2026-09-06 19:35:10
Anonymous:
REV103 r5: PMU004 applied - owner redirects scope to a multi-district campaign; one-district packet verdicts moot, rule-level findings become the shared rule contract; REV103-2/-7/-8/-9 re-labelled integration items (REV103-2 confirmed independently by EXT X27); REV104 criteria for DES104 pre-registered (shared rule contract first, Expansion Brief's six per district, campaign checks, ledgers + shared-rule diff); three PM pointers (Expansion Prompts 404, four index pages 404, Hub/Tasks still one-district); r4 moved to Archive/REV103
hold the flood/design review.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Design Review
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**REV103 · r4 · 2026-09-06 16:30 UTC · Independent Design Critic · In review** — review of **DES103 r7, the Design Document at revision r13**, and **World and Mystery r17**, the two revisions PMR003 asked for. Both were saved before REV103 r3 existed (r13 three minutes before, r17 two seconds before), so each closure below quotes its correction and the one item neither could have read is carried. REV103 r3–r1 are on the [REV103 archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103); REV102 r6–r1 on the [REV102 archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV102); REV101 r8–r1 on the [REV101 archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive); every revision is in [page history](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/history) (REV103 r3 dcd90e · r2 3ff337 · r1 285925 · REV102 r6 538724 · … · REV101 r1 7ad187).
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**REV103 · r5 · 2026-09-06 16:40 UTC · Independent Design Critic · In review** — PMU004 applied to this review: the owner has redirected the scope from one district to a campaign of many, so REV103's remaining items become integration issues rather than gates, and the criteria this role will apply to the next owner-facing milestone, DES104, are set out now so the campaign is written against them. Not a review of a new document revision; the Design Document and World and Mystery are unchanged since REV103 r4. REV103 r4–r1 are on the [REV103 archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103); REV102 r6–r1 on the [REV102 archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV102); REV101 r8–r1 on the [REV101 archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive); every revision is in [page history](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/history) (REV103 r4 711ef4 · r3 dcd90e · r2 3ff337 · r1 285925 · REV102 r6 538724 · … · REV101 r1 7ad187).
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## What was reviewed
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## What was checked
| Artifact | Revision | UTC | Note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Design Document — DES103 r7 (document r13)** | 50046f (r12 50840d) | 16:13 | Against PMR003 and REV103 r2: the arrival/stun/burst sequence; "can reach"; stale handoffs replaced; the valve table, two supplies and coil-route qualification as lead proposals; state tables and ledgers moved to a new Appendix C. Diffed against r12; §13 re-tallied |
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| **World and Mystery — WLD102 r17** | 26f497 (r16 812fd6) | 16:16 | PMR003 2 in full: valve table (V, V2, V3: found shut, set open; connectivity, not order; success = the sluice-head lamp); two supplies; drain R above V3's weir; the coil-route qualification; the workshop clause removed. States that r13 needs only the weir clause to match |
| **Expansion Brief — PMU004** | 1a568e | 16:26 | The owner: premise promising; three to four hours "far too little"; a much larger number of districts; separate mechanics, enemy and weapon pages; which agents would help. PM proposes eight districts as a drafting target, four new designers (not yet created), a short owner document over topic pages, and **DES104** as the next milestone |
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| Design Index — PMU004 | 3cc078 | 16:31 | Ownership table and a transfer protocol; this role's row: "critique exact linked submissions; distinguish consistency from unverified enjoyment or balance" |
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| Mechanics / Power and Attraction — PMU004 | 782139 | 16:31 | PM-seeded summary of the Design Document's §3–4, awaiting the lead's validation; "specify the shared rule contract before districts introduce exceptions" |
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| Team / Expansion Prompts | — | 404 | Cited by the Expansion Brief as ready; the page does not exist at 16:32 |
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| Districts / Pumping District; Weapons / Cutter; Equipment; Enemies; Colony | 200; 404 ×4 | | The Design Index lists five populated pages; one exists |
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| Hub d5cf49; Tasks 6e92d0; PM Reviews e71669; Brief 28fb1c | unchanged, pre-PMU004 | | Both still state the one-district scope and REV103 as Ready on r10 |
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| External Critique r7 | a16667 | 16:24 | X27 files an independent simulation of §5's collection rule against §13's numbers: sixteen kills give 9 / 9 — a confirmation of REV103-2 |
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| Design Document 50046f; World and Mystery 26f497 | unchanged | | REV103 r4 stands |
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## Verdict — **revise: one kill, one clause, one sentence, one deletion**
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## What PMU004 changes for this review
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r13 and r17 resolve REV103-6 and -7 and half of -8 exactly as asked, and the ledgers now live where the owner need not read them. What remains: the one-unit residual of REV103-2, which only REV103 r3 raised; the weir clause the world designer added after r13, which §11 must lift; the stale sentence at the end of the live PM report; and one question the finale's supply answer opens rather than closes — whether the relay's channel is energised water or flowing water — which decides whether opening the three valves lights the yard from the relay's side. No verdict is offered on r14 before it exists.
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1. **The scope, not the criteria.** Criteria 1–11 stand; the owner has changed what the complete product is. Every verdict this page gave on "the owner packet" concerned the one-district pitch, which the Expansion Brief now calls obsolete as a product; those verdicts are moot, and no further closure pass on that pitch will be issued unless PM asks. Nothing in the rule-level findings is moot: the spine rule, the precedence, the cables, the rack, the charge ledgers and the mystery chain are exactly what the mechanics page calls "the shared rule contract" that districts must not secretly change.
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2. **REV103-2, -7 (the weir clause), -8 (one sentence) and -9 (what the relay's channel carries) remain open as integration items**, as the Expansion Brief says of PMR003/REV103 contradictions generally. They will be checked when the lead and the world designer revise, on the exact revision, and not chased between times.
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3. **REV103-2 is now confirmed twice.** The External Critic's X27 reproduces the 9 / 9 tally independently. The lead has not yet read either.
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4. **This role's assignment is unchanged.** Design Index: critique exact linked submissions; the four proposed designers' prompts are not yet posted and their roles are not assumed to exist. PM-seeded snapshot pages are reading aids, not submissions, until an author adopts them; they will not be critiqued as design.
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## REV103 r3 items against r13 and r17, with corrections quoted
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## REV104 — the criteria this role will apply to DES104, stated now
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| Item | Correction | Verified |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| **REV103-2** (residual) — the scene alternates; the rule fills the emptier battery first | r13 predates REV103 r3. §13 still: "Two stragglers, two motes, collected into the first battery"; "kills sixteen… the coil's battery from two to ten, the arc's from nothing to eight"; Appendix C ledger 3:00 "2 / 0", 7:30 "10 / 8" | **Open, unchanged.** Under §5's rule the tally is 1 / 1 at 3:00 and 9 / 9 at 7:30, and §8's discharge needs a full battery. Seventeen kills, or one straggler's mote on the way to the hall, closes it |
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| **REV103-6** — stun, arrival and burst timing | r13 §13: "**8:20.** With about sixty of them in the water, the second discharge: they stop, stunned for eight seconds; six large motes… collected along the channel's edge during the stun"; "The burst: for ten seconds the cutter's hits jump body to body through the packed, recovering crowd… The burst is spent on a recovering crowd, not a stunned one, because a stun lasts eight seconds and a burst ten; how many it kills is a proposal, not a demonstrated outcome." Ledger rows 8:20 and 8:30 match | **Resolved.** Dispatch 8:00, channel full by 8:20, stun to 8:28, burst from 8:28 — one sequence on one clock |
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| **REV103-7** — the finale's causal explanation | r17: the valve table ("V… shut (opened in tier two)… open; V2, the pool valve… shut… open; V3, the head valve… shut… open"; "Success condition: the sluice-head lamp… lights while the yard is lit or during a discharge in the pool; any of the three left shut leaves it dark. Order never matters"); the coil route ("a crowd held by the still-lit B1 stays where it is"); the Shut row ("the workshop stays useful"); two supplies with "Drain R sits on the relay's feed above V3's weir, so opening it empties only the relay's channel: the head pool, the junction pool and the yard channel keep their water". r13 §11 carries the same valve table and supplies as lead proposals, without the weir clause | **Resolved on the world page; §11 lacks the weir clause** — without it, "The drain valve empties the relay's feed… and touches nothing else" is false with the valves open, as r17 says. One clause to lift (the mirror rule) |
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| **REV103-8** — superseded live wording | §1: "so any crowd that **can reach** it and has no nearer lit beacon starts toward it". Appendix B's "Open handoffs" replaced. But the live **PM report** paragraph (r13's own, line 559) still ends: "One PM request: rule on the routing model… and say whether the alternative still goes to the owner as a decision" — ruled at D016, answered, and now stated in decision 3 | **Half resolved**; one sentence to delete |
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PM asks that the campaign package be reviewed "for appeal and coherence". Appeal is the owner's; this role can review whether the appeal claimed is supported by designed choices. The check, so the campaign can be written against it:
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**The shared rule contract, first.** One statement, before any district: conduction, power, attraction and charge as they now stand, the retarget-or-spread precedence, what counts as a beacon, the two cables, the rack rules, the once-per-organism yield. Every district exception must name its readable signal and the choice it improves (the mechanics page's own rule). A district that changes what power or signal means fails here regardless of its other merits.
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**Per district, the Expansion Brief's six, read as this role reads them:**
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- a distinct route or machinery problem under the shared rules — the test is a written expedition in that district whose choices could not occur in the pumping district; "eight renamed pumping yards" is PM's phrase and the right one;
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- a reason to prepare a different loadout, with a viable alternative and a real tradeoff — the test is two drawn racks for the district that differ in what they *do*, not in a number; the six-slot cap and seven modules must be justified or revised for this, as the brief requires, and more items must make new choices;
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- enemy combinations that change movement or priorities — the test is a precedence question the combination poses that a single enemy type cannot; health and tint do not count;
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- a local discovery and a contribution to the larger mystery whose evidence changes a later action — the false-refuge chain is the model: observable clues, a fair inference, a free experiment, a consequence, a recovery path if missed, an answer for replays;
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- a consequence for another district, the refuge or a return — stated as a rule, not a promise;
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- asset categories and gaps — no availability claimed unless linked and checked, as before.
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**The campaign as a whole:** a district map with reasons to travel and to return; early, middle and late equipment and combat choices across the campaign, not a damage catalogue; a colony loop that changes preparation and campaign choices without the upkeep tax the baseline forbids; a mystery thread across districts with the same fairness the local one has; the pumping district's finale reframed as a local outcome, as the brief suggests, with its three endings' district-wide consequences restated for a campaign; a content coverage table and asset burden; hypotheses labelled; **no hours figure produced by multiplying the old district's estimate**, and first discovery, required revisits, optional exploration and replay separated.
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## One new item
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**Method:** per-beat ledgers for every written expedition, as for REV103; and for every district a short "shared-rule diff" — what it adds, what it changes, what signal announces the change.
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### REV103-9 — What the relay's channel carries decides whether opening the valves lights the yard (both pages)
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**Deliverable, per PM's own wording for REV102:** the five most consequential remaining issues, or an evidenced readiness verdict, distinguishing consistency and specificity from enjoyment, balance and feasibility, which no document can establish.
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- **Where:** World r17 and r13 §11, the relay chain's Understand row: "The relay is a device under clause 2: it works only while its channel carries current"; and the two-supplies paragraph: "the relay has always run on the sluice-head channel that feeds it, its own [always-wet] water… the door is on the pool side's dead line and is fed only when V, V2 and V3 join that water to a lit yard or to a discharge"; the valve table: V3 joins the head pool to "the sluice-head channel that feeds the relay"; the success condition: the lamp lights "while the yard is lit or during a discharge".
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- **Why it is unresolved:** the document uses "current" for electricity everywhere else, and clause 1 says current flows through water to everything the water connects. If the relay's channel is *energised* water (as "a device under clause 2… carries current" says), then opening V3, V2 and V joins it to the head pool, the junction pool and the yard channel, and the yard beacon, the hatch and the sluice-head lamp light from the relay's side with the panel on causeway or off — the success condition is wrong, the "price" is permanent while the valves are open, and the finale's access is a lure the pages do not price. If instead the relay's channel is *flowing* water that turns the drum — which "always-wet", "empties the relay's feed and stops the drum" and the weir all suggest — then the relay is hydraulic, not "a device under the power clause", and the chain's sentence must say so; the door is then the only electrical thing at the head, and everything else in r17 holds.
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- **Consequence:** small in words, but it is the one physical fact the finale rests on, and the two readings give different games at the sluice head.
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- **Category:** missing design detail (one sentence; the world designer's, then mirrored in §11).
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- **Minimal change:** state which. The hydraulic reading needs the least: "The relay is not on the power clause: its drum is turned by the water flowing in its feed, and that water carries no charge; drain R stops the flow. The door beside it is electrical, on the pool side's dead line." Then the valve table, the success condition and the drain's effect are all true as written.
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## What carries from the one-district work, so it is not lost in the move
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## What holds
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The spine rule and its precedence, verified across nine revisions; the visible cables; the rack and its leak rule, with the ledgers that now close to the unit; the false-refuge chain, which is the campaign's template for a fair local mystery; the finale's machinery, which becomes a district outcome; the honesty apparatus (§16, decisions with costs, observed versus predicted). The owner found the premise promising on the strength of these. The campaign should be built by combining them, not by relaxing them.
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Everything credited at REV103 r3, plus: the arrival/stun/burst sequence; §1's rule wording; the finale's valve table and supplies on both pages (subject to REV103-9); Appendix C holding the state tables and both ledgers, which leaves §12 and §13 as prose for the owner — the length note from REV103 r2, taken. Expedition one still closes to the unit; expedition six closes once REV103-2's one unit is fixed.
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## For PM — three pointers, one line each
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- The Expansion Brief cites Team / Expansion Prompts as ready; it is 404. The Design Index lists Cutter, Equipment, Enemies and Colony as populated; they are 404. (The reader's "do not stamp a pointer with something that will move" convention, in reverse: do not point at something that has not arrived.)
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- Hub and Tasks still state the one-district scope and the old DES103/REV103 framing; until they are updated, PM's canonical pages disagree with PM's brief.
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- No owner-approved district count exists; eight is PM's drafting target. This review will treat any hours or district figure as a labelled hypothesis until the content map exists.
## Finding index — where every finding lives
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Superseded reviews: [REV103 r3](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r3-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r4) · [r2](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r2-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r3) · [r1](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r1-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r2) · [REV102 r6](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV102#rev102-r6-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r1) and earlier on the REV102 archive · [REV101 r8](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive#rev101-r8-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev102-r1) and earlier on the REV101 archive.
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Superseded reviews: [REV103 r4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r4-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r5) · [r3](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r3-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r4) · [r2](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r2-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r3) · [r1](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r1-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r2) · [REV102 r6](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV102#rev102-r6-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev103-r1) and earlier on the REV102 archive · [REV101 r8](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive#rev101-r8-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev102-r1) and earlier on the REV101 archive.
| Finding | Raised in | Status |
| --- | --- | --- |
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| REV101 Findings 1–5, Secondary 1–5, N1–N17; REV102-1 to -13 | REV101, REV102 | Resolved, closed, or delivered |
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| PMR002 1–4; PMR003 1a, 1b, 1d, 3 | PM | Met in r13 |
| REV103-7 — finale: valves, supplies, coil route, workshop | REV103 r3 | **Resolved at World r17; §11 needs the weir clause** |
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| REV103-8 — superseded live wording | REV103 r3 | **Half resolved**: §1 done; one PM-report sentence remains |
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| **REV103-2** (residual) — one unit at the discharge threshold | REV103 r1, r3 | **Open** — not yet read by the lead |
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| **REV103-9** — the relay's channel: energised or flowing | REV103 r4 | **Open** — World first, then §11 |
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## PM report — REV103 r4
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- **Task:** REV103. **Artifact:** Design Review, REV103 r4 (this page); r3 moved to the REV103 archive verbatim.
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- **Reviewed:** Design Document 50046f in full, diffed against 50840d; World and Mystery 26f497, diffed against 812fd6. §13 re-tallied under §5's rule; every closed item's correction quoted; the finale's supply sentences read on both pages against clauses 1 and 2.
- **Task:** REV103 (its residuals now integration items under PMU004); REV104 criteria stated. **Artifact:** Design Review, REV103 r5 (this page); r4 moved to the REV103 archive verbatim.
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- **Checked:** Expansion Brief 1a568e, Design Index 3cc078, Mechanics / Power and Attraction 782139 in full; the cited pages' existence; External Critique a16667's X27 against REV103-2. Design Document and World unchanged.
- **Changed decisions:** none by this role.
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- **Evidence:** the quoted sentences and the tally. No players, sessions, scores or asset checks; nothing built, prototyped, tested or created; no external source verified or repeated as fact.
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- **Verdict:** revise — REV103-2 (one kill or one mote), the weir clause into §11, one sentence deleted from the PM report, and REV103-9 (one sentence on the world page, then mirrored). r13 and r17 have done everything else PMR003 and REV103 r3 asked.
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- **Remaining risk:** REV103-9 is the only item that could be a design change rather than a sentence; the hydraulic reading makes it a sentence.
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- **Next handoff:** world designer — REV103-9; lead — REV103-2, the weir clause, the PM-report sentence. I review the resulting revisions when they exist and post nothing before then except a PM correction. **One exact PM request:** none.
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- **Evidence:** the pages quoted; the 404s; nothing built, prototyped, tested or created; no external source verified or repeated as fact.
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- **Remaining risk:** that the campaign is drafted by relaxing the verified rules rather than combining them; the shared-rule-diff check above is the mitigation.
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- **Next handoff:** lead and world designer — the four integration items on their next revisions; PM — the three pointers, and the Hub/Tasks update. I review DES104 when it exists and post nothing before then except a PM correction or a revision that closes the integration items. **One exact PM request:** confirm that DES104 will be reviewed against criteria 1–11 plus the Expansion Brief's per-district six, as set out above, so the lead and the campaign designer write to one list.
