The scenario ran 20 minutes over the house budget (3h30 play plus a ten-minute
break, 3h40 wall clock) and Act Two carried all of it at 65 minutes. It is now
45, and the session lands at 3:40 exactly: 45 + 45 + 50 + 45 + 25 = 210 minutes
of play.
NOTHING WAS DELETED. The twenty minutes came out of structure, which is the
only kind of cut that survives contact with a table:
- THE CROSSING IS CAPPED AT FIVE. It was "let the silence sit until a player
breaks it", which is open-ended by construction. If the table is still quiet
at minute five the Geiger finds its own voice. A silence that has stopped
being tense is just a pause.
- THE OFFER RUNS INSIDE THE COLUMN SCENE, not beside it. It was "somewhere in
this act, take Ashcroft's player aside for one minute" -- a separate slot.
Run during the line's rest, while the other players are talking to Ivy, it
costs nothing, because the table is already occupied.
- THE LINE'S REST IS THE ACT'S CLOCK, and this is the cut that does the work.
The column walks every day and stops to rest, not to meet people. Ivy talks
for as long as the line is sitting down, and the line sits for twenty-five
minutes; then the old ones stand up, because they always do. The scene ends
on the GM's schedule through the scenario's own premise rather than through
a GM deciding to move things along -- and it is the loop showing itself for
the first time, which makes the timer do dramatic work as well as temporal.
The Pacing Note now carries 65 minutes of further cuts against what was a
55-minute problem, so there is about ten minutes of genuine slack for a table
that talks. That is the first slack this scenario has ever had. It also now
says where to cut if the break arrives late: Act Three's depot search, never
Act Four, which is the shortest act with the most to do.
Also fixed a stale duplicate: the Overview said "Runtime: 4h00" while STATUS
and the timing table said otherwise. Every runtime figure in the document now
agrees, and the remaining mentions of 4h00 are explicitly historical.
CAVEAT, STATED IN THE DOCUMENT: desk pass 1's 4:25 predates this restructure
and no fourth desk pass has been run against the new timings. The first human
run is also the first test of this clock.
npm run check: 17 guards, exit 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
