Brief. Eleven days ago a Custodian team crossed to a Near world on a routine survey and did not come back. Their beacon is still transmitting from a stretch of coast outside a town called Ilfracombe — a town that exists on our Earth too, which is why the case was graded routine in the first place.
The anomaly. Something on that coast is holding a crossing open. It should not be possible without a regulator, and the missing team was not issued one. Whatever is doing it has been doing it for eleven days.
The objective. Reach the beacon, find out what happened to the first team, and close the crossing. In that order. The agency would like the regulator back; it would prefer the four agents back; it will settle for knowing which.
The complication. The team's own regulator is dead. Nobody aboard knows how it starts, and the way home was aimed on the assumption that it would.
Cover. Environment Agency coastal survey. It will hold for about a day.
Every subsystem, once each: the case team tracks, first contact, the research chain, the familiarity gradient, and one fight that exercises both marksmanship styles at their proper ranges. If the GM has to invent a number anywhere, that is a defect — write it down.
` }, { name: "The Approach — four phases", content: `Baseline cost is −1 Supply per leg. All four are on foot.
| # | Terrain | Nav | Mod | Days | Explored | Event |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Silted river flats, chest-high reed | Difficult | +0% | 4 | yes | — |
| 2 | disused railway embankment | Difficult | +10% | 3 | yes | Contact at the end of this leg |
| 3 | Closed forest district belt | Difficult | −10% | 5 | no | — |
| 4 | Rim-wall foothills, to 2.9 km absolute | Difficult | −20% | 6 | no | Raiders at the midpoint |
The Quiet Neighbours intercept the team at the end of phase 2, at the field boundary. Resolve the contact before rolling phase 3, so that its rewards apply to the phase they are meant to help with. This was a real defect in an earlier draft: contact used to happen after phase 3, and its rewards were retroactive.
Navigate governs every overland leg. Pilot does not substitute — on a foot leg it does nothing at all.
Altitude: the foothills top out at 2.9 km absolute. The high-altitude rule needs 4 km. It does not apply anywhere in this slice.
` }, { name: "First Contact — the Quiet Neighbours", content: `Roughly thirty adults. They live above the ground and consider that the only civilised place to be. Statistics are in the Natives & Threats compendium.
TABOO — they will not converse with anyone standing on the ground. A person on the ground is prey, or a corpse, or an animal, and the distinction is not important. Addressing them from ground level is the offence. It reads as embarrassment on the party's behalf, not hostility. While the party is on the ground, SIGNAL is at −30% whether or not they know why.
DESIRE — medicine. Their own ran out two generations ago, and they have watched the same three illnesses take people ever since.
On a critical READ, a third fact: they have watched the party for two days, and they know it is carrying something transposed, because it does not smell of anything.
READ — Tomas is the obvious roller: Insight 58, Anthropology 52, Xenology (Baseline) 47.
SIGNAL — no shared language, but Tomas has Language (Sign) 42 and the eldest, Ambaro, has 30. That is a weak shared language, so it is opposed. If Ambaro wins, they simply misunderstand — treat it as a failure, not an offence. Alternatives: Persuade 44 or Art at Difficult, or Insight 58 at Difficult.
OFFER — Bargain governs, verbal or not. The correct form is a gift passed hand to hand with both parties off the ground. Someone has to climb: Athletics, Average — generic Athletics covers it, there is no separate Climb specialisation on these sheets. Dunn 48 or Tomas 40. Rakhi at nineteen MAS going over a wall is a comedy they will remember for a generation.
Antibiotics are the gift. One sealed course is the correct quantity; Tomas carries four in his field medic pack. Correct form is Easy; anything offered from the ground, or any other trade good, is Difficult.
This is the most important change in v0.6, and it exists because two earlier versions failed on it. The abandoned vehicle holds the control plate, and the control plate is the object the entire research chain depends on. It used to be a Standing +3 reward. The maths said the party would reach it 1.7% of the time.
So: the party will reach the vehicle. Contact decides only how fast and at what cost.
And one further reward that now carries real weight: at impression +1 or better the party may research inside the band's territory as guests, which costs no Supply. Since the research takes about forty-five days and would otherwise cost 9 Supply, this is often the difference between finishing and starving.
Permanent Standing still moves by at most ±1 for any later meeting.
| Route | Impression |
|---|---|
| SIGNAL success + OFFER success or special | +2 |
| SIGNAL special + OFFER special | +3 |
| SIGNAL critical + OFFER success or better | +3 |
One OFFER per encounter. Tomas's four medicine gifts are four encounters' worth, not four attempts at one. Impression cannot be farmed.
The climb is Athletics Average. On a failure another character may try in the same encounter. On a fumble the climber falls, takes 1D3, and the band finds it funny — impression is unaffected.
+2 is a good encounter; +3 requires a critical at SIGNAL or OFFER — SIGNAL special plus OFFER special is only +2, and an earlier draft got that arithmetic wrong twice. Since the vehicle is no longer gated, +3 being rare is now merely a bonus rather than a scenario-ender.
The quickest way to the object the whole scenario depends on still runs through understanding a taboo about where you are standing. No amount of firepower reaches the vehicle sooner.
` }, { name: "Combat — the cliff path", content: `Six Cleaners raiders working the foothills for salvage. They want power cells. They are not suicidal.
Cliff path 120 m long, 30 m wide, climbing toward the rim. Rifles (2): north lip, 40 m above the floor, 60 m from the party's entry. Pistols (4): behind boulders on the floor at 45, 60, 60 and 75 m. Cover on the floor at 15, 35, 55 and 80 m — solid partial, attacker −30%. It blocks line of sight to the floor shooters but NOT to the lip. Party enters at 0 m. Exit at 120 m.
At entry the pistols are at 60 m — long band, −30%. The rifles are at 60 m — medium, −10%. That is why the pistol raiders must close, and with the range ladder in place it is now mechanically true rather than merely asserted.
The rifle raiders are Deliberate — heavy-gravity origin, so POW governs their shot and an aimed round ignores four points of armour. That is the only reason a heavy rifle threatens a the catalogued worlds impact vest at all: against armour 6 an unaimed rifle causes a Major Wound on zero percent of hits. Aimed, it bites.
The pistol raiders are Reflex, and are useless until they close. Rakhi answers the lip; Dunn and Tomas answer the floor. The encounter cannot be won by one style alone, and that is the point.
Success levels. A critical deals maximum weapon damage plus a rolled damage modifier and ignores armour entirely. A special deals normal damage and the target's armour counts as half, rounded down. A success is normal damage against full armour. A fumble drops or jams the weapon; a loaded firearm needs one full round to clear.
Action economy. One offensive action per round, plus unlimited defensive reactions at the escalating penalty. Attacking, aiming, taking cover, reloading, giving First Aid and operating a device each consume it. Movement does not — 15 m if you also act, 30 m if you do not. So you may move and take cover, but not take cover and shoot.
Cover penalises, it does not block. Solid partial cover is −30% to the attacker and never removes line of sight.
Rifle cadence. The two Deliberate rifles alternate aiming and firing — aim one round, fire the next. Without that they never activate the armour bypass and the Major Wound table does not fire at all against impact vests. An aimed rifle at 60 m: skill 50, medium −10, aim +30 = 70%, ignoring 4 armour. Against Dunn's vest 4 that is a Major Wound on 40.8% of shots; against an impact vest 6, 19.4%.
Pistol positions. They start at 45, 60, 60 and 75 m and bound forward to the cover at 35 m — 15 m per round while firing, 30 m if not. Ignore the 80→55→35 route in earlier drafts; it ran the wrong way.
Targeting. Nearest visible, then lowest current hit points, then lowest DEX, then GM's choice. A character who is down is not a legal target while anyone is still standing.
Wound checks. The Stamina roll made immediately on taking the wound is the first of the three. Ordinary wound unconsciousness lasts 1D6 × 10 minutes, or until First Aid.
Twenty thousand fights per case: with the party in cover and shooting the rifles first, someone goes down 50% of the time and the party wipes 0.2% of the time. Out of cover, someone goes down 88% of the time. Shooting the nearest raider instead of the rifles turns it into a 48% party wipe. Take cover, and shoot the lip.
` }, { name: "Research and the Device", content: `Question: how is a transposed alloy-permeability field initiated?
Step 1 — FIELD. Objective: recover an intact regulator control plate from the abandoned vehicle. Resolved in play at the vehicle site. One Engineering (Field Systems) roll by the best-qualified character, Average. Success = intact; failure = cracked; fumble = cracked and −1 Integrity.
A cracked plate inserts one 100-hour Average Repair (Electronics) step before step 2 — not a percentage penalty. An earlier draft applied −20% instead, which produced about a thousand expected research days.
Step 2 — LABORATORY. Engineering (Field Systems), Difficult, 200 hours, portable kit −20%. Rakhi 16%, Ceyla 10%, combined 24.4% on the first attempt.
The calibration ramp is what makes this playable: a retry costs only 40 hours and grants +10% cumulative to everyone on the step.
| Attempt | Per-attempt | Cumulative | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 24.4% | 24.4% | 200 |
| 2 | 40.8% | 55.2% | 240 |
| 3 | 55.2% | 79.9% | 280 |
| 4 | 67.6% | 93.5% | 320 |
Step 3 — ARMCHAIR. Research, Average, 200 hours reduced to 160 by Ceyla's agency handset. She rolls 55%.
93.5% complete by day 32; expected 25.9 days. Step 3 adds an expected 1.65 attempts and 18.6 days. Steps 2 and 3 together: expected 44.6 days. Note that is an expectation, not a guarantee — there is a 6.5% tail past day 32 on step 2 alone.
Research hours are project hours, not per-researcher hours. Two researchers do not halve the calendar; they improve the odds per attempt.
Stationary time costs 1 Supply per 5 days — about 9 Supply for the whole project, which the party does not have. They must either run Supply recoveries or accept the band's hospitality, which costs nothing. Roll one hazard per ten research days, ignoring results 2 and 5 (both travel-only; reroll them).
The brone is stored at Integrity 0. The Discovery does two separate things, and both matter:
operate function, which is otherwise not attemptable at all.Before the Discovery, Rakhi repairs at 58 halved to 29, minus 50 — floored to 5% (Repair's printed base is 15, so the 5% floor applies). Effectively impossible, which is correct. After it: 58 − 20 = 38%.
The target is net Integrity 3, not three successes — a fumble removes a point. That makes it a reflecting walk, not a simple count: expected 8.48 attempts, 33.9 hours. 59.8% done by eight attempts, 94.5% by sixteen.
Research does not merely grant permission. It makes the work possible. An earlier draft unlocked the function and left the device broken with no path to fixing it.
Rakhi's Megastructure Lore is 17. Average difficulty, −20% familiarity because the locals made something similar: 17 − 20 = −3, clamped to 1%. Megastructure Lore's printed base is 0, so the 5% floor does not rescue it. Ceyla's 12 gives the same. Nobody in the catalogued worlds can read builder-grade hardware yet, and the tech gradient is doing exactly its job.
After the Discovery, diagnose costs 0 Power and its output widens to include what is on the far side of the wall. This matters: the post-compliance budget is exactly Power 4, and operating costs 4.
The far side is the outer face of the cliff: hard vacuum, 0.99 gee outward, and a sixteen-hundred-kilometre drop to the shoreline. Only Dunn and Tomas have pressure suits. The post-Discovery diagnose reveals this, so it is information the party can act on rather than a surprise death.
Power budget, corrected. The vehicle yields 1D3 Power and is now guaranteed, so complying with the raiders (−2) leaves 5 to 7, not 4. Diagnose after the Discovery is free. Operating costs 4 on success and 1 on a failure or fumble. The rim-wall site is a Power-recovery installation — Repair (Electronics), Average, one day, +2 — so running dry costs days and Supply, never the scenario.
Critical-path invariant: the eye-storm never takes the brone, and Power can never be exhausted to a dead end. Two versions of this scenario died on exactly that kind of single point of failure.
` }, { name: "Reference — bases, masses, budgets", content: `The resolution rule floors any skill whose printed base is 5% or more at 5%. A rating is not a base, so these matter.
| Skill | Base | Skill | Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brawl | 25 | Navigate | 10 |
| Melee / Firearm / Energy / Bow | 5 | Research | 1 |
| Bargain, Fast Talk, Insight | 5 | Megastructure Lore | 0 |
| Persuade, Status | 15 | Listen, Spot, Athletics | 25 |
| Language (any) | 0 | Track, Stealth | 10 |
| Repair (any) | 15 | Scent | 0 |
| Science, Anthropology, Xenology | 1 | Dodge | DEX×2 |
| Engineering, Medicine | 1 | Pilot, Spacecraft | 1 |
| Computer Use, Knowledge | 5 | First Aid | 30 |
Because Repair's base is 15, pre-Discovery repair of the brone floors at 5%, not 1%. Because Megastructure Lore's base is 0, diagnose really does sit at 1%.
| Item | kg | Item | kg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crossing regulator | 12.5 | Marksman rifle | 3.2 |
| Trauma unit | 14 | Environment suit | 8 |
| Engineer's toolkit | 8 | Prybar | 3 |
| Field analysis kit | 9 | Impact vest | 3 |
| Medical kit | 2 | Service pistol | 0.8 |
| Ground scanner | 1.5 | Redaction lance | 0.7 |
| Field medic pack | 1.2 | Power cell | 0.6 |
| Agency handset | 0.3 | Medicine (0.5 kg) | 0.5 |
Heaviest single item, by character: Ceyla field analysis kit 9 · Rakhi the regulator 12.5 · Dunn ground scanner 1.5 · Tomas field medic pack 1.2.
Rations are not itemised. The firestorm hazard costs −1 Supply and the medical kit if carried. The vampire hazard costs −1 Supply per separated character, once, not per day.
The Keepers want the location of any death. The party has crossed twelve days of country; if the GM wants something concrete, the silted flats of leg 1 held a drowned Grass Giant. At impression +2 they give up the vehicle's position: one day, no Navigate roll. It is inside the district belt, not beyond it.
Replaced. Instead of "something notices", the work draws a scavenger pack: 1D3 Night Hunters — use the Keepers statblock at −20% to everything — arriving 1D6 hours later. They want the food stores, not the researchers.
` }, { name: "GM — running the acceptance test", content: `This slice exists to be broken. Run it start to finish using only this journal, the compendia and the character sheets, and log every failure.
Target: zero INVENT, zero CONTRA. Anything else is a defect for the next version.
Advancement between sessions, training, the simweb, publication downtime, psionics, starship travel, vehicle-scale combat, any species other than human, and building a character from scratch. The four explorers are given.
Two rules in an earlier draft were each correct on their own and together made this scenario impossible: permanent Standing was capped at ±1 per encounter, and the control plate was a Standing +3 reward with only one contact available. The plate had a 0.666% chance of ever appearing. The fix was to separate impression within an encounter from permanent Standing between encounters.
That is the sort of thing only a full playthrough finds, which is why this exists.
` } ];