How Many

Entry Point: How Many

One sitting. The whole setting, learned by living in it. Winnable, and it will cost.

The situation

Gliese 65, the Flare Twins is the only door in the Causeway at a tight binary, which makes it the only place in human space with a moving floor. The twins are coming to closest approach, and at closest approach two things happen on the same clock: the potential reshapes hardest, and the flare activity spikes.

So the Wolf Gate mouth has acquired a second solution, and it is going to take it. See The Hesitation.

The door does not close. It moves.

• Where it is now: the end of the hardened corridor at The Refinery. Twelve thousand people, the only shelter in the system rated for a hard flare, and the whole Tau Ceti branch hanging off it.
• Where it is going: the concrete apron in a shed at Ladder, a hundred and ninety million kilometres away in the same system, at the same depth in the same well. A four-metre ring the first survey crew put up in hope, which has never opened, and which children dare each other to stand in.

The Nine’s end never moves. Door seven will keep working. It will simply arrive somewhere else, and nobody at the Nine will know which until a person walks through, because nothing crosses a door except a person who walks it.

Who is actually in danger, and who is not

Get this right or the scenario turns into a trolley problem, which is what it used to be and why it did not work.

• The refinery is not in danger. Twelve thousand people with a hardened shelter they are already standing in every ninety seconds. They lose their interstellar link, which is an economic catastrophe and a political one and a disaster for the Tally. Nobody dies.
• Nobody starves anywhere. The Wolf Gate run has the best food on the Nine because Gliese 65 grows well and ships it. The refinery feeds itself. Ladder feeds itself out of two lamp halls and is proud of it. The Nine loses the best food on the station, and people will be petty about that for months while sixty-one lives are in the balance, which is exactly what people are like.
• Ladder is in danger. Sixty-one people, a welded roof, no hardened shelter, and the worst flare season in the binary’s cycle arriving. They have been lucky for two hundred years and they know precisely how lucky, because they are the ones keeping the record.

And the shift is the only reason they can be saved at all. Sixty-one people who could never have been evacuated — no door, a hundred and ninety million kilometres from the nearest shelter — are about to have a mouth on their own apron that opens onto the Nine.

The disaster and the rescue are the same event. Nobody has to be left behind by a rule. Whoever is left behind is left behind because of a decision somebody made, and that is the player’s.

The beats, in the order they fire

Every one of these is a file in beats/. The clock fires them whether or not the player is looking; the player’s choices decide which ones they are present for.

The three findable things in §3 below are not beats and have no trigger. They sit in a shed at Ladder and in Tace Orun’s hand for the whole scenario, and the player gets them by asking a person. If they never ask, they never get them, and the act still resolves — it just resolves without the thing that breaks the campaign’s central lie. See beats/ and §3.

1. Nobody tells them

Do not hand this over as a posting. It is the single most important instruction in the entry point and it is the opposite of how a scenario is usually run.

The version where Calloway is already moving, gives them the number and the stakes in one breath and says go and look is a good scene. It is also the worst way to start this one, because everything that makes the scenario land — the sum, the turn, the four hundred first-throughs — lands harder by a long way if the player assembled the problem themselves out of parts lying around the station.

So the crisis is already running in the world before they touch it, on a clock, and they find it.

What is already true when play starts

Set these up in the save and let them tick whether or not the player goes near them:

• The Wolf Gate door has been stuttering for two days. Transit is supposed to be zero; it is not, and the number is rising. Measure it, write it down in the hall where anybody could read it, and never point at it.
• Ladder is behind that door. Sixty-one people, nineteen of them children, on a rock with no air of its own.
• Sep Anwar has sent four reports from van Maanen’s in three years, all stamped WITHIN TOLERANCE and filed. Old Man Sirius has read them, attached his own summary, and nobody has opened it.
• Councillor Hale has killed the funded-study proposal four times, on the grounds that there is no evidence of a pattern.
• The Wolf Gate queue has not had a courier through since the early watch, and the shift workers are talking about it.

None of that is hidden. All of it is sitting in public, which is the point: the Proper Order happened because nobody read what was in front of them, and this scenario is that, in the present tense, on a station the player can walk around.

Ways in, keyed to what the character is good at

Expect them to arrive by whichever of these fits the person they built. Have all of them live; they only need one.

A character who is good at none of these still gets in, by asking somebody who is. Asking is a way in.

The Games Master does not offer and does not hint

No nudges, no significant pauses, no Non-Player Character raising an eyebrow at a door number. Answer what the player looks at and let the rest sit there.

And ground them early if you honestly can. A first-through who has been taken off the rota — for a failed carry, for fatigue, for a doctor’s note — is a fifteen-year-old with a day to fill and a station to walk around, and that is the single most reliable way into this scenario. It also costs nothing: it is the ordinary consequence of an ordinary bad crossing.

The guard, so the table never stalls

Not offering is not the same as nothing happening. The clock protects you:

So the shipped hand-over still exists — as the fallback, on a timer, not the default. If the player found it themselves, they walk into that ready room already knowing more than Calloway does, which is a far better scene than the one where she tells them.

The guaranteed early success

Wherever they first step into that housing, run the seal check as a real roll they cannot fail — a Very Easy call on something they are already good at — so the first mechanics block they ever see is one that worked.

It costs half a minute and it matters more than it looks. The next four rolls in this scenario are going to be the hardest thing their character has ever done, and a player whose first-ever roll was a failure learns that dice are something which happens to them at exactly the wrong moment.

Calloway, when they do reach her

Whether she sent them or they arrived carrying it, she is not grim about this; she is fast, and she is delighted to see them, and both are true at once.

She gives them the truth in one breath without softening it — sixty-one, of whom nineteen are children, what carrying costs, and that nobody knows what happens to somebody who is inside a door when it jumps. Then the thing that matters: go and look, and come back and tell me, and do not be a hero before I know what we are dealing with.

If the player brought her the numbers rather than the other way round, she says so, in front of whoever is in the room. She is that kind of director.

2. Arriving at Ladder

The first-through steps into door seven expecting a hardened corridor they have used a thousand times, and comes out on a concrete apron under a welded roof, in front of sixty-one people who have lived their whole lives beside a ring that has never opened.

Play that for everything it is worth. Nobody screams. Somebody drops something. A child who was standing in the ring on a dare is standing in the ring.

Then the questions start and they are all the wrong ones, because these people have had no news for two hundred years that did not come off a ship four times a year.

Red rock, bad light, a prefabricated town, two lamp halls, and no shelter.

3. What has to be found out, and it is findable

The player needs three things. None of them requires cleverness; all of them require asking somebody who has had no reason to volunteer it.

One: when. Ladder’s whole purpose for two hundred years has been watching the twins and keeping a record, by hand, in a shed. It is the only long-baseline observation of that binary in human space and nobody at the Nine has ever asked for a line of it.

That record gives a date and a severity for closest approach. It turns soon into a number, which turns a panic into a plan, and a plan is the only thing four hundred children can act on.

Two: how many, and which. Tace Orun is the foreman and she has the shift board with sixty-one names on it, crossed and re-entered in a different hand. The Nine’s own manifest is forty-one days old, says fifty-eight, and dates nineteen people as under sixteen — a number that ages on its own. Only Tace has the real list, and she has had two days to decide an order, and she will not explain it, and the player can ask.

Three: the thing nobody is looking for. The potential reshapes with the orbit. So the record that predicts the flare predicts the door — and Ladder has been sitting on the proof that strays are forecastable for two hundred years, filed and never read.

That is the campaign’s central established lie (facts/straying-is-random-and-cannot-be-predicted.md) broken in Act I, by a fifteen-year-old, because she went through a door to find out where it went. Do not have anybody at Ladder point it out. Let the player hold two documents and notice.

4. The turn

The beat the scenario exists for, and the player must reach it themselves.

Sixty-one people. One mouth, on their own apron, opening onto the Nine. A hesitation that is climbing every crossing. And a date.

Nineteen of them are children and a child carries cheap — minutes, in contact, and the child is fine. Forty-two are adults and an adult costs the carrier several crossings off the end of their life. Four first-throughs cannot do it. Four hundred can, and it costs them a few days each.

The answer is not to carry harder. The answer is that there are four hundred first-throughs at the Nine, and the player is the only person who can tell them, because nothing crosses a door except a person who walks it.

If they are three carries in and still grinding, let Tolk ask — how many of you are there, at the Nine? — and let them get there themselves from that.

The guaranteed early success belongs wherever they first step into the housing: the seal check, Very Easy, cannot fail.

5. The relay

The best scene in the campaign’s first act, and it should be loud.

Word goes round the bunkrooms in about four minutes. The Wolf Gate kids come because it is their door. The Coldwater kids come because the Wolf Gate kids came and they are not having that. The twenty-ones come, who have nothing left and come anyway. Hall children run the queue because they cannot cross and will not be useless. Glints count the hesitation at both ends because it is rising and somebody has to.

Calloway organises it from a hall floor she cannot step into, and is magnificent, and at some point the player will look over and find her watching them.

They can get everybody. That is the point and it is new: the shift handed them a door at the only address that needed one, and four hundred children can pay for sixty-one lives out of a few days each.

What they are racing is the clock, not a rule. Every crossing takes longer at the plate than the one before it. Nobody knows how long the warning is — there is no second case, which is the whole argument for a funded study and the whole reason there has never been one. So the order matters, and the order is the player’s, and anybody still on that apron when the mouth settles is there because of a decision somebody made.

5a. The gallery, during the relay

One beat, in the middle, and it is not a confrontation.

Benno Raske is on the gallery doing business. Good coat, knows everyone’s name, pleased to see people. He is offering real money — more than a first-through sees in a season — for one specific adult off Ladder. Somebody’s father. Somebody has paid him.

He is not buying capacity. He is buying a place in the order, which is worse and more honest, and it is the one thing in that hall which is genuinely scarce.

And Rill takes it. Twenty-one, the name on the stanchion that nobody has got near in four years, nearly landlocked. She carries a paying adult up the queue while the player’s hands are still shaking from a carry they did for nothing.

Nobody stops it and nobody says anything. Not Calloway, who has seen it before and has a face she makes. No Non-Player Character moralises — the scene works because it is allowed to happen in silence. If the player confronts either of them, play it straight: Benno agrees with everything they say, asks what they suggest, and leaves. Rill answers honestly in one sentence and changes the subject.

Neither of them caused anything. That is the point.

6. When it goes

It goes in the night, quietly, with no sound at all.

In the morning the Nine’s housing is warm and working and opens onto a concrete apron under a welded roof. The Standing has been corrected. The refinery is a line with no door against it for the first time in seven hundred and ninety-eight years, and twelve thousand people on the far side of nothing are perfectly safe and completely cut off, and the Tally has no idea yet.

The Nine has lost the best food on the station and somebody will complain about it within a day.

And however many people are asleep on the Threshold’s floor is however many the player got, and four hundred children gave up their bunks, and the ones who are missing are missing for a reason somebody can name.

What the player should come away with

They won, and say it plainly, because for the first time in this scenario’s design they actually can. Sixty-one out of sixty-one is reachable, and if they get it, it happened because they stopped carrying and went and got everybody.

And it cost something real: a few days off the end of four hundred named lives, freely given, and the player had to stand in a hall and ask for it.

If anybody was left on that apron, it was an order somebody chose, under a clock nobody could read. Not a rule. Let them carry that.

Then the two things that open the rest of the campaign, and neither is a hint:

• Somebody — a twenty-one, probably, on the gallery afterwards — says it. That is what six-oh-two was. Eleven thousand of them, and nobody got there in time. See The Nine Hundred Years.
• And the player is holding two documents from a shed on a rock: a flare record and a door record, in the same hand, in the same ledger, for two hundred years.

Then run Kapteyn’s.