A stand-in GM opening this had no single place to start: the state of the document
lived across three playtest logs, twenty commit messages, a status paragraph and a
checklist at the foot. Worse, the two written accounts had drifted apart — the
status paragraph still said the scenario "wants a stress re-run of Act Four, a
player-chair pass", both of which were done and committed, and the foot checklist
still said v0.8 in a v0.9 document with a sentence broken in half.
STATUS now sits at the top and answers the questions a GM actually arrives with:
what version, can I run it (yes, from this file alone), is it convention-ready (no —
never played by human beings, no print pack), what playtesting exists and at which
seeds, how long it runs and where the cuts are, how many players.
Then the three things that are not obvious, as pointers rather than restatements,
because GM ESSENTIALS is where rules live: opposed rolls use a scenario-local ruling
since rules.mjs has none; Ashcroft cannot fight and his player must be told before
the game; and the lethal encounter is the column in Act Two, not the monster in Act
Four, which cannot hurt anybody.
The foot checklist is deleted rather than corrected. Every item on it was either
struck through or now in STATUS, its history is in the logs and the commits, and
keeping a second account of what is outstanding is what let the first one drift.
Open Questions stays as the single home for decisions and STATUS says so in a line
instead of holding a copy — the same rule this repository applies to rule formulas,
applied to prose about state.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
