Peregrine v4 — Beat Schedule (proposal)

Date: 2026-09-19 · Status: Approved (Sarah, 2026-09-19 morning): the mechanism, the placeholder round counts, and un-stick at 6 rounds. Unbuilt hosts wait for their games instead of falling back to the table. See §7. Not built yet.

Why it exists: the handoff spec and the season record say what each act contains. Neither says what moves the season from one act to the next, or when a document arrives. The Docket countdown (4 rounds until something turns up) has nothing to count toward until this exists.

Sources: handoff spec §5–§8 and §11, season-record.proposed.json (act_turns, proof_documents), solved-case doc §"Still open" (un-stick round counts).

1. Rules the schedule keeps

These come from locked decisions. The schedule adds no new rules.

• No timed drops. Nothing arrives by the clock. A beat waits on rounds, and a round is one whole game, recorded as one NightTake row. Prime Suspect banks a round only when a case closes.
• Acts fire strictly in order. Nothing can be bought or compressed.
• The app doesn't do the noticing. An act closes when the student draws its closing line on the board. The app never draws the line for them.
• The Docket never lies. A line is logged when its document arrives, and it carries its in-fiction day. It never records the moment the student happened to play.
• Routine play is never gated. A beat rides on play and never blocks it.

2. How a beat works

Beat { id, act, delivers: [docID], docket: [DocketEntry], afterRounds: Int,
       hosts: [gameKey] (≤ 2), requires: [flag or beat id] }

1. Arming. A beat arms when everything in requires is true. From then on the countdown shows afterRounds − rounds played since armed, plus the beat's hosts. That is where Could be in The Blotter · Client file 02 comes from.

2. Arrival. When the count reaches zero, the next round played in a host game delivers the document inside that game's result screen, as Something turned up. The document then goes on the file-room table and its Docket lines are written.

3. Guaranteed fallback. If no host is built, or afterRounds × 2 rounds pass without a host being played, the document goes straight onto the file-room table. The next session opens on the file room, as the burn does. The spec already uses this pattern for Act III (Before She's Back "if reached; guaranteed file-room fallback"). This proposal applies it to every beat. It matters today because none of the three named hosts is built: The Dossier, The Blotter (Fault in the Record) and Before She's Back are all build_status: proposed.

4. Only one beat at a time. The countdown shows the next beat and nothing else.

3. Act closes

An act closes when its closing line holds on the Connection Board. The next act then opens at the next session open, with the same cadence as the burn. That gives the moment a screen of its own: the Case Board's Act II · neighbor pinned hero is exactly this pause.

Un-stick (spec §7, confidence 65):

• When it fires: once every document an act needs is delivered and read, and unstickRounds rounds pass without the closing line.
• What arrives: Falconer's official version, as a document on the table, titled Interim review finding.
• What it does: it counts as the close. The student who doesn't notice gets the official version, on paper.
• Before the burn: there's no un-stick in Act I, because a case closing is not a noticing task.

4. The schedule

Days are in-fiction and taken from the spec's Docket (§6). Round counts are placeholders for Sarah to set. The solved-case doc lists them as "session data".

Two consequences to check:

• New Docket lines. Beats 4 and 5 need Docket lines the spec doesn't list. Both use the locked verb received, and their days are placeholders.
• Out-of-order days: resolved 2026-09-19. The pharmacy log moved from Day 12 to Day 29, which matches the season record's approved trace ("three weeks after the death"), and the desk file moved from Day 22 to Day 30 so it still follows. The Docket now reads in order without the beats swapping, which would have made the pharmacy log wait on the unbuilt Before She's Back.

5. What this needs from Sarah

1. Approve the mechanism: rounds, not time; a host game or the table; the act opens the session after its line holds.

2. Set the round counts (the bold numbers), or approve the placeholders for playtesting.

3. Beats 4 and 5: the Docket copy and days, and whether their hosts are right.

4. Un-stick: approve it, and set unstickRounds. A suggested starting point is 6.

5. The Dossier, The Blotter, Before She's Back: confirm the table fallback until they're built. Otherwise the season waits on three unbuilt games.

6. The content itself: all eight documents are unwritten in the season record. The engine can run on titles, as the file room does now, but a playtest needs the pages.

6. Build shape once approved

• SeasonBeats in PeregrineCore: the table above as data, plus pure functions armed(state), countdown(state, roundsSince) and arrivals(state, round: gameKey). The shipped SeasonBoard.countdown then returns real values instead of nil.
• SeasonState gains beatArmedAtRound: [beatID: Int] and a total roundsPlayed counter, bumped from the one place a round is banked (NightDebrief and CaseSession.bankTheNight).
• Session open: the act-advance check sits beside the burn (SeasonSession.open), with the same "next session" rule and the same tests.
• The Something turned up card on result screens: one shared component, placed in NightDebrief so every built game gets it at once.

Confidence: 70 that the mechanism is right. 40 on the round counts, which are placeholders by design.

7. Decision: unbuilt hosts wait (2026-09-19)

Sarah chose to have beats wait for their host games instead of using the table fallback while a host is unbuilt. Applied to the schedule, the effect is narrower than "the season stalls":

Open follow-up. The table fallback also covered a student who never plays a built host. For example, someone who never opens a Prime Suspect client file would never receive beat 4. The decision above concerns unbuilt hosts. Whether the fallback still applies to built-but-unplayed hosts is not yet decided.