slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
f185c92088
Ten civilians, one decommissioned telephone exchange, and eleven minutes during
which the building went back to being on the street it was built on. Nothing
attacks anybody. Nothing wants anything. That is the horror, and it is the whole
design.
The premise was already in the pregens. Wren Finch's biography said she was
inside a building "on the night it stopped being on the street it was on", and
Soraya Rahimi's said she talked a caller down on air "for eleven minutes, and
the recording does not play back the same way twice". Those are two views of one
afternoon, so the scenario is built at the intersection and the other eight
"How they found her/him" lines are the same afternoon from eight more jobs.
Nothing in the prologue contradicts a sheet, because the sheets came first.
The reconciliation pass, which is most of the work:
- Finch's line said "night". The open day is an afternoon. One word changed on
the pregen, and both are true. Her line also says she was the only witness
who could describe the inside, so she is the one who goes into number 11 —
written into the location note rather than left to chance.
- Rahimi's line says she was ON AIR. So the disconnected telephone that rings
at 15:45 is patched through to her outside broadcast, which makes the canon
line and the scene the same event instead of two coincidences.
- Okonkwo carries two men out; Nkemdirim's patient has a forearm that healed
crooked over a break he took six minutes ago. Both seams needed an injury in
Act Two and there was none, so 15:50 and 15:51 now have one.
- Sandoval's forty minutes of traffic sit inside an eleven-minute window. That
is the anomaly, so it is on the handout in those words.
- "Prine" collided with an NPC already in the world. The engineer is Kearsley.
Structure: 2h15 against the house 3h30, stated in the design intent, because a
prologue exists to make the first real case land. No combat, no antagonist, no
Coherence — the last one is thematic, not a simplification: Coherence is what it
costs to keep looking once you know what you are looking at, and these ten do
not know yet. The Briefing is the first time the word is said aloud.
Ships as docs/scenarios/OPEN_DAY.md (the full GM document) and a Foundry
Adventure in a new `prologue` pack: 8 GM pages, 7 handouts, 5 NPCs, and ten
generated plates. The PCs are the "(before)" pregens already in the Pregens
pack — a second copy here would give a GM two sets of the same ten people and
no way to know which one their notes were on.
Verified in Foundry: the adventure imports, both journals render branded, the
countdown table reads as a table, and all ten plates load.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
189 lines
8.1 KiB
Markdown
189 lines
8.1 KiB
Markdown
# THE CUSTODIANS
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*A Basic Roleplaying game of crossings, as a Foundry VTT system.*
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A drab British government agency deals with **crossings**. Reality keeps a record of
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what belongs where, and it can be made to get it wrong. Agents are civil servants:
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they carry warrant cards and cordon tape, they file in triplicate, and the thing that
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makes them dangerous is that they know how the record works.
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The tone is bureaucratic horror. Most cases close with an arrangement rather than a
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fight, and the supernatural is a filing error somebody committed on purpose.
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---
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## Installing
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**In Foundry:** *Game Systems → Install System → Manifest URL*
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```
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https://gitea.timevans.uk/slaguru666/RingBRP/raw/branch/main/system.json
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```
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**Or by hand:** clone this repository into your Foundry data directory as
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`Data/systems/ringbrp`, then restart Foundry.
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```bash
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git clone https://gitea.timevans.uk/slaguru666/RingBRP.git ringbrp
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```
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Requires **Foundry v13+** (verified against v14.364). No modules are required. Dice So
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Nice is supported but optional — the system registers four of its own dice textures.
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### Deploying to a remote Foundry server
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The built compendia in `packs/` **are committed on purpose**, so a remote server needs
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nothing but the files:
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```bash
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cd /path/to/foundrydata/Data/systems
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git clone https://gitea.timevans.uk/slaguru666/RingBRP.git ringbrp
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# restart Foundry
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```
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`node_modules/` is *not* committed. You only need it if you intend to rebuild the
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packs or regenerate art on that machine:
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```bash
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npm install # pulls classic-level, used to write the LevelDB packs
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npm run build # rebuilds packs/ from tools/content.mjs
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npm run check # the three guards; the build refuses to run if they fail
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```
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To update a deployed server: `git pull` and restart Foundry. If the pull touches
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`packs/`, Foundry must be **stopped** first — LevelDB will not tolerate its files
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changing underneath a running server.
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---
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## What is in the box
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<!-- box:start -->
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|---|---|
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| **Postings** | 25, each with a key characteristic, trained skills, talents and its own kit |
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| **Trades** | 10 ordinary jobs the department recruits from, plus induction |
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| **Catalogue** | 236 items — 123 gear, 62 weapons, 32 armour, 19 vehicles |
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| **Skills / talents** | 59 skills, 19 talents |
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| **Bestiary** | 21 statblocks across folklore, horror and the far side |
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| **Eras** | modern, antique, future, anomalous — the agency is old and never abolishes anything |
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| **Icons** | 292, all generated from `tools/icons.mjs`; no external art |
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| **Starter scenario** | **BLACK PLATFORM**, a six-player action starter, importable as a single Adventure |
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| **Compendia** | pregens, NPCs, skills, weapons, armour, gear, vehicles, powers, tables, rules, the starter |
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| **Rules journal** | 12 pages, generated from `rules.mjs` so the book cannot drift from the code |
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<!-- box:end -->
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---
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## The rules, in brief
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**d100 roll-under**, banding into critical / special / success / failure / fumble.
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96–99 always fail, 00 always fumbles, and every skill has a 1% floor.
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**Reaction Lanes** replace Strike Rank. Initiative is
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`3 × max(⌈DEX/3⌉, ⌈readiness/10⌉)` less carried load, plus a d6, **re-rolled every
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round** — including the first, so the opening round is ordered like every other.
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**Coherence** runs 10 → 0 and measures how well-filed an agent is in reality. It bands
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into Anchored / Loose / Adrift / Unmoored / Displaced, and spending it is how the
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supernatural works.
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**The Quiet Arts** are deliberate misfilings, not spells. They cost Coherence, and
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they **only ever arrive from a crossing that goes wrong**.
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**Defences are graded.** A defence stops a blow of its own quality or worse outright;
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against something better it only reduces it by as many steps as it was outclassed by.
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Only a critical stops a critical.
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**Access is a record.** There is no hacking skill and nothing to break into — see
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below.
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**A weapon's fire mode is a decision.** Slow weapons shoot better and then make you
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work; fast ones offer a second shot at the cost of both; rapid ones fire bursts; beams
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can be held on the target for damage instead of hits. A weapon that cannot fire a
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burst cannot be made to.
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**Sights and lamps apply themselves.** A sight is graded by range band — a telescopic
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sight is a penalty inside ten metres — and a carried lamp buys the dark back to dim,
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never to daylight, and tells everyone where you are. Neither is a thing the player
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selects: both are facts about what is in the pack.
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---
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## Borrowed Authority — the access subsystem
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Deliberately not cyberpunk. Nobody jacks into anything.
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What an agent has is a **named credential** belonging to somebody real, with a
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**scope** of things that person could plausibly do, a **Trust** that erodes as it is
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used, and **red flags** describing how the real owner behaves.
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- **Inside its scope there is no roll.** A facilities contractor opening a plant room
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is not intrusion, it is Tuesday. It costs 1 Trust and it works.
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- **One tier beyond is a stretch** — roll, at −20 for each red flag you break. The
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system is not testing whether you are clever. It is testing whether you are
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behaving like the person whose name is on the record.
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- **Two tiers beyond is impossible at any skill.** No percentage on any sheet gets a
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contractor issuing accounts.
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- A **fumble burns** the credential, and somebody real is going to be asked about it.
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A credential is assembled, not found: up to **three dossier items, each a separate
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scene using a different skill, at most one of them at a keyboard**. Items make the
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credential better, never the roll easier.
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**AI** is a posture on the target rather than an opponent — a *gatekeeper* raises what
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counts as routine, an *analyst* writes a new red flag every time you stretch, an
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*asset* stands in for a dossier item.
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And you may spend **Coherence** to widen a scope, because reality can be made to
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remember that the person always held that duty. It works. It always works. Push a
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credential past what its Trust will carry and your file and theirs converge one step,
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and nothing in this game spends anything to converge them back.
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---
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## Repository layout
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```
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ringbrp.mjs the system: sheets, engine, hooks (~5,500 lines)
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rules.mjs THE SINGLE AUTHORITY for every rule formula
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system.json Foundry manifest
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template.json data model for every Actor and Item type
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templates/ Handlebars sheets
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styles/ one stylesheet
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lang/en.json all user-facing text
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icons/ dice/ fonts/ generated art
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packs/ built LevelDB compendia (committed — see Deploying)
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tools/
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content.mjs the catalogue: skills, weapons, armour, gear, vehicles, NPCs
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build-packs.mjs builds packs/ — runs the three guards first and refuses on failure
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make-icons.mjs draws all 231 icons
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make-dice-textures.mjs
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rules-text.mjs generates the rules journal FROM rules.mjs
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mission.mjs the case generator
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mission-tables.mjs its content tables
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check-rules.mjs guard: no rule may be defined twice
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check-kits.mjs guard: every posting's kit must exist and be usable
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check-lang.mjs guard: no localisation key may be both a value and a branch
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docs/REVIEW_LOG.md the design and defect log, R-1 onward
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```
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### The one rule this codebase enforces on itself
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**No rule formula may exist in more than one place.** Everything lives in `rules.mjs`,
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and `tools/check-rules.mjs` fails the build if a formula is restated, if an alias
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stops being identity-equal to what it aliases, if a constant is re-declared as a
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literal, or if an exported rule has no spot-check. The packs used to be built under
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one set of numbers and played under another; this makes that impossible to ship.
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The build runs all three guards before it writes anything:
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<!-- guards:start -->
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```
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check-rules: OK — 87 rules, 19 files scanned, 3 aliases + 41 constant sets checked, 275 formulas verified
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check-kits: OK — 25 roles, 10 trades, 218 catalogue items, every kit key resolves, every posting can use what it carries, every loadout distinct
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check-lang: OK — en.json, 927 keys, no leaf/branch collisions
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check-behaviour: OK — 42 behavioural tests
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```
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<!-- guards:end -->
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