🎲 Referee's Screen

The Core Roll

Lower is better. The target number is built from an ability score, then adjusted by specialization and gear.

Building a Target Number

A few checks use the full ability score instead of half — those are the ones the story frames as brute-force rather than finesse.

Ability Pairs

Rolled as pairs, ~30–69 before racial modifiers. Clamped 15–90. STA doubles as your hit points.

Races

Primary Skill Area

Your PSA grants +15 to any check that falls inside it. One choice, permanent for the run.

Damage & Injury

Damage comes off STA. At 0 the run ends.

Creature: Ravik

Territorial, six-limbed, fast. Can be avoided entirely with a successful RS check in the scrub.

Check Difficulty by Scene

Endings

Gear found in scene 1 raises your odds in three later checks — the search is the highest-leverage roll in the game.

What Changes Per Run

Every run re-rolls the following, so the shape stays but the details don't:

The Core Roll

Higher is better. Bigger dice mean wider swings — the combat processor can roll brilliantly or catastrophically, the social subroutines mostly land in the middle.

Die Ladder

Each subsystem starts at +1 before chassis modifiers.

Chassis Loadouts

Diagnostic is the hardest run — it can barely fight, but it opens the disable path in combat and the quiet path everywhere else.

Difficulty Classes

Each DC is re-rolled ±1 per run. DCs are tuned to their die: a d8 social check can never beat 8 + your modifier, so social DCs sit in a much lower band than d20 combat DCs. Live odds are shown on every choice before you commit.

Damage & Integrity

Integrity starts at 48. At 0, shutdown ending.

Hostile: Legacy Unit

Old-model security construct, isolated nine years, still executing its last valid order. It can be fought, disabled, or — on a successful parley — talked down without a fight at all.

Bond with Latitude

Bond is invisible during play and shows up in the closing manifest as transport, friendly, or confidant. It colors the ending rather than selecting it.

The Disclosures

Two separate disclosures matter. Voss asks at extraction — that sets the tone. But the ending hinges on whether you told Latitude, the transport intelligence, on the private channel in Act 6.

Running It Cold

If you're reffing this at a table instead of clicking through: the die ladder is the whole system. Assign a subsystem, pick a DC from the band below, roll, narrate.

What Changes Per Run

Re-rolled at the start of every contract:

The Core Roll

Same ascending ladder as Offline Protocol. What's different is that there is nothing to fight — every die in this game is spent establishing a fact or getting a person to say something they didn't intend to.

Die Ladder

Each starts at +1 before your method modifiers.

Methods

Auditor is now genuinely distinct rather than just good at looking: Procedure is what pulls the schedule, cites clauses, compels access and survives the review. Forensic reads bodies and rooms. Investigator gets more out of people and works from a thinner file.

Difficulty Classes

Re-rolled ±1 per contract. Live odds show on every choice.

The Five Facts

Each is established once or not at all. A failed check burns the hour and closes that line for the contract.

The Clock

There are five facts and three suspects and not quite enough hours to do all of it carefully. That shortfall is the game.

The Contradiction

Each suspect has exactly one document that breaks their account — but the option to produce it only means something against the one who is lying.

Hold it up to an innocent suspect and it still fits — that's the trap. They read it, hand it back, and tell you they flagged it themselves three days ago.

Reading the Reaction

The only reliable tell in the game is what happens after you put the document on the table.

Innocent suspects also give you the unflattering truth when pressed. People constructing a story rarely construct one that makes them look that bad.

Outcomes

The Nine Clauses

Your brief has six. The real document has nine, and the three missing ones are the useful ones.

All three are found together by pulling the full policy schedule from station records. One PROCEDURE check.

Endorsement 4

Filed six weeks before the death. Adds key-person cover on Ganz — eleven million on a man worth nothing to this policy the day before.

Clause 15.2 requires the countersignatory to record their designation. Somebody did, and it is typed:

Put 15.2 to the guilty party and they do not say it is wrong. They say it is not what you are turning it into.

Ganz's Partition

His account is purged on the decedent cycle. His personal partition is not, because nobody ever wrote a procedure for it.

Six files inside, each with three readings depending on what you already hold. Holt's counter-argument — that a decedent's partition belongs to the estate, not the Policyholder — is probably right. Getting in on the thin route becomes a bad faith ground at review and adds +2 to every defence DC.

Day Ninety

Clause 11.6 gives the Policyholder ninety days. On day eighty-one a firm in Reno files, and it does not argue you are wrong — it argues manifest error, that you did not do the paperwork.

Eight Outcomes

Upheld — wrong name is the one to sit with. A finding can be procedurally perfect and still be the wrong answer, and clause 11.6 makes it determinative anyway.

What Changes Per Run

The station does not repeat itself:

Because the guilty party is drawn fresh, you cannot solve this once and replay from memory — the evidence means something different every contract.

The Actual Choice

The policy pays eleven million on misadventure and nothing if a covered party did it. The brief says confirm and close.

So there are two questions in this game and only one of them is a puzzle. The other is what you write down once you already know.

The Argument

Stay with the vehicle. Search and rescue finds vehicles; it does not find people.

But the advice assumes a search, and a search assumes somebody noticed you were gone. Each trip rolls whether anyone is expecting you, and tells you which at the start. That one variable decides whether waiting is a plan or a way to die at your own Jeep.

Die Ladder

Three kits: the one who works on their own vehicles (+4 MECH), the one who knows the country (+4 FIELD), the one who over-prepares (15 L and a mirror).

Water

At 38°C that is 1.33 L/h walking and 0.39 L/h in shade. You start with eight to fifteen. The whole game is that ratio.

The Day

14°C at 04:00, 38°C at 16:00. Night travel costs a third of the water of afternoon travel, which makes it correct — and much harder to navigate. Missing an unvisited point in the dark is a 35% chance unless you are on high ground or have spotted it.

Running Dry

The status bar switches from litres to a countdown the moment you run out.

Terrain

Plus an hour per 600 m of ascent.

Seeing

Only tall things carry: the windmills, the headframe, the calibration masts. A windmill tells you at distance whether its head is turning — which is whether there is water in the tank.

Being Found

The Jeep figure climbs with the days — but only if somebody is looking. A note under the wiper triples your odds away from the vehicle.

The Jeep

Two of five cannot be fixed out there at all, which is why diagnosing is worth an hour even when the answer is no.

The Radio

Dead in daylight. After dark the band goes continental.

4% battery per half hour — the same battery that turns the starter.

The Other Situation

A second thread that pays in water rather than competing for it:

Ray Hollis kept the cairn logbook from 2001 to 2004. Everything else is downstream of forty-one entries in a freezer bag.

R.H.'s Stashes

A man who drove out forty-one times over four years did not carry every litre in each trip. He cached — jugs in contractor bags, under slabs, weighted with rock.

Reading the logbook is what turns a blind search into a directed one. On the hardest draw — nobody expecting you — ignoring the stashes kills you roughly 6 times in 7; searching for them flips it to surviving 4 in 7. The mystery is the survival strategy.

The Two Rooms

Not descriptions — spaces you move through, with things to examine and a memory of what you have already looked at.

Every description has three clarity variants. Time passes while you look — not much, but it passes.

The descent is a real gamble: two hours and water to go down, and there is a working standpipe in the maintenance bay that fills everything you own. Conditioned air means plant, plant means services, and services mean there is a tap somewhere. That reasoning is sound. It is also the kind of thought a man has at eleven percent body water.

The People

The trade is why he noticed a trench and recognised the inventory tag. The hobby is why he was in the valley at all, and why there were thousands of bottles.

Encounters

Eleven events, weighted by ground, hour, heat and anomaly. Something happens on 34–47% of arrivals.

The Cairn

Signing is the story's resolution, and it works whether you live or not. If you have found the truck, the entry carries its coordinates in capitals.

Clarity

Every description of anything strange has three versions, chosen by this number. Nothing is ever confirmed or denied — you simply stop being someone whose account would hold up. That is the entire supernatural mechanic and it is made of dehydration.