Verifying R-255 on a live sheet found the rule working everywhere it was built and
contradicted in the first place a GM looks. The header's ARMOUR field is the hide the
creature HAS; on a grounded beast the hit-location table under it read 4 and the header
still read 9. Nothing computes off that field, so nothing in the code was wrong. It was
wrong at the table.
The field stays editable and stays 9 — that is the creature's hide and what a GM types
into. Under it, when system.grounded is set, the sheet now says what is in play:
DOWN: 4 · CHEST 9, derived from exposedHideFor rather than from a second opinion, with
the reason on the tooltip. Verified live: no badge in the air, and grounded the badge and
the location table agree at 4 with the forequarters at 9.
check-rules forbids redefining a rule by NAME, which misses how this goes wrong in
practice — nobody redefines exposedHideFor, they write Math.floor(hide / 2) in the sheet
because it is cheaper than an import. I wrote that version first and check-rules passed
it. It now fails any file outside rules.mjs that halves a hide inline, naming file and
line; check files are exempt because stating the expected value independently is what a
test is for.
That guard also turned up something I have not fixed, recorded in R-256: armourAgainst
lives in ringbrp.mjs rather than rules.mjs, and tools/simulate.mjs has its own inline copy
of it. They agree today so no published number is wrong, but every figure in the bestiary
and the lethality baseline comes out of that simulator.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
R-254 shipped the belly rule and called +6.4 points "modest on purpose". That read the
wrong statistic. +6.4 measured whether grounding helps; the question was whether the
borough still matters, and the gap between fighting the supporter on borough ground and
off it had fallen from 60.6 points to 44.9. Half damage from every departmental weapon is
meant to be the fight's central problem, and I had quietly taken sixteen points off it
while reporting a small number about something else. Same error as R-251.
Three changes that only work together:
- hide 7 -> 9, restoring the weight on the axis that should hurt
- grounded still halves it, 9 -> 4, which an ordinary round beats
- exposedHideFor now takes the location's kind and leaves `vital` unhalved: a beast on
its belly is not presenting its chest to the floor
Measured: 28.4% on borough ground flying, 68.4% grounded, 84.6% off it — a 56.2 point gap
against 44.9 before. Predicted 28.4 / 84.3 / 55.9 before building.
The composition of the three hide functions lives in prepareDerivedData where no test
could reach it, and check-anatomy's guard 6 is deliberately one-sided so it would not
have caught the vital losing its exemption. check-behaviour now composes the same
expression from the real supporter spec and the real tables. Negative-tested four ways:
removing the exemption, un-baring the wings, removing the halving, and inflating the hide
past what a round can beat each fail it with the right message.
Cost: the supporter goes from fifth to second deadliest creature in the book (2.84 -> 3.38
down, 46.8% -> 69.3% wiped). check-lethality refused the build until that row was
deliberately re-recorded.
BESTIARY.md printed the new hide and said nothing about it halving, because the body-plan
blurb predates the rule. The README said "eight guards" in three sentences above a
generated block listing nine. Both are the signature defect in prose: a number written
down that nothing reads. Both now generate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
The baseline needed no re-recording — e5dc9b5 already captured these
numbers, it matches HEAD's code exactly, and it differs from 4b71859's
in precisely the 26 entries ddc4f99 moved. What was missing was any
record of WHAT that change did, since it was folded silently into a
commit about wings.
Isolated by replaying 322389b and ddc4f99 against the same party, seed
and counts, so the figures are ddc4f99's own and not contaminated by the
four commits after it:
creatures whose numbers moved 26 of 46
deadlier 3
less deadly 8
unchanged wipe rate, moved elsewhere 15
mean change in wipe rate -0.17 points
Routing every blow through a hit location REDISTRIBUTED lethality
without raising it. Creatures with one big attack got slightly less
dangerous, because a blow that used to come off a single pool now has to
beat the armour covering wherever it landed; creatures that attack often
got slightly more dangerous, because they now accumulate damage in a
limb and disable it. Across the bestiary those cancel to within a fifth
of a point. Largest moves: the courier 6% -> 3.5%, the arrears 7.5% ->
9.5%, the stanchion 26% -> 28%, the long walker 68% -> 66.5%.
The log entry also records the two corrections I owe this thread, both
from explaining before measuring: the seeding was always per creature,
and the claim in check-lethality's header that I called untrue was true.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
Asking for the type of armour per location turned out not to be a display request.
Every equipped piece added its points to EVERY location, so a Brodie helmet protected
your shins and a cuirass protected your skull — with a catalogue containing sallets,
lobster-tail helmets and three cuirasses, that could not be printed without the sheet
saying something visibly false.
Armour now declares coverage as a named set rather than a list of locations, because a
piece has to fit whatever body wears it: all, torso, torsoArms, torsoLimbs, head. The
sets expand to location KINDS, so a cuirass covers a baseline torso and a vesh trunk
and ridge without either knowing the other exists. Unstated coverage is `all`, so
anything that does not declare behaves as everything did before. Eighteen of the
twenty-five catalogue pieces are not whole-body and now say so.
The trap was double counting: hitLocationRoll subtracted the global worn total PLUS
the body's own armour at that location, which was right while armour was global and
becomes a double count the moment a location knows its own pieces. It reads the
location's total and nothing else, verified by firing fourteen hits of 10 damage
across every location and asserting damage applied == 10 - that location's armour.
A single ARMOUR number no longer exists, so the header shows the torso with "0-8 by
location" beside it when the rest of you is not that. This is a real difficulty
change: limbs are frequently bare and limbs are 12 of 20 on the melee table.
Coherence moves out of the derived strip into the vitals at hit-point size, with its
band under it and the box reddening as it falls.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
There was no way to ready a weapon. The strip under the characteristics reads
`equipped`, and the only toggle-equipped control on the sheet was on the ARMOUR list —
a weapon could only be readied by opening its item sheet and finding the tickbox
there. The weapons table now carries the same toggle, the row is tinted when readied,
and a line above the table says what the control does.
The tab runs in the order it is used: weapons, armour, defend, reaction, body last.
Weapons lead with 40px art and a display-face name, having previously sat below two
screens of anatomy and reaction arithmetic.
The figure is a partial, drawn in three places — header thumbnail, combat tab, anatomy
tab. Three inline copies would have been the template-layer version of the defect
check-rules exists to prevent: a location present in one drawing and missing from
another.
The header carries a 34px figure and every location with its damage and the armour
over it, so "how much armour is on the part that just got hit" is answered on the main
page without changing tab.
Also fixed: `.ringbrp-sheet a` outranks a bare `.rb-equip`, so an unequipped toggle was
painted white and read as lit — true of the armour toggle too, since it was added.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The goods yard fight made the case: three agents inside the same pool of light shot at
-50% while the fourth, four metres away, shot at -10%.
A lamp now has a reach, per item rather than global, because a weapon lamp and a
vehicle searchlight are not the same offer — 4 m for cold light strips, 6 m for a
weapon lamp, 10 m for the issue field lamp, 30 m for a roof searchlight. Anyone inside
it is in the light and the card names whose lamp it is, so both halves of the rule
travel together: the pool is one position and the whole group is standing in it.
Measured from the tokens. The shot that started this — no lamp of her own, four metres
from somebody else's, in pitch dark — goes from 20% to 60%, while an agent
twenty-five metres out still eats the full -50%.
An UNKNOWN distance is explicitly not lit: Number(null) is 0, so an unmeasured
distance would otherwise have read as standing on top of the lamp and lit any scene
with no tokens placed. The dialog carries a tick instead, pre-set when the canvas could
measure it and the GM's answer when it could not.
Note: template.json is read when Foundry loads the system, so a deployed server needs
a restart and not just a pull before the migration can stamp the new field.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
R-228: Ambidextrous was a compulsory build. 0/-20 gave a full-strength main hand
AND a cheap second attack. It now buys consistency, not a free attack: -20 in both
hands against -20/-40 untrained.
R-229: full auto was a firing squad. Ten independent hits off one critical, each
with its own damage, location and Major Wound check. Hits capped at 3/5/7, and a
burst is ONE wounding event however many rounds connect.
R-230: Engines deleted the pressure it existed to create. Guns +2 and Helm +1
against a vent of 3 made a fighting round heat-neutral, so Heat only mattered when
the engineer failed. Venting is now 2/3/4.
Also: falling halving no longer stacks (soft + controlled quartered the drop);
blast has one formula floored once, so the answer no longer depends on call order.
And the structural note — "giving everyone a roll is not the same as giving
everyone a decision". Sensors, Damage Control and Medical now have mutually
exclusive modes that bite in the engine: mark/spoof/read, patch/brace,
restore/steady.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stress test first: 150 characters across every posting, tier and species against
fourteen invariants each, then the edges (characteristics at 1/3/21, every
location destroyed, twelve pikes carried, hp set to -99).
R-227: a destroyed head was a nap. The printed effect has always read "For
anything that keeps its brain there, this is death" and the code set unconscious
and stopped. destructionOutcomeFor() now says what destruction means.
THE WORLD: falling (a die per 3 m, armour does not apply), drowning (CON rounds
then a point a round, straight past the Major Wound threshold), fire (a condition
with a size; armour helps on the round you catch and never after), explosives
(one roll at the centre, shared by band, cover beats armour).
AUTOMATIC FIRE: one roll, the success level says how much of the burst arrived,
and the rounds are spent either way. TWO WEAPONS: -20/-40, or 0/-20 with the new
Ambidextrous talent; the off hand takes the lighter weapon and nothing over 2 kg.
BESTIARY: 21 entries in three families — folklore, horror, and what comes back
from further along — each with characteristics, natural armour, tactics and a
POWER written as a rule with a cost.
SPACE: eight stations, each on a skill somebody already has, so the Physician has
a chair. Range is a band; the helm moves one a round, in or out. Heat is the
pressure and took two rounds of playtest tuning to stop being a countdown.
64 rules, 198 spot-checked formulas, a 12-page rulebook in reading order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
Phases read 41/36/31 before the fumble; the fight with the rival desk cost two
agents; the last two phases resolved at 11% and 1% and the card says why —
Wounded: -20%. The wound pipeline reaches case phases, which is correct and now
legible. Closed at Containment 6, Resources 3, Clearance 5.
Confirms R-222: every agent finished with experience ticks from phase and combat
work, where before the fix a case produced none.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ramp made every phase after the first Difficult (halving the lead's skill) and
stacked a cumulative -5% on top. Separated in phaseRampFor() in rules.mjs:
difficulty belongs to the phase (only Containment is Difficult, and it does not
also ramp), the modifier is attrition (-5 a phase, capped at -15).
lead 55% was 55 -> 22 -> 17 -> 12 -> 7 now 55 -> 50 -> 45 -> 27 -> 40
Over 20,000 simulated cases with destitution modelled, phases passed roughly
double and destitution incidence roughly halves.
R-222: resolveLegDialog passed no skillFamilyId, so the choke point could not
resolve the skill item and leading a phase never earned a tick — Tradecraft, the
skill the job most uses, could never improve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bestIn("tradecraft") ?? bestIn("navigate") never reached Navigate, because every
character carries every skill and skillRating() returns the printed base rather
than null — so the first lookup always found somebody. A team of postings that
train Navigate and not Tradecraft was led by whoever had the highest UNTRAINED
Tradecraft, which is 5%, putting phase three at 1%.
TRAINED now means above the printed base. Measured on a Pathology / Overwatch /
Warden / Materials team: lead 5% -> 34%.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Audited every exported rule in rules.mjs against what the rulebook says and closed
the gaps:
- Dodge starts at DEX x 2 — newly evaluated, and stated nowhere until now
- Encumbrance: free carry, and which skill categories it actually penalises
- Bleeding rates and what stops each kind
- The merge ladder for Borrowed Authority, as a table
- A new page listing all 25 postings, generated from ROLES
The rulebook is now 9 pages and every one is generated from the code it documents.
All packs, 231 icons and the dice textures rebuilt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Since 0.6.1:
- VEHICLES as their own Item type: crew, seats, cargo, hull, armour, range,
terrain and the skill that works them, with speed as a band. 14 of them, from
the pool car and the Custodian van to a sealed crawler and the carriage that is
already parked outside wherever you were going to go.
- STORES roughly doubled to 118 gear items across four eras — standing issue and
paperwork, transport stores, and the forward stores Registry will not hand a
probationary officer. Catalogue now 175 items, 231 icons.
- Agents leave creation properly equipped: standing issue, the posting's kit,
what seniority adds, and one personal effect that is theirs and not the
department's.
- All 25 postings now describe themselves in the creation dialog.
- BORROWED AUTHORITY, the access subsystem. No hacking skill and nothing to break
into: access is a named credential with a scope, a Trust that erodes, and red
flags describing how its real owner behaves. Inside scope there is no roll. Two
tiers beyond is impossible at any skill. Coherence widens a record, and pushing
one past what its Trust will carry merges your file with theirs.
- Defences graded by level, and damage now rolls at the level a blow landed at.
- Dodge's DEX x 2 base is finally evaluated; it read 0% for most postings.
- Brawl is a fallback rather than a peer of the weapon in hand.
- check-lang guard: one key that was both a value and a branch silently
un-localised the entire system.
- The case generator is reachable from the Actor Directory, and no longer puts
every character in the world on a new case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Foundry VTT game system: Basic Roleplaying d100 in a drab British agency that
deals with crossings, where reality keeps a record of what belongs where and can be
made to get it wrong.
Contents:
- rules.mjs as the single authority for every rule formula, with 40 rules and 132
spot-checked values. Nothing may restate a formula it defines.
- 25 postings, each with a key characteristic, trained skills, talents and its own
kit; a 175-item catalogue across four eras; 231 generated icons.
- Reaction Lanes initiative, re-rolled every round including the first.
- Coherence, and the Quiet Arts, which only ever arrive from a crossing gone wrong.
- Graded defences: only a critical stops a critical.
- Borrowed Authority — access as a record rather than a hacking roll.
- A case generator, and a rules journal generated from rules.mjs so the book cannot
drift from the code.
Built compendia are committed so a remote Foundry needs only the files.
node_modules is not; `npm install` restores it for rebuilding content.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
