RingBRP/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md

Crossing case — The Custodians: CLEAN GROUND

In 1962 the department filed a spare valley, in case it was needed. It was needed. Forty-one people have been walking north across it ever since, looking for clean water and clean soil, and there is no north. Two weeks ago a contractor felled the tree the whole arrangement was pegged to.

Status: v0.1 — rough outline only. Beats and truth are fixed; scenes, statlines, handouts, pregens and playtest are not written. Do not attempt to run this yet.

Source: freely adapted from A Hollow Tree (Cathal Fitzpatrick, 2023, 23 min) — post-nuclear survivors walking north for clean ground, and a fast thing that wears people. Nothing of the film's plot or dialogue is used; the borrowed parts are the premise (a walk north that never arrives) and the predator's method (imitation).

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GM ESSENTIALS

• System: d100 roll-under. Special under a fifth, critical under a twentieth. 96–99 never succeed; 00 always fumbles.
• Panic is live — 0–5, up. Triggers marked per act. Act Four is where it bites.
• Coherence is the case. The far side is a filed duplicate and it wants the agents written into it. Coherence loss is the clock on the whole scenario, not a side effect.
• Standing Order 9 is live, and for once it is not a costume rule: the duplicate is a 1962 valley plus sixty years of decay. Modern kit works and is exactly why the column will follow the agents anywhere.
• Borrowed Authority is the detector. A person who belongs on this side has a file. The thing wearing a face does not. Neither do any of the forty-one. That is the scenario — the test cannot tell monster from refugee, only filed from unfiled.
• Runs with 4–6 agents from the duty roster. Not "(before)" sheets.
• The mission as briefed is to cancel a 1962 contingency. Cancelling it strands forty-one living people. Nobody at the Bureau will say that out loud.
• Content warnings: nuclear war and its aftermath; radiation sickness; starvation and a refugee column including children; body horror (a person worn); sustained paranoia and player-on-player suspicion; a decision that abandons named people; a dog; dark confined spaces; a felled tree as a scene of violence.

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Overview

• Setting: the Bureau, present day — then Bewcastle Waste, the forestry border country north of Hadrian's Wall, and its 1962 duplicate.
• Tone: procedural, then cold, then unbearable. A filing contingency with forty-one people inside it.
• Runtime: 4h00 including a 10 minute break.
• The crossing: the stump of a boundary oak on the Sike Head march. Open since the felling, widest at dusk, and it will not close on its own.

Design intent

1. The department is the author of the monster. No outside intrusion, no folklore, nothing came looking for us. Agents are cleaning up a contingency their own service filed and never cancelled, because the agency never abolishes anything.
2. The horror is a category error, not a creature feature. The understudy is frightening because the agents' own instruments classify it identically to a child who was born over there. If the table leaves thinking "we shot the skinwalker", it has been run wrong.
3. The column is not a threat and must never become one. Forty-one people walking north in a loop. They are polite, they are starving, and they will share. Any table that opens fire on them should feel the floor go out.
4. The swap lands on an NPC first, by design. The party will spend Act Four suspecting each other anyway; the scenario does not need to take a player's game away from them to get there. If a PC is taken, that player gets handed the understudy — a promotion, not a punishment.
5. The ending is a decision priced on both sides, with no roll. Cancel the contingency and the duplicate collapses with everyone in it. Leave it filed and the thing at the stump gets a second attempt, and a third, for as long as the file exists. There is no third door and the GM must not invent one.

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Session Timing

	Act	Clock	What it is for
0:00	One — Registry and the Sike Head	0:45	Briefing, the felled tree, the first body
0:45	Two — Over	1:05	The crossing, the burnt valley, the column
1:50	break	0:10
2:00	Three — There is no north	0:50	The loop, the 1962 file, what the walkers are
2:50	Four — One of us	0:45	The swap, and the test that does not work
3:35	Close — Cancellation	0:25	The decision, in front of somebody who will be cancelled

Hard rule: at 2:50 on the clock, somebody at the table is not who they were.

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Plot Summary (GM truth)

October 1962. With the Cuban crisis running, a standing committee authorises RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) — a deliberate misfiling that teaches the record there are two Bewcastle Wastes. Eleven miles of empty border ground, duplicated, so that if the exchange came there would be somewhere unrecorded to put people. The arrangement is pegged to a survey feature, as boundaries were before maps: the hollow oak at Sike Head. The committee rises. Nobody cancels the entry, because cancelling it would mean admitting in writing that it was made.

The duplicate took the war the real valley did not. Not because anyone sent it there — because a spare place filed as where the survivors go is a place the record then has to supply survivors for. Ninety-odd people arrived over four days in 1962 and have been there since.

There is no north over there. The entry duplicated eleven miles. Walk to the northern edge and the ground hands you back to the southern one, and the column has never once noticed, because the record corrects them as they cross it. They have made the same walk something over three thousand times. Forty-one are left.

What the walking does to people. Cross the seam often enough and you come back thinner each time — hollow men, six of them now, still walking with the column and no longer really in it. Past that is the understudy: what is left when the record has been correcting a person so long that it is holding the whole person, and the person has stopped. An understudy can only cross to our side inside somebody the record already carries. It has never had one. It has been practising on the column for decades, which is like a violinist practising on a photograph of a violin.

Two weeks ago a Forestry England clearance contractor felled the Sike Head oak. The peg is gone; the entry is still filed; the seam is standing open on the march at dusk. The first thing through was a hollow man, who walked four miles and died in a sheep pen. The second was the understudy, wearing the contractor. It did not hold — the contractor was casual labour, paid in cash, unfiled, and the copy came apart in a week. It is now at the stump, waiting for somebody properly recorded to come and stand in front of it. The Bureau is sending four.

Timeline

Oct 1962	RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) authorised and pegged to the Sike Head oak
Oct–Nov 1962	~90 people arrive on the far side; the walk north begins
1963–2026	The column loops. Numbers fall to 41. Six become hollow men
~1990s	The understudy begins rehearsing in earnest
26 Aug	Contractor Dean Corrigan fells the oak; the peg is gone
29 Aug	A hollow man comes through, walks four miles, dies in a sheep pen
31 Aug	The understudy comes through wearing Corrigan
6 Sep	"Corrigan" comes apart in front of his foreman. Local police attend. Flag
9 Sep	Farmer's dog killed at the stump. Registry raises the case
Today	The agents arrive at 15:40. Dusk is 19:12

Revelations (6, and that is all)

1. The tree was a survey peg, not a tree, and felling it opened something.
2. There is a second Bewcastle Waste and the department made it.
3. The people over there are alive, are real, and are walking in a circle.
4. The circle is doing something to them — the hollow men are the middle of a process.
5. The thing at the stump is the end of that process, and it needs a filed person.
6. The only way to close it is to cancel the entry, and the entry is the ground the forty-one are standing on.

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The Countdown — rehearsal (0–6)

Advance one step per act, plus one whenever the agents spend Coherence on the far side.

0	It watches from the treeline. Nothing happens that anybody can point at
1	Small mimicry — a voice from the wrong direction, a name only the Bureau uses
2	It has a posture and a limp right. Someone sees "a colleague" a field away
3	It takes an NPC. The NPC's file is still good, so the copy holds
4	The copy is fluent. It is inside the cordon and helping
5	It reaches for an agent — opposed POW×5, as the hollow man's swap but permanent
6	It leaves for the south road wearing a warrant card, and this is a campaign

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Handouts

ID	Description	When
CG-H01	Coroner's preliminary note — the body in the sheep pen	Act One, once Braithwaite has looked
CG-H02	RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) — the 1962 authorisation	Act Three, in the depot
CG-H03a	Ivy's almanac — one page, this September	Act Two, when she decides to trust them
CG-H03b	Ivy's almanac — one page, eleven years earlier	Act Three, and not before

H03a and H03b are the same trick as a magician's two cards, and they only work held together. Give H03a in Act Two and say nothing about it. Give H03b in Act Three, flat on the table, beside the first. The distances are identical. Nobody has to explain the loop to anybody — the table will do it, out loud, and that is the scene.

Print guidance: H01 on white A4, official and dull. H02 on cream, typewriter face, and if you can run it through a photocopier twice, do. H03a and H03b must be the same hand on the same ruled paper — that is the whole point, so print them identically and let the dates be the only difference a reader can find.

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CG-H01 — Coroner's preliminary note

Act One. Hand it over when Braithwaite examines the body, or when anyone asks the farmer what the police said. The GM reads it aloud as it is given, as always.

HM CORONER — NORTH NORTHUMBERLAND                    PRELIMINARY NOTE
Ref: NN/1174/26                                      Not for release

DECEASED:   Unidentified male
FOUND:      29 August, stone sheep pen, Sike Head march
BY:         Mrs M. Swinburne, of Sike Head

Estimated age at death, from dentition and general condition: forty to
forty-five years.

Bone density, joint surfaces and vascular condition are those of a man in
his ninetieth year. I have written that sentence three times and I am
content with it.

No dental record answers to this mouth. No fingerprint record answers to
these hands. Enquiries with the National Insurance index return nothing.
He is not a missing person anywhere I can reach.

Dressed in wool and cotton of good but old manufacture, mended repeatedly
and competently by hand. The boots have been resoled, by my count, nine
times, and not by a tradesman.

Lungs, turn-ups and hair carry a fine grey particulate which I am not
equipped to identify and have sent onward.

Cause of death: exhaustion, on a body that had no reserve left to draw on.
There is no injury. Nobody did this to him.

I would be glad to be told what this was, in due course, if anyone is
ever able to tell me.

                                        J. A. Corbridge
                                        Assistant Pathologist

• The three clues, in the order a table finds them: he is unfiled, he is old in the wrong way, and somebody has resoled his boots nine times by hand.
• Nine resolings is the scenario's whole premise in one detail. Do not point at it.
• Corbridge is not a character and should not become one. The last paragraph exists so the players understand that an ordinary professional has been left holding this.
• Failure case: if nobody asks for the note, Swinburne has a photocopy of it in a drawer because she was not satisfied with what she was told, and she will produce it.

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CG-H02 — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN)

Act Three, in the buried depot. This is the only place the truth is written down. Give the physical paper; do not summarise it.

COMMITTEE ON CONTINGENT ARRANGEMENTS                    SECRET
Minute of the meeting of 26 October 1962                Copy 3 of 4

RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) — AUTHORISED

1.  The Committee approved the entry of a reserve holding of ground in
    the northern march, of eleven miles and a fraction, to be recorded
    twice in order that one record may be drawn upon without disturbance
    to the other.

2.  The purpose of the reserve is to hold persons displaced by a general
    exchange, in a place which is not on any list that an adversary may
    obtain. Members were reminded that an unrecorded place cannot be
    targeted and cannot be requisitioned.

3.  The entry is pegged to the standing boundary oak at Sike Head, being
    the feature to which the march was recorded before the survey of
    1861 and therefore the older of the two authorities. The Committee
    was satisfied that the tree is in good health.

4.  The Registrar drew the Committee's attention to the consequence of
    paragraph 2. A place recorded as the place to which the displaced go
    is a place the record must afterwards furnish with displaced persons.
    The Committee noted this and did not regard it as an obstacle.

5.  The entry is to be reviewed at the rising of the emergency, and
    cancelled if it is found not to have been drawn upon.

                                    Signed  (illegible)
                                            Chairman

                                    Minuted by  A.E.W.
                                                Clerk (Junior)

• Paragraph 4 is the scenario. A table that reads it properly understands, without being told, that nobody sent those people north — the record supplied them, because somebody wrote down that it should.
• Paragraph 5 is the crime. The emergency rose. The review was never held, because holding it would have meant putting paragraph 4 in writing a second time.
• Paragraph 3's last sentence is the one that gets the bitter laugh. Let it.
• A.E.W. is Bhattacharya's predecessor, the man whose brass slide rule is in his pocket. If Bhattacharya is at the table, put the sheet in his hand and let him find the initials himself. Say nothing. If he is not at the table, the initials mean nothing and that is fine.
• Copy 3 of 4 is deliberate. Three other copies exist and the players will ask where. The honest answer is that the department does not know, and that is a campaign.

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CG-H03a and CG-H03b — Ivy's almanac

H03a in Act Two, when she decides to trust them. H03b in Act Three, laid flat beside it. Same hand, same ruled paper, eleven years apart.

H03a — the page she is writing now

   DAY      WEATHER        WALKED     TO CLEAN GROUND     NOTES
   ----     -----------    ------     ---------------     ----------------
   Mon      low cloud      7 mi       41 mi               Ground softer.
   Tue      dry, cold      8 mi       41 mi               Passed the lorry.
   Wed      rain           5 mi       41 mi               Rested at noon.
   Thu      dry            8 mi       41 mi               Thursday again.
   Fri      low cloud      7 mi       41 mi               Alec is tired.
   Sat      rain           6 mi       41 mi               Passed the lorry.
   Sun      dry, bright    9 mi       41 mi               Good day. Sang.

   Counted this morning: forty-one.

H03b — the page from eleven years before

   DAY      WEATHER        WALKED     TO CLEAN GROUND     NOTES
   ----     -----------    ------     ---------------     ----------------
   Mon      dry            8 mi       41 mi               Passed the lorry.
   Tue      rain           6 mi       41 mi               Ada's chest again.
   Wed      low cloud      7 mi       41 mi               Ground softer.
   Thu      dry, cold      8 mi       41 mi               Thursday again.
   Fri      dry            7 mi       41 mi               Passed the lorry.
   Sat      low cloud      6 mi       41 mi               Rested at noon.
   Sun      rain           5 mi       41 mi               Nobody sang.

   Counted this morning: fifty-three.

• The column that never moves is the whole reveal, and no roll is required to see it. It is forty-one miles to clean ground on every line of both pages.
• "Thursday again" appears on both pages, on the Thursday. She has written it for decades without ever once asking herself why she keeps writing it.
• The two counts are the cost: fifty-three then, forty-one now. Twelve people, and Ivy wrote every one of them down somewhere in between.
• "Passed the lorry" is Pollard's evidence made portable. It is the same wrecked lorry from Act Three's clue trail, twice a week, for sixty-four years.
• Do not let Ivy explain any of this. She cannot. She is the one person at the table for whom these pages are simply a record of an ordinary journey.
• Failure case: if H03a never gets handed over, Ivy offers the almanac at the Close instead, open at the current page, as the thing she wants somebody to keep. That is a worse reveal and a better scene, and the GM may prefer it.

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Act One — Registry and the Sike Head (~45 min)

Beats

• Registry briefing. The case comes up as a livestock-and-labour nuisance: a dog killed, a contractor who "had some kind of episode", a body in a sheep pen with no name. [CUS: Research — the sheep-pen body has no dental record, no NI number, nothing]
• Stores. Standing Order 9 applies; period-clean kit, lamps, a Geiger they will be told is precautionary and is not. [CUS: Knowledge — why a Geiger for Cumbria]
• The farm at Sike Head. The farmer, the dog, the stump. [CUS: Track — three sets away from the stump, one of them not walking upright] [CUS: Science (Botany) — the oak was ring-counted in 1962 and the notch is a survey mark]
• The first body, still in the pen. Thin in a way that is not starvation. [CUS: Medicine — bone density of a man of forty; everything else of a man of ninety]
• The seam at dusk. It does not look like anything. It smells like a fire that has been out for a long time.

Clue trail (first pass) — the three that must land: the stump is a peg; the felling date matches the flag; the body is unfiled.

Failure case: if they never examine the stump, the farmer's dog turns up a boot that belongs to nobody in Britain, and dusk comes anyway.

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Act Two — Over (~65 min)

Beats

• The crossing — read aloud or paraphrase:

  The tree line is where it was and the wall is where it was, and every sheep is gone. Everything is grey with something that is not frost, and it lifts into the air where your boots go through it. It tastes of a fire that went out a long time ago and has not been rained on since. Nothing is calling — not a bird, not a thing in the grass.

  • Do not say "nuclear", "1962", or "ash". The Geiger says the first, Bhattacharya says the second, and ash is a word a player should be the one to use.
  • If anyone asks what the grey is, the honest answer is that it is on their hands now.
  • Nobody rolls anything here. Let the silence sit until a player breaks it.

• Coherence starts draining — one per hour, and the record offers each agent a small, correct-feeling detail about why they belong here. [CUS: Insight — that memory is new]

• First contact: the column — read aloud or paraphrase:

  They come over the shoulder of the hill in a line, forty-odd of them, walking at the pace of the slowest without anybody having to be told. The old are at the front, the children are in the middle, and six at the very back are not quite keeping up. The line stops when it sees you, and one woman walks forward with her hands held where you can see them.

  • The six at the back are the hollow men. Do not name them and do not linger on them. They are one item in a list, and the list moves on.
  • Her hands are visible because this column has met armed men before. Never explain that; let it be noticed or not.
  • Say nothing further until a player speaks. They offer water they cannot spare. [CUS: Persuade — they will believe almost anything except that it is 2026]

• Ivy Hetherington (b. 1948, aged 14 when she arrived) leads by consent. She has walked the valley since before the agents' parents were born and has an almanac of a journey she has never completed.

• The six hollow men walk at the back. The column is kind to them and does not talk about them. [CUS: Spot — the same six at the back, and the same six yesterday]

• Somewhere out on the flank, something is keeping pace at a distance and on all fours.

Failure case: if the party refuses contact, the column camps within sight and one of the children is sent over with bread. That works on almost everybody.

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Act Three — There is no north (~50 min)

Beats

• The evidence of the loop, made findable. [CUS: Navigate — the pole star has not moved in four hours of walking] [CUS: Spot — their own boot prints, going the other way] [CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — the same wrecked lorry, three times, with their chalk on it]
• The seam at the northern edge. Walk it and you come out at the southern edge with an hour missing and a memory of continuing. The column has never felt it.
• The 1962 depot — a buried reserve store with the entry's paperwork in it, which is the only place the truth is written down. [CUS: Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN), authorised, pegged, never cancelled] [CUS: Anomaly Lore — what a peg is and what losing one does]
• Telling Ivy. Or not telling her. This is the act's real scene and it has no roll.
• A hollow man tries the swap — opposed POW×5, 2 Coherence. Survivable, and it is the table's first sight of the mechanism the understudy will use properly.

Failure case: if they never find the depot, Ivy hands them a 1962 ration tin with a requisition number on it and that number is enough to work the rest out from the Bureau.

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Act Four — One of us (~45 min)

Beats

• The understudy takes somebody. Default: an NPC — the Bureau liaison holding the cordon on the real side, whose file is excellent. It comes back through with them.
• The tests the agents will reach for, and what each one actually proves:
  • [CUS: Insight — it is word-perfect, because it has had thirty years]
  • [CUS: Psychology — it is not pretending to be human; it thinks it is the file]
  • Borrowed Authority — pull the record. The copy checks out; the column does not. The instrument is working correctly and is useless.
  • [CUS: Xenology (Baseline) — the only test that works, and only one sheet carries it] Not Scent. Scent's base chance is 0 and the 1% floor is all anybody has, so it is not a route, it is a joke at the table's expense. Xenology (Baseline) is the skill for what a baseline human body is and is not, and Braithwaite has it at 53.
• REHEARSED applies: it acts immediately before whoever it is copying, always.
• Panic triggers here: a voice from the wrong side of a door; two people answering to the same name; the run at the cordon on all fours.
• If a PC is taken: hand that player the understudy sheet and a private note. They keep playing. Do not sideline them and do not let it run more than twenty minutes.

Failure case: if the party kills it clean in the first ten minutes, it does not matter — the entry is still filed, and the second one is already practising. Go to Close.

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Close — Cancellation (~25 min)

The decision, taken at the stump, at dawn, with Ivy Hetherington standing on the far side of it because she has walked south for the first time in sixty-four years.

Read aloud or paraphrase:

She has walked south, which she has not done since she was fourteen, and she stops a yard short of the cut stump because that is where the ground stops being hers. Behind her the line has sat down in the heather to wait, the way it sits down every morning of its life. She does not ask who you are, or what you are holding, or what the paper says — she asks whether there is a north.

• This works in both branches. Whether Bhattacharya told them at the briefing or they found it in the depot, she arrives at the same question, and it is the one question the agents cannot answer kindly and truthfully at the same time.

• If the GM wants the line spoken rather than reported, it is "Is there a north?" and nothing after it. Then stop talking. The silence is the scenario.

• She does not argue, plead, or bargain. She has walked three thousand times and she is not going to beg at the end of it. Anything that makes her pitiable cheapens the decision, which has to be made by people who respect her.

• Cancel the entry. The duplicate stops being a place the record has to supply. The seam closes for good. The forty-one are not killed, exactly, which is the worst available answer and the department will write it as a success.

• Leave it filed. Everyone lives. The peg is gone, the seam is open at dusk, and something over there will keep rehearsing for as long as the file exists. The agents will be the ones who come back for it, repeatedly, for the rest of their careers.

• Bring them through — the thing the table will try. It costs Coherence per person at a rate no party can pay, and the record will not carry forty-one unfiled people. Let them get four across and understand what that means about the other thirty-seven.

No roll resolves this. No NPC advises. Registry signs whatever they write.

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NPC Roster (sketch)

Who	Essence
Ivy Hetherington, 78	Fourteen when she arrived; leads the column by consent; has an almanac of a journey she has never completed
Dean Corrigan (deceased)	The contractor who felled the peg, and the coat the understudy tried on first
Margaret Swinburne	Sike Head farmer; her dog died at the stump; she wants a name for it and will not be fobbed off
Sgt Aled Prichard	Bureau liaison on the cordon; excellent file; default victim of the swap
Registry clerk (unnamed)	Knows RESERVE ENTRY exists, has never been cleared to say so, and will let one sentence slip

Creatures used (all from the bestiary — nothing new to build)

• The understudy — the case. REHEARSED. One only.
• Hollow man — six with the column. THE FILE IS YOURS NOW is the Act Three teaching scene.
• The Quiet Neighbours — reskin for the column's outriders if a fight is unavoidable.
• Duplicate (of an agent) — only if a PC is taken and the table wants the long version.

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Casting — six from the duty roster

Nothing new is built. All six are existing compendium agents (packs/pregens, defined in tools/roster.mjs), so their numbers cannot drift from the register and check-creatures already validates them. The compendium is the authority for every figure below — the handful quoted here are the ones a GM needs in hand at the table, not a second definition of the sheet.

Not the "(before)" sheets. This is the job, and it wants people who have been inducted.

	Agent	Lane	The one thing they are for
1	Dominic Ashcroft pc_ashcroft	Coherence	He has been thin before and knows what it costs
2	Arun Bhattacharya pc_bhattacharya	Registry, lore	He has already read the file this case is about
3	Kate Renshaw pc_renshaw	People	She is the only one who can take Ivy's statement
4	Neil Braithwaite pc_braithwaite	Forensics	He is the only one who can tell a person from a copy
5	Gareth Pollard pc_pollard	Ground, nightwatch	He writes down the times, so he finds the missing hour
6	Ben Okonkwo pc_okonkwo	Containment	He is what stands at the cordon when it comes through

Six lanes, no two overlapping, and every one of them has an act it owns: Braithwaite Act One, Renshaw Act Two, Pollard and Bhattacharya Act Three, Braithwaite and Okonkwo Act Four, Ashcroft the Close.

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1. Dominic Ashcroft — Anchor Officer

Holds the door open while everyone else goes through it, and stays filed correctly for as long as that takes. Three years older than his birthday says, and does not discuss it.

• At the table: Transposition 63, Anomaly Lore 63, Insight 63, Listen 63, Dodge 63.
• He carries no weapon. That is on the sheet on purpose and the GM must not fix it. An anchor holding a door has both hands full.
• Key relationship: the department holds the other half of his cut school tie. He is the only agent who already understands, in his body, what it means to peg an arrangement to an object — which is exactly what was done to the Sike Head oak.
• PRIVATE (do not share). You have come back thin before. Over there the record will offer you the easiest lie you have ever been told: that you have always been the anchor for this valley, that the three missing years were spent here, and that it is a relief. It will feel correct. Do you tell the team how little of you is left before the Close, or do you let them decide the Close without knowing?
• Playing Ashcroft: speak last, and briefly. Volunteer for the thing nobody else wants to hold. Never say you are frightened; say what time it is.

2. Arun Bhattacharya — Registry Officer, 56

Thirty years in the registry. Has read files that were withdrawn before he finished them and remembers what was in them anyway.

• At the table: Research 63, Occult 63, Knowledge 63, Anomaly Lore 63, Language (Own) 63.
• Key relationship: a brass slide rule that belonged to his predecessor — who was a junior clerk in October 1962.
• PRIVATE (do not share). You have seen RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) before. One afternoon in the nineties a file crossed your desk and was recalled before you reached the end of it, and you have never been cleared to say a word about it. You know there is a second Bewcastle Waste. You do not know there are people in it. Do you tell them at the briefing, or do you let them find it over there?
• This box answers the scenario's own open question and hands it to a player. Told at the briefing, CLEAN GROUND is a tragedy and the table spends four hours knowing. Held back, it is a mystery and the reveal lands in Act Three. Either is correct. It is not the GM's call.
• Playing Bhattacharya: ask for the reference number. Be unhurried in a way that irritates people who are in danger. When you finally say the thing, say it once.

3. Kate Renshaw — Interview Officer

Sits with the witness afterwards, for as long as it takes, and is very hard to lie to twice.

• At the table: Insight 63, Persuade 63, Listen 63, Anthropology 63, Psychology 40.
• Key relationship: Ivy Hetherington. Renshaw's whole craft is finishing a statement, and Ivy is a statement sixty-four years long that nobody has ever taken.
• PRIVATE (do not share). You carry a hair clip belonging to a woman whose statement you never finished. You have not forgiven yourself for it and you do not intend to repeat it. But a statement taken is a statement that can be filed — and in this case filing is what makes the forty-one cancellable. Do you finish Ivy's, knowing that?
• The cruelty is deliberate: she is the table's best reader of people, and Act Four exists to prove that reading people is the wrong test. Insight 63 will tell her the copy is sincere, because it is.
• Playing Renshaw: ask the smaller question. Let silences run past comfortable. Never take a note in front of the person you are talking to.

4. Neil Braithwaite — Pathology Officer, 51

Establishes what a thing was, which is usually the question the case turns on.

• At the table: Medicine 53, Science (Biology) 53, Xenology (Baseline) 53, Insight 53, Research 53. Issued an envsuit, which is the only reason anyone should be relaxed about the Geiger.
• He owns two clues outright: the sheep-pen body in Act One, and the understudy in Act Four. Xenology (Baseline) is the only working test in the scenario and only his sheet carries it above the floor. If Braithwaite is not at the table, see scaling.
• Key relationship: his father's fountain pen, which signed death certificates.
• PRIVATE (do not share). You have signed a great many of these and you have never once signed one you could not evidence. At the stump you will be asked to endorse forty-one at a stroke, on the grounds that they were never properly alive on this side of the record. Will you put your father's pen to that?
• Playing Braithwaite: talk to the body, not the room. Refuse to speculate, then speculate precisely. Say "that is not what I said" whenever anyone rounds you up.

5. Gareth Pollard — Night Warden, 47

Sits with a site all night so that nobody else has to, and writes down the times.

• At the table: Listen 53, Spot 53, Stealth 53, Dodge 53, Brawl 53. Cudgel, riot shield, stab vest — the only agent equipped to be hit rather than to shoot.
• He is how the loop is found. Act Three's evidence is not a clever roll, it is a man with a notebook noticing that four hours of walking produced three hours of sky. Give him the time every time he asks for it, accurately, and let him catch it himself.
• PRIVATE (do not share). Your wind-up alarm clock has not kept time since 2003 and you have carried it anyway for twenty-three years, which everyone thinks is sentimental. Over there it is the only instrument in the party that is not being quietly corrected, because it was already wrong before you crossed. When it disagrees with your watch, which of the two do you believe in front of the others?
• Playing Pollard: state times out loud, unprompted. Volunteer for the watch. Be the last one to agree that everything is fine.

6. Ben Okonkwo — Containment, 33

Goes through the door and holds the corridor while everyone else does the clever part.

• At the table: Firearm (Rifle) 53, Brawl 53, Melee Weapon (Prybar) 53, Athletics 53, Dodge 53. Breach suit and riot shield. He is in the frozen lethality party, so anything the GM simulates with tools/simulate.mjs is measured with him in it.
• Key relationship: his sister's voice note, saved and never deleted.
• PRIVATE (do not share). The thing at the treeline has spent thirty years learning to be people, and it learns by listening. Sooner or later it will use a voice you know. It is not her, you will know it is not her, and you will still have to decide what to do with your hands.
• Playing Okonkwo: go first, without being asked. Ask what the plan is once, then do it. Never complain about being the one who is hit.

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Roster-level notes

Party seams — recommended 2+2 splits (let the table choose; this is the fallback):

Act	Split
One	Braithwaite + Pollard at the pen and the stump · Renshaw + Bhattacharya with the farmer
Two	Renshaw + Ashcroft to the column · Okonkwo + Pollard on the flank, where the thing is
Three	Bhattacharya + Braithwaite at the depot · Pollard + Ashcroft walking the north seam
Four	Do not split. The whole point is that they are all in one room and one of them is wrong
Close	All six, at the stump, with Ivy on the far side

Player-count scaling.

• Six: as written.
• Five: drop Pollard. His loop evidence moves to Ashcroft, who has Listen 63 and a professional reason to notice the record correcting him. The cordon loses its shield.
• Four: drop Okonkwo as well, and Act Four becomes a pursuit rather than a stand — which the scenario already permits, since killing the understudy cleanly changes nothing. If the table wants a shooter, substitute Joseph Agyeman pc_agyeman (Firearm (Pistol) 58, Spot 58, Insight 58, Tradecraft 58) for Okonkwo rather than adding a seventh lane.
• Never drop Braithwaite. Xenology (Baseline) is the only test that works. If a player insists on a sheet that hasn't got it, hand the lane to Dr Chidi Nkemdirim pc_nkemdirim and accept that Act Four gets harder, or give the understudy a visible physical tell and lose the ambiguity.
• A walk-up seventh plays Rey Sandoval pc_sandoval — Track 35 is the highest on the roster and the thing runs on all fours, so there is a real lane waiting for them.

Portraits already exist in art/portraits for all six. No new art needed.

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What this outline does not yet have

1. Pregens. Done — see Casting, above. Six from the duty roster, no new sheets.
2. The read-aloud text. Done — three blocks, in place in Act Two and the Close.
3. Handouts. Done — four sheets, CG-H01 to CG-H03b. Still need a print-ready HTML pack (A4, 11pt minimum) before a convention; the text is final.
4. A written exposure model for Act Four, so the GM knows what a fight at the cordon actually costs before the table starts one.
5. Desk playtest, twice, before any of this is called runnable.

Open questions for Tim

• Is this a convention 4-hour or a campaign opener? The cancellation ending is a one-shot ending; the "leave it filed" branch is a campaign spine.
• Which convention slot, if any — Contingency 2027 has room.
• Does the party get told about RESERVE ENTRY at Registry? Resolved by casting — it is Bhattacharya's private box, so a player decides it, not the GM. Say if you would rather take that back and fix it yourself.
• How hard do you want the PC-replacement? Default here is NPC-first.
• Scent is unusable (base 0, 1% floor). I moved Act Four's working test to Xenology (Baseline), which puts Braithwaite on the critical path. Worth deciding whether you want the whole scenario's one reliable test sitting on a single sheet.