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>
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>
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
160 changed files with 1343 additions and 134 deletions
> **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
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