slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ddc4f99ff4 Hit locations reach ordinary combat, and creatures get a body
THE DEFECT. locationFor had ONE caller in the engine, hitLocationRoll, and
hitLocationRoll was called from fall, burn, detonate and burstAttack. Falling,
fire, explosions and automatic fire. Nothing else. rollWeaponDamage rolled dice,
printed a number and returned it, so the chat Damage button, the character
sheet's damage button and the item sheet's all stopped there.

A grenade knew which arm it took off. A sword did not.

Every individual piece was already correct - the tables, per-location armour and
coverage, disable and destroy thresholds, Major Wound, dying, death, the figure
on the sheet. They simply were not joined up, which is why this reads as a wiring
change rather than a new subsystem.

- rollWeaponDamage now carries through to hitLocationRoll: it rolls the location,
  applies that location's armour, applies the wound, and handles the rest through
  the machinery that already owned it. Nothing here re-implements any of that
- locationModeFor picks the melee or ranged column from the weapon's class. The
  two columns have always differed and nothing was choosing between them
- with no target it does exactly what it did before and SAYS SO on a card, rather
  than failing quietly
- burstAttack opts out with locate:false - it rolls its own location per round,
  and letting both fire would have applied every round of a burst twice

BODY PLANS. Two new tables: quadruped (four legs, fore/hindquarters, neck, a head
that is hard to reach) and winged (that, plus wings). Forequarters are the vital.
DISABLE EITHER WING AND IT CANNOT FLY, which is the fight a party can win.
Barghest, Kelpie and Church grim were all species "baseline" - a black dog, a
horse and a grave-hound, each hit-located with two arms and a chest. Fixed. Added
"The supporter", a winged heraldic beast, so the new table is exercised by real
content instead of existing unused.

Body plan is a NEW FIELD, not a species. A bear is not a playable people with
characteristic dice and talents, so creature specs take bodyPlan and the playable
species list is untouched.

THE NPC SHEET had no hit locations at all - 102 lines against the character
sheet's 627 - while every NPC in the game had them derived and wired to
consequences. It now carries the body-plan selector, the figure, the per-location
table, the condition and a GROUNDED flag. The sheet class already extended the
character sheet, so it already HAD the context; the template never used it.

FOUND IN PASSING, by the new guard: kind "body" - the abdomen, the trunk, the
hindquarters - did nothing whatever. Its printed effect has always promised "-30%
to all Physical actions and bleeding 1 hit point per round until First Aid" and
the code delivered none of it, on every body plan including the humanoid default.
It now bleeds 1, or 2 destroyed, exactly as bodyX says.

NEW GUARD: check-anatomy. Every body plan must cover 1-20 exactly once in BOTH
modes, every location must be drawn and every drawn shape must be a location, and
every kind must be one locationEffectsFor acts on, has effect text for, and has a
destruction outcome. Verified it fails on a d20 gap, a shapeless limb and an
unhandled kind before wiring it in. Ninth guard.

VERIFIED IN A RUNNING FOUNDRY, not just unit-tested: melee bar reads the Melee
column and the rifle reads Ranged on the same creature; forequarters graded as a
vital hit; a maxed wing set flightLost and the sheet said GROUNDED; the real chat
Damage button rolled 1D20 15, found the right foreleg, applied 12 through armour,
disabled the leg and took the dog from 16 to 4; and with nothing targeted nothing
was touched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 15:46:11 +01:00
2026-08-30 21:08:22 +01:00
2026-08-30 21:34:37 +01:00

THE CUSTODIANS

A Basic Roleplaying game of crossings, as a Foundry VTT system.

A drab British government agency deals with crossings. Reality keeps a record of what belongs where, and it can be made to get it wrong. Agents are civil servants: they carry warrant cards and cordon tape, they file in triplicate, and the thing that makes them dangerous is that they know how the record works.

The tone is bureaucratic horror. Most cases close with an arrangement rather than a fight, and the supernatural is a filing error somebody committed on purpose.


Installing

In Foundry: Game Systems → Install System → Manifest URL

https://gitea.timevans.uk/slaguru666/RingBRP/raw/branch/main/system.json

Or by hand: clone this repository into your Foundry data directory as Data/systems/ringbrp, then restart Foundry.

git clone https://gitea.timevans.uk/slaguru666/RingBRP.git ringbrp

Requires Foundry v13+ (verified against v14.364). No modules are required. Dice So Nice works if you have it, using your own dice — the system ships no dice skins and does not touch anybody's dice settings.

Deploying to a remote Foundry server

The built compendia in packs/ are committed on purpose, so a remote server needs nothing but the files:

cd /path/to/foundrydata/Data/systems
git clone https://gitea.timevans.uk/slaguru666/RingBRP.git ringbrp
# restart Foundry

node_modules/ is not committed. You only need it if you intend to rebuild the packs or regenerate art on that machine:

npm install          # pulls classic-level, used to write the LevelDB packs
npm run build        # rebuilds packs/ from tools/content.mjs
npm run check        # the eight guards; the build refuses to run if they fail

To update a deployed server: git pull and restart Foundry. If the pull touches packs/, Foundry must be stopped first — LevelDB will not tolerate its files changing underneath a running server.


What is in the box

Postings 25, each with a key characteristic, trained skills, talents and its own kit
Trades 10 ordinary jobs the department recruits from, plus induction
Catalogue 236 items — 123 gear, 62 weapons, 32 armour, 19 vehicles
Skills / talents 62 skills, 19 talents
Bestiary 47 statblocks across folklore, horror and the far side
Eras modern, antique, future, anomalous — the agency is old and never abolishes anything
Icons 292, all generated from tools/icons.mjs; no external art
Starter scenario BLACK PLATFORM, a six-player action starter, importable as a single Adventure
Compendia pregens, NPCs, skills, weapons, armour, gear, vehicles, powers, tables, rules, the starter
Rules journal 13 pages, generated from rules.mjs so the book cannot drift from the code

The rules, in brief

d100 roll-under, banding into critical / special / success / failure / fumble. 96–99 always fail, 00 always fumbles, and every skill has a 1% floor.

Reaction Lanes replace Strike Rank. Initiative is 3 × max(⌈DEX/3⌉, ⌈readiness/10⌉) less carried load, plus a d6, re-rolled every round — including the first, so the opening round is ordered like every other.

Coherence runs 10 → 0 and measures how well-filed an agent is in reality. It bands into Anchored / Loose / Adrift / Unmoored / Displaced, and spending it is how the supernatural works.

The Quiet Arts are deliberate misfilings, not spells. They cost Coherence, and they only ever arrive from a crossing that goes wrong.

Defences are graded. A defence stops a blow of its own quality or worse outright; against something better it only reduces it by as many steps as it was outclassed by. Only a critical stops a critical.

Access is a record. There is no hacking skill and nothing to break into — see below.

A weapon's fire mode is a decision. Slow weapons shoot better and then make you work; fast ones offer a second shot at the cost of both; rapid ones fire bursts; beams can be held on the target for damage instead of hits. A weapon that cannot fire a burst cannot be made to.

Sights and lamps apply themselves. A sight is graded by range band — a telescopic sight is a penalty inside ten metres — and a carried lamp buys the dark back to dim, never to daylight, and tells everyone where you are. Neither is a thing the player selects: both are facts about what is in the pack.


Borrowed Authority — the access subsystem

Deliberately not cyberpunk. Nobody jacks into anything.

What an agent has is a named credential belonging to somebody real, with a scope of things that person could plausibly do, a Trust that erodes as it is used, and red flags describing how the real owner behaves.

  • Inside its scope there is no roll. A facilities contractor opening a plant room is not intrusion, it is Tuesday. It costs 1 Trust and it works.
  • One tier beyond is a stretch — roll, at −20 for each red flag you break. The system is not testing whether you are clever. It is testing whether you are behaving like the person whose name is on the record.
  • Two tiers beyond is impossible at any skill. No percentage on any sheet gets a contractor issuing accounts.
  • A fumble burns the credential, and somebody real is going to be asked about it.

A credential is assembled, not found: up to three dossier items, each a separate scene using a different skill, at most one of them at a keyboard. Items make the credential better, never the roll easier.

AI is a posture on the target rather than an opponent — a gatekeeper raises what counts as routine, an analyst writes a new red flag every time you stretch, an asset stands in for a dossier item.

And you may spend Coherence to widen a scope, because reality can be made to remember that the person always held that duty. It works. It always works. Push a credential past what its Trust will carry and your file and theirs converge one step, and nothing in this game spends anything to converge them back.


Repository layout

ringbrp.mjs          the system: sheets, engine, hooks (~5,500 lines)
rules.mjs            THE SINGLE AUTHORITY for every rule formula
system.json          Foundry manifest
template.json        data model for every Actor and Item type
templates/           Handlebars sheets
styles/              one stylesheet
lang/en.json         all user-facing text
icons/  fonts/  art/     generated art
packs/               built LevelDB compendia (committed — see Deploying)
tools/
  content.mjs        the catalogue: skills, weapons, armour, gear, vehicles, NPCs
  build-packs.mjs    builds packs/ — runs the eight guards first and refuses on failure
  make-icons.mjs     draws all 231 icons
  rules-text.mjs     generates the rules journal FROM rules.mjs
  mission.mjs        the case generator
  mission-tables.mjs its content tables
  check-rules.mjs    guard: no rule may be defined twice
  check-kits.mjs     guard: every posting's kit must exist and be usable
  check-lang.mjs     guard: no localisation key may be both a value and a branch
  check-lethality.mjs guard: no creature may quietly change what it does to a party
docs/REVIEW_LOG.md   the design and defect log, R-1 onward

The one rule this codebase enforces on itself

No rule formula may exist in more than one place. Everything lives in rules.mjs, and tools/check-rules.mjs fails the build if a formula is restated, if an alias stops being identity-equal to what it aliases, if a constant is re-declared as a literal, or if an exported rule has no spot-check. The packs used to be built under one set of numbers and played under another; this makes that impossible to ship.

The build runs all eight guards before it writes anything:

check-rules: OK — 103 rules, 34 files scanned, 3 aliases + 46 constant sets checked, 358 formulas verified
check-kits: OK — 25 roles, 10 trades, 218 catalogue items, every kit key resolves, every posting can use what it carries, every loadout distinct
check-lang: OK — en.json, 1015 keys, no leaf/branch collisions
check-templates: OK — 19 templates compile
check-behaviour: OK — 75 behavioural tests
check-scenarios: OK — 10 scenario files, 78 mechanic tags, every skill named resolves against 62 catalogue entries
check-creatures: OK — 102 actor specs across 8 sources, every characteristic, skill, kit key, talent, species and style resolves, no duplicate keys
check-lethality: OK — 47 creatures, none drifted more than 6 points of wipe rate against the frozen party, 1 new
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