vesh and cadence have had complete hit-location tables, body geometry, species talents
and location effects since they were written, and no creature had ever used either. So
none of that had run outside the character generator, and the whole bestiary was
hit-located as a person - including a black dog and a stack of paper.
THE CHOIR IS A CADENCE. It always was: its tactics say "run them as ELEVEN separate
bodies with one initiative between them", which is Distributed and Quorum described in
prose because the species that models it had no users. Retagged, and given the two
talents. No scenario prose refers to it, so nothing else moves.
PRECEDENT is new, and is a Vesh - the first. Built to exercise what makes the species
different rather than to be another sack of hit points: no head, so no fight against
one ends on a lucky roll, and a sensory ridge for a vital that runs the length of its
back and is correspondingly easy to hit. It is also not hostile, which is the point;
the encounter is a conversation with something that answers questions about an event
that has not happened yet.
Two things left deliberately unfixed and written down rather than fudged:
- The choir is eleven in the fiction and five in the location table. Reconciling it
properly means giving cadence a per-creature body count, which stops the table being
a constant and makes the paper doll follow it. That is the right fix and it is not a
small one. A note on the spec says so.
- Precedent gets unblinking but not out_of_step, though SPECIES.vesh grants both. An
npc actor has no Coherence track, and out_of_step costs 1 to use.
Also corrects a comment in creature-schema.mjs claiming Out of Step is vesh-locked. It
is not - five postings and a roster agent offer it to humans, and locking it would take
it off all six. SPECIES[x].talents is what a species is GRANTED; TALENTS[].species is
what only that species may HAVE. Two different fields, and only the second locks.
Simulated: Precedent 0.68 of 4 hurt over 3 rounds, no wipes. The choir alone is
trivial; at the eleven its own tactics call for, 3.05 of 4 hurt, median 18 rounds, 0.3%
wipes. Read both as floors - the harness does not model hit locations, so a Cadence's
entire mechanical identity is exactly what it cannot yet measure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
