UNSTABLE SIGNALS

Twenty five fixes clearing the Cold Case and Raid Racers backlog, covering the investigation loop, the Evidence Chain, the Burn Counter, the Zone ladder, possession contests and the security drone.

• Cold Case. Fourteen fixes. A session is now defined: three rounds, one investigation action per operator per round, which is what every clock printed in sessions was already counting. The source still sets the threshold, but the operator's rating now lands on the die at Good plus 1, Ordinary plus 0, Bad minus 1, and it sits outside the plus 2 stacking cap, so a printed stat line is worth something in the core loop. The Soft Lead is now a one tier threshold drop rather than a plus 1 on the die: under the old wording the plus 2 cap refused the spend to exactly the specialists built to use it, switching the whole soft lead economy off. Surplus Hard Tokens at Stage 5 buy the same currency, one tier off a climax roll. Stage 5 advances on 2 Hard Tokens like every other stage and the challenge it names is the climax itself. The Complications table has a trigger, roll at the end of any round the Burn Counter rose by 2 or more. Burn threshold shifts apply from the next action after the counter crosses. A Burn or clock trigger whose subject play has already resolved is void and is not replaced. The Cold Case natural 1 row replaces the core Fumble Table for CANVASS, PRESS and RUN. The Evidence Chain and the d6 Evidence table have a stated relationship: the Chain is the source list, the d6 table names what a token turns out to be. The two token cap attaches to the evidence, not to the row, so two routes to the same evidence share one allowance. Institutional contact is defined by a test, anyone whose position is defined by keeping, granting or enforcing a record, instead of a list of examples. And a new Reading a Case File Chain callout prints the capacity math, 8 tokens to reach Stage 5 at 2 per source, requires the GM to open a conditional source before a case becomes mathematically unwinnable, and standardises a source gate as a crew composition requirement that costs no action.
• Raid Racers. Eleven fixes. At Locked In the Jumper boards the target for 1 action and no roll, which is what makes Locked In worth driving for, and the Early Board from Chase stays the priced exception with its Latch. A natural 6 Commit that reaches the top of the Zone ladder with an advance to spare banks it, as plus 1 on the next Race Roll or a free board, rather than wasting the best result on the die. The FIGHT rating now modifies all three possession contests, the Check, the contested Lift and the grab off a carrier, at Good plus 1, Ordinary plus 0, Bad minus 1: these are the only three rolls that decide who owns the package and they ignored the stat entirely. The Line Read natural 6 is bounded, it may place an obstacle or an opportunity but may not directly remove a rival's LINE, Zones or actions. The Race Complication table now reads natural 1 on any NON OPPOSED Race Roll, which makes it agree with the Block entry instead of contradicting it. Block gains a positional prerequisite, your own Zone or one adjacent, and a Burned sled may not Block at all. LINE has a printed gain and ceiling: a successful Race Roll restores 1, up to the starting 3. The security drone that delivers Ripper Contact, the sport's only mortal wound, finally has a profile covering activation, move, target selection and a reach roll. A Raid Surge result with no legal target is rerolled. And precedence for a natural 1 inside an event is stated once: an action's own natural 1 line replaces the core Fumble Table, and where an action prints none, a natural 1 is simply an automatic failure. The forced Security Pressure tick for being STUCK with no action left now clears the obstacle, so one bad Flow cannot cost 2 Pressure.

Twenty one fixes in one day: eight approved balance and design calls across Iron Line, Raid Racers, Threat Response, Big Game Hunts and the solo core, ten Skirmish clarifications covering terrain, the Climax Table, melee, the Pressure Clock, stealth detection, grenades, the Medic and cover, and three approved Skirmish design calls on Breach Token generation, a new Deny spend and the Recon Drone.

• Iron Line. Perilous terrain now charges one attack per full inch moved through it rather than one per movement point. Because retreating and shuffling cost a point per half inch and advancing costs a point per inch, the old wording made backing out of a hazard exactly twice as lethal as walking into it, which meant the correct answer to a void field was usually to charge through. It is now the same price in every direction.
• Raid Racers. Vehicle layout is rebuilt so the sport's central engineering argument is felt by the drivers the fiction says care most about it. In your home terrain, front engine in tight and rear engine in open, you may reroll one failed Race Roll each round. In hostile terrain you take minus 1 as before. Neutral terrain applies neither. The old flat plus 1 in home terrain is retired: at a Good threshold of 2 plus it moved a number that was already on the floor.
• Raid Racers, The Bright Signal. The Tunnel Run now opens at Alert Level 1 and cannot be driven back to 0, and the Alert Level Effects table's 0 row is deleted, so the scene no longer promises an elevated alert state and then contradicts itself. The sensor drones run on a schedule rather than as a punishment for failure: one drone activates every round regardless of how well the Jockey is driving, and the Jumper's non contact suppression breaks a lock and pushes that drone back 6 inches. The passenger seat now has a standing job.
• Threat Response. Broken Wire scenario 2 is cut from a six turn clock to four. On a 2 foot board with the convoy moving 8 inches a turn and the bridge halving one of them, four was always the real window and the last two segments were decoration.
• Big Game Hunts. All five generic specimen types now carry a baseline stat line, derived from the published territory specific entries, so a generated hunt is playable without inventing the target's combat profile. Each line notes that the tier table overwrites Flesh and Mortal Wounds, that the Heavy tier adds 1 to Armor Rating on top, and that a territory specific entry replaces the line entirely. Competition gained an arrival round and an objective track per rival plus a new Competition Clock: once a rival has contact with the specimen it marks one step per Threat Phase on a SITREP, a natural 1 erases a step and advances the specimen's alert state, and the final step is the Kill Steal. Kill tracks stop while you have the rival engaged, and capture tracks keep running unless you put down the model doing the work, which is what makes the two non lethal rivals playable.
• Threat Response and Big Game Hunts. A side that fields exactly one model is now exempt from Priority Pressure. The rule is a tax on one model out of four or five, which a squad absorbs, but against a lone operator it took half that side's entire action economy for the round while the threat side spread the same penalty across a specimen and its competition. Losing priority still costs the solo side the initiative.
• Skirmish. Ten clarifications from the desk's Crossfire game. Terrain gains an OVERHEAD row for a raised passable structure, a catwalk, overpass, pipe bridge, gantry or mezzanine: Elevation for a model on it, Light Cover for a model at ground level inside its footprint, and it blocks no line of sight. Climax result 3, Structural Collapse, is now a full paragraph. The trailing side chooses the piece when the players cannot agree, a piece that carries or blocks a scenario objective may not be chosen, the wreck is Difficult Terrain rather than Impassable and grants Light Cover without blocking line of sight, models on it drop to the ground beneath with no falling damage, and models trapped in the footprint are displaced to the nearest legal ground. The Breacher's Demolition check at one step harder is written out as minus 1 on the die at your own threshold, the same step convention the rest of the line already prints, and Demolition gains the casualty clause it never had. Melee now says which die carries the Mortal Wound, the winner's opposed die, because the opposed roll is the Fight, and the natural 1 clause is printed in the melee section instead of being imported from the core book. The Pressure Clock's three triggers each carry a frequency, and the contested objective trigger fires at most once per round however many objectives are contested. Active detection is an area sweep: name a point within 12 inches and line of sight, and every Stealthed model within 3 inches of it rolls TACT or is revealed. Grenades gain a throw range, the thrower's MOBI in inches, and the Infiltrator's concussion grenade finally has a profile, a blast that Pins instead of wounding. The Medic's Stabilize accepts an Edge reroll but not an Edge plus 1, because the bands are raw die results, and a Medic may Field Dress but not Stabilize herself. Wound penalties apply immediately, mid activation included, and a model cut to one action that has already acted takes no further action. Cover does not stack: apply the single best cover modifier only.
• Threat Response. The same one step harder wording in Broken Wire, blocking the road with debris, is written out as minus 1 on the die and given the same casualty clause as the Skirmish version, so a rule the two books share does not drift apart.
• Skirmish, second batch. Three approved design calls. Breach Tokens are now generated only by a Flesh Wound inflicted by an ENEMY ATTACK, a Shoot, a melee, a grenade or a demo charge belonging to the opposing player. Terrain, Climax results, falling and your own side's fire generate nothing, so a Structural Collapse no longer mints a handful of tokens for a player who did nothing to earn them. A hit landing on an operator already on the Mortal Wound track still generates one; a result that is itself a Mortal Wound does not. Breach Tokens also gain a third spend, DENY: cancel one no-roll ability that operator uses this activation, a Medic's Field Dress, an adjacent auto success Override, any class ability resolving without a die, declared when the ability is announced and before it resolves, once per operator activation. The Tech Specialist's Recon Drone is fully specified at last: placed within 8 inches of the Tech in line of sight, repositioned up to 8 inches for 1 action, airborne so it ignores difficult and impassable ground and never controls an objective, and destructible, a legal target at AR 1 with no wound track that any confirmed hit or any blast covering it removes. One drone per game. An ability that hard counters the Infiltrator has to be answerable.

Forty five daily-desk playtest clarifications across Iron Line, Raid Racers, HVT, Threat Response and Big Game Hunts, including new vehicle rules, a new Raid Racers traversal mode, and a full stat line for solo enemies.

• Iron Line. The four sample doctrine lists now print their true totals and the two keyword-cost-multiplier errors are corrected, with the multiplier stated to apply to weaknesses as well as strengths. Punishment now reads 'each unbroken enemy it was in contact with', dropping the self-contradictory 'unengaged'. Berserk inflicts 1 Strain, not the undefined D1. Grim terrain cascades onto both armies, since terrain is friendly to nobody. Neither Hardened nor Implacable reduces Perilous, Grim, Degraded or Self-Destructive Strain, and Flying moves over Rough and Perilous without triggering either. A Broken unit acts normally until the Scrap Phase removes it. Unit footprints gained a recommended size per class plus a rule for compulsory moves blocked by a friendly. Wheel is measured as the chord with the pivot corner fixed, with a worked example, and range from the centre of the front edge got one too. The Relay Beacon carries the Relay keyword, Command auras stack, a Relay needs sightlines like a gun, and an ability with no legal target does not spend its Signal. Solar Lance has a 12 inch range. Spore Shroud can target either side, keeps its target's Strain, counts nothing off the table at game end, and cannot be broadcast in the final round. The Breacher's demo charge is command detonated, and demolition of a named structure is now a real action.
• Raid Racers. New Traversal Mode for events with no package and no target vehicle: a course of gates, Commit advances one and a natural 6 advances two, and the Zone ladder measures the sled's line rather than its distance. A natural 6 never carries a sled through an obstacle that has its own printed check; the second advance is banked as plus 1 on that check instead. New conversion table retiring Defense, ExoPlate and vehicle Heat, none of which exist in Operator Tactics: Defense N is a difficulty step on the acting model's own roll, 1d6 ExoPlate is 1 sled damage, and N Heat is N Security Pressure. In The Bright Signal, the dead cross reference to a Blockade Run scenario now points at Traversal Mode, Razborki's three incompatible impairment readings collapse to the Reliability roll, and every borrowed stat line is restated in the supplement's own currency.
• HVT. A Wounded operator may be deployed when no Active operator is available, rolling at the degraded tier, and a challenge that must be resolved with nobody deployable fails the mission. Impossible is now playable as printed. The challenge card's archetype line is named as the source of your proficiency: on the Good line rates Good, on the Ordinary line rates Ordinary, and absent from both rates Bad. The printed variable threshold is now a modifier against the Ordinary 4 plus baseline rather than a floor, matching the solo book and the RPG core: a printed 5 plus is minus 1 on the die, a printed 3 plus is plus 1, and you always roll at your own threshold.
• Threat Response. The Enemy Types table gained SHOOT, FIGHT and AR columns plus baseline GUTS, a 6 inch foot MOBI and default weapon ranges, which removes the largest source of referee invention in solo play. New Vehicles block: armour rating by hull class, 1 Durability per hit, 2 on a natural 6, 1 from a blast, and 0 Durability is disabled and stopped. New Mounted Models block covering shooting from a moving vehicle, shooting a driver through the hull, what dismounting costs, and whether occupants are hurt when their ride dies. Shooting into a melee that contains a friendly now works like Hostage Fire. Fumble results 3, 4 and 5 gained fallbacks so no natural 1 is a no-op. Solo melee applies FIGHT to the die and resolves a double natural 6 on modified totals with the attacker winning ties. Tempo rerolls only dice you rolled. SITREP now tells you to phrase every question so that Yes favours you. In Broken Wire scenario 2, the convoy deploys on the table so the Ambush Window has something to shoot, the roster is 400 points rather than an unbuyable 200, the collapsed bridge is a TACT check rather than a roll against MOBI, the mounted weapon deals 2 Flesh Wounds rather than an undefined plus 2 damage, the Escort Clock ticks once per firing activation, and the scenario finally names an extraction edge.
• Big Game Hunts. Environmental Merge is a type trait of every Type-3 rather than a rolled ability, and a rolled ability that duplicates a type trait is rerolled. Type-3 specimens gained separate merged transit and surfaced movement values, so a Hunting Type-3 can patrol without becoming targetable. Duplicate anatomy rolls stand as paired sites. A specimen takes one action per activation and two at Frenzy, which was the most used number in the book and was never printed. The anatomy columns are renamed Called Hit and Uncalled Hit and now have a stated trigger, with calling a revealed target free and a miss doing nothing. The Type-3 natural 6 Read beats the general draw two, and the attachment point it reveals now has a rule that breaks the merge for D3 rounds. The two Read actions per hunt cap does not touch the solo Field Read. And a setup SITREP's severity rider lands as table state in the operator's favour rather than changing the binary.