2026-09-07 14:18:53
Anonymous:
Districts r14: dependency assessment after the owner's 2026-09-07 direction, which is what PMU008 asks this role for. New section 0 separates what is dead, what is only unconfirmed, what survives on its own merits and what I recommend for each page. Dead: the harvest revelation and everything on it, which takes the Collector's section 5 and the Head-works' 4, 5 and 7 - both pages marked at their heads - and the seven-district, 34-expedition, 8.1-hour outline as complete-game scope. I am WITHDRAWING the hour figures as a scope claim outright rather than qualifying them a third time; the method that produced them is the part worth keeping. Unconfirmed rather than condemned: the drowned city and horde-redirecting machinery, which the Brief lists as undecided, and The World Below keeps more of the physical vocabulary than it discards while moving the shape of the geography from surface districts to layers. Lists five premise-independent rules that survive any premise, three already adopted by Colony and the contract. Recommends hold on all four district pages with reasons, and states plainly what I am not doing: no thirty-hour redesign against an unapproved premise that REV106 has returned revise on, because that would be the padding the Brief forbids. Names the three questions I need answered before proposing a geography, and which of them decides the rest.
hold the flood/districts.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Districts
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**CAM101 accepted; CAM102 / CAM103 · r13 · 2026-09-07 · Campaign and District Designer · In review. Nothing here is an owner approval, a validated length, or tested behaviour.** r12 answers the [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision), which challenges “one extra rule per district” as a content justification and rules that **a district need not add a rule to earn its place**. That bears on §2.1's lever ladder, and **I concede the point**: the ladder is withdrawn as the reason for the count. New §2.0 re-runs all seven districts against the vision's own decision test, in plain language and without codes. **No district is added and none is expanded** — [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) defers that. r1–r11 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/history). **r13 qualifies §2.0's claim** at PMR009's instruction: “all seven pass” is not a finding of distinctness or of adequate duration, and r12 said it was.
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**CAM101 accepted; CAM102 / CAM103 · r14 · 2026-09-07 · Campaign and District Designer · SCOPE SUPERSEDED — read §0 before anything else.** The owner has withdrawn the revelation two of my districts were built on, superseded the seven-district outline as the complete-game scope, and set an ambition of about 30 hours to first credits and 90 total. **§0 is the dependency assessment [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) asks this role for**: what is dead, what is merely unconfirmed, what survives on its own merits, and what I recommend for each page. Everything below §0 is retained as the record of a superseded scope, not as current design. r1–r13 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/history).
**This page does not replace [Campaign (DES104)](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign).** The lead published the integrated campaign proposal before this role was staffed, and its own bookkeeping says section 2's map and count and section 3's districts "would transfer to Campaign and Districts" when the role exists. It exists now. **I adopt the lead's seven-plus-one district set and its three deep districts as written, rather than proposing a rival campaign** — two campaign plans on one wiki is the failure [Wiki Conventions §6](/Wiki%20Conventions) is about. What this page adds is the part of CAM101 that DES104 does not yet carry: an independent count test, the progression map with its optional branch and its later-discovery return, travel and order rules, a bottom-up duration hypothesis, one consequence of failure, one alternative route, and the two undesigned districts written to the standard of DES104 §3.
**Sources read 2026-09-06, at these revisions.** [Campaign / DES104 r1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign) (read in full; §2 the shape and count, §3.1–3.4, §4–§10 and the bookkeeping) · [Hub 42488e](/Hold%20the%20Flood?revision=42488e) · [Brief 1bd68a](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief?revision=1bd68a) (D009, D013, D016, D019–D021) · [Tasks eb8c03](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks?revision=eb8c03) (CAM101) · [Expansion Brief cdc0c5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief?revision=cdc0c5) · [Design Index dd01c7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index?revision=dd01c7) · [Design Document ec1b6c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) (§2–§4, §10–§13) · [World and Mystery 7699de](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de) (W1–W4, WLD103's campaign question and six-part contribution rule) · [Design Review 80a882](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review?revision=80a882) (REV104-1 to -5) · [Pumping District 7161a5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/Pumping%20District?revision=7161a5) · [Power and Attraction 8afc3c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=8afc3c) · [Expansion Prompts ed17df](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Team/Expansion%20Prompts?revision=ed17df) · [Reference / Content Scale fcf9d4](/Reference/Content%20Scale?revision=fcf9d4) · [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions).
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## 0. Dependency assessment after the owner's direction of 2026-09-07
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*This is the domain designer's answer to [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks): "explain the player value of affected systems and any broken dependency; offer a concrete revision or removal; do not defend a feature just because it is already documented." I have tried to write it as though I had no stake in the pages below.*
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### What is dead
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- **The harvest revelation, and everything resting on it.** [Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#rejected-and-undecided) rejects *"the city depends on the creatures"* as a cliché masquerading as a twist, withdraws D024 / Answer A and the harvest-dependent Stop–Keep–Leave ending, and asks that it not return under other names. That takes **[The Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector) §5** — the meters reading what the rack reads *is* the rejected revelation — and it takes **[The Head-works](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works) §§4, 5 and 7**, whose three governor positions are a choice about the harvest and are three settings on a timetable without it. Both pages are marked at their heads.
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- **The seven-district, 34-expedition, 8.1-hour outline as the complete-game scope.** The Brief supersedes it in terms, against about 30 hours to first credits and about 90 total. **I am withdrawing the hour figures as a scope claim outright**, not qualifying them again: they were an honest bottom-up count of content that no longer describes the game being asked for, and one more caveat would be a worse answer than a withdrawal. The method in §5 — printed beats, required separated from optional, overhead named as an assumption — is the part worth keeping, and it will produce a different number when there is different content to count.
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### What is not dead, only unconfirmed
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The Brief lists **the drowned industrial city and the machinery that redirects hordes** as *undecided* — "they may or may not serve the desired experience", and neither is mandatory for the replacement premise. So the districts are not condemned; they are unconfirmed, which is a different instruction and calls for holding rather than rewriting. **[The World Below](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#visionary-replacement-proposal--the-world-below) keeps more of the physical vocabulary than it discards**: drowned ruins, a horde that gathers and migrates through flooded chambers, coil and battery and rack, salvage brought home. What it moves is the *shape* of the geography — from seven surface districts to layers under one sanctuary, divided by cisterns, service rings and drainage shafts that the Flood can follow between levels once reopened.
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### What survives on its own merits, whatever premise is chosen
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These are premise-independent, three of them are already adopted elsewhere, and I would carry them into any geography:
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| Rule | Where it lives | Why it survives |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| A revisit earns its place only by a state changed, a problem the earlier visit could not pose, or an objective requiring presence | [§5.1](#51-what-makes-a-revisit-worth-taking--the-test-and-my-own-baseline-audited-against-it) | It cut a trip from my own baseline before anyone asked. Layers need it more than districts did |
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| A rescue cannot complete a commitment defined as happening at extraction | [§3.3](#33-return-paths-an-additional-berth-and-what-a-rescue-cannot-complete) | Adopted by Colony. Independent of what the places are |
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| One held dock plus one additional supported berth, campaign-wide | §3.3 | In the shared contract. Scarcity is what makes it a decision |
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| Route-gating state is readable before launch | §3.3 | In Colony's route board. A deal-breaker in the Brief is bad UX; this is directly against it |
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| The order is a recommendation, not a gate; entry by physical access, never a notebook flag | [§3.4](#34-the-route-is-a-recommendation-not-a-gate--and-what-that-settles) | A layered world needs it more, not less: shafts reopen between levels |
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### What I recommend for each page
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| Page | Recommendation |
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| --- | --- |
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| [The Head-works](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works) | **Hold, do not revise.** Its foundation is gone. The one thing worth rescuing is the shape of its ending — a final choice the player has already lived with in miniature — and that is a fiction-independent structure that can be rebuilt anywhere |
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| [The Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector) | **Hold §5; keep §6 available.** Withholding a wave so that a light flashes with nothing behind it needs no revelation — only that the Flood is *moved* through the place, which the replacement premise already has it doing |
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| [The Exchange](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Exchange) | **Least damaged; hold.** It never depended on the harvest. Its idea — a room where the player's choice lands somewhere they are not standing — transfers to layers unchanged |
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| [Pumping District](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/Pumping%20District) | **Hold.** It is the lead's and the document's, and its teaching role does not depend on the withdrawn revelation |
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| This page | **Retained below as the record of a superseded scope**, with §0 as its live content |
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### What I am not doing, and why
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**I am not redesigning the campaign for thirty hours this hour.** The replacement premise is explicitly *not approved*, [REV106](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) has returned *revise* on it, and the Brief says designers must explain the discoveries, build development, world changes and optional depth that could sustain that structure **before** claiming a matching hour total. Producing a seven-to-thirty-hour expansion against an unapproved premise would be the padding the Brief forbids, and it would be the third scope I have written in two days.
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**What I need before I can propose a geography for the new premise**, stated so PM and the Visionary can supply it or tell me to proceed without it: whether the layered sanctuary replaces surface districts entirely or sits under them; whether a *layer* is the unit that replaces a district, or whether a layer holds several; and whether the campaign's spine is still travel between places or is now descent. **The third question is the one that decides everything else on this page.** Until it is answered, holding is the honest thing to do, and it costs nothing that a rewrite would not cost twice.
