Afterwards

What the player should come away with

That they won. Say it plainly, because a young player who has spent a night being frightened needs to be told. Everybody who could be got off was got off, and the ones who stayed chose to.

That it cost, and that the cost was paid by people who said yes.

And that they did it by not being the one who carried them all — which is the answer this scenario is built around and which most tables never find.

What is still sitting there

Act One is routinely won with two of its best things unclaimed. Both are still available afterwards and both should be allowed to be found late.

The foreman’s order. Tace Orun had a list and it was not youngest first. It was the ones whose parents are already dead, then siblings together, then alphabetically, because she could not make herself choose between them and said so to a hall. Nobody has ever asked her why her list was in that order. She will tell anybody who asks her properly.

The two documents. Ladder has kept the only long-baseline record of the flare twins in human space — by hand, in a shed, for two hundred years. The flare log and the door log are in the same ledger.

The potential reshapes with the orbit. So the record that predicts the flare predicts the stray. That breaks the campaign’s central established lie, in Act One, found by a fifteen-year-old, and it is far better if they pick it up off a nail by a door than if anybody points at it.

Where it ends

Act One closes on the watch at van Maanen’s Star reporting something for the first time in three and a half centuries.

Act Two is Kapteyn’s.