Field manuals
for the crises
nobody preps you for.
When the bureaucracy decides you're the easiest one to grind down, you need more than a sympathetic ear. You need a tactical playbook.
Tactical playbooks.
Not legal textbooks.
Every Hardcopy Crisis Systems title is the field manual we wish someone had handed us when life detonated. Written by people who actually navigated the maze. Built for the person sitting at a kitchen table at 2am wondering where to start.
Decision trees, escalation ladders, and templates you actually send. Not a book about the law — a playbook for navigating it when the system is grinding you down.
Every manual is built from real lived experience. The traps, the relabels, the war-of-attrition tactics — we mapped them because we walked through them.
No legalese. No screaming caps lock. No predatory upsells. A clear voice when everything around you is loud, with an Operator Maintenance section because you're a person, not a claims-handling machine.
Field manuals available now.
Each manual is a complete operating system for one specific crisis: a tactical PDF plus the spreadsheets and template letters you'll actually use.
Insurance
Claim Recovery
Your insurer denied the claim. The contractor pointed at the municipality. The municipality pointed back. Now you're sitting on a stack of paperwork wondering if you have the energy to fight a system designed to wear you down. This is the playbook for that fight — chain-of-liability demands, the categorization rebuttal, the FOIP power move, the GIO escalation ladder, and a Statement of Loss that turns "I'm pissed" into "you owe me $X."
Alberta Estate
Administration
Someone you loved died, and now you're the executor — drowning in GA forms, creditor calls, CRA deadlines, and family arguments. This manual is the one we wish someone had handed us. The 72-hour protocol, the GA-form walk-through, the surprise-family-member playbook, the tax clearance checklist that keeps you from being personally liable, and an Operator Maintenance section because grief and probate aren't a fair fight.
Last Call:
Evacuation
The Alberta Emergency Alert just went off. You stand in the kitchen, open a drawer for no reason, and watch the first fifteen minutes vanish before you've moved with purpose. Wildfire, flood, or whatever comes next — the hour is enough, but only if the decisions were already made. This is the playbook for that hour — the 60-minute triage, the tiered go-bag doctrine, the documents that must leave with you, the house walkdown, the route out, AEMA reception centres, and a re-entry checklist for when "you can go home" doesn't actually mean go home yet.
Cyber Incident
Recovery
Your bank account drained overnight. A text says your email password changed — and it wasn't you. The crypto's gone, the SIM is dead, and every account is asking for a code you never requested. This is the playbook for the first sixty minutes and the long week after: disconnect and contain, take back your email, freeze the money, lock down every account, and build the evidence file the bank, the police, and the credit bureaus will all ask for. Bank and card fraud, crypto theft, identity theft, account takeover, ransomware, and SIM swaps — one calm sequence for when everything is on fire.
Start here. No purchase required.
Plain-English walkthroughs of the crises our manuals cover. Read them free — and when you're ready to act, the matching manual has the templates and trackers.
Claim Denied?
What to Do Next
The escalation ladder most homeowners are never told about — from the denial letter to a final position letter to the General Insurance OmbudService.
Settle an Estate
Without a Lawyer
Probate vs administration, the Surrogate forms, what it actually costs ($35–$400), and when you genuinely need a lawyer.
Alberta Evacuation
Checklist
Alert vs order, the 60-minute triage, the tiered go-bag, the documents that must leave with you, and AEMA reception centres.
Identity Stolen?
What to Do First
The first-hour containment sequence, then the CAFC, fraud alerts at both credit bureaus, and the police report you'll need.
Two Albertans who got tired of saying
"I wish I'd had a manual for this."
Hardcopy Crisis Systems is an independent publisher run by a designer and a writer in Alberta. We build the manuals we needed when our own crises hit. Each one is researched, drafted, audited for anonymization, and shipped as a PDF + resource pack you can download and use the same hour.
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