diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23f171f --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +# Contingency 2027 — Convention Scenarios + +Working repository for Tim Evans' games at **Contingency 2027**. + +**Convention:** Contingency (Wyrd Sisters Games Club) · **Wed 27 – Sun 31 January 2027** +· Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton · five days of gaming +· Members-only event (£10/yr, £5 concession for GMs & volunteers) +· Advance game booking via **Warhorn**, with on-the-day sign-ups at the event +· Self-catering on-site accommodation, check-in from Mon 25 Jan + +**GM commitment:** two games a day — one afternoon, one evening — across all five +days. Ten slots; eight scenarios booked, two Sunday slots held as reserve. + +--- + +## The Slate + +| # | Day | Session | System | Game | PCs | Status | +|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| +| 1 | Wed 27 | Afternoon | The Walking Dead Universe (modified) | [**BLACK SUMMER — Last Flight Out**](games/slot01-black-summer/) | 5 | Outline | +| 2 | Wed 27 | Evening | Blade Runner RPG | [**AFTERIMAGE**](games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/) | 4 | **Port — con-ready (v2.2)** | +| 3 | Thu 28 | Afternoon | Call of Cthulhu 7e | [**DEAD AIR I — Ash & Amber** (1946)](games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/) | 5 | Outline | +| 4 | Thu 28 | Evening | The Dee Sanction | [**THE FAVOUR**](games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/) | 5 | Outline | +| 5 | Fri 29 | Afternoon | Call of Cthulhu 7e | [**DEAD AIR II — The Quiet City** (1962)](games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/) | 5 | Outline | +| 6 | Fri 29 | Evening | VANITY | [**ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP**](games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/) | 5 | Outline | +| 7 | Sat 30 | Afternoon | Call of Cthulhu 7e | [**DEAD AIR III — Full Volume** (2027)](games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/) | 5 | Outline | +| 8 | Sat 30 | Evening | Vaesen | [**THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY**](games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/) | 4 | Outline | +| 9 | Sun 31 | Afternoon | — | *Reserve — re-run of highest-demand game* | — | Held | +| 10 | Sun 31 | Evening | — | *Reserve — pick-up / open table* | — | Held | + +The three **DEAD AIR** games are a linked Call of Cthulhu trilogy running in the +same session slot on three consecutive days, so a player can book all three +without a clash. Each also stands alone. See the +[trilogy bible](docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md). + +--- + +## Repository Map + +| Path | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`docs/schedule.md`](docs/schedule.md) | Slot grid, running times, day-by-day GM load, prep deadlines | +| [`docs/warhorn-blurbs.md`](docs/warhorn-blurbs.md) | Player-facing, spoiler-free pitches for Warhorn submission | +| [`docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md`](docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) | The linking truth, arc rules and hand-off state for the CoC trilogy | +| [`docs/production-tracker.md`](docs/production-tracker.md) | Per-game status: scenario, pregens, handouts, art, playtest, print | +| [`docs/house-standards.md`](docs/house-standards.md) | The house one-shot format this repo is written to | +| `games/slotNN-/` | One folder per game — see the per-game README | + +### Per-game folder shape + +``` +games/slotNN-/ + README.md status line, file index, remaining prep + scenarios/ the scenario document(s) + characters/ pregens + print-ready sheets + handouts/ player-facing props + reference/ GM quick-reference screens + playtest/ desk playtest logs and fix lists + gm-utility/ GM console modules + print/ generated PDFs +``` + +Directories are created as their content is written; every game starts with a +`README.md` and a scenario outline. + +--- + +## Status + +**Framework stage.** The slate is fixed and every game has a synopsis, design +intent, act skeleton and open-questions list. One game (AFTERIMAGE) is already +convention-ready and only needs porting. Full scenario drafts, pregens, handouts +and playtests are the work ahead — see +[`docs/production-tracker.md`](docs/production-tracker.md). + +--- +*Private convention play materials — not for sale or distribution. All game +systems are the property of their respective publishers.* diff --git a/docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md b/docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6cf64f5 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@ +# DEAD AIR — Trilogy Bible + +*A Call of Cthulhu trilogy in three eras. Berlin 1946 → the Urals 1962 → Berlin 2027.* + +> *Every government that found it thought it was a weapon. It was an advertisement.* + +**Contingency 2027 · Slots 3, 5 and 7 — Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons.** +Same session slot on three consecutive days so a player can take the whole arc. +Each part is written to stand alone; nothing essential to a single afternoon +depends on having played the one before. + +--- + +## The spine, in one paragraph + +In the last winter of the war, a German broadcast-research unit recorded +something that was not a sound and pressed it onto lacquer discs. It is not a +weapon, though three states in a row have spent enormous effort proving to +themselves that it is. It is a **lure**: a pattern that survives by being heard, +that lodges in a listening mind and makes that mind a relay, and that needs only +enough minds holding it *at the same moment* to arrive properly. Every regime +that has possessed it has responded the same way — by building a bigger +transmitter. The trilogy is the story of that pattern getting a larger and larger +audience, from a flooded basement, to a closed city, to the open internet. + +## The truth (GM only, all three parts) + +- The material was catalogued by its German handlers as **die Folge** — *the + Sequence*. Nobody involved has ever agreed on what it is. It has no body, no + location and no demands. Its only appetite is **simultaneous attention**. +- A mind that has held the Sequence for long enough becomes a **carrier**: + outwardly normal, occasionally producing the pattern unprompted — humming it, + drawing it, tapping it. Carriers are not possessed and are not villains. Most + of them are victims, and the arc's cruelty is that every part asks the players + what to do about a person who has done nothing wrong. +- The Sequence propagates but does not scheme. There is no cult with a plan. + What there is, in every era, is a **committee** — men in a room deciding the + thing in the vault is an asset. The recurring antagonist of the trilogy is + institutional confidence, not a monster. +- **What actually happens if it completes:** not an eruption or a summoning. The + world simply becomes a place where the Sequence is one of the things that is + true, retroactively, and always was. Nobody notices. That is the horror, and it + is why the players' win condition is always *keeping the audience small* + rather than *destroying the thing*. + +## Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| 1938–44 | The unit's research runs out of a broadcast annexe in Berlin. Human listeners are used. The records of what was done to them are what the 1946 players find first. | +| Feb 1945 | The unit's director orders the material destroyed, then doesn't. He seals the sub-basement and floods it. | +| **Feb 1946** | **PART ONE.** An Allied technical-intelligence team and a Soviet trophy brigade race to the same address in a shattered city. What the players find is split three ways at the end of the afternoon — and *how* it splits is the players' choice. | +| 1947–61 | The Soviet share becomes a state programme. A closed city is built over the work. | +| **Oct 1962** | **PART TWO.** The programme's own staff, sealed in during a containment failure, in the fortnight the world is closest to ending for entirely unrelated reasons. | +| 1963–89 | The programme is buried, its paperwork scattered into archives. Discs go missing individually rather than all at once. | +| 1991–2010s | Archive dumps and private collectors. Lacquers surface at auction, mislabelled, cheap. | +| **Jan 2027** | **PART THREE.** Berlin. A disc has been digitised, sampled, and is about to be played to an audience of a size no previous era could have assembled. | + +## Arc rules + +1. **Each part stands alone.** Any part can be a player's only DEAD AIR game and + must land completely on its own. No part ends on "to be continued". +2. **Each part is a different genre of investigation.** Part One is a scramble — + competing teams, a physical dig, a deadline set by rivals. Part Two is a + closed-box procedural — no way out, everyone a suspect, the enemy is the + institution. Part Three is an open-city sprint — too much information, no + authority, a clock set by a scheduled broadcast. +3. **Each part escalates the audience, not the monster.** One room, then one + city, then everyone. The Sequence never gets stronger. The speakers do. +4. **Continuity is a reward, not a requirement.** Returning players should get + three or four specific payoffs per part — a name in a file, an object they + handled, a person they spared. New players lose nothing but the shiver. +5. **State hand-off explicitly.** Each part's Epilogue records what the table + decided in a short "carry-forward" block. The GM notes it and honours it in + the next part where cheap to do so. **Default assumption if a table's choices + don't feed forward:** the Soviets take the material in 1946, the programme is + shut down but not destroyed in 1962, and at least one disc reaches Berlin. + Part Two and Part Three both open with a one-line reconciliation note so a + contrary Part One result is absorbed, not contradicted. +6. **Nobody gets to be right.** Every climax is a decision where each option + costs something real, and all options are written. + +## Recurring elements + +| Element | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | +|---|---|---|---| +| **The object** | Twelve lacquer discs and a listening ledger | The discs, transcribed to tape and fed to an antenna array | One surviving lacquer, digitised, in a sampler | +| **The carrier** | A survivor of the wartime listening trials | A senior engineer who has been humming it for thirty years | A musician who doesn't know where the hook came from | +| **The committee** | Two intelligence services who both want it | A ministry that wants the array switched on | A label, a festival and a streaming platform | +| **The clock** | The rival team's dig | The scheduled test | The scheduled broadcast | +| **The choice** | Who gets it | Whether to end it or hide it | Whether to stop it publicly or quietly | + +## Tone and content + +Bleak, procedural, adult. Horror comes from paperwork and from decent people +following instructions. Keep the supernatural sparse: in a 3h30 slot the Sequence +should be directly *experienced* no more than three times, and the third time is +the climax. + +**Content warnings (stated at the top of each part):** Nazi human +experimentation and its documentation; the Holocaust as historical context; +Soviet state violence and coerced labour; suicide; institutional cruelty to +people who have done nothing wrong; in Part Three, self-harm and mass-casualty +risk. Safety tools stated in 30 seconds at the top of each table, no ceremony. + +## Art direction + +Ink and pencil, hand-drawn, never photorealistic — house style. Each era gets its +own register: **1946** ruined-city line drawing, heavy blacks, wet stone. +**1962** technical-drawing precision, isometric plant schematics, Cyrillic +labelling. **2027** cold flat vector and screen-grab textures. The Sequence +itself is only ever drawn as a waveform or an oscilloscope trace — never given a +face, in any era. + +Asset IDs: `DA1-ART-##`, `DA2-ART-##`, `DA3-ART-##`; handouts `DA1-H1-A` etc. + +## Open questions + +1. Is the trilogy pitched on Warhorn as a series with booking priority for + players taking all three, or as three unrelated CoC games with a quiet nod? +2. Pregens: three fresh sets, or one family/institutional lineage carried + through the eras (a name recurring across three generations)? The lineage + option is stronger for returning players and more work. +3. Does Part Three use modern-day CoC 7e straight, or lean on Delta Green-style + handler structure? Straight 7e is the default until decided. diff --git a/docs/house-standards.md b/docs/house-standards.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5615aab --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/house-standards.md @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ +# House Standards — Contingency 2027 + +Every scenario in this repository is written to the same format. This page is the +short version; it exists so a stand-in GM, or a future draft, does not have to +guess. + +## Structure + +- **Introduction → Act One → Act Two → Act Three → Epilogue** + (VANITY games use the four-act variant.) +- **3h30 (210 min) of play** inside the 4-hour slot, plus a 10-minute break — + about 3h40 wall clock. Plan **~3h15 of actual content** against that budget. +- Budgets: Intro 15 · Act One 60 · Act Two 90 · Act Three 30 · Epilogue 15. + These are ceilings, not targets. +- The session clock counts **play time** and pauses for the break. +- **Act Three always happens.** Compress Act Two if the clock has beaten the + table. Hard rule: at 2:45, go to Act Three regardless. +- The break sits at the end of Act One, on a cliffhanger. +- Every act ends with a **Pacing Note**: what must be true before the next act, + and the specific fast-track if running late. +- A one-shot **ends written** — closure or designed ambiguity, never an + unwritten "to be continued". + +## Timing table + +Every scenario carries a Session Timing Guide with a **GM Checkpoint** column — +a one-line test the GM can apply mid-session ("body examined, report started, +they know the test moved"). The checkpoints are what make the table usable in +play. + +## Clues + +Every essential clue has **three routes**: +1. **Automatic on the right approach** — the right question in the right scene + finds it without a roll. Rolls buy extra, not entry. +2. **A written fallback** — an NPC volunteers it, or a second location carries it. +3. **The Countdown** — the antagonist's scheduled move delivers or forces it. + +Essential clues never sit behind a search roll. Each act has at least one +essential and one optional clue. Clue trails are tables: # | Clue | Source | How +Found | What It Reveals | Type. + +## The countdown clock + +Antagonists move on schedule whether the players act or not, and each advance is +*felt* — a van glimpsed twice, a witness suddenly unwilling. Keep the opposition +one step behind the players until the climax. Pressure, not punishment. + +## Writing for the GM at the table + +- Scannable over literary. Bullets, tables, bold keywords. +- **Read-aloud text in blockquotes**, three sentences or fewer (the cold open may + run to six), always labelled "read aloud or paraphrase". +- **Mechanics inline and bracketed:** `[CoC: Library Use — the 1893 entry]`, + `[BR: Observation — the torn hem]`. Never send the GM to another page. +- Every NPC gets a **one-line essence** — who they are and what they want — + before any other detail, and appears again in the end-of-document NPC roster. +- **State the failure case** for every clue, scene and set-piece: what happens if + the players miss it, skip it, or break it. +- A 3–4 line **system crash-course** in the master rules block, so a stand-in GM + could run the game cold. + +## Slot logistics + +- Pregens always. Player count stated per game, with the scaling line: which + count it runs at, which pregen drops first, how splits adjust. Nothing + essential lives only on one PC. +- **Safety tools stated in 30 seconds, no ceremony.** One line in the + Introduction. Content warnings in the Overview and in the Warhorn blurb. +- **Slot Zero** (the first 15 minutes): seating and safety line → pitch each + pregen in one spoken tagline → players choose in five minutes → open in motion. +- **Party splits are a feature.** Parallel tracks, each holding half a + revelation, alternating in ~12-minute segments, each segment ending on a pull. +- **One set-piece per scenario**, with its own GM quick-reference page. Idle + players get jobs during it. + +## Endings + +- Aim the climax at a **decision, not a die roll** — every option costs + something, and every option is written. +- Write the chaos contingency ("if someone shoots") — the table that torches the + negotiation still gets a real ending. +- List the **compromise endings** players will invent. When a playtest finds a + new one, write it in. +- Epilogue: per-PC vignettes keyed to the outcome, then table debrief. Land the + last line on the theme. +- **Early finish** at 2:30: expand the vignettes, then run the bonus scene, which + is already written. + +## Versioning + +v1 draft → playtest → v2 → v2.1… A game is marked **convention-ready** only +after a full-session desk playtest lands inside the time budget with the fix list +applied. Each game's README carries the version, the playtest count and what +remains. + +## Art + +Ink sketch / pencil illustration, hand-drawn feel, never photorealistic. Each +scenario adds its own direction line on top. Asset IDs `[Slot]-ART-##`, handouts +`[Slot]-H[act]-[letter]`. Generated via `mj-gen ""`. diff --git a/docs/production-tracker.md b/docs/production-tracker.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..586da9f --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/production-tracker.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +# Contingency 2027 — Production Tracker + +Legend: **—** not started · **◐** in progress · **✔** done · **n/a** not required + +| # | Game | Outline | Scenario v1 | Pregens | Handouts | Art | Playtest | Print | Console | +|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| +| 1 | BLACK SUMMER | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | +| 2 | AFTERIMAGE | ✔ | ✔ *(port)* | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ ×3 | ◐ reprint | ◐ port | +| 3 | DEAD AIR I | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | +| 4 | THE FAVOUR | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | +| 5 | DEAD AIR II | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | +| 6 | ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | +| 7 | DEAD AIR III | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | +| 8 | MR PARKER'S DIARY | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | + +**A game is convention-ready when:** the scenario is at v2 or later, pregens are +audited against the rules, handouts and art are produced, it has survived at +least two desk playtests inside the 3:30 budget with the fix list applied, and +the print pack exists. + +## Decisions blocking work + +These are the open questions that stop drafting, gathered from the outlines. +Everything else can proceed without them. + +| # | Question | Blocks | +|---|---|---| +| 1 | Was Witchfinder Garrett on screen in a previous game? Nothing in the Continuum 2026 or Contingency 2025/26 material mentions him. | THE FAVOUR — Act One shape | +| 2 | Does Ilse Brandt (Part One) return in Part Two, and does the Brandt name carry to Part Three? | DEAD AIR II and III — Act Two shape | +| 3 | Trilogy pregens: three fresh sets, or one lineage across the eras? | All three DEAD AIR pregen sets | +| 4 | Confirmed Warhorn slot times. | All print, all timing tables | +| 5 | Which TWDU book edition is at the table? | BLACK SUMMER Runner stat block | +| 6 | Which Vaesen bestiary entry the ferryman is built on. | MR PARKER'S DIARY v1 | + +## Shared production + +- **VANITY rules digest** — copy the Continuum 2026 build into + `games/slot06-.../reference/`. No rewrite. +- **GM console** — one Contingency 2027 build with a module per game. The + AFTERIMAGE module already exists and ports; the rest are new. +- **DEAD AIR is one production with three outputs.** Shared bible, shared NPC + lineage, shared art direction, one print run. Treating it as three separate + scenarios is the main way this slate becomes undeliverable. +- **Art** — house style throughout: ink sketch / pencil, hand-drawn feel, never + photorealistic. Generate via `mj-gen ""`. Each game states its own + direction line on top of the base style. diff --git a/docs/schedule.md b/docs/schedule.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..01f27ab --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/schedule.md @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +# Contingency 2027 — Schedule & GM Load + +**Wed 27 – Sun 31 January 2027 · Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton** + +## Running times + +> **Slot times below are placeholders.** Contingency 2026 ran three slots a day +> (morning / afternoon / evening). Confirm the 2027 published times against +> Warhorn before printing anything, then update this table. + +| Session | Assumed time | Play budget | +|---|---|---| +| Afternoon | 14:00 – 18:00 | 3h30 play + 10 min break | +| Evening | 19:30 – 23:30 | 3h30 play + 10 min break | + +House rule: **3h30 of play in a 4-hour slot**, planned to ~3h15 of actual +content. Session clock counts play time only and pauses for the break. + +## The grid + +| # | Day | Session | Game | System | PCs | +|---|---|---|---|---|---| +| 1 | Wed 27 | Afternoon | BLACK SUMMER — Last Flight Out | Walking Dead Universe (modified) | 5 | +| 2 | Wed 27 | Evening | AFTERIMAGE | Blade Runner RPG | 4 | +| 3 | Thu 28 | Afternoon | DEAD AIR I — Ash & Amber | Call of Cthulhu 7e | 5 | +| 4 | Thu 28 | Evening | THE FAVOUR | The Dee Sanction | 5 | +| 5 | Fri 29 | Afternoon | DEAD AIR II — The Quiet City | Call of Cthulhu 7e | 5 | +| 6 | Fri 29 | Evening | ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP | VANITY | 5 | +| 7 | Sat 30 | Afternoon | DEAD AIR III — Full Volume | Call of Cthulhu 7e | 5 | +| 8 | Sat 30 | Evening | THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY | Vaesen | 4 | +| 9 | Sun 31 | Afternoon | *Reserve* | — | — | +| 10 | Sun 31 | Evening | *Reserve* | — | — | + +## Why the slate sits this way + +- **DEAD AIR runs Thu / Fri / Sat afternoons** — same session, three consecutive + days. A player who wants the whole arc books one time of day and never clashes + with themselves. Each part is written to stand alone for drop-ins. +- **Wednesday opens on the two most physical games.** Black Summer and + AFTERIMAGE are the least prep-hungry on the day (AFTERIMAGE is already + finished) and the best "arrival day" energy — a hard survival run and a + noir case. +- **Evenings alternate tone** against the afternoon's Cthulhu: Dee Sanction + (Thu), comic fantasy (Fri), folk horror (Sat). Never two bleak games in a row + on the same day. +- **VANITY sits Friday evening** — the loosest, funniest game on the night the + bar is busiest and the table is most likely to be tired and social. +- **Sunday is deliberately empty.** People leave, energy drops, and two reserve + slots absorb overspill demand or a re-run without new prep. If Sunday evening + never fills, that is a feature. + +## GM load check + +| Day | Games | Prep-heavy? | Notes | +|---|---|---|---| +| Wed | 2 | One (Black Summer) | AFTERIMAGE is a port — read-through only | +| Thu | 2 | Both | Heaviest day. DEAD AIR I must be fully finished well in advance | +| Fri | 2 | One (DEAD AIR II) | VANITY reuses the existing convention rules digest | +| Sat | 2 | Both | DEAD AIR III is the arc payoff — needs the most playtesting | +| Sun | 0 booked | — | Reserve | + +**Consequence:** eight new-or-ported games is a real workload. The three CoC +games share a setting bible, NPC lineage and art direction, which is what makes +the count achievable — treat DEAD AIR as one production with three outputs, not +three productions. + +## Prep deadlines (working back from 27 Jan 2027) + +| By | What | +|---|---| +| End Sep 2026 | All eight scenario drafts at v1. Trilogy bible locked. | +| End Oct 2026 | Pregens complete for all eight. First desk playtests on DEAD AIR I–III. | +| End Nov 2026 | Playtest fixes applied (v2). Handouts and art briefs written. | +| End Dec 2026 | Art generated, handouts laid out, GM console modules built. | +| 10 Jan 2027 | Print pack produced: sheets, handouts, GM screens. | +| 20 Jan 2027 | Read-throughs done. Everything marked convention-ready. | + +## Open logistics questions + +1. Confirmed slot times from Warhorn — the table above is assumed, not verified. +2. Table size cap at Searles (does 5-player seating work in the game rooms?). +3. Whether the DEAD AIR trilogy can be flagged on Warhorn as a linked series with + booking priority for players taking all three. +4. Power/table space for the GM console tablet in the evening rooms. diff --git a/docs/warhorn-blurbs.md b/docs/warhorn-blurbs.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4ed77c --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/warhorn-blurbs.md @@ -0,0 +1,155 @@ +# Warhorn Blurbs — Contingency 2027 + +Player-facing copy for game submission. **Spoiler-free.** Each entry: title, +system, player count, tone flags, content warnings, and a pitch of ~80 words. + +Copy these into Warhorn as-is once the slot times are confirmed. + +--- + +## Slot 1 · Wed afternoon +### BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT +**The Walking Dead Universe RPG (modified)** · 5 players · pregens provided +*Survival · downbeat · human antagonists · high lethality* + +New York, six weeks after the fall. The army is still flying people out of an old +airfield in Brooklyn, and they stop at dawn. To board you need a stamped transit +chit with your face on it. Between the five of you, you have three. Ten miles of +dead city lie between here and the runway, and the queue at the far end is longer +than anybody wants to think about. + +**Content warnings:** graphic violence and gore, a child in danger, summary +execution, crowd crush, PvP possible. Safety tools in use. + +--- + +## Slot 2 · Wed evening +### AFTERIMAGE +**Blade Runner RPG** · 4 players · pregens provided +*Investigation-heavy · noir · one foot chase · ambiguous ending* + +Los Angeles, 2037. A memory designer is dead in his studio and Rep-Detect has +been handed the case with a whisper attached: rogue replicant. The whisper comes +from a corporation, and it is a lie of the useful kind. You have until dawn. +Nobody in this story gets to be right — you only get to decide who pays. + +**Content warnings:** violence, a death investigation, themes of grief, memory +and consent. Safety tools in use. + +*Previously run at Continuum 2026.* + +--- + +## Slot 3 · Thu afternoon +### DEAD AIR I: ASH & AMBER (1946) +**Call of Cthulhu 7e** · 5 players · pregens provided +*Historical · investigation · competitive · part one of three — stands alone* + +Berlin, February 1946. You catalogue German science before the other lot get to +it, and it has been six weeks of frozen filing cabinets. Then an address in the +Soviet sector turns out to be a broadcasting annexe that officially never +existed, and under it is a sub-basement somebody deliberately flooded. By tonight +what is down there will be in somebody's hands. You get to decide whose. + +**Content warnings:** Nazi human experimentation and its documentation, the +Holocaust as historical context, conditions in occupied Berlin, drowning, +suicide. Safety tools in use. + +*Part one of the DEAD AIR trilogy (Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Each part stands +completely alone — play one, two or all three.* + +--- + +## Slot 4 · Thu evening +### THE FAVOUR +**The Dee Sanction** · 5 players · pregens provided +*Historical horror · protection job · moral trap · no clean ending* + +You are marked. You were going to hang, and instead you belong to Dr Dee. Now +there is a warrant in your hand and it says: go to the border country, and see +that Witchfinder Garrett comes to no harm. The same Garrett who put three of you +in front of a magistrate. He is there to hang a woman on Friday, she did not do +it, and something has been feeding him names for eleven years. + +**Content warnings:** witch trials and judicial execution, torture described, +religious persecution, a hanging on screen. Safety tools in use. + +--- + +## Slot 5 · Fri afternoon +### DEAD AIR II: THE QUIET CITY (1962) +**Call of Cthulhu 7e** · 5 players · pregens provided +*Historical · closed-box procedural · paranoia · part two of three — stands alone* + +A closed city in the Urals that is not on any map, October 1962. You have worked +here eleven years and long ago stopped being curious about the tapes. On Monday +the gates shut for an "administrative period". On Tuesday a technician takes off +his headphones and walks into the lake. On Friday, at six in the morning, someone +is going to close a switch. + +**Content warnings:** Soviet state violence and coerced labour, institutional +cruelty, suicide, medical horror. Safety tools in use. + +*Part two of the DEAD AIR trilogy. Stands completely alone — no need to have +played part one.* + +--- + +## Slot 6 · Fri evening +### ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP +**VANITY** (a house d6 game — no prior knowledge needed) · 5 players · pregens provided +*Comic fantasy · dungeon crawl · light rules · rivals* + +You bought a treasure map off a man in a tavern. Yes. You know. So did four other +groups this week. Here is the thing, though: the map is real, the vault is where +it says it is, and there is a great deal of gold in it. The old man who printed +the maps was not running a swindle. He was running a recruitment drive. + +**Content warnings:** cartoon violence, greed, one genuinely unpleasant moment at +the vault door. Safety tools in use. + +--- + +## Slot 7 · Sat afternoon +### DEAD AIR III: FULL VOLUME (2027) +**Call of Cthulhu 7e, modern day** · 5 players · pregens provided +*Contemporary · research sprint · escalating scale · part three of three — stands alone* + +Berlin, today. A lacquer disc came out of a box of Cold War acetates at auction +and sold for four hundred euros to a producer who liked the label. He sampled +fifteen seconds of it, and the hook has been going round the city for eight +months. You have almost certainly already heard it. At midnight it closes a +festival, live, uncut, streamed to two hundred thousand people. + +**Content warnings:** self-harm and suicide, mass-casualty risk, drug use in a +club setting, loud audio and flashing lights described in play (described only — +no audio or lighting effects are used at the table). Safety tools in use. + +*Part three of the DEAD AIR trilogy, and its payoff. Stands completely alone.* + +--- + +## Slot 8 · Sat evening +### THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY +**Vaesen — Nordic Horror Roleplaying** · 4 players · pregens provided +*Folk horror · archival mystery · slow burn · winter* + +A parcel reaches the Society in February: the field diary of an English +naturalist who drowned in a northern lake last October. It was posted three weeks +after he died. The first sixty pages are ordinary. The next twenty are in the +same hand and written from somewhere outside his own life. The last page is dated +nine days from now and it describes your arrival. + +**Content warnings:** drowning, dead children, an implied suicide, a community's +collective silence. The diary prop addresses players directly. Safety tools in +use. + +--- + +## Submission checklist + +- [ ] Slot times confirmed against the published 2027 schedule +- [ ] Decide whether DEAD AIR is listed as a linked series with booking priority +- [ ] Player counts confirmed against room/table sizes at Searles +- [ ] "Pregens provided, no system knowledge needed" stated on every entry +- [ ] Content warnings reviewed once more before submission diff --git a/games/slot01-black-summer/README.md b/games/slot01-black-summer/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8f147b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot01-black-summer/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +# Slot 1 · Wed 27 Jan, afternoon — BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT + +*The plane leaves at dawn. You have three chits and five people.* + +**System:** The Walking Dead Universe RPG (Free League), house-modified for +*Black Summer* · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) · survival journey with a +hard countdown · one large set-piece (the queue) · downbeat ending by design. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/black-summer-outline.md`](scenarios/black-summer-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, rules modifications, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1, then pregens. + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · chit props (physical handout — the +chits must be real objects passed around the table) · New York route map handout +· Runner stat block and modified threat tables · desk playtest ×2 · print pack. + +--- +*The Walking Dead Universe RPG © Free League Publishing. Black Summer © its +rights holders. Private convention play materials — not for sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot01-black-summer/scenarios/black-summer-outline.md b/games/slot01-black-summer/scenarios/black-summer-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d05bce --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot01-black-summer/scenarios/black-summer-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,152 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 1] BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT + +> *The plane leaves at dawn. You have three chits and five people.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). This document fixes the concept, the truth, the +shape and the rules modifications. The full scenario is written against it. + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Wednesday 27 January 2027, afternoon +- **System:** The Walking Dead Universe RPG (Free League) — **modified**, see below +- **Setting:** New York City, six weeks after the fall. Late autumn, rain turning + to sleet. From a Manhattan basement to Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn. +- **Players:** 5, pregenerated. Runs at 4 (drop the Soldier). At 6, split the + Journey into two tracks in Act One. +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** graphic violence, gore, a child in danger, summary + execution, crowd crush and suffocation, betrayal between player characters as a + supported outcome. Safety tools stated in the first 30 seconds. + +## Design intent + +1. **The dead are the weather; people are the plot.** Runners are fast, quiet and + almost never survivable — they exist to make every human negotiation urgent, + not to be fought. +2. **Scarcity is the whole game.** There are fewer transit chits than there are + player characters, and there is no clever solution that makes the maths work. + The scenario is a machine for producing that conversation. +3. **No heroism, no cavalry.** Nothing in the scenario rewards self-sacrifice + with a rescue. The show's register is exhaustion, not defiance. +4. **PvP is permitted and pre-written**, but never forced. Every anti-social move + a table might make has a written consequence so the GM never improvises a + punishment. +5. **The ending is small.** Some of them get on a plane. The scenario does not + tell the table whether that was worth it. + +## Player experience + +Six weeks ago you had a life. Now you are in a flooded basement on the Lower East +Side with four strangers and a rumour: the army is still flying people out of an +old airfield in Brooklyn, and they stop at dawn. To board you need a stamped +transit chit with a face on it. Between the five of you, you have three. Ten +miles of dead city lie between here and there, the rain is turning to sleet, and +every hour you spend deciding is an hour of the night gone. You will reach the +airfield. That was never the hard part. The hard part is the queue. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +The **airlift was cancelled eighteen hours ago.** The order reached the Floyd +Bennett Field detachment at midday and its commanding officer, **Major Ruth +Okonjo**, made a decision she has not shared with anyone below her: she kept the +processing tents open and kept stamping chits. Four thousand people are queued +in the field's grass runways, orderly, hopeful, and quiet, because they believe +they are in a line that leads somewhere. If they learn otherwise before the last +aircraft is loaded, they will overrun the wire in under ten minutes and everyone +— including the crews — dies. + +So the queue is not a queue. **The queue is the containment.** Okonjo's soldiers +are still taking chits, still checking faces, still saying *"next"*, and the +aircraft on the apron is loading detachment personnel, their families, and +nobody else. It leaves at first light. + +Two things can break it before dawn: +- **Sergeant Danny Vasquez** knows, and has started selling the truth in + exchange for places on the aircraft. He is why the players can find out. +- A **runner incursion** through the field's northern fence line, already + building in the marsh, on a timetable the players cannot stop. + +**Timeline before play:** +| When | What | +|---|---| +| T-6 weeks | The fall. New York goes dark in nine days. | +| T-11 days | Floyd Bennett Field airlift begins. Chit system introduced. | +| T-4 days | The chit black market establishes itself in the tent city. | +| T-18 hours | Cancellation order received. Okonjo suppresses it. | +| T-6 hours | Vasquez begins selling the truth. Play begins. | + +## Structure + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, chits physically distributed, safety line said | +| Act One — The Crossing | 60 min | 1:15 | Party out of Manhattan; at least one PC has lost something they came with | +| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the first sight of the field's lights | +| Act Two — The Line | 90 min | 2:45 | The truth known by at least one PC; chit count changed from its starting number | +| Act Three — Dawn | 30 min | 3:15 | The decision made at the wire; the aircraft resolved | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes, outcome named | + +**Hard rule:** at 2:45 on the clock the northern fence goes, whatever the table +is doing. + +- **Act One — The Crossing.** Manhattan to Brooklyn overnight. A Journey played + as three linked Challenges: getting out of the building, the water crossing, + and the approach through Flatbush. Runners here are environmental — the cost of + noise, never a fight to win. Ends on the field's lights across the marsh. +- **Act Two — The Line.** The tent city outside the wire: the chit market, the + families, Vasquez, and the processing tent. This is the long act and it is + almost entirely social. The players can gain chits (buy, steal, forge, be + given) and every route costs something the scenario names. This is where they + learn what the queue is. +- **Act Three — Dawn.** The fence, the crowd, and the aircraft. A decision, not + a die roll: say nothing and board on your chits; tell the crowd and lose the + window but give four thousand people a running start; or force the wire. +- **Set-piece:** the queue itself — a crowd-pressure sequence with its own GM + quick-reference page. Idle players hold the crowd cards. + +## Rules modifications (The Walking Dead Universe → Black Summer) + +Stated to the table in one minute; a stand-in GM needs only this block. + +1. **Runners, not walkers.** The dead are fast, near-silent and arrive in + seconds. Replace the standard walker profile with a **Runner** block: higher + Mobility, no shamble telegraph, and a Threat Level that rises in one step + rather than climbing gradually. There is no safe distance, only a safe + *situation*. +2. **No Haven play.** Drop the Haven rules entirely — nobody is building + anything. The scenario is Journey + Challenge structure end to end. +3. **The chit replaces the anchor.** Each PC's chit (or lack of one) is tracked + as a physical prop. Holding a chit is what the Drive and Issue mechanics + attach to for this game. +4. **Stress does not reset.** No comfort scenes, no recovery — the arc of a + Black Summer night is one-way. + +*Everything else is core TWDU. These modifications are deliberate and minimal; +if a fifth one appears in playtest, something is wrong with the scenario, not +the rules.* + +## Pregens (design brief) + +Five, each wired into the chit maths and to at least one other PC: + +1. **The one with the child** — has a chit for the child and none for herself. +2. **The soldier** — deserted the field detachment two days ago and knows the + layout, and one of the reasons the queue is wrong. +3. **The broker** — arrived with three chits and sold two. Knows the market. +4. **The doctor** — the only PC everyone else has a practical reason to keep alive. +5. **The liar** — has a chit that is not theirs and a face that does not match it. + +Nothing essential lives only on one PC. Starting chit count: **3 for 5 players.** + +## Open questions + +1. Confirm which TWDU book edition is at the table (core rulebook stat blocks vs + any later supplement) before the Runner block is written against it. +2. Physical chits: card stock with a stamped serial and a photo window, or a + simpler token? The prop is doing real dramatic work and deserves a decision. +3. How closely to nod at the show's canon — Rose and Anna, the western safe zone. + Current intent: flavour only, nothing required. +4. Is PvP at the wire acceptable at a Contingency table with strangers, or does + the scenario steer harder away from it? Affects Act Three's written options. diff --git a/games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/README.md b/games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1a6539c --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +# Slot 2 · Wed 27 Jan, evening — AFTERIMAGE + +*Three women remember the same childhood. One of them buried it.* + +**System:** Blade Runner RPG (Free League) · **4 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) +· investigation-heavy · foot chase in Act Two · ambiguous ending. + +**Status: PORT — convention-ready.** This scenario is finished. It is +[`Continuum2026`](https://github.com/slaguru666/Continuum2026) v2.2, three desk +playtests, three different endings reached, all inside 3:30, art complete. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md`](scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md) | Synopsis, and the complete list of what changes for Contingency | + +**Remaining prep:** copy the Continuum 2026 package in · apply the port changes · +reprint sheets and handouts · one GM read-through. No new writing. + +--- +*Blade Runner RPG © Free League Publishing & Alcon Entertainment. Private +convention play materials — not for sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md b/games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5f41e9b --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 2] AFTERIMAGE — port notes + +> *Three women remember the same childhood. One of them buried it.* + +**This scenario is already written and convention-ready.** It ran as Continuum +2026, Friday Slot 2. Source of truth: +`slaguru666/Continuum2026` → `01 Friday/Slot 2 Evening Blade Runner/AFTERIMAGE/`. +Version **v2.2**, three desk playtests (two full sessions from the GM and player +chairs plus an Act Two stress re-run), six art assets complete. + +Nothing in this document replaces the scenario. It records the synopsis for the +Contingency slate and lists exactly what changes. + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Wednesday 27 January 2027, evening +- **System:** Blade Runner RPG (Free League) +- **Setting:** Los Angeles, 2037 — Sector 9, the Kipple fringe, the ruined Santa + Monica pier +- **Players:** 4 (Rick, Jax, Kael, Sloane) +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot + +## Synopsis + +Memory designer **Elias Kade** is dead in his studio with a neural interface +spike through his temple, and Rep-Detect has been handed the case with a whisper +attached: *rogue replicant*. The whisper comes from Wallace Corporation, and it +is a lie of the useful kind. + +Kade's daughter walked out six years ago. Being a memory man, he rebuilt her — +three identical Nexus-8 units given the same curated childhood, installed in +three districts, visited once a month, each believing she was human and an only +child. One was retired in the street by a patrol sweep in 2036 and he never said +a word. Then he was given ten weeks to live, consolidated everything he had ever +stolen and everything he had ever done onto a single drive — and the real +daughter came home, found out what she had been replaced with, and there was a +struggle near the rig that she herself can no longer honestly remember. + +The players have until dawn. There is no rogue replicant. There is a woman who +may or may not be a murderer, two innocent women who do not know they are copies, +a corporate fixer who wants all three swept into a van as intellectual property, +and a drive that will either break or free everyone who touches it. Nobody in +this story gets to be right. The players only get to decide who pays. + +## What changes for Contingency 2027 + +| Change | Detail | +|---|---| +| Event header | "Continuum 2026 — Friday 24 July, Slot 2, Cranfield" → "Contingency 2027 — Wednesday 27 January, Slot 2, Searles, Hunstanton" | +| Filenames | `fri-slot2-blade-runner-afterimage.md` → `slot02-blade-runner-afterimage.md`; same for handout and sheet exports | +| Asset IDs | `F2-ART-##` → `C2-ART-##` (or keep and note the legacy prefix — decide once, apply everywhere) | +| GM console | Port the AFTERIMAGE module into the Contingency 2027 console build; verify the session clock, chase runner and prop fullscreen still work offline | +| Print | Reprint character sheets and handout pack — including the monologue card ×2, the one item flagged outstanding at Continuum | +| Playtest | None needed. One GM read-through, since the last run was July 2026 | + +**Do not re-cut the scenario.** It is timed, playtested and landed three +different endings inside the slot. Changes beyond the table above need a stated +reason and a new version number. + +## Open questions + +1. Keep the `F2-ART` asset prefix for provenance, or renumber to `C2-ART` for + consistency with the rest of the 2027 slate? Renumbering touches the handouts, + the sheets and the console module. +2. Evening slot at Searles — is there enough table light for the printed props, + and power for the console tablet? Affects whether the physical prop pack or + the console is primary. diff --git a/games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/README.md b/games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..285ff14 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +# Slot 3 · Thu 28 Jan, afternoon — DEAD AIR I: ASH & AMBER + +*Berlin, February 1946. Two armies are digging for the same basement.* + +**System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) · +competitive scramble · physical dig set-piece · the players choose who inherits +the thing they found. + +Part one of the [DEAD AIR trilogy](../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) +(Slots 3, 5, 7 — Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Stands alone. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md`](scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · handouts (the listening ledger, a +disc label, a T-Force inventory form) · art (`DA1-ART-##`) · desk playtest ×2 · +print pack. + +--- +*Call of Cthulhu © Chaosium Inc. Private convention play materials — not for +sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md b/games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c47e1fd --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,159 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 3] DEAD AIR I: ASH & AMBER + +> *Berlin, February 1946. Two armies are digging for the same basement.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Part one of three — read the +[trilogy bible](../../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) first. + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Thursday 28 January 2027, afternoon +- **System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e +- **Setting:** Berlin, February 1946. The British sector, the Soviet sector, and + a flooded sub-basement under a bombed broadcasting annexe that sits, awkwardly, + on the line between them. +- **Players:** 5, pregenerated — a mixed Allied technical-intelligence team + (T-Force / CIOS pattern: officers, technical specialists and interpreters sent + to catalogue German science before anyone else does). Runs at 4. +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** Nazi human experimentation and its documentation; the + Holocaust as historical context; the condition of civilians in occupied Berlin, + including hunger and coercion; drowning; suicide. + +## Design intent + +1. **A scramble, not a mystery.** The players know from minute one that someone + else wants what they want. The tension is speed and leverage, not deduction. +2. **The horror is a filing cabinet.** The worst thing in the scenario is a + ledger of names with listening times beside them. Keep the supernatural to + three moments; the paperwork does the rest. +3. **The city is the antagonist's ally.** Ruined Berlin in February — no light, + no heat, no reliable authority, a sector boundary that changes what a piece of + paper is worth depending on which side of a street you are standing on. +4. **The ending is a distribution, not a victory.** The material *will* leave + the basement. The afternoon is about deciding, under pressure, who ends up + holding which part of it — and that choice is the seed of Parts Two and Three. +5. **No competent authority.** Nobody the players can report to will act in time. + +## Player experience + +You are here to make lists. That is the job: get into German laboratories before +the other lot do, write down what is in them, ship home what matters. It has been +six weeks of frozen filing cabinets and it has been fine. + +Then a name on a captured requisition doesn't match anything, and an address in +the Soviet sector turns out to be a broadcasting annexe that officially never +existed, and a Russian major you have shared cigarettes with all winter suddenly +has no time for you at all. Under the rubble is a sub-basement somebody +deliberately flooded in the last weeks of the war. In it are twelve lacquer +discs and a ledger of people who were made to listen to them. By this evening the +discs will be in somebody's hands. Before the light goes, you have to decide +whose — and whether you tell anyone what they actually are. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +**Reichssender research group "Folge"** operated out of an annexe of a Berlin +broadcasting facility from 1938. Its stated brief was psychological broadcasting. +Its actual work, from 1941, was the capture and reproduction of a signal its +director, **Dr Anselm Vehr**, believed was already being transmitted and merely +needed to be heard properly. To find out what hearing it did, the group used +people: first volunteers, then patients, then prisoners. The ledger records +initials, duration and outcome. The outcomes column has four symbols and only +one of them is good. + +In February 1945 Vehr ordered the material destroyed. Then he did not destroy it. +He sealed the sub-basement, opened the water main, wrote a two-page account of +what he thought the Sequence was, and shot himself in the stairwell — where his +body still is, above the waterline, holding the account. + +**Twelve discs survive.** So does one listener: **Ilse Brandt**, nineteen, +subject in the 1944 trials, now living four streets away, working as a +*Trümmerfrau* clearing rubble. She has not spoken since 1944. She hums, and what +she hums is the Sequence, and she has been humming it in a city of ruins for two +years to an audience of nobody in particular. She is not dangerous. She is the +scenario's conscience: everyone in the story wants her as evidence, and the +players are the only people who might treat her as a person. + +**The competition:** Soviet trophy brigade officer **Major Yeva Kravchenko** has +the same requisition the players have and three days' head start on the digging +equipment. She is not a villain — she is competent, tired, and under orders she +cannot refuse. She will trade. She would rather trade than dig, because the water +is a real problem and she is short of pumps, which the players' side has. + +**What the Sequence does, on the page:** heard once, it is a fifteen-second +pattern that is not quite a tone. It stays. Days later you find you are tapping +it. The scenario's Sanity costs come from the ledger, from Vehr's account, and +from the third and last direct exposure at the climax. + +### Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| 1938 | Group Folge established at the annexe. | +| 1941–44 | Listening trials. 60 subjects. The ledger. | +| Oct 1944 | Ilse Brandt, subject 51. | +| Feb 1945 | Vehr seals and floods the sub-basement; suicide in the stairwell. | +| Jan 1946 | A captured requisition reaches Allied hands and is filed wrongly for three weeks. | +| T-3 days | Kravchenko's brigade begins clearing the site. | +| **Play begins** | The players get the file. | + +## Structure + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, the file in their hands | +| Act One — The Paper Trail | 60 min | 1:15 | The address identified; Kravchenko met; Ilse found or heard of | +| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the first descent into the water | +| Act Two — The Annexe | 90 min | 2:45 | Ledger recovered; Vehr's account read; the Soviets are inside too | +| Act Three — The Division | 30 min | 3:15 | The material distributed; Ilse's fate decided | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; carry-forward block recorded | + +- **Act One — The Paper Trail.** Requisitions, a bombed records office, a former + technician now working as a translator for the Americans, and an approach to + Kravchenko across the sector line. The act's real work is establishing that + everyone wants this and nobody knows what it is. +- **Act Two — The Annexe.** The dig and the flooded sub-basement. Cold water, + bad air, a body on the stairs holding a confession, twelve discs in a rack, the + ledger, and — once — the Sequence itself, played by accident. The Soviet team + arrives partway through, which turns the act from an exploration into a + negotiation conducted while standing in freezing water. +- **Act Three — The Division.** Above ground, at dusk. A decision, not a die + roll. The discs, the ledger, Vehr's account and Ilse are four things, and there + are at least three parties who want them. Every split is playable and each one + is written. **Default carry-forward for Part Two: the Soviets get the discs.** + Any other outcome is absorbed by Part Two's opening reconciliation note. +- **Set-piece:** the flooded descent — cold-water exposure, failing lamps, a + rising level and a rival team on the stairs. Own GM quick-reference page. + +## Cast + +- **Major Yeva Kravchenko** — Soviet trophy brigade. *Wants the discs delivered + and to go home.* Will trade pumps for access. Honest, and out of options. +- **Dr Anselm Vehr** — dead on the stairs. *Wanted to be believed.* His account + is the scenario's central handout. +- **Ilse Brandt** — subject 51. *Wants to be left alone.* Hums the Sequence. +- **Capt. Hugh Ferrers** — the players' own liaison. *Wants a clean report.* + The voice of the committee: whatever the players find, he will describe it as + an asset. + +## Handouts (brief) + +`DA1-H2-A` the listening ledger page (initials, duration, outcome symbols) · +`DA1-H2-B` Vehr's two-page account · `DA1-H2-C` a disc label · `DA1-H1-A` the +T-Force requisition that starts it · `DA1-H3-A` the inventory form the players +must fill in at the end, which is the scenario's last quiet joke. + +## Open questions + +1. Are the pregens all one nationality (British T-Force) or a mixed Allied team? + Mixed is richer and complicates the sector-line politics usefully. +2. Does Ilse Brandt survive as a written NPC into Part Two (aged 35 in 1962, + somewhere in the Soviet programme)? That is a strong arc payoff and needs + deciding before Part Two is drafted. +3. Historical register: how much real 1946 Berlin detail — sector boundaries, + rations, the Trümmerfrauen — before it becomes homework? Current intent: + heavy on texture, light on dates. +4. Sanity budget for the afternoon: the ledger and the account are both hits, and + the climax is a third. Confirm that is not one too many for a 3h30 slot. diff --git a/games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/README.md b/games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..af8abf1 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Slot 4 · Thu 28 Jan, evening — THE FAVOUR + +*Keep alive the man who condemned you. That is the favour.* + +**System:** The Dee Sanction · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) · +protection job turned inside out · a hanging assize on a deadline · no clean +choice at the end. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/the-favour-outline.md`](scenarios/the-favour-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 Agent pregens · handouts (Garrett's +commission book page, the indictment, Dee's written order) · art · desk +playtest ×2 · print pack. + +**Continuity check needed:** Witchfinder Garrett is described as *returning*. +No prior scenario in the Continuum 2026 or Contingency 2025/2026 material +mentions him — see the outline's open questions. + +--- +*The Dee Sanction © Paul Baldowski / All Rolled Up. Private convention play +materials — not for sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/scenarios/the-favour-outline.md b/games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/scenarios/the-favour-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f3a74b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/scenarios/the-favour-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,155 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 4] THE FAVOUR + +> *Keep alive the man who condemned you. That is the favour.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Thursday 28 January 2027, evening +- **System:** The Dee Sanction +- **Setting:** England, autumn 1596. A market town on the Welsh border, three + days before the assize. +- **Players:** 5 Agents of Dr John Dee — condemned men and women working off a + sentence that will never actually end. Runs at 4. +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** witch trials and judicial execution; torture described, + not depicted; religious persecution; the accusation of a child; a hanging on + screen unless the players prevent it. + +## Design intent + +1. **The protection job, inverted.** The Agents are ordered to keep alive the + witchfinder who put half of them in irons. Everything else in the scenario + follows from how badly that sits. +2. **The Agents cannot walk away**, and the scenario never pretends otherwise. + Dee's Sanction is a leash. The one thing the players fully control is *how* + they obey. +3. **Garrett is not a monster.** He is frightened, devout, and about to find out + that everything he has believed about his own righteousness was a transaction. + He must be playable as a man the table could almost pity. +4. **The innocent woman is not saveable and the guilty thing is not killable** — + at least not both, not in one night. The climax is a trade. +5. **Period texture over period accuracy.** Mud, cold, bad law, and the specific + Elizabethan terror of being *noticed by the state*. + +## Player experience + +You are marked. Every one of you was going to hang, or burn, or rot, and instead +you belong to Dr Dee — and the man who put three of you in front of a magistrate +in the first place was Witchfinder **Ezekiel Garrett**. + +Now there is a warrant in your hand, in Dee's own script, and it says: *go to +Ludlow, and see that Master Garrett comes to no harm before Michaelmas.* Dee owes +a favour to someone at court, that someone needs Garrett alive to testify at +Westminster, and so the debt comes down the chain until it lands on you. + +Garrett is in Ludlow to hang a woman on Friday. She did not do it. And something +in that town has been feeding Garrett names for eleven years, has decided the +arrangement is finished, and intends to collect him before the court ever hears +a word. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +Ezekiel Garrett, 51, has been a witchfinder for eleven years and has a +conviction rate that has made him famous. He believes it is God. It is not. + +In 1585, half-starved and failing, Garrett was given a **commission book** by a +grateful magistrate — a bound blank ledger for recording accusations. Something +came with it. Since then, names have appeared in that book in a hand that is not +his: usually overnight, usually while he sleeps, always people who can be made to +confess. He has never spoken of this to a living soul. He has told himself, +successfully, for eleven years, that he writes them himself and forgets. + +**The thing in the book — call it the Clerk —** has been trading. It writes the +names; he burns and hangs them; each execution is payment. The arrangement was +never open-ended. The book has eleven pages left and the Clerk has written +Garrett's own name on the last one. + +**Alys Corbett**, 34, herbwoman, was named on Tuesday. She is completely +innocent — she is not even a witch of the ordinary harmless kind. She was named +because she is the only person in Ludlow who noticed that Garrett's accusations +arrive in a rhythm, and said so in the wrong alehouse. + +**The favour:** Dee owes **Lord Bramfield** a debt from 1591. Bramfield is +building a case at Westminster against a rival, and Garrett's testimony about +that rival's household is the hinge of it. Bramfield does not care what Garrett +is. He cares that Garrett arrives in London breathing. + +**The trap for the players:** the simplest way to save Alys is to discredit +Garrett, and a discredited Garrett is a useless witness, and a useless witness +means the favour is unpaid, and an unpaid favour means Dee withdraws his +protection from five marked people. The scenario is built so that the players +find that out in Act Two, not Act Three. + +### Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| 1585 | Garrett receives the commission book. | +| 1585–96 | Forty-one executions. Garrett's reputation made. | +| 1591 | Dee incurs the debt to Bramfield. | +| 1595 | Three of the Agents are condemned on Garrett's evidence. | +| Tue | Alys Corbett named. | +| **Play begins** | Wednesday, the Agents arrive in Ludlow. | +| Friday, dawn | The assize. The hanging. | + +## Structure + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, Dee's warrant read aloud | +| Act One — Ludlow | 60 min | 1:15 | Garrett met face to face; Alys seen; at least two townsfolk turned | +| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on a new name appearing in the book overnight | +| Act Two — The Book | 90 min | 2:45 | The Clerk understood; the last page found; the favour's price known | +| Act Three — The Assize | 30 min | 3:15 | Friday dawn; the trade made | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; what the marks cost | + +- **Act One — Ludlow.** Arrival, the town, the gaol, and the excruciating first + conversation with a man who does not remember any of the Agents' faces. The act + must earn the players' hatred honestly and then complicate it. +- **Act Two — The Book.** Investigation proper: eleven years of records, a + bereaved family, a priest who has suspected for a decade, and eventually the + commission book itself. Ends when the players know what Garrett is and what + saving him costs them. +- **Act Three — The Assize.** Dawn, the market square, the scaffold. A decision, + not a die roll. Written options: let the Clerk take Garrett and lose Dee's + protection; give the Clerk a substitute (there are two candidates and both are + appalling); break the book, which frees Garrett to go on hanging people for + another twenty years; or hand Garrett to Bramfield whole and let Alys die on + schedule. +- **Set-piece:** the assize itself — a public hearing run as a scene with a clock, + where the Agents must act without being seen to act. Own GM quick-reference + page. + +## Cast + +- **Witchfinder Ezekiel Garrett** — *wants to be a righteous man and has almost + managed not to notice that he is not.* Frightened, devout, courteous, doomed. +- **Alys Corbett** — herbwoman, condemned. *Wants to be believed.* Innocent, and + aware that this makes no difference. +- **The Clerk** — the thing in the commission book. *Wants the last page filled.* + Never seen. Writes. +- **Lord Bramfield's man, Hollis** — *wants Garrett on a horse to London by + Saturday.* Polite, armed, and entirely uninterested in the players' consciences. +- **Father Wells** — parish priest. *Wants to have said something ten years ago.* + +## Open questions + +1. **Continuity: Garrett is described as returning, but no prior scenario in the + Continuum 2026 or Contingency 2025/2026 material mentions a Witchfinder + Garrett.** Is he from an unwritten backstory, a different repo, or the + Agents' *shared character history* rather than a played scenario? If he was + on screen before, his prior appearance changes Act One entirely — the Agents + would already know his face and he theirs. **Needs an answer before v1.** +2. Are three of the five pregens specifically condemned on Garrett's evidence, or + is that one PC's hook? Three is stronger and riskier — it invites the table to + unite on revenge in Act One before the complication lands. +3. Ludlow, or a fictional border town? Real Ludlow has a real assize history and + a real castle; a fictional town avoids the homework. Current lean: fictional + town, real county. +4. Does the previous Dee Sanction game (*The Princes Bride*, Continuum 2026) + share Agents with this one? If so, veteran players get a payoff and the + pregens should be built as the same five. diff --git a/games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/README.md b/games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6bb7227 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +# Slot 5 · Fri 29 Jan, afternoon — DEAD AIR II: THE QUIET CITY + +*October 1962. The gates are shut, the phones are dead, and the test is on Friday.* + +**System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) · +closed-box procedural · no way out · the institution is the antagonist. + +Part two of the [DEAD AIR trilogy](../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) +(Slots 3, 5, 7 — Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Stands alone. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md`](scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · handouts (programme file, the +array schematic, a censored letter home) · art (`DA2-ART-##`) · desk playtest ×2 · +print pack. + +--- +*Call of Cthulhu © Chaosium Inc. Private convention play materials — not for +sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md b/games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4c7642c --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,161 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 5] DEAD AIR II: THE QUIET CITY + +> *October 1962. The gates are shut, the phones are dead, and the test is on Friday.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Part two of three — read the +[trilogy bible](../../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) first. + +**Reconciliation note (if the table played Part One):** this scenario assumes the +Soviets took the discs from Berlin in 1946. If the Part One table sent them west +instead, open with one line — the material was recovered from an American +facility by a KGB operation in 1951 — and change nothing else. + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Friday 29 January 2027, afternoon +- **System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e +- **Setting:** **Sosnovy-9**, a closed city in the Urals — a place that is not on + maps, whose residents have no address, and which exists to house Programme + SIRENA. 22–27 October 1962. +- **Players:** 5, pregenerated — the programme's own staff: engineers, a + physician, a political officer, an archivist. They are not investigators sent + in. They already work here, and that is the point. +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** Soviet state violence, coerced labour and the camp + system as background; institutional cruelty to people who have done nothing + wrong; suicide; radiation-sickness-adjacent medical horror; the Cuban Missile + Crisis as a real, lived fear. + +## Design intent + +1. **A closed box.** Nobody leaves. The gates shut in the Introduction and stay + shut. Every problem must be solved with the people and materials already + inside the wire. +2. **The antagonist is a committee.** There is no cultist. There is a ministry + that has decided the array is a strategic asset, a deputy director who agrees + with them, and a schedule. Horror by memorandum. +3. **The players are complicit.** They built this. Some of them have been + humming it for years. The scenario never lets them stand outside the thing + they are investigating. +4. **1962 pressure is real and irrelevant.** The world is genuinely five days + from a nuclear exchange, and that is exactly why the ministry wants SIRENA + switched on. The crisis is not the plot; it is the reason nobody sensible is + available to stop this. +5. **Ending it costs the city.** There is no option where the array goes quiet + and everyone goes home. + +## Player experience + +You have worked here eleven years. The city has a cinema, a good bakery, a lake +with a fence around it, and no name — mail goes to a box number in Sverdlovsk. +What you do here is classified from your own families, and you have long ago +stopped being curious about the tapes. + +On Monday the gates close for an "administrative period". The telephones go to a +single line. Two men from the ministry arrive and announce that the SIRENA +array's full-power test, scheduled for next spring, will now happen on Friday, +because of Cuba. On Tuesday a technician in Building Four takes off his +headphones, walks into the lake, and does not come up, and you are the ones who +have to write the report. By Wednesday you will have read the 1946 file. By +Thursday you will understand that the array does not project anything at the +Americans at all — it simply makes the city loud enough to be heard properly. And +on Friday, at 06:00, someone is going to close a switch. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +The twelve Berlin lacquers reached Moscow in 1946 and became **Programme +SIRENA**: an attempt to weaponise the Sequence as a broadcast psychological +agent. Sixteen years of work has produced no evidence it can be aimed and +abundant evidence it does *something*, which in this system is enough to keep a +budget. + +**The array** — a phased transmitter across the ridge above the city — was built +to project the Sequence at range. It cannot. What it does is expose everyone +within about nine kilometres, simultaneously, at volume. Every test has raised +the number of carriers inside the fence. The programme's own personnel are the +sample and nobody has ever written that down in one place, because no single +department holds all three of the files that would show it. + +**Chief engineer Arkady Sorin**, 55, has been on the programme since 1949 and has +been humming the Sequence, unconsciously, for thirty years. He is the most senior +carrier and the kindest man in the city, and he has known for a decade that the +full-power test will finish something. His plan is not sabotage. He intends to be +in the transmitter hall when it fires, because he believes — correctly — that a +carrier at the focus becomes the instrument, and he would rather it were him than +the eleven thousand people who live here. The players can help him, stop him, +replace him, or turn him in. + +**Deputy Director Lev Bogdanov** brought the schedule forward. He is not +malicious and not stupid: he has read summaries, not files, and the summaries say +promising. He is the trilogy's committee in one man and he can be *persuaded* — +which is the scenario's central and hardest route, because it requires the +players to assemble, from three departments, a document that proves their own +work has been poisoning their own city. + +**The containment failure** in Building Four on Tuesday is what starts play: +one dead technician, one surviving colleague who will not stop tapping her +fingers, and a report that the players must write and that everyone above them +wants to say "industrial accident". + +### Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| 1946 | The discs reach Moscow. | +| 1949 | Programme SIRENA established; Sosnovy-9 built over the next four years. | +| 1953–61 | Six partial-power tests. Carrier count rises after each. | +| Mon 22 Oct | Gates closed. Ministry party arrives. Test moved to Friday. | +| **Tue 23 Oct** | Building Four incident. **Play begins.** | +| Fri 26 Oct, 06:00 | Full-power test. | + +## Structure + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, the gates shut on screen | +| Act One — The Incident | 60 min | 1:15 | The body examined; the report started; the players know the test moved | +| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the 1946 file being signed out | +| Act Two — The Files | 90 min | 2:45 | Three departments' records cross-referenced; Sorin's condition known; Bogdanov approached at least once | +| Act Three — Friday, 06:00 | 30 min | 3:15 | The transmitter hall; the decision made | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; carry-forward block recorded | + +- **Act One — The Incident.** A drowning, an autopsy, a colleague who taps, and a + report form with a box on it labelled *cause*. Establishes the city, the wire, + and that the players' own signatures are on things. +- **Act Two — The Files.** The long act: three departments, three partial truths, + one archivist who has been quietly indexing this for years. Splits well — + archive track and medical track, each holding half a revelation. The 1946 + Berlin file is in here, and returning players will recognise the ledger. +- **Act Three — Friday, 06:00.** The transmitter hall. Sorin is already there. + The options are all written: let him do it, take his place, cut the feed and + face what the ministry does to a city that fails a test, or expose the + programme and accept that eleven thousand people will not be allowed to leave + either way. +- **Set-piece:** the array test itself — countdown, hall, and the one direct + exposure of the afternoon. Own GM quick-reference page. + +## Cast + +- **Arkady Sorin** — chief engineer, carrier, thirty years. *Wants to be the + price.* Warm, funny, and completely resolved. +- **Deputy Director Lev Bogdanov** — the ministry's man. *Wants a result to + take back to Moscow this week.* Persuadable with evidence, and only evidence. +- **Nadia Vlasenko** — archivist. *Wants someone senior to read what she has + filed.* The players' best ally and the scenario's clue engine. +- **Dr Irina Kus** — physician. *Wants to stop signing death certificates she + does not believe.* Holds the medical half of the truth. +- **Yuri Petrov** — the tapping survivor from Building Four. *Wants to sleep.* + +## Open questions + +1. **Does Ilse Brandt from Part One appear here?** Aged 35, brought east in 1946 + as "material". This is the single strongest continuity payoff available in the + trilogy and needs deciding before v1 — it changes Act Two's shape. +2. Are the pregens all Soviet nationals, or does the party include a German + specialist taken east in 1946 (a route for a Part One character to return)? +3. How much Cuban Missile Crisis to put on screen? Current intent: radio + bulletins only, never a scene — it is pressure, not plot. +4. Naming: **Sosnovy-9** is invented, to avoid attaching this to a real closed + city with real residents. Confirm that choice stands. diff --git a/games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/README.md b/games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..45dc14f --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +# Slot 6 · Fri 29 Jan, evening — ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP + +*The map is genuine. That is the problem.* + +**System:** VANITY (Tim's own d6 pool game) · **5 players, one per class** · +4-hour slot (3h30 play) · simple D&D-shaped dungeon crawl · comic on the way in, +straight-faced at the vault door. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md`](scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, four-act skeleton, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens (one per class) · the map itself as a +physical handout · rival-party cards · art (woodcut/scratchboard, matching the +VANITY rulebook) · desk playtest ×2 · print pack. + +**Reuses:** the VANITY convention rules digest built for Continuum 2026 — copy +it in as `reference/vanity-convention-rules.html`, no rewrite needed. + +--- +*VANITY © Tim Evans. Private convention play materials — not for sale or +distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md b/games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6ef481a --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,141 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 6] ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP — a VANITY one-shot + +> *The map is genuine. That is the problem.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Built to the same four-act shape as *The Vain +Crown* (Continuum 2026), which is the proven VANITY convention structure. + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Friday 29 January 2027, evening +- **System:** VANITY (Draft 13) — the house d6 pool game. Table copy of the rules + digest carried over from Continuum 2026. +- **Setting:** generic high-fantasy, played broad. A market town, a bad road, and + a hole in a hill. +- **Players:** 5, pregenerated, one per class +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** cartoon violence, greed, one genuinely unpleasant moment + at the vault door. Nothing that needs a warning beyond the usual line. + +**System crash-course** *(for a stand-in GM)*: roll a pool of d6 = Attribute + +Knack + situation; **5–6 = Success**; one Success succeeds, extras buy damage or +manoeuvres. Fail with two or more 1s = **Stumble** (bank 1 Bane). **Push** +rerolls non-Successes once, always +1 Bane. Players spend **Vanity** (start 3) +for +1 die / go first / Refuse to Fall; playing a **Vice** earns 1 Vanity and +hands the GM a Bane. At **6 Banes → THE RECKONING** (2d6 table). No HP — +**Grit**; at 0 you are Taken Out (attacker may always Subdue). + +## Design intent + +1. **Simple, D&D-shaped, on purpose.** Tavern, road, dungeon, treasure. No + mystery structure, no clue trail. This is the loose Friday-night game and it + should feel like one. +2. **Funny on the way in, straight at the vault.** VANITY's register — the jokes + buy you the right to play the last twenty minutes completely seriously. +3. **The joke of the title is the premise.** Everyone at the table has done this + before. The scenario knows that, says so, and then makes the map real. +4. **Rivals, not monsters, are the pressure.** Three other parties have the same + map. They are competent, comic, and genuinely dangerous. +5. **The ending is a division of spoils**, and the division is the actual + scenario. Everything before it is set-up for one conversation about who + carries what. + +## Player experience + +You bought a treasure map off a man in a tavern. Yes. You know. So did four other +groups this week, because he printed a great many of them and he is not a subtle +man, and by Tuesday there were three parties of adventurers on the same road +being extremely rude to each other. + +Here is the thing though. The map is real. The vault is where it says it is. The +treasure is in it and there is a *lot* of it. The old man who printed the maps was +not running a swindle — he was running a recruitment drive, because the hoard has +a condition attached and he has been trying to give it away for sixty years. +Whoever carries the gold out of that hill inherits everything else that came with +it: the name, the debts, and the people still owed. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +**Ordric Vane** was a very successful thief who, in 1547 of the local reckoning, +robbed the wrong shrine and acquired a hoard bound by a **weighing curse**: the +treasure may only leave the vault carried by someone who wants it, and whoever +carries it out assumes the carrier's obligations in full — every enemy, every +debt, and the name Ordric Vane, which a surprising number of people are still +actively looking for. + +Ordric has spent sixty years failing to die and printing maps. He is not +malicious; he is exhausted, and he has been scrupulously honest in a way nobody +has ever noticed, because the maps say exactly what the terms are in a marginal +note everybody assumes is decorative flourish. (**It is `H1-A`, the map handout. +Put the terms on it in plain sight from minute one.** When the table works it out +in Act Four, the joke is on them and it is a fair joke.) + +**The weighing room** at the vault's threshold does the arithmetic: it measures +what each person is carrying against what they want, and the door only opens +outward for someone whose greed balances the load. A party can split the hoard so +that no one person qualifies — and then nothing leaves at all. + +**The rivals:** +- **The Company of the Bright Hand** — professional, insured, and led by a woman + who has done proper research and knows about the curse. She wants the players to + carry it out. She will be extremely helpful. +- **Three Lads Called Ned** — enthusiastic idiots. Comic relief that becomes + tragic if the players let them reach the door first. +- **Brother Anselm** — one man, no party, here to seal the vault permanently. Not + wrong. + +### Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| ~60 years ago | Ordric robs the shrine; the curse takes. | +| Since | Roughly 400 maps printed. Eleven parties have reached the vault. Nine turned back. Two are still in there. | +| Last week | The players buy their map. | +| **Play begins** | The tavern. | + +## Structure (four acts, VANITY house shape) + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, one practice roll each, map handed over | +| Act One — The Tavern | 45 min | 1:00 | Map read, at least one rival party met, the road taken | +| Act Two — The Road | 40 min | 1:40 | One fight won, one rival party outmanoeuvred or joined | +| Act Three — The Hill | 35 min | 2:15 | Vault entrance found; the two who are still in there met | +| Act Four — The Weighing Room | 60 min | 3:15 | Hoard reached; the terms understood; the division made | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Who carried what, and what came looking | + +**Hard rules:** the party reaches the hill by 2:15. The weighing room starts by +2:40. The division happens no later than 3:15 — it is the entire point of the +evening. + +**Pre-written cuts if running late** *(take them early, in this order)*: +(1) the Neds are met on the road rather than getting their own scene at the hill; +(2) one road encounter instead of two; (3) Brother Anselm is already at the vault +door when the party arrives rather than trailing them. + +## Cast + +- **Ordric Vane** — *wants to put it down.* Sells the map in Act One as a + disappointing old man in a good coat. Returns in Act Four. +- **Captain Ilsabet Crane**, Company of the Bright Hand — *wants the players to + be the ones who carry it.* Charming, generous, entirely straight with them if + asked a direct question, which nobody ever does. +- **The Neds** — *want to be adventurers.* Three of them. All called Ned. +- **Brother Anselm** — *wants the hill sealed.* The only honest broker, and + therefore the least popular person in the scenario. + +## Open questions + +1. Does this share a world with *The Vain Crown*? A one-line nod (the same + peacock motif, a mention of Nettlebrook) is free and rewards returning + players. +2. Five classes — confirm the VANITY Draft 13 class list is unchanged since the + Continuum build before the pregens are written. +3. The map handout is doing heavy lifting: it must be attractive enough that + players read it in Act One and dense enough that they miss the terms. Prop + design needs a dedicated pass. +4. How mean is Act Four allowed to be? A table that splits the hoard perfectly + gets nothing out — is that a valid ending, or does the scenario always give + them a way to leave with *something*? Current lean: valid ending, and funny. diff --git a/games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/README.md b/games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..961ac91 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Slot 7 · Sat 30 Jan, afternoon — DEAD AIR III: FULL VOLUME + +*Berlin, now. Eighty years of secrecy, and it goes out live at midnight.* + +**System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e (modern day) · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 +play) · open-city sprint · too much information, no authority, a broadcast clock. + +Part three — the payoff — of the +[DEAD AIR trilogy](../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) +(Slots 3, 5, 7 — Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Stands alone. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md`](scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. **This is the arc payoff — +budget the most playtesting here.** + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · handouts (auction lot listing, a +waveform print, the platform's takedown policy, a set list) · art +(`DA3-ART-##`) · desk playtest ×3 · print pack. + +--- +*Call of Cthulhu © Chaosium Inc. Private convention play materials — not for +sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md b/games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..83fac45 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,169 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 7] DEAD AIR III: FULL VOLUME + +> *Berlin, now. Eighty years of secrecy, and it goes out live at midnight.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Part three of three — read the +[trilogy bible](../../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) first. + +**Reconciliation note:** this scenario needs exactly one thing to be true — that +at least one lacquer disc survived and reached the West. Every Part One and Part +Two outcome allows that, including the ones where the players thought they had +destroyed everything. If a previous table burned the lot, the surviving disc is +the one Vehr kept in his desk rather than the vault, and that is a *better* +opening line, not a retcon. + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Saturday 30 January 2027, afternoon +- **System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e, modern day +- **Setting:** Berlin, January 2027. A Kreuzberg record archive, a Charlottenburg + auction house, a Neukölln studio, and **Teufelsberg** — the abandoned Cold War + listening station on the rubble mountain, where the closing set of a broadcast + festival goes out live at midnight. +- **Players:** 5, pregenerated — no agency, no badges: an archivist, a mastering + engineer, a music journalist, a historian of the East German security + apparatus, and one person who has been hearing it since childhood. +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** self-harm and suicide; mass-casualty risk; drug use in a + club setting; flashing-light and loud-audio content described in play (state + this one plainly — it is the only warning that might affect a real person at + the table); the trilogy's historical warnings carried forward. + +## Design intent + +1. **Too much information, not too little.** Part One was a dig and Part Two was + an archive; Part Three is a flood. Everything is online, most of it is wrong, + and the players' problem is triage against a clock. +2. **No authority to call.** No Delta Green, no Society, no ministry. Five + private citizens with laptops and about eleven hours. +3. **The scale finally lands.** One room, then one city, then everyone. The + climax is the first time in the trilogy that the audience is genuinely + uncountable. +4. **The quiet win is the hard one.** Stopping a broadcast publicly is easy and + catastrophic — it makes the Sequence a story, and a story is an audience. + Stopping it quietly costs the players everything they would need to prove they + were right. +5. **End the trilogy, but honestly.** The arc closes. It does not end with the + Sequence destroyed, because it cannot be — it ends with it made small again, + by five people nobody will ever thank. + +## Player experience + +A lacquer disc came out of a box of Stasi-era acetates at a Charlottenburg +auction and sold for four hundred euros to a producer who liked the label. He +sampled fifteen seconds of it. The hook has been going round Berlin for eight +months — it is on a playlist with nine million plays, and you have almost +certainly already heard it. + +You have until midnight. At midnight the producer's set closes a festival at +Teufelsberg, live, streamed, and the whole thing is built around the sample at +full length for the first time. Between now and then you have an archive that +holds a 1946 ledger nobody has looked at since 1991, a woman who has been drawing +the same waveform since she was six, a platform whose takedown process takes four +working days, and a producer who is not a villain, has done nothing illegal, and +will not stop for anything less than a reason. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +The disc is **one of the twelve**. It travelled west in a document dump after +1991, mislabelled, and sat in a private collection until the owner died and the +estate went to auction in May 2026. + +**Kasimir Adler**, 34, producer, bought lot 118 because the label was pretty. +He sampled fifteen seconds into a track called *Amber*. It did well. It did well +in the way things do when they will not leave your head. Adler has been sleeping +badly, has been extending the sample in each remix without deciding to, and has +built his festival closing set around the full uncut lacquer. He is not +possessed and there is no cult. He is a man with a good ear who found a hook that +works better than anything he has ever made, and the reason it works is the +reason everyone should stop. + +**The arithmetic:** every previous era's exposure was bounded — a basement, a +city. The festival stream is expected to hold somewhere north of two hundred +thousand simultaneous viewers, at the exact moment the uncut Sequence plays for +four minutes. That is the number. Nothing else in the trilogy has ever been the +number. + +**What happens if it completes** is not an eruption. The Sequence simply becomes +one of the things that has always been true, quietly and retroactively, and +nobody — including the players, including the survivors — will be able to +remember that it was ever otherwise. The Epilogue for that outcome is the +scariest page in the trilogy and it is entirely mundane. + +**The carrier** is **Mila Brandt**, 29, a mastering engineer and one of the +pregens' natural allies — a great-granddaughter of the Berlin trials (surname +deliberate; see Part One's Ilse). She has drawn the same fifteen-second waveform +in the margins of her notebooks since she was six years old and has never known +why. She is the only person alive who can tell, by ear, which parts of Adler's +set are the Sequence and which are just music. Using her means asking her to +listen to it deliberately. + +### Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| 1991 | Archive dump; the disc goes west, mislabelled. | +| May 2026 | Estate auction, lot 118. Adler buys it. | +| Jun 2026 | *Amber* released. | +| Sep 2026 | Playlist placement. Nine million plays by January. | +| Nov 2026 | Adler books the Teufelsberg closing set. | +| **Play begins** | ~13:00 on the day of the festival. | +| 00:00 | The set. Four uncut minutes, streamed. | + +## Structure + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line (including the audio/light warning), the clock on the table | +| Act One — The Hook | 60 min | 1:15 | The sample traced to lot 118; the auction record found; Mila identified | +| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the 1946 ledger surfacing in the archive | +| Act Two — Provenance | 90 min | 2:45 | The chain 1946 → 1962 → now assembled; Adler approached at least once; the platform route tried and failed | +| Act Three — Teufelsberg | 30 min | 3:15 | On the mountain before midnight; the decision made | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; the trilogy's last line | + +- **Act One — The Hook.** Modern research: streaming metadata, an auction + catalogue, a dead collector's estate, and the growing realisation that the + players have all heard this already. Fast, sharp, lots of screens. +- **Act Two — Provenance.** The long act. The archive holds the 1946 material + (returning players meet the ledger again) and a Soviet file from Sosnovy-9 that + arrived via a 1990s dump. Meanwhile: the platform's takedown process, the + festival's promoter, and Adler himself, who is reachable, reasonable, and + cannot be convinced by anything except the thing the players cannot prove. + Splits well — archive track and Adler track. +- **Act Three — Teufelsberg.** Night, the rubble mountain, the radomes, four + thousand people and a stream. A decision, not a die roll: cut the power and + cause a story; get Mila to the desk and have her surgically strip the Sequence + out of the master live; convince Adler in ninety seconds; or take the stage. + Every option is written, including the one where they fail and the Epilogue is + a perfectly ordinary morning. +- **Set-piece:** the last twenty minutes before midnight — a split-track sprint + between the stage and the sound desk, with its own GM quick-reference page. + +## Cast + +- **Kasimir Adler** — producer. *Wants the best set of his life.* Not a villain. + Tired, courteous, and completely certain the players are cranks. +- **Mila Brandt** — mastering engineer, carrier. *Wants to know why she has been + drawing it since she was six.* The cost of using her is asking her to listen. +- **Dr Ute Halbach** — archivist at the institute holding the 1991 dump. *Wants + someone to care about a collection nobody has requested in thirty years.* +- **Jonas Reike** — festival promoter. *Wants the stream to go out.* The + committee, 2027 edition: he has a contract, an insurer and no imagination. + +## Open questions + +1. **The Brandt surname link is currently the trilogy's whole payoff.** Confirm + it, or find a subtler thread — a returning object rather than a returning + bloodline. Decide before v1. +2. Straight CoC 7e, or Delta Green-style handler framing? Straight 7e is the + default, and the "no authority to call" design intent argues for keeping it. +3. Teufelsberg is real, currently a guided-tour site, and hosting a fictional + festival there is a licence worth taking knowingly. Confirm. +4. Does the failure ending get played out, or narrated? Playing it — an ordinary + morning where nobody remembers — is far stronger and needs careful writing so + it does not read as an anticlimax at a convention table. +5. The uncut Sequence is described, never performed. Confirm there is no + intention to use actual audio at the table — the content warning assumes + description only. diff --git a/games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/README.md b/games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..423e511 --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +# Slot 8 · Sat 30 Jan, evening — THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY + +*The last twenty pages are in his hand. He has been dead a month.* + +**System:** Vaesen — Nordic Horror Roleplaying · **4 players** · 4-hour slot +(3h30 play) · archival mystery · folk horror · a frozen lake at night. + +| File | What it is | +|---|---| +| [`scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md`](scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions | + +**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. + +**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 4 Society pregens · handouts (three diary +spreads — Parker's hand early, Parker's hand wrong, and the page that describes +the players) · the burnt parish register · art · desk playtest ×2 · print pack. + +--- +*Vaesen © Free League Publishing, based on the work of Johan Egerkrans. Private +convention play materials — not for sale or distribution.* diff --git a/games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md b/games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1a80fbb --- /dev/null +++ b/games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,164 @@ +# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 8] THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY + +> *The last twenty pages are in his hand. He has been dead a month.* + +**Status:** outline (pre-v1). + +--- + +## Overview + +- **Slot:** Saturday 30 January 2027, evening +- **System:** Vaesen — Nordic Horror Roleplaying (Free League) +- **Setting:** the Mythic North, February 1901. The Society's castle in Upsala, + then **Hällvattnet**, a sawmill parish in northern Sweden, in the fortnight of + the year when the lake is thickest. +- **Players:** 4, pregenerated members of the Society. Runs at 5. +- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot +- **Content warnings:** drowning; dead children (myling); a suicide implied in a + journal; a community's collective decision to let someone die. The diary + handout addresses the players directly, which lands harder than expected — + flag it in the safety line. + +## Design intent + +1. **The document is the monster's vehicle.** The diary is not a clue about the + haunting; it is *how the haunting travels*. Everyone who reads it becomes + eligible, and the players read it in the Introduction. +2. **Archival investigation.** Vaesen is at its best in registers, parish + records and ledgers. The solution is a name, written down, in a book somebody + burned. +3. **The grievance is a public works project.** The vaesen is not evil. It is + owed something, and the parish took it away in 1894 for good economic reasons. +4. **One vaesen, seen twice.** Once in glimpse, once at the climax. Vaesen's + monsters shrink when overexposed. +5. **The ending is a choice about a stranger.** Two routes out. One of them is + easy and passes the problem to somebody the players will never meet. + +## Player experience + +A parcel reaches Castle Gyllencreutz in February. Inside is the field diary of +**Edmund Parker**, an English naturalist who spent last autumn cataloguing the +fauna of a lake in the far north, and who drowned there in October. The parcel +was posted from Hällvattnet three weeks *after* the drowning. + +The first sixty pages are ordinary — weather, water temperature, a very great +number of birds, a man being slowly charmed by a place. The next twenty are in +the same hand, plainly, unmistakably his, and they are written from somewhere +outside his own life. They describe the parish as if from the water. They +describe the sawmill's owner in terms no living guest would use. And on the last +written page, dated nine days from now, they describe four people from the +Society arriving at Hällvattnet by sledge, and they get two of you right. + +## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page) + +Hällvattnet's lake had a **ferryman** — a vaesen of the drowned, whose office was +to carry the dead across and whose right was a name spoken over the water at the +inlet each Michaelmas. The parish did this for two hundred years without much +thinking about it. + +In **1894** the sawmill company dammed and rerouted the inlet. The rite stopped, +because the place where it was performed no longer existed. Since then the +drowned of Hällvattnet — including four children under the ice in 1897 — have +been stranded: not carried, not gone, in the water. The ferryman is not malicious +and it is not free. It cannot leave its office and it cannot perform it, and it +has spent seven years looking for a replacement. + +**Edmund Parker**, 41, naturalist, spent September and October on that lake with +nets and notebooks, and was the first person in seven years to look at the water +with genuine attention. He was not tricked. He was *asked*, in the way these +things ask, and — lonely, unmarried, in love with the place and privately +finished with the life he had — he agreed to a bargain he understood only in +outline. He gave himself to be *kept*. + +What is now writing in Parker's diary is Parker, in the sense that matters least. +It is him as the office has made him: an inventory-taker who now inventories the +living. **The diary is the recruitment.** It circulates; it is read; each reader +is looked at. Parker is trying — in the only way left to him — to find someone to +take the post so that he can finally go under properly, and he is being decent +about it in a way that makes the whole thing worse. + +**The weakness (Vaesen requirement):** the ferryman must be given back the name +it was called by before the mill, spoken over open water at the old inlet. That +name is in the **parish register for 1893**, which the mill's owner, +**Gustaf Lind**, burned in 1895 when a company lawyer told him the old rights +recorded in it might constitute an easement. A copy exists: the dean's visitation +transcript, filed in Härnösand, which the players can reach by telegram — or the +name can be had from the one person in the parish old enough to remember hearing +it, who will not say it aloud for any money. + +### Timeline + +| When | What | +|---|---| +| ~1690 | The rite established. | +| 1894 | The inlet dammed and rerouted. Rite lapses. | +| 1895 | Lind burns the 1893 register. | +| 1897 | Four children under the ice. | +| Sep–Oct 1900 | Parker's season on the lake. | +| 12 Oct 1900 | Parker drowns. Bargain struck. | +| Nov 1900 | The diary posted to the Society. | +| **Play begins** | February 1901, Upsala. | + +## Structure + +| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint | +|---|---|---|---| +| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, the diary read at the castle | +| Act One — Hällvattnet | 60 min | 1:15 | Parish reached; Lind met; the 1894 works identified | +| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the first glimpse from the ice | +| Act Two — The Register | 90 min | 2:45 | The burning known; the name's two routes open; Parker spoken to | +| Act Three — The Old Inlet | 30 min | 3:15 | Night on the ice; the name spoken, or not | +| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; what happened to the diary | + +- **Act One — Hällvattnet.** Sledge, cold, a company parish where everyone works + for one man. The Society's usual difficulty: the people who know are the people + with the most to lose by saying so. +- **Act Two — The Register.** The archival heart. The presbytery, the mill's + legal file, an old woman who will not speak the name, and a telegram to + Härnösand that takes hours to answer. Meanwhile Parker can be *talked to*, + through the diary, which is the scene the whole scenario is built to earn. +- **Act Three — The Old Inlet.** Night, the frozen lake, the choked channel where + the rite was performed. A decision, not a die roll: speak the name and release + the ferryman (which releases Parker, and the four children, and ends the + office) — or hand the diary on, which saves nothing and dooms a stranger, and + which at least two NPCs will suggest helpfully. +- **Set-piece:** the crossing to the old inlet over rotten ice, at night, with + something keeping pace underneath. Own GM quick-reference page. + +## Cast + +- **Edmund Parker** — the kept man. *Wants to be relieved of the post.* Courteous, + articulate, apologetic. Never threatens. +- **Gustaf Lind** — mill owner. *Wants the easement question to stay closed.* + Burned the register for a reason he still thinks was sound. +- **Kerstin Aho**, 79 — *wants not to be the one who says it.* Heard the name as + a girl. Will not repeat it, and her refusal is not stubbornness; it is the last + correct instinct in the parish. +- **Pastor Elias Ström** — *wants the four children to have been carried.* Keeps + the presbytery. Has been praying about this for four years without telling + anyone what about. + +## Handouts + +Three diary spreads are the core props: `H0-A` Parker's hand, early and ordinary +· `H2-A` Parker's hand, from the water · `H2-B` the page dated nine days ahead +that describes the players. Plus the burnt register fragment and the Härnösand +telegram. + +## Open questions + +1. `H2-B` — how specific can the page describing the player characters be, given + the players choose pregens in the Introduction? Options: leave two blanks for + the GM to fill in after selection, or describe them obliquely enough that any + two fit. The first is far stronger and needs a physical prop that supports it. +2. Which vaesen, exactly? The office described here is closest to a **Näcken** + given a psychopomp function, but Vaesen's own bestiary may have a better fit — + check the core book and *Mythic Britain & Ireland* before v1 rather than + inventing one. +3. Is Parker English by design (a foreign naturalist, an outsider's eye on the + Mythic North) or should he be Swedish for tighter fit? Current lean: keep him + English — the outsider is the point, and the Society is used to English + correspondents. +4. Four players or five? Vaesen's Society archetypes reward five, but the + Saturday evening slot is late and four moves faster.