SUBURBAN DEADFIELD MANUAL Cordon Authority · unclassified Run the Drill ▸
An abandoned office lobby, reception desk facing a bank of lifts, the wall clock beside them stopped.

Cordon Authority · timekeeping

The clock

There is no game time and real time. There is one clock, it is yours, and Fenwick keeps it whether or not you are looking at it.

Plate reception Vector House, reception. Clock stopped at sixteen-forty. Uncorrected.
Standing order 2

“Dusk is not negotiable and is not announced twice.”

ONE DAY · 24 REAL HOURS 14h LIGHT 10h DARK 06:00 20:00 · dusk 06:00 A FULL TANK · 50 AP · ONE EVERY 10 MIN 8.3h to refill — less than one day's light THE WHOLE RUN · 7 REAL DAYS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ⚑
One clock, and it is yours: dusk falls at 20:00 every evening and the run ends at the dawn after night 7, not after an eighth day. A full tank comes back in 8.3 hours, so a day's light is worth more than a day's AP — the scarce thing is you, not the hours.

The single most important thing on this page: Fenwick's clock is your clock. When it is half past eight in the evening where the server lives, it is half past eight in Fenwick and the dead are already moving. There is no compression, no speed setting and no separate game calendar to convert between.

The day is shaped like a day: light from 06:00 to 20:00 — 14 hours — and dark from 20:00 to 06:00, which is 10. Dusk is the same moment every evening, so you always know when you need to be behind something.

In game The clock. The hour is the real hour and the countdown is to the real 20:00. There is no control beside it, because there is nothing anyone is allowed to do to it.

What that costs you, in practice

It means Fenwick is not a game you sit in front of. It is a game you visit. You get one action point every 10 minutes, up to 50 of them, so a full tank is about 8.3 hours of not playing — see action points. Spend it in ten minutes at lunchtime and come back in the evening and it is full again.

It also means the thing everybody eventually learns the hard way: if you log off at 19:50 with your walls down, they are still down at 20:00, and you will not be there.

Nothing skips a night

There is no fast-forward. Ask the server to move the clock and it refuses outright; where a skip button would be, the panel reads “night N — it ends when it ends”. The clock is the opponent, and handing anyone a button to skip it would be handing them a button to skip the game. Not even the host has one.

This is also why nobody can be ahead of anybody. Everyone in a run is in the same night at the same time, and the morning report is the same morning for all of you.

How long a run is

7 nights, one per evening, so a run is 7 real days end to end. It ends at dawn after night 7 — not after a final day. There is no eighth day to play. Whatever you were going to do, do it on the seventh.

It can also end early, on any morning where the pact has become unwinnable. See the pact.

If the server goes down mid-run, you do not lose the nights you were not there for. Fenwick catches up by at most a day each time it comes back, so three days of downtime advances the run by one night rather than three. You still get all 7 — the run simply finishes later than the calendar said it would, with dusk still at 20:00 throughout.
In short
  • A game day is a day. Nothing is sped up or slowed down.
  • Light from 06:00, dark from 20:00 — 14 hours and 10.
  • A run is 7 nights over 7 real days, then the convoy.
  • Nobody skips a night. Not guests, not the host.
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