Third reading said the core criticism was gone — areas now arrive as playable
rooms — but that the result was over-stuffed: 'a room plus its operating
manual'. Asked for the single remaining gap, it said one word: integration.
The hand-written delve makes image, situation, pressure and choice read as one
thing; this presented them as stacked components.
So this removes blocks, not content. The image, the situation and the automatic
clue become one opening paragraph to read from. The decision collapses to
attempt/miss/or. Trigger, bane beat, fallback and skip-guidance become a single
GM footer line. The per-area truth drops the delve-level transgression, which
was already in the header and was being reprinted in every area.
Areas go from roughly thirty lines to eleven to eighteen.
A new invariant asserts the pass removed blocks and not information: for twenty
delves, every situation, onArrival, because, offer, decision, alternative,
trigger, fallback, temptation and roster must still appear in the rendered page.
Tests 24 -> 25.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The review's verdict after resolution blocks: 'still choices attached to
prompts, not spaces that naturally produce play'. The hand-written delve gives
a place — four people back-to-back around a dead lantern — and the decisions
fall out of it. DELVE gave a decision and asked the GM to imagine the room.
Every area now carries a situation: an occupant, what they are doing, what
changes when the party walks in, why (GM), and what it offers. 48 across 8
motifs, motif-scoped and dealt without replacement.
It produces chains nothing planned: in seed live-table-01 a grave-robber in
area 2 is trying to get a password's intonation right, and area 4 is a door
that needs one. Three routes to it now exist where there was a Wits roll.
Also closes the last two open complaints: the five roll-less decisions now have
real attempts (a voice you could not speak to was the weakest), and {priorCue}
resolves against a cue the party has actually seen instead of granting the
answer by fiat.
Tests 19 -> 24.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtest 3 put four players (Codex) through a generated delve with only the
player-facing text. Verdict: "a list of room-prompts, not a place", which
"expects the GM to invent too much of the actual game". It localised that to
one thing — decisions had a cue and a cost but no resolution.
Every decision now carries: an attempt roll, an explicit success outcome, an
explicit failure outcome, and an always-available alternative. 48 blocks across
8 motifs. The alternative is not optional: playtest 1 died on a gate the table
could fail without knowing, and the sharpest complaint this time was a door
whose only options were "guess blind and bleed Banes" or "pay time".
Features are now motif-scoped too, so all three furniture pools belong to the
fiction rather than a global list. 136 authored entries per theme.
Three new invariants make the failure modes unauthorable: every decision has a
resolution, no decision gates progress without an alternative, and every rolled
decision states both success and failure. Tests 16 -> 19.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Build steps 1, 2 and 4 of the plan in DESIGN.md.
core/ is pure JS with zero Foundry globals and 11 passing invariants. The
fiction model has one root draw — an APPETITE plus the ACCOMMODATION someone
made for it — and projects the motif, danger, prize, faction, cue fragments and
the appeasement move from it, so the fiction coheres instead of being four
unrelated draws. 336 kernels from 21 authored lines; 60 generated delves gave
51 distinct kernels.
Cue fragments are tagged by facet (institution/ritual/demand/wound/anchor) and
dealt without replacement. The facet progression across the arc reproduces the
hand-authored paper delve's structure, which had arrived at it by instinct.
Generation and table dice stay apart: pressure.mjs decides when a clock roll is
due and what it means, and never rolls. That is what makes the skeleton seed an
honest promise rather than a half-truth.
paper/ holds the hand-written delve and both playtest logs. spike/ holds the
instrumented harness that measured the Forge outside Foundry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tevansandClaude Opus 5