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>
Five postings and five trades, so a group choosing from this sheet meets both
halves of character creation without anyone having to explain them.
Skills and kit are not written out per agent. They are expanded from the
register at build time by the same helper the starter scenario uses, which is
hoisted out of the BLACK PLATFORM block for the purpose — two copies of that
expansion is two places for the induction rule to drift. Ratings sit at the
middle of each band rather than being rolled, because a pregen that varies
between installs is not a pregen.
Portraits are generated art, resized to 512 and stored as webp (12MB of PNG
became 210KB). buildActor now takes a portrait and gives the same face to the
prototype token: a pregen you can recognise on the map is worth more at a
convention table than a correct one you cannot tell apart. It throws on a
portrait that is not on disk, because a broken image on a pregen sheet is the
sort of thing that is first noticed on a projector.
Guard: check-behaviour gains a test that every roster agent names a real
posting or trade and has its portrait on disk, verified to bite. It caught
"archive", which is not a posting — Bhattacharya is Registry.
Verified in a running Foundry: 14 pregens in the pack, sheets render with the
portraits, coherence and hit points fill from the template, no system errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
