The house cadence's second pass is a stress re-run of the weakest act. Pass 1
resolved Act Three in eight minutes of fifty and left three of its four branches
untested, so this forces each in turn on seed 8143 — and runs the three creature
encounters through tools/playthrough.mjs, the same runFight the lethality and
focus baselines come from, against this scenario's own declared six rather than
the frozen four.
THE THREE DOSSIER SCENES CHANGED NOTHING. The party assembled one item of three
and rolled 62 against 63 — exactly the roll they would have made with all three,
because Borrowed Authority says items improve the credential and never the roll.
Correct as a rule, catastrophic as staging: the act's best three scenes had no
effect any player could see, and pass 1 could not find it because there the
amendment failed and the question never arose. The items now buy scope instead.
Same roll, three different worlds: a narrow amendment that stops the ash and
leaves the site sealed, a lifted seal, or records above ground for the sixty-one
so Kit Marlow can leave.
ALL THREE CREATURES ARE INVISIBLE TO THE DICE. STERILISATION ORDER, THE
CORRECTION and ENUMERATED are all classified outOfCombat in powers.mjs, so every
measured number is a measurement of the creature's arms and legs and of nothing
that makes it frightening. That is correct bookkeeping, not a defect in the
guard, and it means the GM's text carries the whole threat at the climax. It
did not. The overwriter now comes with four printed corrections specific to this
case, and with the fact that force does not work: measured, one of them cannot
meaningfully hurt anybody and five grind for forty rounds finishing nothing, so
the end of the world was landing as an inconclusive scuffle.
EXPOSURE wiped all six in fifteen rounds with five dead, without the
sterilisation blast firing at all. The warning was right and understated. It now
prints the six-round countdown that lived only in the bestiary entry, the
argue-down as a named Borrowed Authority stretch, and what a failure costs —
five rounds reaches the adit and does not reach the crèche.
The best ending was three sentences, less than the failure branch beneath it,
and now plays out properly: the tannoy, nobody cheering, Pennyfeather filing it,
and Joan sweeping a yard that stays swept.
The four-player cut was one sentence from disaster. Science (Biology) and
Medicine are the only skills that vanish with Okonkwo and Nkemdirim, the cut
note happened to reassign exactly those two clues, and check-rollable never saw
any of it because the cast declaration names six and the cut is prose. Both
clues are now written on Knowledge and Insight for every table size, so nothing
load-bearing depends on an unguarded sentence.
All twenty-one guards pass, and the document has entered check-figures' strict
regime now that it carries citations.
Still untested: ending 1, and with it Pennyfeather speaking the cost and the pen
held above the paper — pass 1's two headline fixes. Pass 3 is the player chair,
contrarian, and should cancel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
