Dry Run Recap - Benchmark Opus Plugin Smoke - 2026-09-19 Draft

The Party

• Brannor Stonehelm — mountain dwarf fighter, 1st level
• Maevis Thornbury — hill dwarf cleric of the Life domain, 1st level
• Pip Underbough — lightfoot halfling rogue, 1st level
• Tock Fettlewhistle — rock gnome artificer, 1st level
• Ysolde Vane — high elf wizard, 1st level

What Happened

The first night out of Reme

The party left the Tradeway at the end of a long day and made camp in a small clearing with a grassy hillside at their backs. Past the firelight the scrub went black, and the wind hissed through it. They set three watches: Brannor and Ysolde first, Maevis and Pip second, Tock last. Everyone slept in their armour.

The first watch passed quietly. Near its end the wind dropped and the scrub went very still.

A child crying in the dark

An hour into the second watch, Maevis and Pip heard a child crying somewhere down the slope toward the road, thin and hitching, the way a small one cries when it has been hurt for a long time. Now and then it almost made a word, something like “mama?”. To both of them it sounded entirely real. Maevis’s darkvision showed scrub, the slope and a couple of boulders, and no child. Pip, with no darkvision, saw only black past the coals.

They did not go to it. They woke the others first, quietly, and all five came up armed around a fire burned down to coals. The crying had moved a little closer. The night-birds and insects had stopped.

Listening harder

Pip, Brannor and Tock all stopped to listen properly. Pip still heard a hurt child and nothing else. Brannor and Tock both caught it at the same moment: it was the same cry every time, the same catch in the same place, with never a breath between. Under the thin voice was a depth no small chest could make. Then the wind turned up the slope and brought a smell into camp, thick and sweet, like meat left in the sun for a week.

Brannor put the pieces together and remembered a story hill-folk and caravan guards tell: a leucrotta, a beast with a stag’s body and a badger’s head, bone ridges for teeth that can chew through mail, that hunts roads by crying in voices it has heard and waits for someone kind to walk out of the light. The guards said something else too: where a young one is learning to hunt, an old one is usually close by, watching.

Holding the camp

The party stayed in the clearing and kept watching the treeline. The crying went on a minute longer than it should have. Then it stopped, and a new sound started: a dog whimpering the way a hound does with its leg in a trap, off to the east, then the north-east, each time closer. Whatever was making it was circling the camp.

Pip and Maevis found it. Maevis saw it in her darkvision, about forty feet out: something the size of a young deer, crouched low, with a broad flat head like a badger’s, and the dog’s voice coming out of its working jaw. Pip saw two red eyes catch the coal-light, low to the ground, exactly where the whimpering was.

The fight

The party opened fire. The small one went down in the first volley, dead before it could run.

From the dark beyond it, something answered, not crying this time but roaring, from a chest the size of a horse’s. A far bigger beast came up the slope at a dead run with its bone jaw open. It reached them and it hurt them, but it did not last: within a few breaths it lay in the scrub at the edge of the clearing, longer than a pony and stinking of the grave. One at a time, the night-birds started again.

How It Ended

Everyone lived. Brannor finished at 7 of 13 hit points and Pip at 7 of 10; Maevis, Tock and Ysolde were untouched. The fight was over in moments, so the night’s rest carried on and Tock kept the last watch. Each character earned 100 XP.

How This Was Run

This dry run was a smoke test of the rpg-helper plugin, the set of Claude Code skills that lets Claude run the table.

• Claude was the DM, in relay mode. It narrated every scene and voiced the lure, and one operator relayed the table’s decisions back. Claude never rolled a die: every check — the creature’s deception, the listening, the search, the attacks — was rolled at the table and relayed as a result.
• The table’s side came from a fixed test script, the same eleven decisions and rolls used to compare runs, so the same play can be repeated and timed exactly.
• A check split the party on a question of fact. Two characters heard through the mimicry and one did not, and the narration gave each of them only what their own character heard.
• The scene kept moving when the party held still. Nobody walked out to the crying child, so the voice changed and came closer instead, and that is what let the party spot its source.
• When the fight began, Claude handed the operator the creatures’ statistics and the terms of the fight, and the table ran the combat and relayed only the outcome. Claude then applied the result exactly: who was hurt, by how much, and the XP.
• At the end, Claude offered a player recap — this page — written separately from its own notes, which are for the GM.

Claude’s part of the eleven exchanges took about three and a half minutes in all.

Provenance

Recaps the dry run Benchmark Opus Plugin Smoke, 2026-09-19. Built from the narration the table heard, which the test harness preserved word for word, checked against the run’s GM notes. The GM notes stay with the benchmark results and are not published.