
hitPoints(CON,SIZ), armour against naturalArmour, and shear damage against the
catalogue entry for whatever he is actually holding. Verified it bites by
reverting the damage to 1d8+1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
|
||
|
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> |
||
|
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>
|
||
|
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> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
4e28de2a64 |
Play PAPER WINDOW with the shipped pregens; fix four silent defects
Ran the starter end to end. It closed, and it found four defects in what I shipped an hour earlier — all in the scenario data, all silent. R-247: the Borrowed Authority did not work. I wrote scope "operate", which is not one of the five scope tiers; an unrecognised scope ranks 0 and every action came back "impossible" with no error. The first scene of the starter is the Borrowed Authority tutorial. Fixed, guarded in check-kits, and covered by a test that documents the failure mode. R-248: the contact subsystem was unreachable in the scenario built around it. The case file carried a standing for the Returned Clerks and no GROUP ITEM; resolveContact returns null without one, so READ, SIGNAL and OFFER did nothing. Groups are data now, and a test asserts every standing on a shipped case file has a group behind it. R-249: legs wrote `kindId` where resolveLegDialog reads `leg.kind`. It worked only because the terrain text happens to begin with "Extraction". Not a defect: phase four went Difficult because Resources hit 0 and destitution makes every remaining phase Difficult. Best beat in the session. All four phases failed and the case still closed — Containment 8 to 2, Resources 8 to 0 — which is what the scenario is built to survive. Two of six closing requirements succeeded and the settlement still completed. The Cancellation Man opened with a critical against a raised riot shield and went through 10 points of armour, teaching the shield and graded-defence lessons in one roll. Also documented: nobody on the starter team can aim the return, because only the Anchor Officer trains Transposition. The extraction page now says to narrate it rather than roll six dice that will all fail. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
43508259ac |
Consolidation pass after a Codex review
Four real defects, each verified against the source before acting on it. Trade expertise was coupled to agency rank. A probationary burglar came out at 35-50% and a veteran at 65-80%, as though fifteen years of picking locks were something the department conferred. TRADE_BANDS is now fixed at 50-65/30-50 at every rank, and INDUCTION scales with service instead (20-32 probationary to 45-60 veteran) because that half genuinely is the department's. The two axes were the wrong way round. This is the thing I flagged myself after PAPER HARBOUR and then left alone — flagging a defect is not the same as fixing it. Bonus points were sprayed across every skill in the game. grantFullSkillList runs immediately before the loop and puts all fifty-nine skills on the sheet, and the loop picked from actor.items, so a veteran's ninety points landed anywhere. The comment two hundred lines above has always said "over the core skills"; the code never did. "Random species" passed "baseline" into generators that support random perfectly well. No behavioural tests. The strongest point in the review: the three guards are static and none of them can tell whether a rule is READ, which is the only kind of defect this project has ever shipped. tools/check-behaviour.mjs now runs 28 deterministic tests, gated into the build, covering R-231/232/243/245/246, graded defences and the lamp rule. Proved it bites by re-breaking R-246. The register moved to postings.mjs, a Foundry-neutral module the engine, rulebook, guards and tests all import normally — they were previously pulled out of the engine with a regex and eval, which worked and was a trap. My first version of that used `export … from`, which re-exports without local bindings, so ROLES was undefined and the system threw on init: node --check passes that, loading it in Foundry does not. Also: the contact doc comment still said "only OFFER moves standing"; check-kits accepted mas/app, which are the DISPLAY names of siz/cha, so a posting declaring one would have passed and produced an undefined characteristic; package.json disagreed with the manifest; README counts were three revisions stale and are now generated at build. Deferred with reasons: splitting the 6,700-line engine into modules. Right, and a multi-session refactor whose risk is exactly the silent breakage demonstrated above. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
c60485de72 |
Play PAPER HARBOUR with the criminal, and fix R-246
A pier that closed in 1974, a beacon still transmitting, and a probationer recruited out of a city with a caution the department has quietly lost. The generator's gap — somebody uses that agent's name before it is given — landed on him in phase 2, and he held it on Fast Talk 14 against 48 while the Field Lead missed the read. The case turned on a warrant card: the keepers of the ground want relieving by somebody official enough to take the duty on, and every agent carries exactly that. Bargain 27, favourable, rolled 33 — impression -1 to +1. The one unambiguously his moment was the log the first team locked in behind them: 11 against Sleight of Hand 50. R-246: a fumbled greeting cost nothing. contactOutcomes has said fumble/signal -1 since the social pillar was built, and impression was adjusted only inside the `offer` branch — so the -1 was computed on every botched greeting and thrown away. Impression now falls on a fumble at any stage and still only rises on an offer; the narrower fix matters because read's delta counts FACTS LEARNED, not standing, so applying the delta always would have paid the team impression for doing research. Also logged: a probationary criminal is out-sneaked by a career Field Lead (47 to 60) because trade skills use the agency tier bands — defensible, flagged, not changed. And one invented step of my own: I rolled Transposition to get them home after the extraction phase had already put them out. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
b8430c284b |
Play PAPER MARGIN with a trade character
A farm in Angus, a person in two places, and a probationary doctor recruited from A&E alongside two career officers. The generated case turned out to be its own best argument for trades: the truth is that there is no original left, both are copies, and telling two identical people apart is a medical question — Medicine on that team reads 42, 1 and 1. Both halves of the trade design showed up. She was the only one carrying the department's own vocabulary (Anomaly Lore 37 against 0 and 0, Tradecraft 31 against 5 and 5), and she was hopeless at closing: Persuade 23, rolled 95, read on Insight 60. The examination failed by three and the bloods came back critical on 02 — both samples are the same sample. Neither career officer could have found it. R-226 fired visibly: trained Tradecraft 31 lost the phase lead to trained Navigate 34. The riot shield issued to Containment two commits ago turned up unprompted and took Kobe from 7 everywhere to 10 on torso and arms. Coverage applied to the opposition too — the duplicate died through its bare leg. One probe error recorded, not a defect: endOfCase returned nothing because my ad-hoc rolls passed no skillFamilyId, so nothing ticked — the same omission R-222 found in resolveLegDialog, reproduced by hand. Named properly, Medicine ticked and improved 42 -> 48%. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
79acc8227f |
Ten trades, an induction layer, and rolling the stats yourself
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
53eb72c100 |
Issue riot shields to Containment and the Night Warden
Both postings draw a riot shield, and both are trained to use it — issuing one without the skill would have been R-212 again with a different item, the Antiquities Officer who drew a flintlock and rolled 5% with it. melee_weapon:shield is SWAPPED into each support list rather than added, so five core and five support are preserved and the shield arrives without a free power bump. Containment drops stealth (a posting whose job is being the thing in the doorway was always the least stealthy in the department); the Night Warden drops navigate (they sit with one site all night). check-kits now requires the Shield skill for an issued shield, the same way it has always required training for an issued weapon. Verified by removing the skill and watching the build refuse. Four generated agents: shield skill at 25-30%, nobody encumbered, though a Containment officer lands at 32.9 of 33 kg. The shield ships slung — raising it is the choice, and for the Warden it is the difference between 2 points of armour and 5. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
0c2636d543 |
Play the bell tower stair: shields, and what they cost
Two officers, identical kit — riot shield, stab vest, 12 hp, Shield 65% — and one difference: one holds the shield up, one keeps it slung and shoots. Raised it is most of their armour (torso 5, arms 3 against torso 2, arms 0 with it down). Four ordinary blows turned aside cost the shield nothing, which is the right call: at a point per parry a 5-wear riot shield would have been kindling before the fight started. Round 8 a CRITICAL halberd was parried, dragged down one step, and the shield took 2 wear for absorbing it while the reduced blow still landed on the covered arm for 7. Both officers were killed through the gaps a riot shield does not cover — one through both legs, one through the head for 10 against a location maximum of 5, dead outright rather than dying (R-227 holding). The ranged penalty then decided it. Shield up, the survivor shot at 65% less 20% and rolled 93, 89, 73, 65. That last number is the rule in one figure: 65 hits at 65% and misses at 45%. The redcap was on 3 of 13 and walked away. Nothing needed tuning. Full log in docs/REVIEW_LOG.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
016ea1c4ab |
Play the chantry ruin: coverage measured against points
Two officers from the same pregen, same hit points, same Sword and Dodge, armoured so that the one carrying MORE points carried it in FEWER places: a breaching suit at 7 points on all seven locations against a cuirass and helmet at 9 points on three. Against a redcap with an 80% halberd, where fourteen of twenty melee locations are limbs. The cuirass and helmet stopped fifteen points across three connecting blows and it did not matter: the two hits that found a bare leg did every point they rolled, destroyed the leg (12 against a maximum of 6), and started a six-round dying clock. Under the old rule that leg carried 9 points and both blows would have done nothing. The suited officer took the same weapon on a limb for zero and went nine rounds untouched — then a CRITICAL halberd against a successful dodge landed one step down as a special, halved the armour, and put 9 through a 7-point suit. Full coverage is resilience, not immunity. Full log in docs/REVIEW_LOG.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
3421ed4a2e |
Reorder the combat tab, and make weapons readyable
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> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
5c640d65cf |
Fix a fast action firing twice and paying once
Ammunition was charged once before the shot loop rather than once per shot, so the Webley put two rounds out and the cylinder went down by one. That is the exact dishonesty the burst rules exist to avoid, and it landed on the mode that is supposed to cost the most. Charged per shot now, and the loop stops when the weapon runs dry part way through the action. Found by playing the four modes side by side in the goods yard — one agent per mode, all four at 60%, so the fight read the mode and not the shooter. Full log in docs/REVIEW_LOG.md, including two findings left open: burst options are close to unselectable once the light is bad, and a lamp currently lights only its carrier while three agents stand in the same pool of it at -50%. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
d4442a55f0 |
Play SALT COUNTY with the new bestiary
A records office, a revenant as the briefed symptom, and the carrion file as the cause "elsewhere in the same location". The revenant was resolved without a shot off its own leverage line. AMENDMENT then removed two trained skills and a talent permanently, with no roll offered — which is the whole point of that entry. Burning the file exercised the fire rules on a thing rather than a person: armour counted on the round it caught and never again. The team burned too. Closed at Containment 8, Resources 1, Clearance 5; the failed extraction advanced the window clock and every crossing took the -10%. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
ee9e1f5b73 |
Codex review pass: three real faults corrected
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> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
79caf143bd |
R-226: "Tradecraft first" was too literal
My own R-221 fix overshot. A Containment Officer whose Tradecraft had caught a stray bonus point sat at 12% against a base of 5 — technically trained — and led every phase ahead of a Rigging Officer on 53% Navigate. Tradecraft still wins ties and wins when genuinely better; it no longer wins when plainly worse. The Containment phase went 6% -> 26% on the same team. Found playing GLASS LANTERN with the historical gear: salvaged polearms and slings correctly arrive at 5% because nobody trains them, and maille over brigandine (AR 8) reduced four utility-knife hits to zero damage each. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
e2d0ed5bb2 |
A player briefing, and the historical range
The generator was already writing the timeline, the cast and the texture and filing all of it behind the GM screen. New PLAYERS page: a read-aloud opening, what it is like there, what is known so far, who is there and what they want — but never what they lie about. Page ownership is now declared by the page rather than guessed from its index, which would have hidden any second player page. Historical range: 38 weapons (from 6) and 14 armours (from 2), each with its period stated, from arming swords and longbows through matchlocks and Brown Bess to the Lee-Enfield and a trench club. Five new skills to hang them on, including Firearm (Muzzle-loader), because a muzzle-loader is not a rifle. 275 icons; every weapon maps to a real skill and every item has art. Catalogue is 206 items across four eras. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
2d0f70329e |
Play IRON MARGIN: closed socially, no casualties
Four phases, no weapon drawn. The arrangement with the quiet neighbours (standing 0 -> 2) is the win condition on this case. Nobody lost a hit point. A fumbled Transposition on 99 cost 3 Coherence and delivered an Art, which is the only way one ever arrives. Together with LOW VERGE this brackets the death rules honestly: they bite when the fiction has already gone badly, not by default. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
|
5c114601a9 |
R-224: a body at zero absorbed damage for free
Hit points clamp at zero, so further damage to somebody already there changed nothing — and a STABILISED agent absorbed it forever, because the count was held and there was nothing else left to move. You could empty a magazine into someone bleeding out and the system would not notice. Damage at zero now breaks the stabilisation and costs a round of the count, and hitLocationRoll calls died() when that meets the limit. Found by playing LOW VERGE until it killed somebody: two agents who were medically stable died in the water on a failed tidal extraction. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
||
|
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> |