RingBRP/docs/scenarios/LAST_ADMISSION.md

Prologue — The Custodians: LAST ADMISSION

Twelve thousand people paid to be told this house was haunted. It was listening.

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GM ESSENTIALS

• System: d100 roll-under. Under a fifth of the skill is a special, under a twentieth a critical. 96–99 always fail. 00 fumbles. Everyone has 1% at anything.
• Mechanics inline: [CUS: Skill — what it gets you]
• Two hours. One house. Four names on a wall. Three of them can be hit.
• No Coherence is lost. They do not know what they are looking at yet. The word is not said until the last scene.
• Safety: X-card or open door, stated in 30 seconds at seating.
• Runs with the six: Pollard, Ashcroft, Braithwaite, Renshaw, Sharrock, Ferriby — their "(before)" sheets, the civilian ones. Works at 4; drop Ashcroft then Ferriby.

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Overview

• Setting: Culland Hall, four miles outside Nettlefold. The last Saturday in October, 20:40 to about 23:00.
• Tone: A cheap scare attraction, and then the real thing standing in the queue with everybody else.
• Runtime: 2 hours. No break.
• Content warnings: jump scares and staged violence; a real death in a fire (1963, off-screen, discussed); a child character who is not a child; one dead body; brief fighting; strobe and fog effects described.

Design intent

1. One building, one truth, one decision. Deliberately simpler than OPEN DAY: no fixed timetable to narrate, no unresolved list, and the players can hit things.
2. The mystery is "which of these is an actor". That is the whole investigation and it explains itself the moment they walk in.
3. A fight is available and never required. The three can be stopped by hurting them or by breaking their script. Both work. The script is faster.
4. The ending is a decision with a price on both sides, not a die roll.
5. They finish attached to the department because they see it work, not because somebody explains it to them afterwards.

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Session Timing

Section	Time	Cumulative	Checkpoint
Seating + open	~10 min	0:10	everyone knows why they are at the Hall
Act One — Last Admission	~30 min	0:40	they have been through the attraction and something was wrong in it
Act Two — Who's Still In There	~45 min	1:25	the three are loose, one PC has been hurt or nearly, the fourth name is found
Act Three — The Fourth Name	~25 min	1:50	the panel comes down, or it does not
Close — Last Admission	~10 min	2:00	the cards are handed out

Hard rule: at 1:25, go to Act Three.

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Plot Summary (GM truth — one page, players never see it)

Culland Hall has been empty since 1998. This autumn a company called Blackwick Attractions leased it for six weeks and turned it into THE CULLAND HAUNTING — timed entry, twelve people every ten minutes, eighteen actors, fog, a soundtrack, and a story invented in an afternoon by a marketing agency.

The agency invented three ghosts, wrote them a page of backstory each, printed them on the tickets, the wall panel, the website and the actors' call sheets, and had eighteen people perform them forty times a night for six weeks to twelve thousand paying visitors who agreed to believe them, briefly, on purpose, as the price of a good time.

Reality keeps a record of what belongs where. It is a good record, and it can be made to get it wrong by something patient and stupid saying the same wrong thing for a very long time — or by something loud and clever saying it twelve thousand times in six weeks. Tonight is the last night of the run. The house now contains what the panel says it contains.

The three are not ghosts. They are entries. They have exactly as much inside them as was written down, which is a page each, and they do the page. They are cold, they are solid, and they can be hurt.

And there is a fourth name on the panel. The agency's copywriter needed a fourth for the layout and took one off a photograph of a memorial in Nettlefold parish church: EDITH CRANE, 1941–1963. Edith Crane was a real housemaid who died in a real fire in the east wing in 1963, and nobody wrote her a page, because nobody had to. She has been named twelve thousand times alongside three inventions, on a poster, for money.

She is not following a script. She wants her name off the wall.

Tonight, at about 21:10, an actor named Josh Pardoe — who plays the gardener — did not come out of the east corridor. What came out finished his shift.

Timeline

When	What
1963	Fire in the east wing. Edith Crane, housemaid, 22, dies.
1998	The Hall closes.
September	Blackwick leases it. The panel goes up.
Six weeks	Forty performances a night. Twelve thousand visitors.
21:10 tonight	Josh Pardoe does not come out of the east corridor.
21:40	The players' timed entry.
~22:00	The last group of the run goes in. After that the doors are locked and the house is full.

Revelations (7, and that is all)

#	Revelation
R1	Some of the performers are not performing
R2	The three do exactly what their printed backstory says and nothing else
R3	An actor is missing, and the thing in his costume is not him
R4	Breaking the script — panel, tape, call sheets — stops them
R5	There are four names on the wall panel and only three on the call sheet
R6	Edith Crane was a real person who really died here
R7	Somebody official is already in the building and is not surprised by any of it

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Player Experience

You paid eighteen quid, or you work here, or you are in the cast. It is the last night of a cheap haunted-house attraction in a big empty hall, with fog and a soundtrack and a teenager in a nurse's costume who says the same line to every group. Then the nurse says it in the wrong room, and she says it to you by name, and she is cold to the touch. There are three of them on the poster and four names on the wall, and one of those names belonged to somebody who actually died in this building, and she has been listening to twelve thousand people say it wrong.

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The Six, and why they are at Culland Hall

PC	Why
Kate Renshaw — actor	She is in the show. Third-billed. She plays Sister Enderby, forty times a night, six weeks. She knows every line of the script that is now walking about.
Danny Sharrock — site foreman	He built the sets. He is here to start striking them at eleven, because the lease ends Sunday.
Colin Ferriby — infrastructure engineer	He wired the show — fog, lights, sound, the radios. He is in the control room with a laptop and a headset.
Gareth Pollard — custody sergeant	Off duty, on the door as paid security, because the money is good and it is one weekend.
Neil Braithwaite — histopathologist	Dragged along by colleagues who thought it would be funny. It is not funny.
Dominic Ashcroft — research physicist	Came with a group from the university to laugh at it, and has been quietly unsettled since the car park.

Nothing essential lives on one PC. Renshaw's script knowledge, Ferriby's control room and Sharrock's set plans each shortcut a different part of the middle. Any one of them is enough; none is required.

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Act One — Last Admission (~30 minutes)

Goal: let them enjoy a cheap haunted house for ten minutes, then put one wrong thing in it and let them argue about whether it was wrong.

Opening (read aloud)

A big cold house with a marquee bolted to the front of it, a smoke machine going in the porch, and a queue of about forty people in coats. Somebody's speaker is playing the same eleven seconds of organ over and over. A girl in a nurse's costume is taking selfies with a hen party.

The board by the door says LAST ADMISSION 22:00.

The attraction — six rooms, ten minutes

Run it fast and lightly. This is meant to be fun. One or two lines a room.

#	Room	What the show does
1	The Entrance Hall	A recorded voice welcomes you and names the three. Fog to knee height.
2	The Ward (east corridor)	Sister Enderby walks the corridor counting beds. She has one line. Renshaw's room.
3	The Nursery	Sammy, the boy in the wall, laughs and moves behind the panelling. A hand comes out of a hole at ankle height.
4	The Glasshouse	Old Marrow with the shears. He chases you eleven feet and stops at a taped line on the floor.
5	The Long Gallery	Strobe, screaming, a mirror gag. Nothing in it at all.
6	The Ballroom	Everything goes dark and quiet, then the lights come up on the fire exit and a girl thanks you for coming.

The one wrong thing

Pick one and make it the only strange beat in Act One:

• Sister Enderby does her line in room 5. She is not scheduled in room 5. Room 5 has no cast. (If Renshaw is dealt, use this one — she knows the running order.)
• Old Marrow does not stop at the tape. He follows the group to the door of the next room, which is not in the routine, and stands there.
• Sammy's hand is warm and holds on, and the hole at ankle height is nine inches across and there is no room behind that wall.

Let the table talk themselves out of it. That is the correct outcome for Act One. Somebody will say "that'll be the actor messing about", and they will be right, once.

Clue trail — Act One

#	Clue	Where	How	Type
1	The wall panel by the ticket desk lists four names	Entrance hall	Automatic to anyone who reads it — it is a poster, it is at eye height	Essential
2	The call sheet on the green-room door lists three	Green room / clipboard	Automatic to Renshaw or anyone who goes backstage	Essential
3	Old Marrow's costume has no radio pack	Anywhere he appears	[CUS: Spot] — every performer wears one and Ferriby issued them	Optional
4	Josh Pardoe has missed two comms checks	Control room	Automatic to Ferriby; otherwise the floor manager says it out loud	Essential

Fallbacks. Clue 1: the same four names are on the ticket in their hand. Clue 2: Beata Nowak is standing at the green-room door shouting for Josh. Clue 4: the floor manager walks past saying "has anybody seen Pardoe?" — she does this every ten minutes until somebody answers her.

Pacing note

At 0:40, whatever they have worked out:

Fast-track: the lights on the whole east side go out, the soundtrack keeps playing, and Beata Nowak comes through the crowd asking for anyone with first aid.

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Act Two — Who's Still In There (~45 minutes)

Goal: the show stops, the three do not, and the players find out what a script is for. This is where the action lives.

The situation

The public are being walked out through the marquee — it takes twenty minutes and it is not orderly. Roughly thirty people are still inside: cast in costume, crew, a hen party who went the wrong way, and three things that are not any of those.

Josh Pardoe is dead. He is in the east corridor, behind the false wall, and he has been for half an hour. He is not marked. No roll: nothing killed him that leaves a sign. Anyone with Medicine or First Aid says cold and cannot say why, and a good roll does not buy a better answer, because there is not one.

The three

Each does its printed page and nothing else. Read the page aloud when the players first get a good look — the page is on the wall, on the ticket and in the programme, so this is not a secret.

Sister Enderby

"She walked the ward at night and counted the beds, and if the count was wrong she made it right."

• Does: counts people. Out loud. In a group of six she will say six, and then she will say five, and then she will go and make it true.
• Fight: cold, strong, ignores pain. HP 12, armour 0, Brawl 55%, 1d6 damage. She does not defend herself. She counts while you hit her.
• Script break: she stops the moment the count is right. Put a person back in the room and she is finished with it. This is the cheapest kill in the scenario and the table should be allowed to find it.

Sammy, the boy in the wall

"He hid where nobody could reach him, and he is still hiding, and he wants someone to come in and hide with him."

• Does: laughs, moves inside the walls, and takes hold of ankles. He does not hurt anybody. He pulls, and he is very strong, and the hole is nine inches across.
• Fight: you cannot hit him. He is in the wall. Athletics or Brawl vs STR 17 to get a leg back, or somebody else pulls with you for an automatic success. On a fumble they go over on their face and lose whatever was in their hands under the floorboards. He does not get to keep the leg.
• Script break: he is hiding, so he stops when he is found. Say his name and open the panel and he is not there any more.

Old Marrow

"He kept the grounds for forty years and never once came in the house, and he is not coming in now, but he will see you off it."

• Does: carries the shears, moves at a walk, and will not enter the building. He is the reason nobody gets to the car park.
• Fight: HP 20, armour 2, shears 1d8+2, Brawl/Melee 60%. He is the actual fight in this scenario. He is slow, he never runs, and he is between them and the way out. Expect about four and a half rounds, and expect somebody to get hurt. (Tuned by playing it thirty times — see the playtest note at the foot of this file.)
• Script break: he will not come in the house. Going inside is a complete answer and it costs nothing. Reward it. He waits on the lawn.

The set-piece — the run to the marquee (the combat, if they want one)

Someone has to get thirty people across ninety feet of lawn past Old Marrow.

• Three ways to run it: fight him, distract him (he follows anyone off the grass), or go back inside and out through the kitchens — Sharrock built the sets and knows there is a door there; the plans are pinned in the green room for anyone else.
• Rounds: four or five. He closes at a walk, one attack a round, and he goes for whoever is furthest from the house. He drops somebody in about one fight in three — and dropped is dropped, not dying.
• If it goes badly: he does not pursue anyone indoors and he does not finish anybody off. He sees them off the grass. That is his whole page.
• Idle players: hand them the hen party — six frightened people who need telling what to do, and who will do it.

Clue trail — Act Two

#	Clue	Where	How	Type
5	Each of the three does exactly what the panel says and nothing else	Anywhere	Automatic by the second encounter	Essential
6	The fourth name has no page — one line, two dates, nothing else	Wall panel	Automatic to anyone who goes back and reads it properly	Essential
7	Josh Pardoe's body is behind the false wall in the east corridor	East corridor	Automatic if anyone searches; otherwise Beata finds him at the twenty-minute mark and screams	Essential
8	EDITH CRANE, 1941–1963 is on a memorial in Nettlefold parish church	Phone, or the local-history board in the entrance hall	[CUS: Research or Computer Use], or automatic to Braithwaite, who has been past that memorial a hundred times	Essential
9	The 1963 fire was in the east wing, and one person died in it	Local-history board, ticket office	[CUS: Knowledge] or asking any local	Optional

Fallbacks. Clue 6: Renshaw says it herself — "there's only three of us". Clue 8: Mrs Ferrand says it aloud in Act Three if nobody has got there.

The woman on the stairs

At about 1:10, wherever they are, they see her: a young woman in a housemaid's uniform of the wrong period for the attraction, standing halfway up the main stairs, doing nothing at all.

• She is not cold. She is not fast. She does not have a page.
• She will not speak until she is asked her name. Then she says it, and she waits.
• Anyone who tries to hurt her will find they cannot make themselves do it. No roll resolves this. Say it plainly and move on.

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Act Three — The Fourth Name (~25 minutes)

Goal: one decision, priced on both sides. No new information.

Mrs Ivy Ferrand

A woman who came in on a nine o'clock ticket, alone, and has not been surprised by anything since.

• Physical: fifties, a raincoat, a small hard case she has not opened.
• She has been in the building for two hours. She is not here to rescue anybody. She is here to take a statement and decide what the department does on Monday.
• What she knows and will say: what the three are and why. That they will stop.
• What she will not say: who she works for. "I'm not able to tell you that tonight." Not "I don't know" — she is careful about the difference.
• Key line: "Three of them were made up in an afternoon. One of them was a girl of twenty-two who worked here. Which of those do you think is angry?"

The situation

Everyone who is getting out is out. Vic Tunnicliffe wants his last night finished and his set struck. The panel is screwed to the wall of the entrance hall, four names, and Edith Crane is standing on the stairs where anyone can see her.

Taking the name down ends it. Ferrand says so. She also says the department will do it on Monday whatever happens tonight, and that Monday is two days away, and that there are two more performances between now and then, and that the doors open at seven.

The choices

Choice	Cost
Take the panel down tonight	The run ends. Blackwick's licence and bond go with it, Tunnicliffe is finished, forty people including three PCs lose the last of the money, and the town's one profitable weekend of the year is cancelled. The three stop within the hour. Edith goes.
Leave it until Monday	Two more performances, twelve people every ten minutes, with the three still running and Josh Pardoe still dead. Ferrand will not stop them; she will write it down.
Change the name (the table will invent this)	Unscrew the letters, make the fourth name a fiction like the other three. It works. It also does to Edith exactly what was done to her in September, on purpose this time, by people who knew. Ferrand allows it and writes down who suggested it.
Ask her what she wants	Nobody has. She wants her name off a poster and somebody to write down that she was here. That is all, and it takes four minutes, and it is the best ending.

If Tunnicliffe fights for it

He will. He is not a villain — he is a man with a bank loan, forty staff and one dead employee, and he is holding a screwdriver he has not put down since ten o'clock. He does not threaten anybody. He asks them not to. [CUS: Persuade, Insight or Status — he can be talked round, and the roll is a real one]

If someone gets violent

Nothing in the last twenty minutes needs hitting. If they hit Tunnicliffe, Pollard is paid security and off-duty police and this becomes his scene, and Ferrand watches to see what he does. She is not judging. She is recruiting.

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Close — Last Admission (~10 minutes)

Whatever they chose, the ending is the same shape: blue lights in the car park, a statement each, and a woman in a raincoat going round the six of them one at a time with a card in her hand.

Read aloud

The marquee is coming down at four in the morning because nobody can face leaving it up. Somebody has put a tea urn on the tailgate of a van. The board by the door still says LAST ADMISSION 22:00 and somebody has turned it round to face the wall.

The woman in the raincoat has spoken to each of you separately and said nearly the same thing to all of you, which is that you wrote down or said out loud one true thing tonight that nobody wanted to hear, and that this is rarer than you would think.

There is a card in your coat pocket with a telephone number on it and no name.

What she says to each

One line each, spoken privately, in front of the table. Keep it to one line.

PC	Her line
Kate Renshaw	"You knew it was wrong because you knew the running order. Nobody else in that building was listening that closely to a script they were sick of."
Danny Sharrock	"You got thirty people out through a door that is not on the fire plan. Somebody has to know where the doors are."
Colin Ferriby	"Two missed comms checks and you went to look. Everybody else assumed he'd gone for a cigarette."
Gareth Pollard	"You wrote the times down. On the back of a ticket, in the dark, while it was happening."
Neil Braithwaite	"You said cold, and then you said you didn't know why, and you did not fill the gap in with something that sounded better."
Dominic Ashcroft	"You were frightened from the car park onwards and you went in anyway and you kept saying so. Do you know how useful that is?"

The one true thing

If there is time — and there usually is, because this ends early — she says it:

"Reality keeps a record of what belongs where. It is a very good record. It can be made to get it wrong by anything patient enough — or by twelve thousand people agreeing to be lied to, for six weeks, for eighteen pounds each. That is all a haunting is. Somebody wrote it down too many times."

Then the word Coherence, once, and then the card.

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NPC Roster (GM quick sheet)

NPC	Essence	Wants	Key line
Beata Nowak	Floor manager holding the whole night together on a radio	Josh found, the house cleared, and to be sick afterwards	"Has anybody seen Pardoe?"
Vic Tunnicliffe	Operator with a bank loan and a dead employee	Two more performances	"Monday. Just give me Monday."
Josh Pardoe	The gardener. Twenty-four. Dead since 21:10	—	—
Sister Enderby	An invention that counts	the count to be right	"…five."
Sammy	An invention that hides	somebody to hide with	(laughing, in the wall)
Old Marrow	An invention that will not come indoors	you, off his grass	(nothing; he walks)
Edith Crane	A real housemaid, 22, dead here in 1963	her name off a poster	"Edith Crane."
Mrs Ivy Ferrand	Recruiting officer on a nine o'clock ticket	to see what you do	"Which of those do you think is angry?"

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Artwork

Style line: flat editorial vector, deep navy and pale yellow with warm off-white, 1970s British public-information poster, --style raw --ar 3:2 --v 6.

ID	Description
LA-ART-01	Culland Hall at night with the marquee and the queue
LA-ART-02	Cut. Two generations both produced three frames instead of four, and a picture that contradicts the count is worse than none. The panel is a handout — show it, do not describe it.
LA-ART-03	The east corridor: fog, hospital beds, red light
LA-ART-04	The nursery: torn panelling and a hole at ankle height
LA-ART-05	The glasshouse: a figure with shears among dead vines
LA-ART-06	The green room: mirrors, costumes, a clipboard on the door — used on the Act One page, where the call sheet is
LA-ART-07	Edith Crane on the stairs
LA-ART-08	The car park afterwards: a van, a tea urn, blue lights
LA-MAP-01	Culland Hall floor plan — drawn, not generated (art/maps/culland-hall.svg), and shipped as a playable Scene in the adventure: 2800×2000 at 100px to the square, 5ft grid, no walls (add them if you want line-of-sight).

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GM Notes

• Act One is a comedy. Play the attraction as cheap and likeable and let the players take the mickey out of it. The scenario only works if they were having a nice time.
• The three are not clever. Never have them plan, hide their nature, or exploit anything. They have a page each. Anything not on the page, they do not do.
• Say the page out loud. It is a poster in the entrance hall. Withholding it makes the scenario a puzzle; giving it away makes it a game about scripts, which is the good one.
• Let them break the script. Putting a person back in the room, saying Sammy's name, or simply going indoors are all complete answers, and a table that finds one should get it for free and feel clever.
• Edith is not a monster. She never attacks, never speaks first, and cannot be hurt. She is the only thing in the building that is owed something.
• Cut first: the Long Gallery, then the glasshouse fight if the clock has gone — Marrow can simply be standing between them and the cars, and going round him is a conversation.
• If they solve it in ninety minutes, run the close long: let each of them have their private line as a proper scene.

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Which prologue to run

LAST ADMISSION is the two-hour opener: one house, one decision, a fight available. OPEN DAY is the longer, quieter one — 2h15, no combat, a fixed timetable — and it is built for the ten-agent roster rather than these six. Run either. They are alternative first nights and nothing in the campaign depends on which.

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Playtest note — one run, six characters, 12 August

Played through in Foundry with the six on their civilian sheets. Five things came out of it, all now fixed:

1. Pollard and Agyeman were armed. The police trade kit contains a revolver and a stab vest — right for a serving officer, wrong for a British civilian, and it ended the only fight in one round. The civilian build now strips firearms and body armour from trade kit, and the build throws if one gets through. Finch keeps her knife.
2. Old Marrow's shears were a utility knife. The page said 1d8+1; the actor in the pack carried 1d4+2. He now carries a billhook — a real garden tool in the catalogue — and the page says 1d8+2, which is what a billhook does.
3. He was too soft. At the original numbers he died in 2.4 rounds and in 6 runs of 20 he was dead before he swung. At HP 20, armour 2 he lasts about four and a half rounds, somebody is hurt in 28 runs of 30, and somebody goes down in 9.
4. Two stat lines disagreed with the sheets (Marrow 16 vs 15, Enderby 13 vs 12). Both corrected, and check-behaviour now parses this document's fight line and compares it to the actor the build generates.
5. Two rolls had no failure written. The body (now marked no roll) and Sammy's ankle pull (now has a fumble result).

The run itself: Act One's optional Spot clues both missed and cost nothing, because the essentials are automatic. Ashcroft found Edith Crane on Research. Braithwaite failed the body twice, which no longer matters. Renshaw broke Sister Enderby by walking the sixth person back into the room without a die being rolled. Braithwaite fumbled the ankle pull on a 100 and Sharrock hauled him out. Marrow took four rounds and put Pollard on eight hit points. Renshaw talked Tunnicliffe down on a Persuade success. Panel down at 23:40.