RingBRP/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER.md

Crossing case — The Custodians: STANDING ORDER

Two hundred and six people went underground in 1974 to govern the country after the war. There was no war. They have been governing it for fifty-two years, the order that put them there renews itself every ninety days, and the next renewal is on Thursday.

STATUS — read this before anything else

Version	v0.7, 15 September 2026 — absorbs desk playtests 1–5; the slot is 3h15
Can it be run?	Yes, from this document alone, with the compendium for sheets and the three bestiary creatures.
Is it convention-ready?	Nearly — what is left is a run with human beings. Five desk passes, no human runs. _1.md (GM chair, 5291) · _2.md (Act Three stress, 8143, creatures run through the real fight harness) · _3.md (player chair, contrarian, 3307, reached ending 1) · _4.md (the clock, cuts taken as written, 6620) · _5.md (the retry fix, verified). Every content defect the five passes found is fixed, and the budget question they raised is decided: the slot is 3h15.
What it is	A three-act one-shot. It ends in the session; there is no second part and the text must not promise one.
Players	4–6 from the duty roster. The cast is declared in Casting and the build enforces it.
Runtime	2h50 of play in three acts of 45 / 75 / 50 plus a ten-minute break — 3h00 wall, in a 3h15 slot. Act Two is budgeted at its uncut base, which is the figure passes 1, 3 and 4 all reconcile to. The fifteen minutes of slack are deliberate. The Pacing Note's cuts are not defaults; plan to take none of them — and the budget above is the no-cuts budget, which is the pair v0.6 briefly got wrong.

The three things that are not obvious

1. Nobody in Bellhouse is a monster and almost nobody is hostile. The population are civil servants doing an appalling job impeccably, and they will offer the agents tea before they ask them anything. The GM reflex under pressure is to make the underground people sinister. Do not. The horror is that they are correct.
2. The apocalypse is not a bomb, it is a reconciliation. When the site's population record exceeds the surviving population of the region it governs, the record resolves the contradiction by making the region match. That is the threat, it is arithmetic, and Act Two is where the players are shown the sum.
3. Act Three is a decision, not a fight. All three endings are real and all three cost something. If the table reaches for violence the scenario still works, but see EXPOSURE — the quarantine unit will kill them and is meant to be argued with.
4. Nothing in Act One is hidden, and that is load-bearing. Joan Wetherlaw points at every clue the party misses, because she has been trying to show somebody for four years. Desk pass 1 failed six of ten rolls in Act One and lost nothing. A GM who does not notice this will start gating clues behind the dice and the act will die. The rolls buy speed and detail. They never buy access.

Still to do

• A run with human beings. Five desk passes have been run; no human table has.
• Handout production. The three handouts are in the Foundry compendium (STANDING ORDER — Player handouts) but have no print pack. CLEAN GROUND's CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html is the model.
• A decision on Kit Marlow — see Open questions. She is the cost of the tidiest ending and the draft may be leaning on a seventeen-year-old too hard.

---

GM ESSENTIALS

• System: d100 roll-under a percentage skill. Special under a fifth of the skill, critical under a twentieth; 96–99 always fail and 00 always fumbles.
• Opposed rolls: a tie goes to whoever is being acted upon. Resisting is stronger than the numbers look. Two beats in Act Two depend on this.
• Coherence runs 10 → 0 and measures how well-filed an agent is. Spending it is how the supernatural works, and nothing in this scenario gives any of it back.
• Borrowed Authority: a named credential with a scope. Inside its scope there is no roll — it costs 1 Trust and it works. One tier beyond is a roll at −20 per red flag broken. Two tiers beyond is impossible at any skill. Act Three's best ending is a Borrowed Authority problem, so read that section of the rules before you run this.
• A warrant card is a named authority. This matters more here than in any other case in the corpus, and Act Three turns on it.

---

Overview

The department commissioned Regional Seat of Government 12 — Bellhouse, under Sheldon Moor in the Peak District — in 1962, and staffed it in 1974 during a genuine war scare. Its Standing Order says: on execution, the site assumes the government of Region 12 and does not surface until this order is cancelled by the named authority.

The order was executed on 4 November 1974 as a drill. Deputy Controller Edith Marlow filed the drill as live, on purpose, because she believed a real one was coming inside the year and wanted the site already running when it did.

Reality took the filing. Two hundred and six people went down. Down there the war happened, and they have been governing its aftermath for fifty-two years: issuing ration books, logging fallout that nobody up here can measure, answering correspondence from towns that are perfectly fine.

The order renews every ninety days by standing instruction. Each renewal writes a little more of the "after" into the moor above, which is why a farm at Wetherlaw has been sweeping ash off its yard for four years. Renewal 211 is due on Thursday, and Registry has done the sum: at 211 the site's population record exceeds Region 12's surviving population on paper. A record cannot hold both. It resolves by correction.

Design intent

1. The end of the world is a document, and the people administering it are kind. This is a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the apocalypse is entirely clerical and every person responsible for it believed they were doing their duty.
2. It is an arrangement case, not a fight. Two of the three endings involve no violence at all, and the one creature that can wipe the party is there to be talked down. The bestiary entries are load-bearing but the dice are not the point.
3. The cost is named and not softened. The tidy ending kills sixty-one children who have no record above ground. The text says so plainly and does not offer the GM a way to make it painless. If the table finds a fourth way out, let them have it.
4. It is deliberately NOT CLEAN GROUND. That case is a filed valley of people walking north forever, found by accident, resolved by cancellation. This one is a filed institution that works, that the department built on purpose, and that can be amended rather than cancelled.
5. Three things stay unresolved. They are named in the GM notes as do not resolve.

---

Session Timing

The slot is 3h15. Decided 15 September 2026, after four desk passes measured Act Two's floor at about 66 minutes against a budget that said 55. The alternative was cutting twelve minutes out of the sick bay, which is where Revelation 3's best route lives. The slot moved instead, because 3h00 was an assumption and the sick bay is not.

	Act	Budget	GM checkpoint
1	The Returns — Wetherlaw farm, the vent head, getting in	45 min	They are at the blast door by 0:40
—	Break	10 min
2	Bellhouse — the population, the Registry, the sum	75 min	Pennyfeather has shown them the sum by 1:50
3	Renewal — Thursday, the signing, the decision	50 min	Sowerby has the folder open by 2:20
	Total	3h00	against a 3h15 slot

Running times, so the checkpoints mean something: Act One 0:00–0:45 · break to 0:55 · Act Two 0:55–2:10 · Act Three 2:10–3:00. A checkpoint is a point you can still correct from, which is why the sum is wanted at 1:50 with twenty minutes of Act Two left, and why Act Three's is ten minutes in rather than at the signing. If you pass one, take cuts.

The fifteen minutes of slack are the point

3h00 of content in a 3h15 slot, and the difference is deliberate. The house playtest standard says a scenario that lands on schedule to the minute with zero slack is a fail for a real table of strangers, and every figure above was measured on desk passes with a GM who already knew the document. A real table asks more questions, takes longer to decide, and loses five minutes finding the right page.

What the acts are budgeted at is what they measured, not what would fit:

Act	Pass 1	Pass 3	Pass 4 (19 min cut)	Budgeted
One	~50	~30 (Joan skipped)	~45	45
Two	~75	~70	~66	75
Three	~45	~50	~50	50

⚠ Act Two's 75 is the UNCUT base, and it is the number three passes agree on. Pass 4's 66 is that same 75 with nineteen minutes cut and ten handed back by a retry — the three measurements reconcile exactly, and desk pass 5 did the arithmetic.

Read this before you re-budget anything. v0.6 briefly set Act Two at 65 — pass 4's cut figure — while also instructing the GM to take no cuts, which is a ten-minute overrun written in on purpose. The retry fix that prompted it is real and worth having, but it moved the act's worst case, not its typical one: it removes up to twenty minutes of variance when filed clues fail, and changes nothing when they do not. Variance is not the base. If the slot ever moves again, budget the configuration you are actually going to run.

Pacing Note — the cuts, written in advance

⚠ These are no longer defaults. Take none of them unless you are actually late.

They were defaults when the slot was 3h00 and Act Two had to lose twenty minutes it did not have. At 3h15 the act is budgeted at what it measures, so the correct number of cuts to plan for is zero — and that matters most for the second one in the table below, which desk pass 4 proved costs the price of the likeliest ending rather than "the drawings".

Keep them for the room that runs hot: a table that talks, a GM who is behind at the break, a six-hander that splits three ways. In that order, and stop as soon as you are level.

Cut	Saves	What it costs
Fold the pipe room into Registry — Pennyfeather's office backs onto it and she walks them through on the way to the stacks	~8 min	Nothing. Revelation 4 still arrives from the relay or from her
Kit Marlow in the corridor, not the crèche — she is carrying a drawing somewhere and stops to talk	~7 min	⚠ More than it looks — read the note below before taking this cut
The census (see Act Two)	~4 min	Atmosphere only
Skip the Vigil (Countdown step 4)	~5 min	The Revelation 3 emergency backstop. Only take this cut if they already have it
Teague off-screen in Act Three — he stands down when Sowerby tells him to	~6 min	The script break, which is the best beat in the act. Last resort

Do not cut Pennyfeather's sum, the arrival, or the signing. They are the act, the tone and the decision.

⚠ The Kit Marlow cut costs more than "the drawings", and desk pass 4 proved it. That pass took the cut, then reached the narrow row of ending 3 — the likeliest one, because it needs only a single dossier item — whose entire price is the sixty-one stay unrecorded. Kit is the sixty-one made into a person, and her own entry says she should be a person before she is a price. Cut her scene and the price is an abstraction the table has no feeling about.

If you take this cut, the corridor version must still do her one job. She is carrying a drawing, she shows it to them without being asked, and she asks the question from her entry: whether she got the blue right. Fifteen seconds, and the narrow ending keeps its cost.

---

Plot Summary (GM truth)

Bellhouse is real, it is where the map says it is, and everyone in it is alive.

In 1962 the department built RSG 12 into the limestone under Sheldon Moor, as one of a dozen regional seats. In October 1974 the scare was severe enough that the site was staffed and exercised. The exercise order and the live order are the same document with a different box ticked.

Edith Marlow ticked the other box. She was Deputy Controller, she was fifty, and she had read the same traffic as everyone else and drawn a harder conclusion. Her reasoning is in her own hand in the file: a site that begins governing after the event is a site that spends its first fortnight arguing about whether it is allowed to. She removed that fortnight.

Reality keeps a record of what belongs where. The record now said Region 12 had been attacked, and so it had. Not up here — down there, and in the ground between.

What the last fifty-two years have been. Two hundred and six went down; the population below is now two hundred and thirty-one, of whom sixty-one were born there and have no record anywhere else. They govern a region they have never seen. They receive correspondence — it arrives — and they answer it, and their answers go up a pipe that does not come out anywhere. Their fallout readings are real readings of a real contamination that exists only inside the order.

What changed four years ago. Renewals began pushing the boundary outward. Ash that is not ash falls on Wetherlaw farm, three-quarters of a mile from the vent head. Joan Wetherlaw's dog went out into it in 2024 and came back with an extra week of life in its records and none in its body.

Why the department is here now. Four months ago one of Bellhouse's returns came out of the pipe onto a real desk in Registry — franked 1974, answering a question nobody had asked. Bhattacharya's section traced it. In doing so they found the renewal schedule and, in the site's own establishment returns, the sum.

The sum. Region 12's surviving population, as the order records it, decays a little each renewal. Bellhouse's population grows. At renewal 211 — Thursday — the second number passes the first. A governing record whose government is larger than the governed is a contradiction, and this one resolves the way records do: it corrects the region.

Timeline

When	What
1962	RSG 12 "Bellhouse" commissioned under Sheldon Moor. Standing Order drafted.
Oct 1974	War scare. Site staffed and exercised; 206 personnel go down.
4 Nov 1974	Marlow files the drill as live. The order executes.
1974–2022	Fifty-two years of government. 61 children born below. Marlow, now 101, is in the sick bay and has not spoken plainly since 2019.
2022	Renewals begin to push the boundary. Ash starts falling at Wetherlaw.
2024	Joan Wetherlaw's dog goes out into the ash and comes back wrong.
May 2026	A Bellhouse return arrives in Registry, franked 1974.
Thursday	Renewal 211. The sum crosses.

Revelations (5, and that is all)

1. The site is live and the people in it are alive. (Act One)
2. They believe the war happened, and by their record it did. (Act Two, first ten minutes)
3. It was a drill, and one person filed it wrong on purpose. (Act Two, Marlow)
4. The renewal is what pushes the boundary out. (Act Two, Kowalczyk or Pennyfeather)
5. At 211 the sum crosses and the region is corrected to match. (Act Two, Pennyfeather)

---

The Countdown — what Bellhouse does on schedule

The site does not react to the agents. It runs its day. Print this and run it off the clock whether or not the players are anywhere near it.

⚠ The clock starts when they come through the blast door, not at the start of the session, and every step lands inside Act Two's sixty-five minutes. That is deliberate and it used to be wrong: steps 3 and 4 were written at +1h20 and +2h00, which under any budget this scenario has ever had fired after the act they belong to had ended — and both of them are backstops for Essential revelations, so both were arriving too late to back anything up. If you re-time this table, keep them inside the act.

Step	When	What happens, whatever the players are doing
0	On arrival	Shift change. The corridors are briefly full. Nobody is looking for intruders because there has never been one.
1	+15 min	The broadcast. Sowerby reads the daily regional bulletin over the tannoy — casualty figures, ration adjustments, a weather report for a sky nobody has seen. It is four minutes long and the whole site stops to listen.
2	+35 min	Teague is told there are strangers below. From here he is looking for them. He is not yet hostile; he is a policeman with an anomaly. (Act One's Stealth roll moves this — see there.)
3	+45 min	The establishment return is posted. Pennyfeather files the population count that makes Thursday's sum what it is. This is clue 13c, the second road to Revelation 5: the number is on the front and anybody watching her post it can read it. Stopping her does not stop Thursday — the number is already true — but a player who tries has understood the case.
4	+60 min	Vigil. The site's fifty-two-year remembrance for the surface dead. Everyone attends. It is genuinely moving and it is for nothing. It is also Revelation 3's last backstop — somebody reads the 1974 roll of honour and there are no names on it.
5	Thursday, 06:00	Renewal 211. Sowerby signs, Teague countersigns, Pennyfeather files. Act Three.

---

Handouts

SO-H01 — The return that came out of the pipe

A4, buff, typed on a manual machine, franked 4 NOV 1974. Give it in the briefing.

REGION 12 — SEAT RETURN — WEEK 1 ESTABLISHMENT: 206. CASUALTIES THIS PERIOD: NIL. REGIONAL SURVIVING POPULATION (EST.): 1,140,000. SUPPLY: 11 YEARS AT CURRENT SCALE. QUERY TO CENTRE: CONFIRM AUTHORITY TO ISSUE RATION DOCUMENTS IN OWN NAME. QUERY TO CENTRE: CONFIRM DISPOSAL OF SURFACE REMAINS AT SHELDON. SIGNED: E. MARLOW, DEPUTY CONTROLLER.

What it is for. Two hidden things. Casualties this period: nil is wrong for week one after an attack and right for week one of a drill. And the second query asks about bodies at Sheldon, which is where the vent head is — the first hint the boundary was always touching the surface.

SO-H02 — Standing Order 12, extract

A4, foolscap, two paragraphs and a signature block. Registry supplies it on request.

4. On execution this Seat assumes the government of Region 12 and shall not surface until this Order is cancelled by the named authority or by an officer holding a warrant of the Department in person at the Seat.

5. This Order renews at ninety days by the signature of the Controller, countersigned, and is thereafter filed. Renewal is not a decision and shall not be minuted as one.

NAMED AUTHORITY: SIR HUGH ELLERBY-STANNARD, PERMANENT UNDER-SECRETARY.

What it is for. It is the whole of Act Three. Ellerby-Stannard died in 1981 — but clause 4 offers a second door, an officer holding a warrant in person at the Seat, and every agent at the table is holding one. Clause 5 is the other half: renewal is not a decision, which is exactly why nobody down there has ever reconsidered it.

SO-H03 — Pennyfeather's working

A single sheet of squared paper, pencil, in a clerk's hand. She gives it to whoever asks her a straight question.

RENEWAL 209 — SEAT 229 — REGION 1,140,000 → 231 est. decay applied RENEWAL 210 — SEAT 231 — REGION 242 RENEWAL 211 — SEAT 231 — REGION 219 ———————— SEAT EXCEEDS REGION AT 211. I have taken this to the Controller three times. It is not minuted because renewal is not a decision. — A.P.

What it is for. This is Revelation 5 in a player's hands. Note the last line: she has already tried, through the proper channel, and the proper channel is the problem.

---

Act One — The Returns (~45 min)

Where: Wetherlaw farm and the vent head on Sheldon Moor, a wet afternoon in September. What it is for: establish that the boundary is real, expanding, and has a door in it.

Read aloud or paraphrase: The ash starts about a mile before the farm. It lies on the verges and it does not wash off in the rain, which has been falling on it for four years. Joan Wetherlaw meets you at the gate with a yard brush in her hand and says: "You're not from the council."

Hooks — how the table gets here

Use whichever fits the group; all three are live and the department used all three.

⚠ Whichever hook you use, the party meets Joan Wetherlaw. Desk pass 3 took the grid reference and drove straight past the farm, which is what a professional team with a map does — and two of these three hooks let them, because only the second one involves her at all. Act One without her ran fifteen minutes short and had nobody in it, and both of its Essential clues lost their stated failure case, which is "Joan points at it within the minute."

So she is at the farm when they arrive, and she walks up with them. She has been walking up there for four years, which is precisely what the woman in her own NPC entry would do, and it means the forty-minute moor walk has somebody in it instead of being terrain. A party who skip the farm entirely meet her at the vent head, sitting on the concrete with a flask, and nothing else changes. Either way she is present for clues 1–5 and she goes no further than the adit mouth.

• The return in Registry. Bhattacharya's section has SO-H01 on a desk. It is fifty-two years old, it is answering a question nobody asked, and it arrived in May.
• The farm. Joan Wetherlaw wrote to DEFRA about her yard in 2023 and was sent a leaflet. The letter reached the department by the route those letters take.
• The dog. A veterinary practice in Bakewell submitted tissue it could not classify. It is on Nkemdirim's bench in the briefing, and it is nine days older than the animal.

Clue trail — Act One

#	Clue	Where	How found	What it gives	Type
1	The ash is not ash	The verges, the yard	[CUS: Knowledge — it is not combustion product and it is not mineral; it has a grain structure, like something milled]	The boundary is a place, not a contamination	Essential
2	The ash has an edge	Walking the field boundary	[CUS: Navigate — the line is straight for 400 m and then turns exactly 90°, which weather does not do]	It is surveyed. Somebody drew it	Supporting
3	The dog's records	Joan's kitchen, the vet's note	[CUS: Insight — the vet's note is hedged in a way a vet's note never is; nine days of healing in an animal that was gone overnight]	Time runs differently in the ash, not in the site	Supporting
4	Joan's fifty-two years	Joan herself	[CUS: Persuade — she has a box of her father's papers she has never shown anyone]	Her father was a Sheldon works foreman in 1974 and was told to stop digging	Supporting
5	The vent head	Sheldon Moor, 3/4 mile up	[CUS: Spot — a mushroom vent in the heather, painted to lose itself, warm to the hand]	The site is live — something down there is breathing	Essential
6	The postal pipe	Beside the vent head	[CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — a sealed 4-inch pneumatic line, pressurised, and the seal is 1974 and unbroken]	The route in, and where SO-H01 came from	Essential
7	The blast door	End of the service adit	[CUS: Engineering (Field Systems) — it is not locked. It has never been locked. It opens from this side]	Nobody built this to keep anyone out	Essential

Clues 1–5 share one failure case and it is deliberate: nothing out here is hidden. On a failure the agent does not find it yet; Joan, who has lived with all of it for four years, points at it within the minute. She is not being mysterious. She has been trying to show somebody for four years. A special on any of them gets the same fact plus the detail that it has been like this since 2022 and not before.

⚠ Clues 6 and 7 are the exception, because Joan is not there. She walks up to the vent head; she has never gone down the adit and she is not going to start. Desk pass 4 failed the blast door and the blanket rule named a woman standing four hundred metres behind them. Their failure case is time, never access — the postal pipe is pressurised and audible and the blast door is a door. Ten minutes of looking and both open. Nothing in this scenario is gated on getting inside; the door has never been locked.

The three beats

1. The yard. Joan, the brush, the ash. She is sixty-seven, she is tired of not being believed, and she will talk for as long as anyone lets her. [CUS: Insight — she is not frightened of the ash; she is frightened of being told again that there is nothing there]. Success: she produces her father's box unprompted. Failure: she produces it anyway, later, when somebody is kind to her. Nothing is gated on this roll — it changes when, not whether.
2. The walk up. Forty minutes of moor in the wet. Use it for the ash edge (clue 2) and for whatever the table wants to talk about. [CUS: Athletics — average; only a fumble is a fall, and a fall here is a twisted ankle and nothing worse].
3. The vent head and the adit. The way in. [CUS: Stealth — they can be inside without being seen, which matters at Countdown step 2]. This roll buys when Teague finds them, and nothing else. Success: Countdown step 2 moves to +55 min — they get most of Act Two before he appears. Failure: step 2 moves to +15 min and he is looking for them while they are still in the lobby. Special: he is not told at all until they introduce themselves. All three stay inside the act, which is the point — a Teague who arrives after Act Two has ended is a roll that bought nothing. The door opens either way; it has never been locked.

Time, ruled — because the table will ask in Act One

Joan's dog healed nine days overnight. The lore-digger will immediately ask what an afternoon below costs them up here. The answer is nothing.

The ratio is in the ash, not in the site. The boundary band is where the "after" is being written, and time inside it is thick — the dog lay in it for a night. The party crosses that band in thirty seconds, twice, and the site beyond it runs at 1:1 with the surface, because the site is a place with clocks in it that people have been winding for fifty-two years. Thursday is Thursday in both directions.

Say this when it is asked and do not leave it vague — Act Three is on a deadline and a table that thinks time is elastic will not believe the deadline.

⚠ Do not put a fight in Act One. The scenario has one creature above ground and it is not here. If the table needs something to do with their hands, give them the adit: it is four hundred metres of 1962 concrete and the lights still work.

---

Act Two — Bellhouse (~75 min)

Where: the site. What it is for: the players meet a functioning civil service at the end of the world, and are shown the sum.

Read aloud or paraphrase: The corridor is warm and smells of floor polish and soup. A woman in a cardigan and a department lanyard steps out of an office, sees four strangers, and says — with no alarm whatever — "Oh, are you from Centre? Only we've been writing."

How to run the population

Nobody attacks. Nobody is suspicious. Everybody is delighted. Fifty-two years of posting returns into a pipe and somebody has finally come. The agents will be offered tea within ninety seconds and it is real tea, rationed, and giving it to them costs somebody their allowance.

If they refuse the tea — and a contrarian table will — the offer is not withdrawn. It is set down on the side, and it is still there, cold, when they come back through. Say nothing about it. Somebody gave up their allowance for it and nobody is going to mention that either.

Say this three times over the act, in three different mouths: we were told Centre would come when it could. That is the load-bearing line. They are not mad, or trapped, or cursed. They were told to hold on, and they held on.

The one instruction that matters: if the GM feels the act sagging, do not introduce a threat. Introduce a person — the man who has run the site's library for forty years and wants to know whether the National Theatre reopened; the woman who is teaching children the geography of a county she has never stood in. The act's engine is grief, not danger.

When the players tell them the truth — and they will, in the first five minutes

Desk pass 1's talker said "Controller, there was no war" four minutes into the act. This is the likeliest opening move at every table and it needs a printed answer, not a GM's improvisation.

Told to Sowerby. He is courteous, he does not believe it, and — this is the important part — he files it. A written statement from a Centre officer goes in the record, which means it is still there in Act Three when it matters. He says: "I'd very much like that to be true. We had it put to us in 'seventy-nine by a man who'd got in through the ventilation. He believed it as well." He is not lying and there was such a man. Do not resolve who.

Told to Pennyfeather. She goes quiet, then asks one question: "Then what has the region been doing?" She already suspects — this is what tips her from arithmetic into action, and it is the cheapest way to get SO-H03 into their hands if the Insight route was missed.

Told to Teague. This is what makes him dangerous, and the GM should know it before it happens. Everything in his Act Three paragraph arrives early, without the signing to contain it. If they tell him in Act Two, move Countdown step 2 to now and play the rest of the act with him following them.

Taking a resident to the surface. They will ask. The answer is yes, it works, and it is the worst thing they can do before Act Three. A resident who crosses the ash sees a moor with no craters on it, and one of three things happens — GM's choice by who it is:

• Sowerby looks for a long time and says "I'll need to see the region." He is asking for proof of a million people, and nobody can give it to him inside the session.
• Larkhall believes it instantly, because she is a scientist and a sky is evidence, and is then no use to anybody for the rest of the case.
• Teague decides it is an anomaly and not a sky, and goes back down certain. Do not use him for this unless the table insists — it removes the script break.

⚠ Nobody is harmed by crossing. There is no trap here. The scenario is not punishing the humane move; it is showing that proof does not solve an administrative problem.

And if they bring proof back down instead — a photograph, a newspaper, a phone — desk pass 3 did exactly this and the text had no answer. It does now, and it is Sowerby's, and he is kind about it: "That's a photograph of a moor with nothing on it. I've got four hundred of those in the survey file." A picture of an uncratered hillside is a picture of somewhere else, and the man has spent fifty-two years administering a region he has never seen on the strength of documents. One more document does not move him. What moves him is an order.

Locations below

Location	What is there	Why the players come here
The blast door and lobby	A visitor book, opened 1974, three entries, all from that week	First proof anybody has ever thought about the outside
The Control Room	Sowerby, the tannoy, the regional map with 1974 pins	The broadcast (Countdown 1); the man who signs
Registry	Pennyfeather, the establishment returns, fifty-two years of files	The sum — the act's destination
The sick bay	Dr Ivy Larkhall; Edith Marlow, 101, in the end bed	Revelation 3 — it was a drill
The crèche and school	Nineteen children under eleven; Kit Marlow, 17, teaching them	The cost of Act Three, made a person
The pipe room	The pneumatic head, the outgoing tray, fifty-two years of unanswered post	Where SO-H01 came from; Kowalczyk's route to Revelation 4
The plant floor	Generators, the renewal relay, Teague's office	How the renewal physically happens

Clue trail — Act Two

#	Clue	Where	How found	What it gives	Type
8	They think it happened	Anywhere, first ten minutes	[CUS: no roll — the tannoy bulletin does it for you]	Revelation 2	Essential
9	The visitor book	The lobby	[CUS: Spot — three signatures in one week in 1974 and nothing after]	Nobody has ever come back	Supporting
10	The order itself	Registry, on request	[CUS: Research — SO-H02, filed where it should be, because everything here is]	Clause 4's second door	Essential
11	The drill	The sick bay, from Marlow	[CUS: Insight — she is not confused, she is ashamed, and those present differently]	Revelation 3	Essential
11b	CASUALTIES NIL	Registry, from Pennyfeather	[CUS: Insight — ask her what week one looked like and she fetches the 1974 return]	Revelation 3, by a second road	Essential
11c	Marlow's file	The sick-bay day room	[CUS: Research — a box of her papers on the shelf where the ward keeps its old files]	Revelation 3, in her own hand	Essential
12	The relay	Plant floor	[CUS: Repair (Electronics) — the renewal is wired to a relay that also drives the perimeter survey]	Revelation 4: renewal is the expansion	Essential
13	The sum	Registry, from Pennyfeather	[CUS: no roll — ask her a straight question and she produces SO-H03; she has been waiting fifty-two years to be asked one]	Revelation 5	Essential
13b	What she did about it	Registry, from Pennyfeather	[CUS: no roll — it is written at the bottom of SO-H03 in her own hand, and she will say it aloud to anybody who reads that line]	Why the proper channel failed	Supporting
13c	The establishment return	Anywhere, Countdown step 3	[CUS: Spot — she posts the population count herself and the number is on the front of it]	Revelation 5, by a second road	Essential
14	Sixty-one	Registry, the birth register	[CUS: Research — sixty-one born below, no NHS number, no birth certificate above ground]	The cost of cancellation	Supporting
15	What Teague has decided	Plant floor, or he finds them	[CUS: Listen — he asks each of them separately where they were on the day]	He is testing a theory he cannot afford to be wrong about	Supporting

Failure cases. A failed roll on a filed clue costs a SCENE, not ten minutes. This is the most orderly place in the world and nothing here is lost — but desk pass 4 measured what the old rule did to the clock. Act Two asks for six rolls whose failure case was "ten minutes and a second attempt", roughly two of them fail in an average session, and a single failure handed back ten of the nineteen minutes the Pacing Note had just cut. The cuts were sized against the act's length and not against its variance, so they could not hold.

So: a failed Research or Insight on clue 10 or 14 means Pennyfeather goes and fetches it while the party are doing something else, and it arrives a scene later. The roll still mattered — they did not get it when they wanted it, and they owe her — and it costs nothing on the clock. Never make the table stand in Registry waiting. Clue 12 failed means the relay reads as ordinary plant and Revelation 4 arrives instead from Pennyfeather, one scene later.

⚠ Revelation 5 is not behind a roll at all, and that is the fix. Desk pass 3's contrarian split put the wrong agent in Registry — Insight 40 instead of 63 — and one failed roll lost the sum, so the party cancelled the Standing Order having never learned why it was urgent. Pennyfeather's own roster entry already said she hands SO-H03 to anybody who asks her a straight question, and the clue said to roll Insight; those could not both be true. The roster line wins: she gives it to anyone who asks. Desk pass 4 then lost 13b the same way on a 98, so that came off the dice too — it is written at the bottom of her own sheet. 13c is a second road for a table that never thinks to ask her anything: she posts the establishment return at Countdown step 3 whether or not anybody is talking to her, and the number is on the front.

⚠ Revelation 3 has three independent routes, and this is deliberate. Desk pass 1 failed the roll with Marlow and the fallback with Larkhall, and the party finished the case never learning it was a drill — because the only route left was a file in Marlow's private quarters that nothing had told them existed. A fallback that requires the revelation it is a fallback for is not a fallback. So:

• 11 · Marlow herself. Fail and she does not say it today; she is old and ashamed and there is no second attempt. This route is allowed to close.
• 11b · Pennyfeather. She has the 1974 return in a drawer and casualties this period: nil is on it. She fetches it for anybody who asks what week one was like. This route cannot close — she is helpful, and she is already the act's destination.
• 11c · The file, in the sick-bay day room rather than in private quarters. They have a reason to be there (it is where Larkhall talks to them) and a reason to look at a shelf of old ward files.

If all three somehow fail, give it to them at the Vigil (Countdown step 4): somebody reads the 1974 roll of honour aloud, and there are no names on it.

⚠ Clue 14 is Supporting on purpose, and it used to be Essential. Desk pass 3 failed it and the case got better: the sixty-one arrived in Pennyfeather's mouth at the moment of decision instead of in a register an hour earlier, and it was devastating. Do not steer the party into the birth register. If they find it, fine. If they do not, she tells them when it counts.

Specials. A special on clue 11 gets Marlow's own memo in her hand — the fortnight paragraph, the single most damning object in the case.

⚠ Neither 13 nor 13b is behind a roll, on purpose. The sum is the destination of the act and the reason the proper channel failed is the thematic centre of the whole case, and desk passes 3 and 4 lost one of them each to an ordinary failed die. Pennyfeather hands over SO-H03 to anyone who asks her a straight question, and the line about taking it to the Controller three times is written at the bottom of it in her own hand. What a good Insight buys — at the GM's discretion, no roll called for — is her saying the thing she has never said aloud: I think we should not be here.

The census, in the Registry

There is one creature in this act and it is in the stacks behind Pennyfeather's desk, counting. It has been counting for fifty-two years and it is nearly finished.

[CUS: Spot — something between the shelves is keeping a tally, and the tally is people]

It does not attack. It counts — one round, no roll, it simply looks — and an agent it has counted is on a list on the far side for good. See the bestiary entry; the department cannot get anybody off that list.

This is the scenario's one cheap lesson and it should be cheap: the players will want to fight it. Fighting it is legal and survivable. It changes nothing about Thursday, because the tally is not the cause of the sum — it is a symptom of the same filing. Let them learn that by doing it.

⚠ Do not let the census kill the act's tone. It is two minutes of cold in a warm place. Get back to the tea.

⚠ The census is optional and missing it costs nothing. Desk pass 1 failed the Spot and never found it, and no later beat noticed. It is atmosphere and a cheap lesson, not a clue — do not give it a second route and do not steer the party into the stacks. If the act is running hot, it is the first thing to lose.

---

Act Three — Renewal (~50 min)

Where: the Control Room, Thursday, 06:00. What it is for: the decision, and its price.

Read aloud or paraphrase: Sowerby has shaved. The renewal folder is squared to the edge of the desk, the pen is the one his predecessor used, and there are eleven people standing along the back wall because they always come. He looks up and says: "You'll want to watch. It's quite short."

⚠ Pennyfeather is in this room and she stays in it. She is the Registrar, she files the renewal, and she is the only person present who knows what cancellation costs. Desk pass 1 put the decision in the Control Room while she was two corridors away in Registry, and the party cancelled the order without ever being told about the sixty-one — which left the GM choosing between teleporting her in and letting them choose blind. Neither is acceptable. Put her at the Controller's elbow from the first line of the act.

The three endings, all real

1. CANCEL — clause 4, the warrant in the room. Any agent may cancel the Standing Order in person. There is no roll. It works, it has always worked, and it is what a warrant card is for.

• What happens: the "after" un-files. Region 12 was never attacked, and Bellhouse was never executed. The 206 who went down in 1974 become people who went down for a drill and came up on the Friday.
• The cost, and do not soften it: the sixty-one born below have no record above ground and never had one. They stop. Kit Marlow stops.
• ⚠ This must be said out loud, by Pennyfeather, before the pen moves. Not in a GM aside and not after the fact. She says: "Sixty-one of us were born here. I have their entries in front of me and there is no other copy. I want you to say the number back to me before you do it." If the agent cancels anyway, that is the scenario working. What it must never be is a surprise afterwards.
• ⚠ If they never got the sum, they are cancelling for the wrong reason, and that is fine. Desk pass 3's party never learned about the reconciliation threshold and cancelled anyway, because the amendment had failed and the warden had thrown them out. Do not withhold the ending from them and do not have anybody explain first. Afterwards — only afterwards — Pennyfeather works out what they prevented, and tells them, and she is the only person who will ever know. A party who do the right thing by accident is the best possible ending for a case about people doing the wrong thing correctly.
• Coherence: the cancelling agent spends 2 Coherence, permanently, because they are the authority that makes it true and reality now records them that way.

2. LET IT RENEW. Sowerby signs. Nothing visibly happens. Then the correction begins, and the overwriter arrives to perform it — five bodies, correcting one fact the party relies on every round, retroactively and truly. It is not trying to fight anybody. It is doing the filing.

⚠ This is not a fight and the party cannot stop it by force. Say so. Desk pass 2 ran it through the real harness: one of them cannot meaningfully hurt anybody, five of them ground for forty rounds and finished nothing, and the party experienced the end of the world as an inconclusive scuffle. Each body destroyed slows the corrections by 10% and that is the entire return on shooting it. The threat is THE CORRECTION and the dice will not deliver one word of it — the GM has to.

The four corrections, in order. Read them; do not improvise at the climax.

1. The adit is not where they left it. It never was. The way they came in comes out four hundred metres further down the moor, and always has.
2. The warrant card names somebody else. Hand the card back to its player and tell them the name on it. It has always been that name. (Use the agent who has spent the least Coherence — they have the furthest to fall.)
3. There was never a dog. Joan Wetherlaw has always lived alone, and the tissue on Nkemdirim's bench is a sheep's, and the vet's note is in a hand nobody recognises.
4. Bellhouse has always had two hundred and thirty-two people in it. Let the table do the arithmetic themselves. Then tell whichever agent is standing nearest the wall that one of them is wearing their coat.

After the fourth, stop. The case is over and the region is being corrected; anything further is the GM enjoying it, and this ending is not for enjoying.

• What happens: Region 12 is corrected to match the record. This is the end of the world and the scenario does not flinch from letting the table choose it.
• This option must stay available. A choice with one acceptable answer is not a choice and the players will smell it.

3. AMEND — the arrangement, and the best ending in the case. The order does not have to be cancelled. Its scope can be changed. Bellhouse governs Region 12 after the war; amend the scope so that it governs somewhere genuinely empty and always was, and the site keeps running, the people keep existing, and the ash stops.

This is a Borrowed Authority problem and is run by those rules:

• The credential is Ellerby-Stannard, who is dead, which is why it is a stretch rather than routine — one tier beyond scope.

• It is assembled from up to three dossier items, each a separate scene, using a different skill, at most one of them at a keyboard. The three that exist here:

  • Marlow's own memo [CUS: Research — her hand, her reasoning, in the sick-bay day room]
  • The 1962 commissioning survey naming an unpopulated alternate seat area [CUS: Knowledge — Sheldon was the second choice; the first had nobody on it]
  • Pennyfeather's counter-signature as Registrar [CUS: Persuade — she has been waiting fifty-two years for somebody to ask her to do something about it]

• The roll: [CUS: Anomaly Lore — the amendment has to be filed as a correction of a 1974 clerical error, which is what it is], at −20 per red flag broken. Each dossier item makes the credential better, never the roll easier.

• Success — and what the dossier bought. ⚠ The number of dossier items does not change this roll and never did. Borrowed Authority is explicit: items make the credential better, not the roll easier. Desk pass 2 assembled one item of three and rolled exactly the same 62 against 63 it would have rolled with all three, which made the act's best three scenes mechanically invisible. So the items buy scope. Same roll, three different worlds:

  Items	What the amendment grants
  One	Narrow. Bellhouse keeps running and the ash stops by the weekend — but the scope covers the ground, not the people. The site stays sealed. Nobody ever comes up, and the sixty-one stay unrecorded
  Two	The seal lifts. The order no longer requires the Seat to stay under it. They can come up, and some of them do, and Sowerby is not among the first
  Three	The sixty-one get records. Kit Marlow can leave, and there is a birth certificate with her name on it dated 2009, and reality has always had one

  Read the row they earned. Do not read the better one because it is kinder.

• Failure: the amendment does not take. Do not fall straight through. Sowerby's pen stops above the paper and stays there for one full round of table talk — he has been handed a reason to hesitate and he is a man who has never been allowed one. Play that silence. Pennyfeather says "Controller."

  • If Teague stood down, he says nothing and does not leave.
  • If Teague did not — if he threw them out, or they fought him, or they told him the truth in Act Two and he has been against them since — he is in the doorway, he has won, and he does not look like a man who has won. Desk pass 3 failed the script break and the beat lost its second voice; this is that voice. He says nothing either. The difference is what the players can see on him. Then the renewal proceeds unless somebody cancels under clause 4. Desk pass 1 fell through in ninety seconds and resolved a fifty-minute act in eight, because the failure state is so much worse than the alternative that nobody deliberated. The pause is what makes it a decision rather than a reflex — it is not optional staging.

• Coherence: widening a scope with Coherence is legal here and it always works. It costs 1 per widening and the agent's file and Bellhouse's converge one step. Nothing in this game converges them back. A table one item short can buy the next row up this way, and should be told the price before they spend it, not after.

What the good ending actually looks like, to read at the table. Desk pass 2 earned this ending and found it was three sentences long — less scenario than the failure branch got. It is what the whole case is for, so play it out:

Sowerby reads the amendment twice. He asks one question — "and the region?" — and Pennyfeather says "not ours any more, Controller," and he puts the pen down without signing the renewal, which is the first time in fifty-two years anybody has done that.

Then, in this order, because the order is the point:

1. The tannoy. He broadcasts it himself, because he broadcasts everything. Two hundred and thirty-one people hear that the war is over in the only sense that was ever going to be available to them.
2. Nobody cheers. Give the table the silence. These people have been right for fifty-two years and have just been told they were right about the wrong thing.
3. Pennyfeather files it, because it is not real until it is filed, and she is the one who has always known that.
4. Then the row they earned, above. If the seal lifted, somebody goes up. Let it be Larkhall, and let her not say anything at all.
5. The ash. By the weekend Joan Wetherlaw sweeps her yard and it stays swept. She is the last image of the case — she does not know what happened and nobody will ever tell her, and she goes inside.

Teague

Warden Michael Teague, thirty-eight, born below, is the only person in Bellhouse who has decided the surface is a lie — because if it is not a lie then his whole life was an administrative error, and that is unbearable. He is the act's only violence and he is avoidable.

His one paragraph, printed so the GM can read it aloud: "I've read the same file you have. I've read it more times than you have. And what it says is that on the fourth of November 1974 this country was attacked and two hundred and six people did their duty. If that's wrong then my mother died down here for nothing and my daughter was born down here for nothing, and I'm not able to hold that. So I'm going to ask you to leave, and then I'm going to ask you again."

The script break: say his daughter's name. He has one — Nell, nine, in the crèche — and any agent who has been to the school knows it. Naming her puts him back in the room as a father instead of a warden, and he steps aside. [CUS: Insight — he is not threatening anyone; he is asking to be argued out of it]. Success: he stands down and becomes the strongest voice for ending 3. Failure: he escorts them out of the Control Room and they must find another way back in before 06:00 — which costs them the dossier scene they had least secured, not the act.

If it comes to a fight: he is one man with a 1974 service pistol against field agents and he will lose, quickly, in front of his colleagues and his daughter's teacher. The scenario does not stop the table doing this. It does not reward it either. Everyone in Bellhouse who was going to help them stops helping them.

Containment's beat, and it is the only one they get. Teague has to get past somebody to reach the folder, and the somebody is the party's heavy. Give that player the choice out loud: put him down, or stand still and let him come. Standing still is the stronger play and the scenario should say so — a warden who walks into a man who will not hit him has nowhere to put what he is carrying. Desk pass 1's heavy scored his own session 3/10 and said "I carried a chair"; this is the fix, and it costs the act nothing.

EXPOSURE — the one thing that will kill the party

If the agents call the incident in as a containment failure rather than an arrangement, the department sends a quarantine unit, and it gets there first.

Read the bestiary entry before you put it on the table. Desk pass 2 ran it against this scenario's own declared six — not the four-player baseline — and it wiped all six in fifteen rounds, five of them dead, without the sterilisation blast firing at all, because that power is out of the fight harness. The recorded figure against the frozen four is a wipe rate of 87.4%. The real encounter is worse than the number, and the number is already a party-killer.

Run it as a clock, not as a fight. All three of these go on the table, out loud:

• The countdown is six rounds and the GM tracks it openly. It is in the bestiary entry and nowhere else, and a GM who has not read that entry will not run it — which removes the only thing that makes this survivable. Count down out loud from six.
• The argue-down is a Borrowed Authority stretch, one tier beyond scope, using the same Ellerby-Stannard credential as ending 3: [CUS: Anomaly Lore — a standing authorisation outranks a containment order, and the unit knows it], at −20 per red flag broken. Each dossier item they assembled for ending 3 counts here too. Success: the unit stands down where it is and waits for Centre, which takes days. Special: it stands down and its officer gives them a name to call.
• Failure is not the end of the attempt. The countdown continues and they may try once more before it expires, at −20. If it runs out they are in a BLAST of 6d6 with a radius of the whole location, and so is everybody in Bellhouse. Five rounds is enough to reach the adit and it is not enough to reach the crèche, and the players should be told that.

This is the scenario telling the truth about its own setting: the fight is the failure state, and the paperwork is the way out. Do not spring the unit as a twist. If a player says the words that summon it, say plainly what they have just done.

NPC Roster — GM quick sheet

Every NPC gets one line of essence first. That line is what to play if you have five seconds and the table is looking at you.

Below

Controller Edwin Sowerby, 61 — the man who has done his duty for fifty-two years and needs it to have been worth doing. Went down aged nine with his mother, which makes him the oldest person in Bellhouse who remembers the sky, and he does not talk about it. Signs the renewal because renewal is not a decision (SO-H02, clause 5) and he has never been offered the chance to make it one. He is courteous, precise and lonely. If the players give him a decision he will take it seriously — he is not a wall, he is a man who has never been asked. Supports ending 3 if Pennyfeather and Teague both back it.

Registrar Alice Pennyfeather, 52 — the clerk who has already done the sum and is waiting for somebody to ask her. Born below. Has taken the arithmetic to Sowerby three times and been told, correctly, that renewal is not minuted as a decision. Hands over SO-H03 to anybody who asks her a straight question. She is the act's destination and the case's conscience, and in ending 1 she is the one who tells the agents what it will cost the children, because she has worked that out too.

Dr Ivy Larkhall, 44 — the doctor who has never had a patient with sunlight in their history, and has written the best paper nobody will ever read about it. Born below. Curious rather than frightened, and the first person to ask the agents an intelligent question. Half-knows about the drill: Marlow has said things in the night for years. Will not break a confidence, but will say ask her, and ask her kindly.

Deputy Controller Edith Marlow, 101 — the woman who filed a war because she thought it would save a fortnight. In the end bed in the sick bay. Has not spoken plainly since 2019 and is not confused — she is ashamed, and Insight tells those apart (clue 11). Her own memo — in the sick-bay day room, on the shelf with the old ward files, where the party can find it without being told it exists — carries the fortnight paragraph and is the most damning object in the scenario. She will confirm it was a drill if she is asked kindly and will deny it if she is pressed.

Warden Michael Teague, 38 — the only man down here who has decided the surface is a lie, because the alternative is unbearable. Born below. Head of the site's eleven-person police. Widower. His daughter Nell is nine and in the crèche. Full paragraph and script break in Act Three. Not a villain, and the scenario should never call him one.

Sub-Officer Kit Marlow, 17 — a girl who has drawn the sky four thousand times from one photograph and wants to know if she got the blue right. Edith's great-granddaughter, born below, oldest of the children, teaches the little ones their regional geography from a 1971 atlas. She is the cost of ending 1 and she should be a person before she is a price — give her a scene in Act Two, doing something ordinary and competent, before Act Three asks anybody to decide anything.

The site, as a character — two hundred and thirty-one people, warm corridors, floor polish, soup, a library, a remembrance service for the surface dead held every year for fifty-two years. They were told Centre would come when it could.

Above

Joan Wetherlaw, 67 — has been sweeping ash off her yard for four years and has stopped telling anybody. Farms three-quarters of a mile from the vent head. Her father was a works foreman at Sheldon in 1974 and was told to stop digging; his papers are in a box she has never shown anyone. Not a mystic and not a crank — a tired woman with a brush who has been right the whole time.

Nell Teague, 9 — has one question about horses and will ask it at the worst possible moment. In the crèche. Her name is the script break.

Creatures used — all from the bestiary, nothing new to build

Creature	Where	What it is for
The census	Act Two, the Registry stacks	Counting, for fifty-two years; ENUMERATED is permanent and the department cannot undo it
The overwriter	Act Three, ending 2 only	The correction, performing itself; cannot be dropped and is not trying to fight
Quarantine unit	EXPOSURE, if the agents call it in as containment	The failure state; argue it down with the ending-3 credential or die

---

Casting — six from the duty roster

⚠ THE DECLARED CAST IS LOAD-BEARING ON THE BUILD. The <!-- cast: --> comment above is read by check-rollable, which holds every skill this document names to being reachable at 25% or better by somebody in that list. Change the cast and re-run the guards before trusting a single clue route.

Deliberately not CLEAN GROUND's six, so the two cases exercise different sheets.

#	Agent	Why they are here	The routes they own
1	Marta Holloway — Senior Field Officer, lead	Signs for it and reads it first	Navigate (the ash edge), Stealth (the way in), Tradecraft
2	Arun Bhattacharya — Registry Officer	The return landed on his section's desk	Research (SO-H02, the birth register), Knowledge (the 1962 survey), Anomaly Lore (the ending-3 roll)
3	Kate Renshaw — Interview Officer	Because everyone down there wants to talk	Insight 63 (Marlow, Teague, Pennyfeather — all three), Persuade (Joan, and Pennyfeather's counter-signature), Listen
4	Marek Kowalczyk — Probationary, engineering	Somebody has to read the plant	Repair (Electronics) (the relay), Repair (Mechanical) (the pipe), Engineering (Field Systems) (the blast door)
5	Dr Chidi Nkemdirim — Probationary, medicine	The dog tissue is on his bench	Insight 58 and Knowledge 58 — he reads the dog and the ash with those, so the clues survive the four-player cut; Listen, Persuade
6	Ben Okonkwo — Field Officer, containment	In case it is the other kind of case. It is not	Athletics, Brawl, Firearm (Rifle) — and the scenario is built so he never needs them. His beat is Teague in Act Three: stand still and let him come

Casting note for Okonkwo's player, given before the game: this case has no fight the party has to win. He is not wasted — he is the one who carries Marlow's chair, holds the adit, and stands beside Teague without raising anything. Tell his player that up front, the way CLEAN GROUND tells Ashcroft's.

At four players, cut Okonkwo and Nkemdirim. No clue needs reassigning — desk pass 2 audited the four remaining sheets and found that Science (Biology) and Medicine were the only two skills that vanished with them, so clues 1 and 3 were rewritten onto Knowledge and Insight for every table size and the scenario no longer calls for either.

⚠ Why that matters more than it looks. check-rollable holds this document to its <!-- cast: --> declaration, which names six. A four-player cut written as prose is checked by nothing. The old version worked only because one sentence reassigned two clues correctly; edit that sentence, or add a Medicine call to Act One, and four-player tables silently lose two clues with every guard still green. Nkemdirim still reads the dog tissue — he just reads it with Insight.

---

Locations — quick reference

#	Location	Act	One line
1	Wetherlaw farm	1	Ash on the yard for four years, and a woman with a brush
2	The ash edge	1	A straight line for 400 m, then a right angle
3	Sheldon Moor vent head	1	A painted mushroom in the heather, warm to the hand
4	The postal pipe	1	Four-inch pneumatic, pressurised, sealed in 1974
5	The service adit	1	Four hundred metres of 1962 concrete; the lights still work
6	Blast door and lobby	1/2	Never locked. A visitor book with three entries
7	Control Room	2/3	The tannoy, the 1974 map, the desk where it gets signed
8	Registry	2	Fifty-two years of files, the sum, and something counting in the stacks
9	Sick bay	2	Larkhall, and Edith Marlow in the end bed
10	Crèche and school	2	Nineteen children, a 1971 atlas, and Kit Marlow's drawings of the sky
11	Pipe room	2	The outgoing tray, and fifty-two years of unanswered post
12	Plant floor	2/3	Generators, the renewal relay, Teague's office

---

GM notes — three things that do not get resolved

Name these as do not resolve so a helpful GM does not answer them.

1. Where the answered post went. Fifty-two years of returns went up the pipe. One came back out, in May, on a real desk. Nothing in this case explains the other ten thousand.
2. What the census was counting for. It has been tallying since 1974 and it is nearly finished. The scenario never says finished for what.
3. Whether Marlow was right. She thought a real one was coming inside the year. The department's own 1974 traffic is not in this file and the players cannot get it.

---

Open questions for Tim

• Kit Marlow. She is the cost of ending 1 and the draft may lean on a seventeen-year-old too hard. The alternative is to put the weight on the whole sixty-one and never give one of them a name — colder, and possibly better.
• ✅ Runtime — superseded. The 45/55/50 estimate was replaced by the measured 45/75/50 below.
• Is ending 3 findable? It depends on the players reading clause 4 and clause 5 and thinking about scope rather than cancellation. It may need a nudge written into Pennyfeather.
• Does this want a fourth act? CLEAN GROUND has one and uses it well. Three is the brief and three is what this is. Four passes say the signing carries its fifty minutes comfortably — passes 3 and 4 both landed Act Three on the nose — so this is probably settled as a no.
• ✅ THE BUDGET — decided 15 September 2026. The slot is 3h15. Act Two ran 75, 70 and then 66 with every cut taken. The alternative was taking twelve minutes out of the sick bay, which is the only non-load-bearing block that size — but Revelation 3's first route lives in it and it is the one that plays best. The slot moved instead. Three things follow and they are all improvements: the acts are budgeted at what they measured rather than at what would fit, there are fifteen minutes of genuine slack for a real table, and the Pacing Note's cuts stop being defaults — which is the proper answer to desk pass 4's finding that the cheapest default cut gutted the likeliest ending, rather than a workaround for it.