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>
Play a full case, then fix what it found
2026-08-18 00:25:19 +01:00 · 2026-08-18 00:10:28 +01:00 · 2026-08-17 23:31:35 +01:00 · 2026-08-17 23:25:46 +01:00 · 2026-08-17 21:58:30 +01:00 · 2026-08-12 22:55:11 +01:00
167 changed files with 1836 additions and 144 deletions
@@ -65,13 +65,13 @@ changing underneath a running server.
 | **Postings** | 25, each with a key characteristic, trained skills, talents and its own kit |
 | **Trades** | 10 ordinary jobs the department recruits from, plus induction |
 | **Catalogue** | 236 items — 123 gear, 62 weapons, 32 armour, 19 vehicles |
-| **Skills / talents** | 59 skills, 19 talents |
+| **Skills / talents** | 62 skills, 19 talents |
 | **Bestiary** | 21 statblocks across folklore, horror and the far side |
 | **Eras** | modern, antique, future, anomalous — the agency is old and never abolishes anything |
 | **Icons** | 292, all generated from `tools/icons.mjs`; no external art |
 | **Starter scenario** | **BLACK PLATFORM**, a six-player action starter, importable as a single Adventure |
 | **Compendia** | pregens, NPCs, skills, weapons, armour, gear, vehicles, powers, tables, rules, the starter |
-| **Rules journal** | 12 pages, generated from `rules.mjs` so the book cannot drift from the code |
+| **Rules journal** | 13 pages, generated from `rules.mjs` so the book cannot drift from the code |
 <!-- box:end -->

 ---
@@ -180,9 +180,9 @@ The build runs all five guards before it writes anything:

 <!-- guards:start -->
 ```
-check-rules: OK — 87 rules, 20 files scanned, 3 aliases + 41 constant sets checked, 275 formulas verified
+check-rules: OK — 92 rules, 21 files scanned, 3 aliases + 45 constant sets checked, 291 formulas verified
 check-kits: OK — 25 roles, 10 trades, 218 catalogue items, every kit key resolves, every posting can use what it carries, every loadout distinct
-check-lang: OK — en.json, 945 keys, no leaf/branch collisions
-check-behaviour: OK — 46 behavioural tests
+check-lang: OK — en.json, 981 keys, no leaf/branch collisions
+check-behaviour: OK — 59 behavioural tests
 ```
 <!-- guards:end -->
@@ -0,0 +1,394 @@
+# Crossing starter — The Custodians: THROUGH TRAIN
+
+> *A train has been running the same four miles of track since the third of November,
+> 1881. It has never stopped. There are sixty-one people on it and they are all alive.*
+
+---
+
+## GM ESSENTIALS
+
+- **System:** d100 roll-under. Special under a fifth, critical under a twentieth.
+  96–99 never succeed; 00 always fumbles; a 60% skill fumbles on 98–00.
+- **Panic is live** — 0–5, up. A trigger costs a point with no roll; relief is rolled.
+  **This is the case where it earns its keep.**
+- **Standing Order 9 is live** — nothing modern goes through. Charge for *using*, never
+  for carrying. Anchors are exempt.
+- **Runs with 4–6 agents from the duty roster.** Not the "(before)" sheets — this is the
+  job, and it wants people who have been trained.
+- **Hard rule: at 2:45 on the clock, they are on the train.**
+- **Content warnings:** entrapment and confinement; a decision that condemns named
+  people including children; period racism and hardship implied but not staged; heights;
+  one death by fire in backstory.
+
+---
+
+## Overview
+
+- **Setting:** Mercy Draw, Nevada — present day, and 3–4 November 1881.
+- **Tone:** Procedural, then unbearable. It is a paperwork error with sixty-one people
+  inside it.
+- **Runtime:** 3h30 play + a 10 minute break.
+- **The crossing:** opens at 11:40 every day, for about four minutes, on the grade.
+
+### Design intent
+
+1. **The supernatural is science fiction underneath.** Nobody is dead, nothing is
+   haunting anybody, and the whole event has a mechanism the players can understand and
+   explain back. If a table leaves thinking "ghost train", it has been run wrong.
+2. **The obstacle is a physical problem, not a mystery.** They will know what is
+   happening by the end of Act One. Acts Two and Three are about a train that cannot
+   stop and an arithmetic that cannot be beaten.
+3. **Standing Order 9 is the tutorial.** One shot at a time, no radio, a lantern that
+   runs out. The period kit *is* the difficulty setting, and it is the scene where
+   players learn what kind of game this is.
+4. **The ending is a decision priced on both sides**, with no roll and no correct
+   answer, taken in front of a woman holding a manifest.
+5. **What this is not:** a fight. There is no antagonist. Kell is not possessed, Vane is
+   not a villain, and the train is not malevolent — it is a note being held.
+
+---
+
+## Session Timing
+
+| Section | Time | Cumulative | Checkpoint |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| Briefing — the standing order | ~20 min | 0:20 | kit swapped, somebody has complained |
+| Act One — Mercy Draw, now | ~50 min | 1:10 | they know it is a survey fraud, and they have heard 11:40 |
+| *Break* | *10 min* | *1:10* | lands on the whistle |
+| Act Two — Cordera, 1881 | ~70 min | 2:20 | they are on the train |
+| Act Three — Aboard | ~50 min | 3:10 | they have decided |
+| Epilogue — the register | ~20 min | 3:30 | sixty-one names, written down |
+
+**Hard rule:** at 2:45 they are aboard, by the department's wagon if not by their own wit.
+
+---
+
+## Plot Summary (GM truth)
+
+**April 1881.** The Cordera & Western needed four miles of narrow gauge across a dry
+wash called **Mercy Draw**. The company surveyor, **Elias Vane**, was told what the chart
+had to say before he walked the ground. He filed a survey showing the line on the
+**north bench**. The line was laid on the **south bench**, because that is where the
+ground allowed it.
+
+Nobody was hurt by that. It is the dullest possible paperwork lie. And for six months
+every timetable, waybill, dispatch and telegraph order in the company's operation
+described a train running along the north bench.
+
+**Reality keeps a record of what belongs where.** It can be made to get it wrong by
+anything patient enough — and a train is the most patient arguer there is: a fixed line,
+a constant speed, on the hour, every day, saying the same wrong thing about where it was.
+
+**3 November 1881, 11:40.** The record gave way. Four miles of line came loose from the
+date with No. 9 and five cars on it and **sixty-one souls aboard**.
+
+**The running is what holds it open.** This is the thing the players must arrive at: the
+train is not trapped inside the crossing — the train *is* the crossing. A standing wave,
+sustained by its own motion the way a bow sustains a note.
+
+- **Nobody is dead.** They eat, sleep in shifts, and have organised a water rota. By
+  their clocks it has been about nine hours.
+- **Nobody can get off.** Step down and you are on ground outside the error. Three
+  departmental attempts are on file; none returned; all three tried to stop it first.
+- **Stop the train and the note ends** — and everything it holds open ends with it.
+
+**Elias Vane is aboard.** He rode his own line to see what he had signed for. He has had
+nine hours and a hundred and forty-five years to think about it. He understands the
+standing wave better than the department does, he has told nobody, and he will answer any
+direct question honestly because he has been waiting a very long time to be asked.
+
+### Timeline
+
+| When | What |
+|---|---|
+| 12 Apr 1881 | Vane files the survey. North bench. |
+| Apr–Oct 1881 | Line laid on the south bench. Six months of paperwork says otherwise. |
+| **3 Nov 1881, 11:40** | The record gives way, with No. 9 inside it. |
+| 1889 | Rails lifted. The grade is still there. |
+| 1974, 1991, 2009 | Three departmental attempts. No survivors. All tried to stop it. |
+| Every day, 11:40 | The crossing opens on the grade for about four minutes. |
+
+### Revelations
+
+| # | Revelation |
+|---|---|
+| R1 | The filed survey puts the line on the north bench |
+| R2 | There has never been a railway on the north bench |
+| R3 | Six months of paperwork repeated it |
+| R4 | The dispatcher's book has no 11:45 entry |
+| R5 | The 11:40 sound is a train working *up* a grade — always accelerating |
+| R6 | Nobody aboard is dead, and by their clocks it has been nine hours |
+| R7 | The running is what holds the crossing open |
+| R8 | Coal that should have lasted four hours has lasted a hundred and forty-five years |
+| R9 | Kell will stop if told to, and only if told to |
+| R10 | Vane signed it, and knows exactly what stopping it costs |
+| R11 | Sixty-one people, six passes, four hours — and the crossing may not hold |
+
+---
+
+## Player Experience
+
+You are handed a Webley, a single-shot rifle, an oil lantern and a pocket watch, and told
+that the handset stays behind. Then you stand in a dry wash in Nevada at 11:38 in the
+morning and listen to a train you cannot see work a grade that has had no rails on it
+since 1889. By lunchtime you know it is a survey fraud from 1881. By the evening you are
+lying on the top of a water tower waiting for forty seconds of slow track, and after that
+you are in a warm carriage that smells of coffee, being asked by a conductor with a
+manifest whether you are from the company. She has counted sixty-one every hour for a
+hundred and forty-five years. She would like that noted.
+
+---
+
+## The Countdown — the crossing clock (0–6)
+
+Move it on **each pass of the train**, when **somebody uses a modern object across**, and
+on a **fumbled boarding attempt**.
+
+| Clock | What |
+|---|---|
+| 0 | Open. Four minutes at 11:40. |
+| 1 | Thinning. The whistle arrives a half-second before it should. |
+| 2 | Slipping. −1 Coherence to everyone across, once. |
+| 3 | The line flickers — a hundred yards of grade is briefly not there. |
+| 4 | The far end stops answering. Fallon's wire goes dead in 1881. |
+| 5 | One pass left, and everybody can tell. |
+| 6 | It closes, with whoever is aboard. |
+
+---
+
+## Handouts
+
+| ID | Description | When |
+|---|---|---|
+| TT-H01 | Case brief TT-004 | Briefing |
+| TT-H02 | **Standing Order 9** — period crossings | Briefing |
+| TT-H03 | Issue list, 1881 | Briefing |
+| TT-H04 | **The filed survey** — the line on the north bench | Act One |
+| TT-H05 | Working timetable and the dispatcher's book | Act One |
+| TT-H06 | **Passenger manifest** — sixty-one souls, nine children | Act Three |
+
+The manifest is deliberately held back to Act Three. It is a list of names, and the
+players should not be holding it until the moment it starts to weigh something.
+
+---
+
+## Briefing — the standing order *(~20 min)*
+
+> You will be crossing to November 1881. Nothing you are carrying goes with you. Stores
+> has laid out what you may take instead, and I would ask you not to argue with the
+> storeman, because he is right and you are in a hurry.
+
+**Nothing modern goes through.** Give both reasons:
+
+1. **It costs you.** An object that does not belong is a thing the far side must also be
+   wrong about. **Using** a modern item across costs **1 Coherence**, per object, first
+   time.
+2. **It is a beacon.** A crossing is a place where the record is already wrong. It
+   notices what does not fit, and the case clock moves.
+
+**Charge for using, never for carrying.** A player who smuggles a torch across and never
+switches it on has made a good decision and should get away with it.
+
+**The anchor is exempt.** Everybody keeps theirs.
+
+### The 1881 issue
+
+| Instead of | They get |
+|---|---|
+| service pistol | **Webley revolver** — 1d10, six shots, slow reload |
+| carbine | **Martini-Henry** — 2d6+2, **one shot**, then work the lever |
+| torch | **oil lantern** and lamp oil, which runs out |
+| the handset | **nothing.** Out of contact from the moment they cross. |
+| stab vest | **buff coat** or oilcloth coat |
+| medkit | **chirurgeon's roll** and **laudanum** |
+| phone and GPS | **brass compass**, **pocket watch**, **spyglass** |
+
+---
+
+## Act One — Mercy Draw, now *(~50 min)*
+
+> **Goal:** find the fraud, hear the train, understand it is on a timetable.
+
+Nevada. A dry wash four miles long with a railway grade along the south side. Rails
+lifted in 1889; ballast and tie marks still there. Your watch says 11:38.
+
+- **The south bench** — the grade, real and obvious.
+- **The north bench** — nothing, and never anything. `[CUS: Spot or Engineering]`
+- **The water tower footing**, half a mile up at the top of the grade. *Remember it.*
+- **11:40.** A whistle a long way off, then four minutes of a train working a grade,
+  getting no nearer. **Automatic — nobody rolls for this.**
+
+### Clue trail
+
+| # | Clue | How found | Type |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| 1 | The filed survey puts the line on the **north** bench | **Automatic** — it is a handout with a line drawn on it | Essential |
+| 2 | There has never been a railway on the north bench | **Automatic** to anyone who walks it | Essential |
+| 3 | Six months of paperwork all say north bench | `[CUS: Research]`, or Registry provides | Essential |
+| 4 | No 11:45 entry in the dispatcher's book | `[CUS: Research]` | Essential |
+| 5 | E. Vane, surveyor, is on the manifest | `[CUS: Research]` | Optional |
+| 6 | Three previous attempts, no survivors, all tried to stop it | Registry, if asked | Optional |
+| 7 | The sound is a train *accelerating* up a grade | `[CUS: Listen or Engineering]` | Optional |
+
+**Fallbacks.** 1 and 2 are the handout and the ground. 3 and 4 arrive from Registry by
+telephone at the twenty-minute mark if nobody goes looking — Bewley is thorough and
+slightly impatient.
+
+**They cannot board at this end.** Too fast, grade against them. Let them try: a bruise, a
+lesson, and the clock moves one.
+
+> **Fast-track at 1:10:** the 11:40 comes round again and the door stays open long enough
+> to walk through. That is what degrading looks like.
+
+---
+
+## Act Two — Cordera, 1881 *(~70 min)*
+
+> **Goal:** the far side, the standing order in practice, and the boarding.
+
+The fourth of November, 1881. A town of four hundred that smells of woodsmoke and horses.
+Nobody is frightened yet — a train went into the Draw yesterday and has not come out, and
+the wire says it never arrived.
+
+- **The company office** — dispatcher, orders on spikes, the original survey in a drawer.
+- **The livery** — horses. This matters.
+- **Ada Reyes**, telegraph, who has sent the same query forty times and has noticed the
+  missing 11:45.
+- **The Draw**, four miles out. The train passes about every forty minutes.
+
+**Nobody in 1881 can help them stop it, and everybody will help them get near it.** The
+company wants its train back. Let the players use that.
+
+### The set-piece — getting aboard
+
+The train cannot stop and cannot be flagged. The only way on is to **match its speed**,
+and the only place it is slow is **the top of the grade at the water tower** — about eight
+miles an hour, for perhaps forty seconds.
+
+1. **Ride it down.** Horses alongside on the bench, step across. `[CUS: Ride, then
+   Athletics]` — and the horse needs its own Ride roll to go near the train at all.
+2. **Drop from the tower.** Twelve feet onto a moving roof. `[CUS: Athletics — average;
+   **only a fumble is a fall**]`. **Do not make this difficult** — playtested at halved
+   skill it put four agents on 12–31% and all four missed, which stalls the one scene the
+   scenario is built around.
+3. **The wagon on the grade.** Four horses, a plank across. Slowest to arrange, safest to
+   cross, and it needs the company's help.
+
+**The wagon is easier than the tower, and the tower is easier than the horses.** A party
+that spends an hour arranging the wagon has bought an easy roll and should get one.
+
+**Everybody has to get on.** A failed attempt gets the next pass, forty minutes later, and
+the clock moves — not a full stop.
+
+**Panic:** boarding is worth a point to anybody who wants one. Offer it; do not force it.
+
+> **At 2:45 they are aboard.** If two attempts have failed, the department's second wagon
+> arrives with two more agents and a plank, and the players owe somebody a favour.
+
+---
+
+## Act Three — Aboard *(~50 min)*
+
+> **Goal:** sixty-one people, one man who knows, and a decision that costs either way.
+
+> It is warm. That is the first thing. Sixty-one people in five cars, and it smells of
+> bodies and coal smoke and coffee. Somebody has organised a rota for the water. A child
+> is asleep across two seats with a coat over her. They look up when you come through the
+> door, and one of them says: *"Are you from the company?"*
+
+| Where | What |
+|---|---|
+| The locomotive | **Marius Kell**, engineer, who has not let go of the regulator |
+| Tender, car one | Coal that has not run out — the first hard evidence |
+| Cars two and three | Most of the sixty-one. Organised, rationed, glad to see anyone |
+| Car four | Freight, the company safe, **the signed survey** |
+| Car five | **Elias Vane**, alone, watching the line come out from under |
+
+### The three facts aboard
+
+1. **The coal has not run out.** `[CUS: Engineering or Spot]`
+2. **Kell cannot let go** — not *will* not. He worked out on day one that slowing is the
+   end of everything, and he has been right for a hundred and forty-five years. He is not
+   mad and not possessed. He is tired.
+3. **Vane knows**, and will say so to a direct question.
+
+### Getting people off
+
+**Off the moving train is survivable. Off the crossing is not.** A person put off at the
+top of the grade — the same forty seconds the agents used — lands in 1881 and lives.
+
+**Sixty-one people. Six passes. Four hours.** They cannot do it in the time they have.
+That is deliberate: the ending is what they choose to do about the arithmetic.
+
+### The choices — no roll resolves this
+
+| Choice | Cost |
+|---|---|
+| **Everyone off, then stop it** | Four hours while the crossing degrades. It may not hold. The right answer, and a gamble. |
+| **Stop it now** | Clean close, clean file. Sixty-one people end. Kell will do it if asked. |
+| **Children and crew off, then stop it** | The compromise every table finds. It works — and it means choosing, by name, off a manifest they are holding. |
+| **Leave it running** | Everyone lives today. It fails inside a year with everyone aboard. A real option; the scenario logs it without punishing it. |
+
+### If they ask Vane
+
+> I filed a chart that said the line was somewhere it was not, because a man told me to
+> and I wanted the work. That is all I did. It took six months of honest railwaymen
+> repeating it to make it true. If you stop us I would call that fair, and I would ask you
+> to put the children off first.
+
+---
+
+## Epilogue — the register *(~20 min)*
+
+A Registry room, a form, and somebody writing down sixty-one names.
+
+| Ending | What the register says |
+|---|---|
+| **All off, then stopped** | Sixty-one resettled in 1881, new papers, no way home. Two find their way into the department's files within the decade. |
+| **Stopped with people aboard** | Closes clean. The file closes clean. Nobody is quite the same about a timetable. |
+| **Partial** | However many were put off, put off. The rest are a number in a column, and the agent who chose is named. |
+| **Left running** | Logged, monitored, inherited by whoever holds the case in a year. Defensible. Nobody thanks them. |
+
+---
+
+## Cast
+
+| Who | Wants | Key line |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Marius Kell**, engineer | to be allowed to stop | *"You tell me when. I'll not do it before you say."* |
+| **Elias Vane**, surveyor | to be asked, at last | *"I signed it. Six months of honest men made it true."* |
+| **Hester Bligh**, conductor | her passengers accounted for | *"Sixty-one aboard. I have counted them every hour since."* |
+| **Ada Reyes**, telegraph | an answer up the line | *"It never got to Fallon. I've sent it forty times."* |
+| **Mr Bewley**, Registry | the chart, and the truth written down | *"Bring me the paper. The paper is the case."* |
+
+---
+
+## Do not resolve
+
+- **Why the coal has not run out.** The wave sustains it; that is as far as anyone gets.
+- **What is at the far end of the line.** Nobody aboard has reached it.
+- **Whether the people put off in 1881 were saved or exiled.** Both. It should sit badly.
+
+## GM notes
+
+- **Play the passengers as people, hard.** The scenario dies the moment they become a
+  number, and it lives on the fact that they are not.
+- **Standing Order 9 is the tutorial.** Do not soften it and do not apologise for it.
+- **Cut first:** the town, down to the livery and the telegraph office. Never cut the
+  boarding.
+- **If they crack it early,** run the passes — six of them, forty minutes apart — and let
+  the table feel the arithmetic they are betting on.
+
+---
+
+## Which scenario to run
+
+| | Length | Combat | Sends them across |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| **LAST ADMISSION** | 2h | yes, one fight | no — prologue, civilians |
+| **OPEN DAY** | 2h15 | no | no — prologue, civilians |
+| **THROUGH TRAIN** | 3h30 | no | **yes** — the first real case |
+| **BLACK PLATFORM** | 3–4h | yes, heavily | no — a modern-day action case |
+
+Run a prologue, then THROUGH TRAIN. BLACK PLATFORM is the one to reach for when a table
+wants a fight.
@@ -943,5 +943,41 @@
  "RINGBRP.Item.ArtRating": "Rating",
  "RINGBRP.Item.PushCost": "Push cost",
  "RINGBRP.Item.PushRule": "What pushing does",
-  "RINGBRP.Item.Origin": "Where it came from"
+  "RINGBRP.Item.Origin": "Where it came from",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Label": "Panic",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Steady": "Steady",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.SteadyNote": "You are all right. You are doing the job.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Rattled": "Rattled",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.RattledNote": "Your hands are not quite steady. No penalty — the first one is free.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Shaken": "Shaken",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.ShakenNote": "−5% to everything. You keep checking the way you came in.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Losing": "Losing it",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.LosingNote": "−10% to everything. You are talking too fast and not hearing answers.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Overwhelmed": "Overwhelmed",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.OverwhelmedNote": "−20% to everything. One more and you go.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Broken": "Broken",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.BrokenNote": "You freeze, run, or go at it. Choose one, take it, and come back at 3.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.WrongThing": "Something that should not be there",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.Touched": "It touched you",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.Body": "A body",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.Known": "Somebody you knew",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.Dark": "The lights went",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.Wounded": "A major wound",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Trig.Named": "It said your name",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Relief.Steady": "Steady yourself (POW×5)",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Relief.Religion": "Religion — something older than the department",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Relief.Psychology": "Psychology — talk somebody else down",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Relief.Occult": "Occult — name it, out loud, for everyone who can hear",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Relief.Anchor": "Your anchor, once per case",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Gained": "{name} — panic {from} → {to}",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Eased": "{name} — panic {from} → {to}",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Breaks": "BREAKS — freeze, flee, or fixate. Choose, take it, come back at 3.",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.NoChange": "No change.",
+  "RINGBRP.Flavour.Panicking": "panicking ({mod}%)",
+  "RINGBRP.Chat.ToEverything": "to everything",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.Backfired": "Fumbled —",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.SceneEnd": "Scene over",
+  "RINGBRP.Panic.SceneEndNote": "Panic clears when the scene does. Coherence does not.",
+  "RINGBRP.Party.Title": "The team, right now",
+  "RINGBRP.Party.Who": "Agent"
 }
@@ -1 +1 @@
-MANIFEST-000004
+MANIFEST-000002
@@ -1,5 +1 @@
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Author	SHA1	Message	Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5	774e95dea8	THROUGH TRAIN — the crossing starter, and two more playtest fixes A train has been running the same four miles of track since 3 November 1881. It has never stopped. Sixty-one people are aboard and all of them are alive. The supernatural is science fiction underneath, which is the point. A railway company laid track to a filed survey instead of to the ground, then described the line as being where it was not — ten thousand times, in timetables and waybills and telegraph orders, for six months, at a constant speed. Reality keeps a record of what belongs where, and that is the most patient argument there is. The record gave way with No. 9 inside it, and the RUNNING is what holds the crossing open: a standing wave sustained by its own motion the way a bow sustains a note. So the players must board a train that cannot stop, and then find that sixty-one people at six passes is four hours they do not have. The ending is what they choose to do about arithmetic they cannot beat, in front of a conductor holding the manifest. No roll resolves it. It is also the case that teaches Standing Order 9: NOTHING MODERN GOES THROUGH. Using a modern object across costs a Coherence and moves the clock; carrying it costs nothing; anchors are exempt. The catalogue already had the 1881 issue — Webley, Martini-Henry, oil lantern, brass compass, pocket watch, buff coat, laudanum — so the constraint needed no new content and gives the table something to feel in the first twenty minutes. Ships as docs/scenarios/THROUGH_TRAIN.md and a Foundry Adventure: 7 GM pages, 6 handouts including the survey that started it and a manifest deliberately held back to Act Three, the case file at Containment 6 / Resources 5 / Clearance 4 with its four legs loaded, four of the people aboard, and 7 plates to show. Two fixes from playing it: - Bhattacharya's RESEARCH was 1%. Placing the new skills last night I swapped Occult into Registry's core and took Research out — a records office that cannot look anything up. Research is back in core; Antiquities gets its Knowledge back the same way. - The boarding was unrunnable. At halved skill the set-piece put four agents on 12–31% and all four missed, which stalls the one scene the scenario is built around. It is an average roll now and only a fumble is a fall, with the reason written into the text so nobody "fixes" it back. Re-run: 3 of 4 aboard on the first pass and one waiting for the next, which is the shape it wanted. Version 1.3.0. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-08-18 00:25:19 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5	37b4043746	Play a full case, then fix what it found Ran THE HOLLOW ROAD with five agents — approach, crossing, contact, the thing on the road, extraction, debrief — with panic and Coherence both live. It ran clean and it found one thing that mattered. ANOMALY LORE 0. Marta Holloway, Field Lead, Senior Field Officer, could not roll the department's signature skill. Nor could Okonkwo. Induction was gated to TRADES on the reasoning that a career posting is itself the agency training — but 17 of the 25 postings do not list anomaly lore, its printed base is 0 on purpose, and nothing else supplies it. So the people who joined the department straight out of school were the only ones who never received its basic training, which is exactly backwards. Induction is a FLOOR for everybody now, posting or trade, in the live generator and the pack builder both. It never demotes: Bhattacharya keeps Registry's 63, Holloway goes 0 → 43, Okonkwo 0 → 33. All twenty built agents verified non-zero. Two GM tools the case showed were missing, both found by feeling the friction rather than by reading anything: - clearPanic(actors). Panic clears when the scene does — one line in the book and, until now, five sheets edited by hand while the table waited. It leaves Coherence alone, which is the whole point of having two tracks. - partyState(). Everybody's hit points, panic and Coherence in one card. With five agents the alternative is asking "what are you on?" five times a scene, which is friction a table absorbs silently and then blames on the game. And the player-facing gap: the primer never mentioned panic. Players got a one-page aide-memoire for a track they now meet in the first scene. It has a page of its own and a row on the cheat sheet, both generated from the same tables as the rules. One thing I reported as a bug and withdraw: Okonkwo's "Firearm (Pistol) 5%" was me rolling the wrong weapon. He carries a marksman rifle at 53%. check-kits was right. Version 1.2.0. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-08-18 00:10:28 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5	7ec7efd29b	Replay the scene with the fumble rule; expose panicReliefFor Ran the east corridor again with fresh dice and every relief attempt routed through easePanic, fumbles included. The rule did not fire this time. All three attempts failed cleanly — Psychology 58 against 40, and two POW×5 rolls at 66 and 76 — so nobody was punished for trying. That is worth reporting as loudly as a hit would have been: two play-throughs in and a fumbled relief has come up once, which is about right for something meant to be a memorable disaster rather than a tax. Braithwaite still broke at 5 on "it said your name" and fled. Marrow went down in a single round to a special with the entry bar — 19 through armour — against the 4.5-round average the thirty-run tuning gave, so that was dice, not balance. Then the question the rule actually raises. Relief rolls are made at your own panic penalty, so the worse you are the worse your odds AND the wider your fumble range — and now a fumble adds a point. That is a feedback loop, so I measured it rather than trusting it, 300 runs per row: from 2, POW×5 60% 280 calm · 0 broke from 3, POW×5 60% 227 calm · 2 broke from 4, POW×5 60% 138 calm · 31 broke from 4, POW×5 50% 96 calm · 35 broke from 4, POW×5 85% 267 calm · 5 broke Recovery dominates everywhere. The worst case — overwhelmed, weak POW, no help — spirals into breaking about one time in eight, which is a bad night rather than a trap. No change needed. Also: panicReliefFor and panicAfter were missing from the API, which I only noticed because measuring the loop needed them and the alternative was re-implementing the rule in the test — the exact duplication check-rules exists to forbid. Both exposed. Version 1.1.3. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-08-17 23:31:35 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5	5aaae186e0	A fumbled relief attempt puts a point on Trying to steady somebody and making it worse is the most familiar thing on that list, and until now it was the only outcome that cost nothing. Done as a NEGATIVE relief rather than a second code path: panicReliefFor returns -1 on a fumble, and easePanic already subtracts what it is given, so subtracting a negative raises the track. One number, one direction, no branch that could drift from the other. The clamp still holds — fumbling at 5 stays at 5. The chat card had to be told, because otherwise it prints the word "Psychology" over a number that has just gone UP and the table reads that as a bug rather than as the rule. It now leads with a red FUMBLED tag. Guarded three ways: a spot-check in check-rules for the -1 itself, and two behaviour tests — one that the sign survives easePanic's subtraction and actually raises the track, one that it cannot push past the top. A test on the constant alone would have passed even if easePanic had healed on a fumble. Verified live: 2 → fumble → 3 → success → 2 → special → 0, and a fumble at 5 staying at 5, with the cards reading correctly. Version 1.1.2. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-08-17 23:25:46 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5	20306d83d9	Play a scene with panic; tighten one reference row Ran LAST ADMISSION's east corridor with the six civilians and real dice. The track works end to end and, more importantly, the penalty REACHES things: Ferriby at panic 3 swung at Old Marrow with Brawl 25% printed and 15% effective, while Sharrock at panic 1 rolled his full 58%. That is the whole point of the track and it is the part that is usually decoration. The arc played well. Lights out took four of them to 1. The body took Braithwaite and Ferriby to 2. Enderby counting took three of them again. Braithwaite fumbled his Psychology roll trying to talk Colin down, then it said his name — 5, broke, fled, came back at 3. Renshaw steadied herself on POW×5 and dropped to 1. One thing I got wrong and one thing worth knowing: - I flagged a 99 grading as a fumble as a bug. It is not. A 58% skill fumbles on 98-00, and both the primer and the rules page say so in those words. The "96-99 never succeed / 00 always fumbles" pair are floor rules, not the whole fumble range. Only the quick-reference row was ambiguous — it now says "never succeeds ... and is a fumble if it is inside your fumble range". - The civilians cannot use two of the three new skills. Occult, Religion and Psychology sit at 5% on the "(before)" sheets, so in the prologue the only relief that works is POW×5 at 50-85%. That is correct — a site foreman is not an occultist — but it means the skills are an AGENT'S tools, and the prologue is deliberately the game without them. The agents have them where they should: Bhattacharya Occult 63, Lindqvist 58, Renshaw Psychology 40, Braithwaite Religion 35. Version 1.1.1. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-08-17 21:58:30 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5	cbad87ba98	Add Occult, Religion and Psychology, and the Panic track From the first game's list. The three skills are not decoration — they are the levers on the new track, which is why they arrived together. PANIC, 0 to 5, up. It is the other half of Coherence and the rules page says so in the first line, because a table that confuses them will make the wrong call at the worst moment: Coherence what knowing has cost you weeks 10-0, down Panic what is happening to you NOW minutes 0-5, up A trigger gives a point with NO ROLL. Asking for a die to find out whether you are frightened slows the scene and tells the player how to feel; the die is for getting rid of it, which is the interesting direction. 0 steady · 1 rattled · 2 shaken -5% · 3 losing it -10% 4 overwhelmed -20% · 5 broken The first point is free on purpose, so the opening shock of a scene costs the table nothing. At 5 you break — freeze, flee or fixate, choose fast — and come back at 3, not at 0, because breaking is not a rest. Relief is where the skills come in. A success takes one point, a special takes two. Psychology is the only thing that steadies somebody who is NOT you. Religion steadies you alone and does not care whether you are right. Occult is the odd one: naming a thing correctly, out loud, helps everybody who can hear — the department's actual work, and the only relief that reaches a room. Plus POW×5 to steady yourself, and your anchor object once per case, which is what that briefing scene was for. The three skills are placed in six registers rather than left floating: Occult to the professor and to Registry, Psychology to the doctor and to Interview, Religion to Antiquities and Pathology. Guards, because a track nothing reads is this project's oldest failure: the five new rules carry spot-checks in check-rules, and check-behaviour gains nine tests — the free first point, monotonic penalties, only 5 breaking, clamping at both ends, breaking not clearing the track, special taking two, every band/trigger/ relief having a label, and every relief naming a skill the catalogue actually has. Verified in a live game: penalty reaches the roll (58 → 58 → 53 → 48 → 38 for panic 0-4, criticals and specials recomputed with it), the full arc runs 0 → 2 → 4 → eased to 2 → pushed to 5 → breaks → 3 with no errors, the sheet shows the band, and the rules journal has a Panic page generated from the same tables. Version 1.1.0. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-08-12 22:55:11 +01:00
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