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 — read this before anything else

Version	v0.14, 13 September 2026
Can it be run?	Yes, from this document alone. A GM with this file and the compendium can run it end to end.
Is it convention-ready?	Nearly. The print pack is built (CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html, held by check-handouts). What is missing is a run with human beings, and a slot.
Playtesting	Four desk passes, no human runs. _1.md GM chair (seed 4271) · _2.md Act Four stress (9314) · _3.md player chair, contrarian (5580) · _4.md the clock, against v0.13's recut timings (6142). Twenty-eight fixes plus one post-pass. Pass 4 is the only one that describes the current timings; 1–3 ran against a 65-minute Act Two.
What it is	A convention one-shot, decided 13 September 2026. It ends in the slot; there is no second session and the text must not promise one.
Where it runs	Contingency 2027 — Sunday 31 January 2027, afternoon (slot 9), Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton.
Runtime	3h30 of play plus a 10-minute break — 3h40 wall clock, which is the house budget. Act Two was cut from 65 minutes to 45 in v0.13 to get there. The Pacing Note carries a further 65 minutes of cuts; take them as the default.
Players	4–6 from the duty roster. The cast is declared in the Casting section and the build enforces it.

It fits the house budget, as of v0.13

3h30 of play plus a ten-minute break — 3h40 wall clock. For most of this document's life it budgeted 4h00, which is the whole slot with nothing either side, and did not say that was over. It was: the house standard is 3h30 of play against roughly 3h15 of content.

Act Two carried the entire overrun at 65 minutes and is now 45. The twenty came out of structure, not content — the crossing is capped at five minutes, THE OFFER runs inside the column scene instead of beside it, and the line's rest gives that scene a clock that ends it on the GM's schedule. Nothing was deleted.

The Pacing Note now carries 65 minutes of further cuts against a 55-minute problem, so for the first time there is about ten minutes of real slack. Desk pass 1 ran 4:25 uncut; that figure predates this restructure and a fourth desk pass has not been run against the new timings. The first human run is also the first test of this clock.

The three things that are not obvious

Read GM ESSENTIALS in full — this is only what a GM most often discovers too late.

1. An opposed roll's tie goes to whoever is being acted upon, which makes resisting far stronger than the numbers look. GM ESSENTIALS has it. Two beats depend on it.
2. Ashcroft cannot fight — no weapon, no unarmed skill, a 1% attack. That is deliberate and his player must be told before the game. See his entry in Casting.
3. The lethal encounter is the column, in Act Two — not the monster in Act Four, which cannot hurt anybody. EXPOSURE has the measured figures and the reason.

Still to do

• A run with human beings. No desk pass can settle whether Act Four's spine holds 45 minutes with no mechanical threat, or whether THE OFFER plays as a decision.
• A slot. Contingency 2027, Sunday 31 January 2027, afternoon (slot 9). Booked.

The handout pack is done: CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html, four A4 sheets, 11pt floor. H03a and H03b share one CSS class and one set of variables so they cannot be styled apart, and check-handouts fails the build if their markup ever diverges — that pair printing identically is the almanac trick and there is now no way to break it quietly.

Decisions, both now made

• Convention one-shot, 13 September 2026.
• rules.mjs has a real opposed roll (R-273), so the scenario-local ruling is deleted and GM ESSENTIALS points at the game.

Open Questions at the foot carries the full list, including the ones already settled, and is the only place decisions are recorded — this block does not keep a second copy.

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.
• Opposed rolls are a REAL RULE now (opposedContestFor, R-273), and the scenario-local ruling this document used to carry is gone. Both sides roll; the better band wins; an equal band goes to whoever is being acted upon, which in both of this scenario's beats means the agent; and if neither side succeeds the contest is unsettled, which is not the same as the defender winning. Each side takes its own difficulty, which is how Act Two's OFFER gets priced in Act Four.
  • The tie-break is not a detail — it decides these beats. At POW×5 100 against Braithwaite's 60 the hollow man succeeds on everything but a 96–00 and still takes him only 48% of the time, because both sides usually succeed and the tie goes to the person being reached for. If you remember one thing about opposed rolls here, remember that resisting is much stronger than the raw numbers look.
• 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: 3h30 of play plus a 10-minute break — 3h40 wall clock, inside a four-hour slot.
• 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

3h30 of play plus a ten-minute break — 3h40 wall clock, which is the house budget. An earlier version of this table ran 3h50 and called it 4h00; Act Two carried the whole overrun and has been cut to fit.

	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	0:45	The crossing, the burnt valley, the column
1:30	break	0:10
1:40	Three — There is no north	0:50	The loop, the 1962 file, what the walkers are
2:30	Four — One of us	0:45	The swap, and the test that does not work
3:15	Close — Cancellation	0:25	The decision, in front of somebody who will be cancelled

Hard rule: at 2:30 on the clock, somebody at the table is not who they were.

Pacing Note — the cuts, written in advance

Desk pass 1 ran 4:25 against an earlier table that budgeted 3h50 of play. The house budget is 3h30 plus a ten-minute break. That is a 55-minute problem, and it is now solved in two halves rather than left to the GM at the table.

Half one — twenty minutes are already gone from the printed timings. Act Two was 65 minutes and is now 45. Nothing was deleted: the crossing is capped at five, THE OFFER runs inside the column scene rather than beside it, and the line's rest gives that scene an in-fiction clock. You do not have to do anything to take this cut — it is the act as written. See Act Two's budget table.

Half two — these, and take them as the default, not the emergency.

Cut	Saves	Costs
Registry briefing capped at 10 minutes — when the tenth minute arrives, Registry has another appointment	~5	Nothing. Every answer is in Act One anyway
Act Three: drop the walk to the northern seam	~15	Nothing. The lorry and the almanac already prove the loop
Act Two: the column's hospitality, once rather than twice	~5	A little warmth. Take this one last, and only if the line's rest has already overrun

Running total: 65 minutes of cuts available against a 55-minute problem. On paper that is ten minutes of slack. Treat it as somewhere between zero and ten, and take the cuts early.

Desk pass 4 ran v0.13 on a hostile seed and estimated ~3:46 against 3:40; correcting six misread skill ratings in that pass moved the same seed to ~3:34. Neither figure is a runtime. They are two readings of one simulated table, ten minutes apart, and the distance between them is roughly the size of the margin being argued about — which is the honest thing to tell a GM about a desk estimate of how long people will talk.

What the passes do establish is the shape: every scene now has something written into it that ends it, the cuts are real, and the act most likely to overrun is Three, not Two.

Do not cut: telling Ivy, the almanac pair, or the Close. They are the scenario.

If you are still over at the break, the thing to shorten is Act Three's depot search, not Act Four. Act Four is already the shortest act with the most to do, and the Close is the only part of the night the table will remember in a year.

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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 the lowest POW in the room — opposed POW×5 (it is 75, not 100), permanent. Unless Ashcroft accepted THE OFFER in Act Two, in which case it takes him instead and he resists at Difficult. GM ESSENTIALS has the resolution; Act Four beat 3 has the reasoning
5 — unsettled	If neither side succeeds, the reach fails and the row is spent. This is common enough to plan for: 10% against Braithwaite, 14.5% against Ashcroft if he accepted. It does not retry. See below — it is an outcome, not a gap
6	It goes south at dusk wearing whatever face it has. Read the Close's "leave it filed" note: in a one-shot this lands tonight, not as a sequel

WHEN STEP 5 COMES TO NOTHING — and it will, about one time in seven against an Ashcroft who accepted. The rule returns unsettled, which is not the agent winning. Do not re-roll it and do not quietly hand the understudy the win. Play the failure, because it is the most frightening thing the creature does all night:

Read aloud or paraphrase: For a moment it is wearing the wrong face — not a stranger's, theirs, badly, like a coat on the wrong shoulders. Then it is a colleague again, and it apologises for the interruption.

• That is information, and it is the only time the party sees the mechanism fail. They now know what it is doing and cannot prove it to anybody, which is the scenario.
• The clock still turns. Step 5 is spent, step 6 comes, and it leaves with whatever it already has. A thing that fails to take a Custodian goes south wearing the NPC from step 3, and the party let it walk because they were watching each other.
• Do not give it a second attempt. The countdown fires once per step by design; the creature has had thirty years of rehearsal and this was the performance.

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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.
• On a FUMBLED Persuade with Swinburne — she has buried a dog and been fobbed off once already, and the above is written for a party who never asked, not for one that asked badly. She does not produce the photocopy. She produces the dog.
  • She walks them out to the stump and shows them where it died, and she does not speak on the way. Handing a rude stranger a document is a favour; showing them the thing that actually happened to her is not, and she is owed neither.
  • This is better staging than the drawer and the GM should not regret the fumble. It puts them at the stump early, on foot, in silence, with a woman who is not helping them — and the felled oak is the scene the act is walking toward anyway.
  • H01 still reaches them, later and from the coroner. It arrives in Act Two or at the break as a faxed copy Registry forwards, by which point it confirms rather than reveals — which costs the party nothing except the pleasure of having found it.
  • Desk pass 4, seed 6142: Renshaw fumbled this roll and the GM had to improvise Swinburne helpfully producing the note anyway, which worked and was flat.

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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 — hard cap 10 minutes. 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. Six players will each ask one sensible question and that is the ten minutes gone. [CUS: Research — the sheep-pen body has no dental record, no NI number, nothing] Missed: Swinburne kept a photocopy of CG-H01 because she was not satisfied with what she was told, and produces it unasked.
• 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] Missed: nothing. They carry it and find out in Act Two.
• The farm at Sike Head. The farmer, the dog, the stump.
  • The notch is automatic. Anyone who walks up to the stump and looks sees a squared notch cut deep into the heartwood — old, deliberate, and nothing to do with felling. No roll. This is the clue the act cannot afford to lose, so it is not gated.
  • [CUS: Knowledge — a squared notch in a boundary tree is a survey mark, and the march here was recorded to the tree before it was ever recorded to a map] Missed: they know the notch is deliberate without knowing what it means. Registry can tell them later, and CG-H02 says it outright in Act Three.
  • [CUS: Spot — three sets of tracks leaving the stump, and one set is not walking upright] Missed: Swinburne says it for them. She has twice seen "something going away on its hands" and has told nobody, because of how it sounds.
• Ray Teasdale, the foreman — the man who watched Corrigan come apart on 6 September, and the best eyewitness in the case. Desk pass 3 reached him from the employer's paperwork without going near the farm, so he must exist on the page. [CUS: Persuade — he has told this to the police once and been looked at strangely]
  • Essence: a ganger of thirty years who is not remotely superstitious and has stopped sleeping properly.
  • Three things he says, in this order: Corrigan was casual, cash, no cards, nobody he knew before that fortnight. He got the tree down in a morning, which should have taken two men a day. And at the end he stopped being able to do his hands — Teasdale's own phrase, which he will repeat if asked and cannot improve on.
  • Missed: he says the first two anyway, because they are simply facts about a job.
• 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] Missed: CG-H01 carries the same finding in Corbridge's own words.
• The seam at dusk. It does not look like anything. It smells like a fire that has been out for a long time. No roll.
• IF THEY WILL NOT GO THROUGH — and a careful party should at least propose it, because cordoning a hazard and calling it in is the correct professional instinct. Desk pass 3 stopped dead here, so the scenario answers it now.
  • The Bureau's answer is a reason, not a compulsion. The entry is pegged to a tree that no longer exists. A seam with no peg does not sit still: it is on the march tonight, it may be half a mile away tomorrow, and it may be somewhere nobody can cordon by the weekend. Waiting does not make this safer, it makes it unfindable — and the forty-one go with it.
  • Nobody orders them through at gunpoint. Registry says the above, once, and leaves the decision where it belongs. A party that still refuses has made a real choice with a real price, and the GM should let them feel it rather than railroading.
  • If they genuinely will not, the case closes as a cordon-and-monitor and they are stood down. That is a legitimate, bleak ending: nobody learns what was over there, and in eleven weeks a hollow man walks into a village four miles south. Do not run four more hours of it. Say what the file says a year later and end the session early.

Clue trail (first pass) — three must land, and none of them is behind a single roll any more: the notch is a peg (automatic), the felling date matches the flag (briefing gives the date, Swinburne gives the felling), the body is unfiled (Medicine, or CG-H01).

Failure case: there is no version of this act that ends without the peg, and it must not depend on them being at the farm — desk pass 3 spent Act One in a forestry office twenty miles away, where the automatic notch and Swinburne both sat uselessly on the other side of the county. Two routes, both of which reach a party anywhere:

• Swinburne telephones the Bureau. She has a dead dog and no answer, she has the case number off the police, and she is not a woman who lets a thing go.
• The police file carries a photograph of the cut, taken because the felling was part of a sudden-death enquiry. The squared notch is in the frame whether anybody has been to the farm or not.

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Act Two — Over (~45 min)

This act was 65 minutes and carried the scenario's entire overrun. It is now 45, and the twenty came out of structure rather than content: nothing below was deleted. The crossing is capped, THE OFFER runs inside another scene instead of beside it, and the column scene has an in-fiction clock that ends it on your schedule. Run the budget below and the act lands. Ignore it and this is the act that eats the Close.

Beat	Minutes	Ends when
The crossing	5	A player breaks the silence. If nobody does by minute five, a Geiger tick does it for them
The column arrives	5	Ivy has walked forward and somebody has spoken to her
The line rests, and they talk	25	The rest ends — see the clock below. THE OFFER happens inside this
The line moves on	10	H03a is handed over and the agents decide whether to follow

THE LINE'S REST IS THE ACT'S CLOCK, and it is the cut that does the work. This column walks every day of its life and it stops to rest, not to meet people. Ivy will talk for as long as the line is sitting down, and the line sits for twenty-five minutes. Then the old ones stand up, because they always do, and the conversation is over whether or not the agents got what they wanted.

• Say it at the start of the scene, once: the line has sat down in the heather, and they do that for a while and then they walk. Players who know a scene has a clock use it; players who do not will still be carried by it.
• Ivy does not stay behind to finish a conversation. She has never once let the line walk without her and she is not going to start tonight. Anything unasked is unasked.
• This is not a punishment and must not read as one. It is the loop showing itself for the first time: these people are on rails and the agents have just watched it happen without being told.

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 — but this is five minutes, not ten. If the table is still quiet at minute five, the Geiger finds its own voice and that is your cue to move. A silence that has stopped being tense is just a pause, and this act cannot afford one.

• 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] Missed: nothing yet, and quietly better — the record should be winning early without being noticed.

• THE OFFER — the anchor's beat, and it is not optional. Run it DURING the line's rest, while the other players are talking to Ivy — that is where the twenty minutes came from, and it costs nothing because the table is occupied. Take Ashcroft's player aside for one minute.

  • Do not move this back to a quiet moment, and here is why. It was originally its own beat and was rescheduled in v0.13 purely to save time. The side-effect is better than the reason: run mid-scene, the offer has no audience, and Ashcroft's player comes back to a conversation that carried on without him. A man being quietly told he could put the weight down, while the people he holds the door for do not notice he has gone, is the whole character in one staging accident. Keep it. The record offers him the cleanest version of the lie: that he has always been the anchor for this valley, that the three years his body is older than his birthday were spent here, and that he may put the weight down now. Accepting costs nothing in the moment, 2 Coherence at the Close, and one more thing he is not told: it makes him the understudy's preferred target in Act Four, resisting at Difficult instead of his own 85%. He decides before he knows any of that. [CUS: Insight — it is being offered, not remembered] Missed: he takes it for a real memory, which is worse, and is the point.
  • Run it for any agent whose player wants it, but it is written for Ashcroft: desk pass 1 found that without this beat his sheet is a second Insight for five acts.

• 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]
    • ⏱ On a SPECIAL or better, give something PORTABLE — never more conversation. This is a timing rule and a fairness rule at once. The rest has a clock (above), so a good roll that buys extra talking is a good roll the clock then takes away, and desk pass 4 found a player saying "I rolled a 7 and got less time." Hand over one of:
      • The almanac now rather than at the line's departure — H03a early, which moves Act Three's reveal forward and buys the GM room later.
      • A name from 1962 — Ivy's mother, or the man who carried the tent poles — which Bhattacharya can look for in the depot paperwork in Act Three.
      • "The six at the back don't eat." Said flatly, as a housekeeping detail, by somebody who has stopped finding it strange.
    • Each of those travels out of the scene. The line still stands up on schedule and the roll still paid — which is the only arrangement where both are true.

• 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.

• If violence against the column is even possible at your table, read EXPOSURE in Act Four first. Six of them wipe one party in seven; at four players three of them wipe nearly half. This is the dangerous encounter in the scenario and it is in this act.

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. On a special or better reading the child [CUS: Insight]: she has been told to smile, and she is doing it carefully. Nobody has sent a child to armed strangers out of carelessness — this column has done this before, and it has lost people doing it.

---

Act Three — There is no north (~50 min, and read the next line before you trust that)

⏱ This act has a twenty-minute bomb in it and the 50 does not include it. If anybody fumbles Anomaly Lore on the depot entry, the text below sends them chasing the re-cut peg, and it says in terms that a table will spend twenty minutes on it. That is a real instruction and it should be obeyed — the silence of that failure teaches more than a correct roll. But 50 + 20 is 70, and the act is budgeted at 50.

So if that fumble happens, the northern-seam cut is no longer optional. Take it the moment the fumble lands, not at the break. With the cut, a fumbled act runs ~55 and the session absorbs it. Without it, Act Three runs 70 and the Close pays.

The arithmetic is the reason, not a playtest. Desk pass 4 originally reported hitting this fumble; re-checking its rolls against the real sheets showed the roll was a plain failure, not a fumble — 98 against Anomaly Lore 63, and 96–99 never succeed. So nobody has yet played the twenty minutes. The warning stands on its own: the text predicts the cost, the budget does not carry it, and nothing connected the two.

Beats

• The evidence of the loop — three routes, with the almanac behind all of them. [CUS: Spot — their own boot prints, going the other way] [CUS: Repair (Mechanical) — the same wrecked lorry, three times, with their chalk on it] [CUS: Anomaly Lore — the sky has not moved in four hours of walking] Missed, all three: CG-H03a and CG-H03b. Laid side by side, the table finds the loop with no die at all. The handouts are the primary route; the rolls only get there first.
• The 1962 depot — a buried reserve store with the entry's paperwork in it, the only place the truth is written down. [CUS: Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN), authorised, pegged, never cancelled] Missed: 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.
• [CUS: Anomaly Lore — what a peg is, and what losing one does] On a success — and they will ask, because re-pegging is the obvious idea and desk pass 3 proposed it unprompted: the answer is that it cannot be done, and why. The entry is pegged to the older authority, the boundary as it was recorded before the survey of 1861, and there is no older tree. A fresh notch in a fresh tree is a note in the margin of a document that was closed in 1962. That is information, not a refusal, and it is the moment the table understands that cancellation is the only lever there has ever been. On a fumble: the agent concludes, with complete confidence, that the peg can simply be re-cut — a fresh notch in a fresh tree will hold the entry and nobody need be cancelled. It is wrong, it is the most attractive wrong idea available, and a table will spend twenty minutes on it. Let them try it exactly once. Cutting the notch does nothing whatsoever, and the silence of that failure teaches more about what the record cares about than a correct roll would have.
• 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 (GM ESSENTIALS has the ruling), 2 Coherence. Survivable, and it is the table's first sight of the mechanism the understudy will use properly.
  • It cannot touch an agent carrying an anchor that is genuinely their own — that is its own statblock's clause, and it rules Ashcroft out of this beat entirely. Aim it at somebody else and let Ashcroft notice that he was skipped. He will draw the wrong conclusion from it, which is set up for Act Four.

CUT AS DEFAULT: the walk to the northern seam. It was a fourth demonstration of a loop the lorry and the almanac have already proved, and desk pass 1 lost fifteen minutes to it. If the table insists on walking north, give them one sentence: they arrive at the southern edge with an hour gone and a clear memory of never having turned round.

---

Act Four — One of us (~45 min)

THE SPINE — four beats, in this order. The act has no mechanical threat by design (see EXPOSURE below), so the structure has to come from the text. Desk pass 1 found it sprawled without one, and judged it equally likely to collapse in twenty minutes at a less patient table.

	Beat	Runs
1	It comes back through wearing somebody	~10 min
2	The tests, and what each one proves	~15 min
3	The tell surfaces, whether or not anyone rolled	~10 min
4	What they do about it	~10 min

Beat 1 — the swap. The understudy takes somebody. Default: an NPC — Sgt Aled Prichard, holding the cordon on the real side, whose file is excellent. It comes back through with him.

Beat 2 — the tests they will reach for, and what each actually proves:

• [CUS: Insight — it is word-perfect, because it has had thirty years] A success yields no tell, and the GM must say so out loud: you read him carefully, and there is nothing wrong with him. The absence is the information. A player who rolled well is owed that sentence rather than a shrug — desk pass 1 flagged this as feeling like a bug from the player's chair when it is in fact the thesis.
• [CUS: Psychology — it is not pretending to be human; it thinks it is the file] Missed: this line is far too good to lose to one 40% roll, and desk pass 2 lost it. If it is failed or never attempted, it surfaces in beat 3 instead — the thing says it itself, unprompted, while being examined, in the tone of a man correcting a clerical error.
• Borrowed Authority — pull the record. The copy checks out; the column does not. The instrument is working correctly and is useless. On a critical: the record answers too well. Prichard's file has been read recently, from inside the cordon, at a terminal nobody signed for. The thing has been studying the paperwork of the man it is wearing, and it left a timestamp doing it.

Beat 3 — the tell, which is NOT gated. Close, unhurried physical examination finds it: the hands are wrong, in the specific way of a thing that has learned hands by watching them. Anyone who examines him properly finds this, with no roll.

• [CUS: Xenology (Baseline) — buys the tell EARLY and PRIVATELY, before it is standing in the middle of the cordon] Braithwaite carries it at 53. Success is a quiet word in the GM's ear during beat 2 instead of a discovery in front of everybody at beat 3. Missed: only the timing and the privacy — which is quite enough to be worth rolling for. Desk pass 1 failed this roll and the act had no route left. That is what this fix is: the roll no longer holds the only key.
• If nobody examines him at all, rehearsal step 5 arrives on schedule and it reaches for somebody in front of the whole cordon. The tell arrives as an event rather than a finding, which is worse for them and perfectly playable.
• Who it reaches for: the lowest POW in the room. For the cast as written that is Okonkwo, POW×5 55% — and Ashcroft is the hardest at 85%. It has practised for thirty years and it is not stupid: it takes the easiest file. The party's muscle being the easiest thing in the room to take is a better scene than the anchor being it.
  • Exception — if Ashcroft accepted THE OFFER in Act Two, it reaches for him instead, because his file is already loose, and he resists at Difficult (85 → 42). That is what accepting cost him, and he was never told it.
  • What it cost, exactly. Refusing, Ashcroft is taken 21.9% of the time — the safest person in the room. Accepting, 48.7%. Accepting does not make him a bit more vulnerable; it moves him from the hardest file at the table to the easiest, past Braithwaite's 37.6%, and the countdown reaches for the easiest. The offer was never a trap, it was a trade, and this is the half of it nobody quoted him.
    • Enumerated rather than sampled — all 10,000 roll pairs through opposedContestFor, so these are exact and there is no seed involved. Reproduce with the rule itself.
• The anchor clause does NOT transfer, and the table will assume it does. A hollow man cannot swap with somebody holding an anchor that is genuinely theirs. The understudy has no such limit on its sheet. Ashcroft is not safe here, and if he was skipped in Act Three he will be certain that he is. Say it once, when it matters.

Beat 4 — what they do about it. 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 past twenty minutes.
• 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.

EXPOSURE — what a fight actually costs. Read before Act Two, not before Act Four.

The finding that matters: the understudy cannot hurt them, and the refugees can wipe them. That is the scenario's whole thesis, and it is not a claim — it is measured. A GM who does not know it will pad Act Four to make it frightening and will be padding the one encounter in the case that is incapable of being dangerous.

MEASURED. tools/simulate.mjs, 2000 runs each, seed 11, against the cast of six — Ashcroft, Bhattacharya, Renshaw, Braithwaite, Pollard, Okonkwo. Taken at commit 6f33525 with a clean tree.

Re-measured at 6f33525 (harness unchanged since ad5fd57, so the figures are identical at 8f3e1ff), including the four-player cut rows further down, after the harness was corrected: hit location by body plan rather than species, armour per location rather than one scalar, and flyers grounded by a lost wing (R-264). The finding is unchanged and the shape of the curve is unchanged — but the column got dearer to fight, because a torso vest no longer protects a head. Six of them now wipe the party in one run in seven rather than one in twelve, and ten wipe it in nine runs out of ten.

node tools/simulate.mjs --creature the_understudy \
  --party ashcroft,bhattacharya,renshaw,braithwaite,pollard,okonkwo --runs 2000 --seed 11

What they fight	Hurt	Down	Wiped	Deaths/run	Median rounds
The understudy, alone	0.55 of 6	0.01	0.0%	0.00	2
A duplicate of an agent	0.34 of 6	0.04	0.0%	0.00	2
One hollow man	0.28 of 6	0.00	0.0%	0.00	2
Three hollow men	1.57 of 6	0.01	0.0%	0.00	6
Six hollow men	3.48 of 6	0.42	0.0%	0.04	13
Three of the column	1.88 of 6	0.40	0.1%	0.16	5
Six of the column	4.79 of 6	3.03	14.8%	1.55	14
Ten of the column	5.97 of 6	5.87	90.8%	2.75	13
Fifteen of the column	6.00 of 6	6.00	100.0%	2.68	7

Read these as a floor. The harness does not model bleeding, Panic, Coherence, cover, range bands or fire modes, and every one of those makes a fight worse for whoever is losing. Both of the first two are live in this scenario.

The five things a GM needs from that table

1. Do not fix the understudy. It is a 1d3 punch with a 60% chance to land, and it goes down in two rounds. That is correct and it is the point: the horror is that it passed every test the party had, not that it is hard to kill. A GM who buffs it into a threat has replaced a scenario about classification with a scenario about a monster, and the case stops meaning anything.

2. Adding hollow men buys rounds, not danger. Six of them still wipe nobody — and take a median thirteen rounds to resolve. In a 45-minute act that is the whole act, and the Close is what pays for it. If Act Four feels thin, the answer is more doubt, not more bodies.

3. The column is the lethal encounter in this scenario, and it is not in Act Four. Three of them is survivable, though somebody dies in about one run in six. Six wipes one party in seven. Ten wipes nine parties in ten. The curve between six and ten is almost vertical and a GM improvising bodies will cross it without noticing. This is why Act Two says the column must never become a threat: not only because shooting refugees is the moral catastrophe of the case, but because the table will lose.

4. The four-player cut is a different game. Without Okonkwo's rifle and breach suit and without Pollard's shield — and with Ashcroft carrying no weapon at all, so the cut is three effective attackers rather than four — three of the column wipe nearly half of all parties and six wipe virtually every one:

   Four-player cut fights	Hurt	Down	Wiped	Deaths/run
   Three of the column	3.25 of 4	2.31	45.0%	0.98
   Six of the column	4.00 of 4	3.99	99.8%	1.46

   It is not a hard fight. It is two different fights. That mean of 2.31 down is the average of a coin flip and describes about a tenth of outcomes: 23% of the time nobody goes down at all, 45% of the time everybody does, and the ground between is thin. Six players against six of the column is an ordinary spread where the average means something. This row is not, and a GM who reads "2.31" as "a bruising fight" is reading the one outcome the table is least likely to deliver.

   It is decided by the first disabling blow, and that lands in round two. Not because a disabled fighter leaves the fight — they do not, and a GM who plays it that way will get the fight wrong in the party's favour. A ruined limb costs 30 points off what that person can do (locationEffectsFor), which takes a 40% attacker to 10% and leaves them still swinging, still drawing attacks, still a target. Nobody is out until 2 hit points or a destroyed head (conditionFor). So the loop is a slope, not a cliff: the first disable does not remove a gun, it makes that gun about a quarter as likely to land — and the side that lands the first one is the side more likely to land the next. Nothing pulls the fight back toward the middle once it has tipped. Round five is where that becomes legible; round two is where it happens.

   Measured	Party strikes first	Then wipes	If it does not
   Three of the column vs the cut	50.3% (mean round 1.8)	25.5%	65.5% — a swing of 40
   Six of the column vs the full six	54.1% (mean round 1.3)	7.8%	23.2% — a swing of 15.4

   First blood is very nearly a coin toss, and in the cut it is worth forty points of wipe rate. Against the full six it is worth a third of that, because one fighter is a sixth of that line and a quarter of the cut. This is a property of the cut, not of the column.

   Recorded in tools/first-blood-baseline.json and re-checked on every build by check-firstblood; read it with node tools/first-blood.mjs. Earlier drafts of this paragraph carried a swing of 43 from a single seed, which was high by more than its own seed-to-seed noise — the figures above are three seeds and are the ones of record.

   At four players, any violence against the column is a party-ending decision. Say the shape aloud, not the average: "nearly half of all parties die" is the honest warning, and "you will probably lose two people" is not.

5. Their sheets read about twice as effective as they are, and the number doing it is Dodge 68. This one is arithmetic off two published numbers, not a measurement. The column dodges at 68% (The Quiet Neighbours, tools/content.mjs; the bestiary prints it), and a defence is spent per incoming blow — so a skill roll is only the first half of the test. A 40% attack against a fresh dodge connects about one time in eight (0.40 x 0.32), against a sheet that reads 40%. The three who can fight in the cut carry Firearm and Melee between 35 and 40. Nobody at the table will guess that from their own sheet, and the same gap is Ashcroft's defect one level less severe: the number on the page is not the chance of doing anything.

   • The way out is to spend their dodges, not to out-shoot them. Each defence after the first in the same round is at -30 (DEFENCE_STEP, rules.mjs), so a defender who has already dodged once meets the next blow at 38%, then 8%, then the 1% floor. The second agent to connect in a round is worth more than the first — that is what check-focus measures across the bestiary, and it holds here.
   • Recorded, and it agrees: the three land 16 to 18% of their attacks — Bhattacharya 17.8, Renshaw 17.3, Braithwaite 16.2 — which is above the one-in-eight the arithmetic gives for a fresh dodge, precisely because most blows in a fight are not the first of their round. tools/attackers-baseline.json, held by check-attackers.
   • This is the other half of why the cut is a different game. Three attackers cannot spend three defenders' dodges; six can. Point 4 says the cut is short an attacker. Dodge 68 says what that costs — the missing attacker is the one who would have made everybody else's shots land.
   • Do not fix it by lowering the dodge. Their 68% is why Act Two's answer is medicine passed hand to hand with both parties off the ground rather than marksmanship. The column being uncatchable is the point; see their tactics line.

How long it runs, which is not the median

Every figure above is a middle, and a middle is not a plan. The table prints median rounds because that is what the suite could measure; it is the wrong number for a slot.

	Median	Past 15 rounds	Past 20	Past 30	1 in 100 runs past
Three of the column vs the cut	10.7	19.9%	7.3%	1.3%	32.3 rounds
Six of the column vs the full six	14	40.3%	21.6%	6.5%	45.3 rounds

Three things a GM should take off that table.

• The six-a-side fight is the LONGER one, which is the opposite of what more guns suggests. It is R-270 showing up as duration: a disabled fighter does not leave, they fight on at 30 points less, so more bodies means more people swinging badly for longer. The cut is shorter because it is decisive, not because it is safer.
• One six-a-side fight in five runs past twenty rounds, and one in a hundred past forty-five. Act Four is 45 minutes. That fight is the whole act and the Close is what pays for it — the same warning point 2 makes about hollow men, now with the column's numbers under it. The last column is the honest way to state a worst case: the longest fight in any one sample is not a bound and moves by a third of its value on a re-seed, so check-cited refuses to let this document quote it.
• A fight still going at fifteen rounds is not a stalemate. It is one the party is losing slowly. Long fights end in a wipe materially more often than short ones, in both encounters. The size of that effect is not quoted here on purpose: at six a side it varies by nearly half its own value across seeds, so only its direction is trustworthy. check-fight-tail holds the direction and fails the build if it reverses.

If the clock says the fight has gone long, it has already gone wrong. Cut to the consequence rather than rolling it out — the party is not going to turn it around, and twenty more rounds of dice is how a convention slot dies.

Recorded in tools/fight-tail-baseline.json, re-checked on every build by check-fight-tail; read it with node tools/fight-tail.mjs. Measured with the round ceiling raised to 400 because the harness default of 40 truncates exactly this distribution — at the default, one six-a-side fight in fifty is cut off rather than finished, and the 99th percentile reads 40 because 40 is the wall.

What to do instead of a fight

• Act Four's tension is a test, not a threat. The question is which of two people is filed, and the clock is the rehearsal counter, not hit points.
• If the table insists on shooting the understudy, let them, and let it be easy. Then hand them the consequence: they have killed something wearing Sgt Prichard's face, the entry is still filed, and something over there is already practising. That lands harder than any wound.
• If they fire on the column, do not soften it. Use three, resolve it honestly, and let the survivors keep walking north past them. Nobody at the Bureau will ask.

If they kill it in the first ten minutes — the likeliest contrarian branch, and desk pass 2 measured what it costs: about ten minutes of act and thirty-five of dead air, if the GM takes "go to Close" literally. Do not. They have shot something wearing Sgt Prichard's face, and the act carries on as Braithwaite's:

• What did they kill? [CUS: Xenology (Baseline) — the hands, and how recently they learned to be hands] Missed: an envsuit and an hour are enough. This is a body on a table and it is not going anywhere.
• Where is the real Prichard? Nobody has asked yet. He is on the far side, alive, four days into a walk north, with people who have been kind to him.
• It is still filed. The seam opens at dusk, something over there is already practising, and somebody has to say that out loud before the Close.

That is twenty minutes of the best forensic material in the scenario, and they earned it by refusing the scene. Then go to Close.

---

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.

  • This is a one-shot, so that last sentence has to land tonight rather than promise a campaign. Do not end on "and you'll be back" — the table will never be back, and a hook they cannot take reads as an unfinished scenario. End on the cost instead: name the next agent who will be sent, from their own roster, and have Registry thank them for a clean resolution. The horror is that the file is now correct.

• WHERE IT IS DONE, WHICH THE TABLE WILL ASK AND WHICH DECIDES THE SCENE. Cancellation is a Registry act on our side. The entry is a record, the record is held here, and nothing said or done on the far side touches it. [CUS: Anomaly Lore — the record is not over there; it never was]

  • So it cannot be done from inside, and somebody has to be back through before it happens. That is a cost nobody has priced until this moment, and it is the real weight of the Close: not only what they choose, but who is standing where when it takes effect.
  • Anybody still in the duplicate when the entry is cancelled goes with it. They were never filed as being there. Say this plainly the first time it is asked — a table that merely suspects it will not choose it, and the choice is the scenario.
  • On a fumble asking the question: the agent is certain it can be done from here, and that certainty is worth a Coherence to correct once somebody proves otherwise.

• 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.

---

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
Ray Teasdale	Clearance foreman; watched Corrigan come apart and has stopped sleeping properly; "he stopped being able to do his hands"
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.

⚠ THE DECLARED CAST IS LOAD-BEARING ON THE BUILD. The <!-- cast: --> comment above is read by two guards. check-rollable holds every skill the acts name to these six, and check-firstblood holds a recorded measurement of this scenario's own encounter against them. EXPOSURE's whole table is measured against these six as well.

So changing who is cast is not a cosmetic edit. It invalidates the exposure figures and it will fail the build. The fix is to re-record, not to revert — node tools/first-blood.mjs --update, and re-run EXPOSURE's own published command — and then to re-read the prose around both, because the sentences quote ratios that move with the numbers. That coupling is deliberate: it converts a table that would otherwise go quietly stale into one that announces it.

	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, and he is not an attacker. That is on the sheet on purpose — an anchor holding a door has both hands full — and the GM must not quietly fix it by handing him a pistol. But it has a consequence that was missed for several drafts and is not allowed to be a surprise: his sheet has no weapon and no unarmed skill, so an attack from him is a 1% roll. He carries Firearm (Pistol) 43 and nothing to fire.
  • TELL HIS PLAYER BEFORE THE GAME. Not as an apology — as the brief. Dominic does not win fights; he keeps people filed while other people fight. Dodge 63, First Aid 40, Insight 63, and the anchor are his set-piece, and they are plenty. A player who is not told will roll at 1% for twenty minutes and conclude, reasonably, that the sheet is broken.
  • This is why he is never the right answer to "who shoots".
• 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.
  • ⚠ The four-player cut is three effective attackers, not four. Ashcroft is not one (see his entry), so the cut fights with Renshaw and Bhattacharya on compact pistols and Braithwaite on a knife. That is a quarter of the party out of any fight, and it is a large part of why EXPOSURE says violence at four players is party-ending. Substituting Agyeman fixes the arithmetic as well as the lane.
    • He is not sidelined in the fight — he is busy and ineffective. He takes his actions — 9.2 attacks across a fight, of which 1% land (check-attackers) — and one attack in a thousand disables anybody. That plays worse at the table than being obviously out of it: a player who cannot act knows to do something else, and a player rolling once a round for an hour thinks he is fighting. If a fight starts and Ashcroft is in it, give him something that is not an attack roll — First Aid 40 on whoever went down, Dodge 63 to get to them through the line, Insight 63 on whether the column is still shooting to kill or only to be left alone, and the anchor. His entry lists the same four; this is where they earn their keep.
• 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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Open questions for Tim

• Is this a convention 4-hour or a campaign opener? Resolved 13 September 2026 — convention one-shot. Both endings stay, but neither may be written as a hook: see the Close, where "leave it filed" now has to land as an ending rather than as a promise of sessions that will not happen. Design intent 5 is unchanged and was already written for a one-shot.
• Which convention slot, if any? Resolved 13 September 2026 — Contingency 2027, slot 9, Sunday 31 January 2027, afternoon. Booked in slaguru666/contingency2027; the game folder there points back at this file rather than copying it. That spends the Sunday re-run reserve, and the convention's own schedule note now names this game as the one that gives if prep slips elsewhere.
• 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.
• Does rules.mjs want an opposed roll? Resolved 13 September 2026 — it has one (opposedContestFor, R-273). The scenario-local ruling is deleted and GM ESSENTIALS points at the game. Both beats were priced against the real rule and the Act Four row gained an unsettled outcome it did not previously have.
• 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.