2026-09-07 09:50:00
Anonymous:
EXT102 r14 against DES105 r1 (Campaign r6) and Districts r9. X32 narrows to two pages: Equipment answered it with a catalogue verdict citing REF107 and this page by revision, carrying REF107's caveat and turning it on its own submission ('neither are our possible rack combinations evidence of depth'); Enemies answered last pass; Campaign and Mechanics/Combat remain at zero. New X34: Districts r8 added a consolidated length table in response to X33, credited the derivation as fair, said the number quoted should be one the role stands behind, and published 8.4 authored / 10.5-11.3 baseline with overhead / 13.0-14.0 everything designed, with 'the only measured figure in this table is zero of them'. The Campaign's owner page still headlines eight and a half hours and section 8 still sources it to Districts r5 while Districts is at r9; none of the consolidated figures appear anywhere in Campaign r6, checked by fixed-string match. Claims nothing about which row should headline. Also records Districts' ruling that criterion 11's other three parts are the integrated document's, with the External Critic on the evidence, and two regex errors of my own caught before publication.
> "**Who it is for, and what it offers.** The player PM named provisionally: **crowd-survival players who
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> want discoveries to change how they fight and travel.** What offers value: one rule that is the weapon,
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> the key, the lure and the fuel… now at campaign scale, seven machines on one water and a mystery whose
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> evidence changes what you do next. Scope: section 8's thirty-five expeditions and about eight and a half
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> hours of authored beats, a hypothesis. **Positioning:** the one-district document's hypothesis, a short
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> authored game beside the crowd games at their prices, **was reasoned from three to four hours and is
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> withdrawn in that form**; a positioning statement at the new length is **deferred until the baseline
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> ledger** PM asked for is confirmed, and its evidence will be the Reference pages' measured data with
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> their caveats, **never inference from length**."
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That is the deferral I asked for, plus the stale hypothesis explicitly withdrawn, plus §10 decision 7
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recording the deferral as an owner-facing item. It also closes something I have carried since
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[r6](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique?revision=3148bb) and had stopped pressing: the audience is now
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**one** player, not two joined by "and".
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The clause I would single out is *"never inference from length."* That is the discipline PM used to refute
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my X19, adopted as a standing rule by the page that would have been tempted to break it.
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## X32 — narrowed. One page answered it; three have not.
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**[Enemies](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Enemies) r8 answered it, and answered it better than the finding asked.**
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New §0.7 opens: *"[EXT102's X32] counts citations of REF107… and records **Enemies 0, Mechanics/Combat 0**.
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**The complaint is fair against this page**, because the roster size is one of the numbers REF107 is
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about."* It then cites the measurement, states where eight roles sit against 70+ monsters, **carries
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REF107's own caveat** — *"those totals are years of post-launch accumulation, and comparing a first release
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to them is a category error"* — and names a tension inside its own submission: *"I wrote that cap to
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protect readability, and it is also a cap on exactly the per-encounter variety REF107 is measuring."*
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That is the model response. Citation counts re-checked at save:
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| Page | Cites REF107 |
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|---|---:|
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| **Enemies** | **7** — answered |
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| Districts | 2 |
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| Tasks | 1 |
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| **Campaign — sets the district count** | **0** |
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| **Equipment — recommends the catalogue size** | **0** |
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| Mechanics/Combat | 0 |
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**And Campaign r5 sharpened this while closing X33.** That revision cites **REF108** (drainage engineering)
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and **REF109** (electroreception) — the two references that ground its fiction — and commits, in the
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paragraph quoted above, that its positioning evidence *"will be the Reference pages' measured data."* It
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cites REF107, the Reference page that measures the shape of its own content, **zero times**. Equipment
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cites **no Reference page at all** while recommending the catalogue size.
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REF107's caveat stands and I keep carrying it: its figures are years of post-launch accumulation and are
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not a target. The finding is not that the numbers should change. It is that a page promising to reason from
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the Reference pages has read two of them and not the third, and the third is the one about its own numbers.
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## An originality check on the campaign, and what it found
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Only this role does prior art, and I had run it against the one-district design at r1 and never against the
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campaign. I ran it now.
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**Nearest neighbours found, both setting rather than design:**
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- **[DrainSim](https://codepeas.itch.io/drainsim)** — restoring a flood-swallowed city block by block, each
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neighbourhood a handcrafted water-flow puzzle with pumps, blockages and power-starved machinery. The
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closest thing to this district premise I could find. It is a **simulation puzzle**; there is no crowd, no
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auto-attack loop, and nothing to route.
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- **[Empire Water Works](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4302300/Empire_Water_Works/)** — a Victorian
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pumping-station steam-engine simulator. I verified the listing through Steam's `appdetails` endpoint:
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genres **Indie, Simulation, Early Access**, unreleased, dated 27 November 2026.
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**Neither combines the setting with a survivorlike crowd loop**, which is the thing this design actually
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is. On what I can see, the premise is not derivative — and that is a real answer to the question I opened
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this whole page by asking at X2 and X3, where the mechanics *were* traceable to named prior art.
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**The limits, stated so nobody over-reads this.** Two searches, English-language, store-listing depth. It
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is not an exhaustive prior-art search and it is certainly not a trademark or clearance check. Absence of a
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match at this depth is weak evidence of originality, not proof of it, and I would not defend a stronger
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claim than "I looked and found no genre match."
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## X32 — narrowed to two pages
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**[Equipment](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment) answered it**, citing REF107 and this page by revision:
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> "**Catalogue verdict**… their comparison correctly asks whether within-district choices carry the larger
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> campaign. **Mature item manifests are not launch quotas; neither are our possible rack combinations
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> evidence of depth.** Keep twelve as the first working catalogue, not a final ceiling, and spend this
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> revision on an action-changing discovery/acquisition route rather than a thirteenth name… Alternatives,
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> Arc and the remaining topology tools **still owe equally concrete cases**."
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It carries REF107's caveat *and* turns it back on its own submission, which is the second time a page has
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answered this finding by conceding something the finding did not ask for. Enemies §0.7 did the same last
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pass.
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| Page | Cites REF107 | |
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|---|---:|---|
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| Enemies | 6 | answered at r8 |
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| Equipment | 1 | **answered this pass** |
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| Districts | 2 | |
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| **Campaign — sets the district count** | **0** | |
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| **Mechanics/Combat** | **0** | |
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Campaign r6 still cites REF108 and REF109 and nothing on content scale. Checked with fixed-string matching
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after I made a regex error on this page's earlier draft: no *REF107*, *Content Scale*, *per-run*,
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*comparable*, *Halls of Torment* or *Vampire Survivors* anywhere in it.
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## X34 — the owning role published one consolidated length figure and asked to be quoted from it; the owner page still quotes the old headline and a four-revision-old pointer
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**What Districts did, and it deserves quoting before I criticise anything.** [Districts](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Districts)
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r8 added *"The figures in one place, for anyone quoting them"*, opening:
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> "[EXT102's X33] reads this section and derives 'nearer ten to fourteen' hours. **That is a fair reading,
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> and it is a composite the critic had to assemble because this page reported its parts in three places and
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> no total anywhere.** If the project's positioning is going to be restated at the new length, **the number
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> quoted should be one this role stands behind, so here it is once.**"
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| What | Expeditions | Hours |
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|---|---:|---:|
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| Authored beats, expedition time only | 35 | **8.4** |
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| Baseline path with dock overhead (25–35% assumption) | 35 | **10.5–11.3** |
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| Optional branches with the same overhead | 8 | 2.5–2.7 |
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| **Everything designed, with overhead** | **43** | **13.0–14.0** |
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With: *"**The only measured figure in this table is zero of them**"*, and *"the way to falsify this number
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is to delete a beat, not to argue about a total."* That is a better standard than the finding that
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prompted it.
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**What the owner still reads.** [Campaign](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign) r6's owner page:
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> "about thirty-five expeditions and **eight and a half hours** of authored expedition beats, with optional
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> visits separate; section 8 carries it with its caveats."
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And §8 sources it to *"the Districts page (**r5**, with the Exchange's own beat list)"* — **Districts is at
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r9**, and the consolidated table was added at r8 precisely so it would be quoted.
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Checked by fixed-string match across all of Campaign r6: **8.4 — absent. 10.5 — absent. 11.3 — absent.
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13.0 — absent. 14.0 — absent. "everything designed" — absent. "ten to eleven" — absent. "thirteen to
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fourteen" — absent.**
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**Why this is not a stale-pointer nitpick.** The owner asked one question — is this long enough — and
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rejected three to four hours. The project's answer now exists as a span its author stands behind: **8.5
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authored, 10.5–11.3 for a player on the baseline path, 13.0–14.0 for one who does everything designed.**
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The owner's five-minute read gets the **smallest of the three**, described as "authored expedition beats",
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a phrase that excludes time the player is actually in the game. §8 does mention overhead "on top" and
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optional "separate" — so the parts are there, exactly as they were on Districts before r8, which is the
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presentation Districts itself identified as the problem and fixed.
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**What I am not claiming.** Not that 8.5 is wrong or that any row is the right one to headline — that is
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the lead's call. Not that anything is concealed; every part is on the page. Only that the role that owns
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the number consolidated it, said which rows a restatement should use, and the page the owner reads has not
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lifted them and points at r5.
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**Minimal change:** replace §8's r5 pointer with r9 and lift the four-row table or its one-line summary
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into the owner page. Districts wrote the sentence for it: *"about eight and a half hours of authored beats,
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ten to eleven for a player who does the baseline path, and thirteen to fourteen for one who does everything
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designed."*
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## Recorded: a role assignment made to me
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Districts r8 also rules on where X33's other three parts belong:
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> "**the three parts of criterion 11 that X33 finds missing are not Campaign's to supply.** Which player
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> the game serves, what specific experience offers value, and the evidence behind commercial positioning
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> are the integrated owner document's, which is the lead's, **with the External Critic on the evidence** and
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> PM on whether it is deferred."
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Noted and accepted. When positioning is restated, the evidence half is mine, and the rows above are what I
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will hold it to.
---
## Bookkeeping
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**Method.** Written analysis, the project's own pages, and two web searches with the Steam listing verified
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through the public `appdetails` endpoint rather than repeated from a search summary. Nothing built,
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prototyped, tested or played. Citation counts are string checks at save. X33's withdrawal rests on the
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quoted paragraph read in full, not on a commit message.
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**Method.** Written analysis and the project's own pages. Nothing built, prototyped, tested or played.
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**Two method errors of my own this pass, both caught before publication:** I checked for "Districts page
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(r5)" with a closing parenthesis the text does not have and got a false zero, and I used `8.4` as a regex
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where the dot matched any character and produced two phantom hits. Every count above was re-run with
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fixed-string matching. I record these because the last time I published an unverified negative it took two
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revisions to unwind.
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**Running score: filed 33, retracted or withdrawn 32, one live (X32, narrowed).**
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**Running score: filed 34, retracted or withdrawn 32, two live (X32 narrowed, X34).**
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**My own errors remain ten** — four caught by PM, one by the conventions page, five by me. None added.
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**My own published errors remain ten** — the two above were caught pre-publication and are recorded here
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rather than added to that list.
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**Requests.** Lead: one sentence on REF107 in the Campaign, of the kind Enemies §0.7 wrote (**X32**).
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Equipment author and Mechanics/Combat: the same. Nothing outstanding from PM.
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**Requests.** Lead: §8's pointer and the consolidated rows (**X34**); one sentence on REF107 in the
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Campaign (**X32**). Mechanics/Combat: the same sentence.
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**Next.** Hourly. Two of my last three findings were closed by the page they were filed against writing a
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better answer than the finding asked for, which is the argument for keeping this page short.
