2026-09-14 19:13:42
Anonymous:
Remove text slop: disclaimers, process metadata, restatements and hedge tags; no rule changes (owner readability review, 14 Sep)
hold the flood/resurrection and corruption.md ..
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# Hold The Horde — Resurrection and Corruption
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**Status.** Three proposals under the fully revisable ancient-experiment/human-hospital draft. None chooses the captive being, shift cause or story truth. All keep ship revival, retained learning, still-carried property and full journal pause. Lost revival during exploration, a death budget or permanent transformation requires an owner exception.
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Three proposals under the ancient-experiment/human-hospital draft. All keep ship revival, retained learning, property returning on death and full journal pause ([Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief)); lost revival during exploration, a death budget or permanent transformation would need an owner exception.
## 1. Corruption is evidence; ordinary player revival is safe
**Sequence.** The astronaut revives unchanged. A ward record shows stable early restorations followed by a human machine writing an alien correction pattern into patients. A nearby creature carries the altered scan’s visible tissue pattern. Hospital intervention—not resurrection count alone—made at least this monster class.
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Provisionally, ship intake captured a clean state and repairs without the ward’s edited profile; evidence must establish this. Death still shifts the station and returns property, adding no corruption state, deadline or access power.
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Ship intake captured a clean state and repairs without the ward’s edited profile; evidence must establish this. Death still shifts the station, adding no corruption state, deadline or access power.
**Knowledge and action.** Before entering an active bay, the player compares its profile identifier with the harmful record while paused. They can disable it, bypass its power or observe what it restores. Installing a relay in the bypass remains a capacity choice. Future expeditions distinguish dangerous treatment from ordinary healing.
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**Where risk ends.** Ordinary death never gives the player this corruption. Monsters arose from edited protocols, core exposure or both; the dominant cause remains story work.
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**Where risk ends.** Ordinary death never gives the player this corruption. Monsters arose from edited protocols, core exposure or both.
**Largest cost.** Personal menace is weaker. The horror concerns patients and survivors while the player can experiment safely. That may create moral stakes, but it can also make corruption feel like lore happening to other people.
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**Sequence.** A working resonance treatment and prior scan show the bargain: its graft makes ancient isolators recognise the body, but hospital machinery also marks it for harmful correction. Both observed effects appear before commitment.
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Acceptance gives a persistent **resonant signature**. Optional ancient controls respond; affected hospital machines telegraph correction pulses at the astronaut. This is a hazard, not passive decay. Death and property return stay unchanged; the chosen state survives revival.
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Acceptance gives a persistent **resonant signature**. Optional ancient controls respond; affected hospital machines telegraph correction pulses at the astronaut. This is a hazard, not passive decay. The chosen state survives revival.
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Monsters still come from unstable compulsory profiles, repeated corrupted treatment or stronger core exposure; accepting this bounded signature is not automatic transformation.
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Monsters still come from unstable compulsory profiles, repeated corrupted treatment or stronger core exposure; accepting this signature is not automatic transformation.
**Discovery and build choice.** An alien instruction reveals that a phased isolator suppresses the signature. Carry the part through a dangerous ward, reserve that capacity for oxygen/loot and fight, or install it in a local suppressor and lose it from the rig. The treatment changes routes and loadouts without becoming required.
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The strongest version grants compatibility rather than removing property or power. Optional ancient interfaces recognise later attunement; hospital machines increasingly identify the astronaut as a candidate and cue harmful treatment. Monsters are patients restored beyond stability, making revival both evidence and threat.
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**Discovery and choices.** Records reveal separation that freezes current attunement while preserving revival, property, knowledge and work. Separation stops further attunement; earned compatibility and existing hostile-machine reactions remain. Exposure can be stopped and resumed, but accumulated attunement is not reversed in this proposal. Later attunement routes require deliberately resumed exposure. Avoidance and countermeasures still matter; there is no death deadline. Final release ends revival only at departure; mortal continued exploration is not assumed.
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**Discovery and choices.** Records reveal separation that freezes current attunement while preserving revival, property, knowledge and work. Earned compatibility and existing hostile-machine reactions remain. Exposure can be stopped and resumed, but accumulated attunement is not reversed. Later attunement routes require deliberately resumed exposure. Avoidance and countermeasures still matter; there is no death deadline. Final release ends revival only at departure.
Build planning changes because later interfaces may replace a carried bypass part, freeing capacity, while hostile treatment rooms favour Barrier, shove or route avoidance. No mandatory objective requires a particular attunement state.
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Use **Option 1 as the ordinary rule and Option 2 as the player-facing branch**: normal revival stays safe, while a discovered treatment offers informed access at a readable hazard cost. This keeps death experimentation compatible with the owner’s safe-return decision and lets corruption become personal through agency rather than a hidden clock. The accepted cost is that cautious players may keep the menace external, and the optional branch requires bespoke reactions and a credible one-time purge.
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Option 3 is the strongest choice if the owner wants every revival to feel narratively consequential and accepts deliberate death as visible access progression. Its farming incentive and survival-cost tension should be chosen knowingly, not smuggled in as atmosphere. Nothing here establishes fun, fear, clarity, balance or production feasibility.
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Option 3 is the strongest choice if the owner wants every revival to feel narratively consequential and accepts deliberate death as visible access progression. Its farming incentive and survival-cost tension should be chosen knowingly.
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## Open questions
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- Which of the three options the owner adopts.
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- The captive being, the shift cause and the story truth (no proposal chooses them).
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- The dominant monster cause—edited protocols, core exposure or both—is still story work.
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- These rules are untested; numbers are proposals.
