2026-09-06 19:47:47
Anonymous:
REV104 r1: first critique under PMU004 of WLD103 r19-r20 (campaign mystery thread, World r20): meets the mystery criteria in structure; five findings - REV104-1 what a local dispatch requires (drum/trunk/both; r18 vs r19, load-bearing), -2 collector vs clause 4, -3 delayed surge vs W1, -4 district circuit power source unstated, -5 routing bank = Finding 2 at campaign scale, 'dark' = Shut regime, price by rule. REV103 closed: -2/-7/-8 resolved in DD r14 (quoted), -9 resolved at World r18 (one %A711 mirror pending); three r5 pointers retracted as mid-rollout errors; r5 moved to Archive/REV103
hold the flood/design review.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Design Review
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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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**REV104 · r1 · 2026-09-06 16:52 UTC · Independent Design Critic · In review** — first critique under PMU004, of the first substantive DES104 section to arrive: **WLD103 r19–r20, the campaign mystery thread**, on World and Mystery r20. Tasks says REV104 may "critique available substantive sections as they arrive; no claimed future acceptance"; this does that and nothing more. **REV103 is closed below**: its four integration items are resolved on their owning pages, with one mirror pending. REV103 r5–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 r5 205bfb · r4 711ef4 · … · REV101 r1 7ad187).
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## What was checked
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## What was reviewed
| Artifact | Revision | UTC | Note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **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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| Brief D019–D021; Tasks; Team; Hub; PM Reviews — **PMU004 rollout** | 1bd68a; eb8c03; d00fad; 4ef1f3; 94e459 | 16:38–16:41 | Owner: larger campaign, many districts (D019). DES104, WLD103, EDT102 Ready; four designers proposed, unstaffed; **REV104** Blocked on DES104 with the section-by-section clause; "no micro-ledger review loop should block parallel campaign drafting" |
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| **World and Mystery — WLD102 r18, WLD103 r19, r20** | d1d56a → 7699de | 16:37–16:41 | r18 closes REV103-9; r19 is the first WLD103 deliverable; r20 adds the evolving-hypotheses table |
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| **Design Document — DES103 r8 (document r14)** | ec1b6c | 16:32 | Against REV103 r4 and World r17: §13 re-tallied under the collection rule; the weir clause lifted; the last stale sentence removed |
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| Team / Expansion Prompts; Cutter; Equipment; Enemies; Colony | all 200 | | Created during PM's rollout, minutes after REV103 r5 checked them |
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## What PMU004 changes for this review
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## REV103 — closed
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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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All four integration items are resolved on their owning pages; each correction was read, not inferred.
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## REV104 — the criteria this role will apply to DES104, stated now
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| Item | Correction, quoted | Verified |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| **REV103-2** (residual) — one unit at the discharge threshold | r14 §13: "Both batteries are empty, so by the collection rule the first mote goes to the earlier-placed battery, the coil's, and the second to the other… one in each"; "kills seventeen… the coil's battery from one to ten, the arc's from one to nine"; 7:50 "the arc's stays at nine"; 8:22 "the coil's battery takes ten and the arc's takes one to reach full; nineteen expire". Ledger: 1 / 1 → 10 / 9 → 10 / 9 → 10 / 10, expired 19 | **Resolved.** Re-tallied from the rule: identical to the numbers REV103 r3 derived |
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| **REV103-7** (residual) — the weir clause | r14 §11 mirrors r17's two supplies with the weir ("weir" ×4) | **Resolved** |
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| **REV103-8** (residual) — stale PM-report sentence | r14: the sentence is gone; Appendix B "no superseded live wording remains, this paragraph included" | **Resolved** |
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| **REV103-9** — the relay's channel | World r18, "Two waters, stated once": "The relay's race is the sluice-head channel *above* the weir: flowing water, never energised… V3 joins the head pool to the channel *below* the weir, never to the race, so the valves cannot light the yard from the relay's side… Drain R empties the race: the wheel stops, the drum stops… the panel's power positions, the beacons, the hatches and GJ… keep working. This states one readable exception to clause 2, that the relay is a source and not a consumer." | **Resolved on the world page, geometrically** — the hydraulic reading REV103 r4 recommended, made true by where the weir is. **One mirror pending:** r14 §11's Understand row still reads "the relay is a device under the power clause, working only while its channel carries current"; §11 should lift r18's row and paragraph |
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**Three pointers in REV103 r5 retracted.** The Expansion Prompts page, and the Cutter, Equipment, Enemies and Colony pages, all exist; PM created them within minutes of that check, mid-rollout — the same error the editor made and withdrew, and the same lesson ("do not flag a gap in the middle of somebody's rollout"). Hub and Tasks now carry the expanded scope. Nothing remains of those three lines.
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## REV104 r1 — the campaign mystery thread (WLD103 r19–r20), against the pre-registered criteria
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**Verdict on this section: it meets the mystery criteria in structure and is the right template for the campaign; five sentences are needed before Campaign builds districts on it, one of them load-bearing.** This is a critique of a contribution, not of DES104, which does not yet exist.
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### What works, and why
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- **The campaign question grows out of the answered local one.** The finale's answer — a drum turned by flowing water — leaves one observable the player has already seen: after opening R, "the thin cable that enters the relay room from outside the district still pulses on the old cadence." That is a campaign clue that costs nothing new and reframes shut/fix/hold as local outcomes, exactly as the Expansion Brief asks. Evidence changes a later action: the door to the campaign is a stopped drum that still hears time.
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- **The six-part per-district rule is the false-refuge chain generalised**, and it carries this role's watchlist by construction: a local question with a fair chain and no item gates; one campaign clue as an inspectable stable object; what travels is a fact and a convention, never an item; one later action enabled; **redundancy — every campaign clue in two districts** — as the answer for missed clues; a consequence stated as a rule. "Or the district is a key hunt" is the right test.
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- **The fixed contract and the may-add list** are the shared-rule contract the mechanics page demands, written by the person who owns the rules it protects: W1–W4 with precedence and the beacon definition, the light convention, the two cables, the flowing-water relay, S1–S3 fixed; new devices, topology, signal sources and beacon variants allowed with a readable signal; "may not change what power, signal or a beacon means, or make an ordinary lamp draw the Flood."
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- **The evolving-hypotheses table** makes fairness checkable stage by stage — each wrong belief a reasonable reading, each overturned by something seen — and gives the early-stop answer at campaign scale.
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- **Two candidate answers with their content costs**, held for the owner, and an honest risk list (the routing bank may dominate; the collector brushes clause 4; Answer B adds a presence). No new machine family is claimed.
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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 findings
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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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**REV104-1 — What a local dispatch requires is stated three incompatible ways (load-bearing).**
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- *Where:* World r18: "the relay is the district's one source of signal, a drum turned by the race"; the drum's contact "makes the pulse". WLD103: after R is opened "the drum stops, local dispatches stop, and the thin cable that enters the relay room from outside… still pulses" (dispatch needs the drum); the Exchange's routing bank: "a district whose position is dark gets no announced surge until the player returns" (dispatch needs the trunk pulse); "the district relays are one network, kept in time from somewhere upstream" (the trunk keeps time). The hypotheses table's fifth row overturns "each district's relay is its own clock" — yet r18 says the pumping district's relay *is* its own clock, turned by its own race.
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- *Why it fails:* the three behaviours are jointly consistent only if a local dispatch needs *both* the local drum's contact *and* a live trunk pulse — and that makes the trunk a second source, which r18's "one source" denies. As written, a reader cannot tell what the exchange's bank does to a district whose drum still turns.
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- *Consequence:* the campaign's central lever and its first clue both rest on this sentence.
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- *Category:* contradiction (r18 versus r19), within the contract the page itself declares fixed.
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- *Minimal change:* one sentence in the fixed contract: "A district dispatches when its drum's contact closes *and* the trunk is carrying time; the drum makes the moment, the trunk permits it. Shut stops the drum; a dark bank position withholds the trunk; either alone stops announced surges." Then the fifth hypothesis row reads "each relay keeps its own time" → "each relay is permitted by upstream".
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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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**REV104-2 — The Collector's meters against clause 4 (the page's own flag).** "Charge never leaves the district" (clause 4) versus "this district's meters read what the player's rack reads: charge" taken from the mass "as it passes". The page asks the lead to resolve it as "never leaves *with the player*" or drop it. Agree; the rewording is one clause of clause 4 and belongs in the contract before any collector is designed. *Category:* contract conflict, self-reported.
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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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**REV104-3 — A delayed first surge against W1.** "Closing a district's collector gate delays that district's first surge on the next visit." W1 says the beacon on the selected line flashes at dispatch "and the surge enters there." If the collector is empty, the drum still ticks and the beacon flashes with nothing behind it — which W1 currently forbids and which would otherwise be a fine clue ("the flash came; nothing came with it"). *Minimal change:* one clause in W1 — "a surge enters there if the collector supplies one" — and a line in the light convention for the empty flash. *Category:* missing design detail.
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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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**REV104-4 — The contract never says what powers the district's circuit.** The panel switches "the district's one live circuit"; the coil injects; the relay is now hydraulic; but the source of the fixed power that lights beacons and opens hatches is unstated anywhere in the Design Document or on this page. Answer A supplies one — the city runs on harvested Flood charge, so shutting the head-works "turns off every powered door and pump in the city, including the colony's" — Answer B leaves it open. Either way the contract should state the source, or name it as part of the campaign question; a campaign about power cannot leave the grid unexplained. *Category:* missing design detail (contract completeness).
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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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**REV104-5 — The routing bank is Finding 2 at campaign scale; price it by rule, and say what "dark" means.** The bank chooses "which district receives the next trunk pulse"; a dark district "gets no announced surge until the player returns". The page rightly flags dominance. Two sentences settle it: (a) a dark position puts a district into the Shut regime the endings table already defines — unannounced trickles that grow, a dark forecast — so "no announced surge" is never read as "no surge"; (b) the bank's price, stated as a rule before Campaign builds on it, as the panel's five-part price was: the pumping district's panel is free because lighting a branch opens its door *and* invites the surge there; the bank needs the same coupling (what does choosing a district *give* the player there, that makes withholding it a cost?). *Category:* missing design detail; future empirical uncertainty for the magnitude.
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## What carries from the one-district work, so it is not lost in the move
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### Minor
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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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- Rule 5 (every campaign clue in two districts) is met for the exchange and the collector; the head-works' clue ("who oiled this?") is named only there. Its redundant form should be stated.
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- The Shut regime's "trickles" and the collector's "cycled, not spawned" are the first statements of where surges come from; the contract should carry one sentence on it, since three districts now depend on it.
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## For PM — three pointers, one line each
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### Recorded for later empirical validation — not defects
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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.
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The bank's dominance once priced; the collector-gate cost; the cadence readability across districts; whether Answer B's presence changes the enemy identity the owner wants.
## Finding index — where every finding lives
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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.
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Superseded reviews: [REV103 r5](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV103#rev103-r5-retained-verbatim-superseded-by-rev104-r1) · [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.
- **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.
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- **Changed decisions:** none by this role.
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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.
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| REV101 Findings 1–5, Secondary 1–5, N1–N17; REV102-1 to -13; REV103-1 to -8 | REV101–REV103 | Resolved, closed, or delivered |
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| REV103-9 — the relay's channel | REV103 r4 | **Resolved at World r18**; §11 mirror pending |
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| **REV104-1** — what a local dispatch requires: drum, trunk, or both | REV104 r1 | **Open — load-bearing** (World, in the fixed contract) |
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| **REV104-2** — collector meters vs clause 4 | REV104 r1 (page's own flag) | **Open** (Lead: one clause) |
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| **REV104-3** — delayed surge vs W1's "the surge enters there" | REV104 r1 | **Open** (World: one clause) |
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| **REV104-4** — the district circuit's power source | REV104 r1 | **Open** (Lead/World: state it or name it as the question) |
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| **REV104-5** — the routing bank: "dark" = Shut regime; priced by rule | REV104 r1 | **Open** (World now; Campaign when staffed) |
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## PM report — REV104 r1
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- **Task:** REV104 (first critique of an available substantive section, per Tasks); REV103 closed. **Artifact:** Design Review, REV104 r1 (this page); REV103 r5 moved to the REV103 archive verbatim.
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- **Reviewed:** World and Mystery 7699de in full (r18–r20 diffed against r17); Design Document ec1b6c diffed against 50046f, §13 re-tallied; PMU004's Brief, Tasks, Team, Hub and PM Reviews changes.
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- **Changed decisions:** none by this role. Three of its own r5 pointers retracted as mid-rollout errors.
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- **Evidence:** the quoted corrections; the tally; the quoted WLD103 sentences read against r18 and W1. 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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- **Remaining risk:** REV104-1 is the sentence the campaign's lever and first clue both rest on; it should be fixed before any district is designed around the exchange.
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- **Next handoff:** world designer — REV104-1, -3, -5 in the fixed contract; lead — REV104-2 (clause 4) and -4, and §11's mirror of r18; PM — nothing new. I critique the next substantive DES104 section as it arrives and post nothing between sections except a PM correction. **One exact PM request:** none.
