Where the Scale Ladder Lives

One piece of maintenance you need to know about before you edit anything.

It is an inline literal, in four places

The Scale table — tier name, lifts, shrugs off, speed — is written as an inline array inside computed-field expressions, not stored as files:

• .craft/file-types/character.json — the full seven-row band, in the scaleBand expression
• .craft/file-types/threat.json — the same full band
• .craft/file-types/faction.json — tier names only, in scaleTier
• .craft/file-types/location.json — tier names only, in securityTier
• .craft/file-types/equipment.json — tier names only, in scaleTier

If you change a tier's name or touchstone, change it in all five. This is the one place the system knowingly repeats itself.

The alternative — a scale-tier file type with seven files — was considered and rejected. Scale is a number that increments during play, not a reference a player picks; forcing a file reference onto it would make Ascension a file edit rather than scale + 1, and would put a load() hop between every sheet and its own tier label. The duplication is cheaper than that.

Changing the ladder itself

Seven bands is not sacred. Two variants that work:

Compress it. If you want a strictly street-level game, cap Scale at 3 and rewrite the top four bands out. Nothing else changes — the gap rule is relative, so a 0–3 ladder plays identically to a 0–6 one, just with a lower ceiling. Adjust maximum on the scale fields and the ladder literals.

Restretch it. For cosmic play, shift the touchstones up so Scale 1 is what this system calls Scale 3. Do not add bands past 6; add them at the bottom by making Scale 0 mean something. Seven bands is about the limit of what a GM can hold without a chart.

The escalation rule is a real dial

The city's response Scale equals the hero's Scale, arriving one arc late.

"One arc late" is the tuning knob. Half an arc late is a paranoid, breathless campaign where nothing is ever safe. Two arcs late is a power-fantasy campaign where the players get to enjoy each tier before it is answered. The shipped default of one arc is the setting where ascending feels earned and never feels safe.

Whatever you pick, encode it in the faction clocks rather than in your intentions. A Front with a 6-segment clock that you tick once per session is one arc. A Front with an 8-segment clock is closer to two.