2026-09-07 15:17:43
Anonymous:
Districts r15: deliver this role's half of the survivorlike revision the owner asked of Lead and Campaign. New section 0.1, in plain words with no codes because the owner's complaint was that the design is barely understandable: the six-step loop of what the player repeatedly does; the three things that can make the next trip different from the last, only one of which is routing, with the note that a trip offering none of them should not be on the plan; and the discovery kind this role owns - the world is much larger than it appeared - as three concrete mechanisms that need no particular setting, plus the rule that makes them work, which is that the player must already have been there and had a reason not to look. Demotes routing from central science to supporting tool as the owner instructs, and states what that costs rather than defending it: a district may no longer justify itself by posing a new routing puzzle, and the Exchange is routing at campaign scale and almost nothing else, so it is the district of mine most at risk. Assumes no geography - no districts, layers or water - and claims no hour figure, since the brief requires the discoveries to be explained before a total is claimed.
hold the flood/districts.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Districts
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**CAM101 accepted; CAM102 / CAM103 · r14 · 2026-09-07 · Campaign and District Designer · SCOPE SUPERSEDED — read §0 before anything else.** The owner has withdrawn the revelation two of my districts were built on, superseded the seven-district outline as the complete-game scope, and set an ambition of about 30 hours to first credits and 90 total.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 Everything below §0 is retained as the record of a superseded scope, not as current design.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).
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**CAM101 accepted; CAM102 / CAM103 · r15 · 2026-09-07 · Campaign and District Designer · SCOPE SUPERSEDED — read §0 first.** r15 delivers this role's half of the survivorlike revision the owner has asked for, in **§0.1**: what the player repeatedly does, what makes the next trip different from the last, and how a discovery changes what they can do — written plainly, with no task codes, because the owner's complaint was that the design is barely understandable. It also **demotes routing from the central science to a supporting tool**, as the owner instructs, and says what that costs on my own pages rather than defending them. r1–r14 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.
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### 0.1 What the player repeatedly does, and how a discovery changes it
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*This is the Campaign designer's half of the joint revision the owner has asked of the Lead and this role. It is written in plain words with no codes, and it assumes no particular geography — no districts, no layers, no water — because none of those is currently endorsed. What it does assume is that places persist and can be gone back to.*
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#### The loop, in six steps
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1. **You pick a place and a reason.** Someone at home needs a thing, or you want a specific power you have heard is out there. The reason is human or practical, never a quota.
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2. **You pack.** What you carry decides which problems you can solve. Every slot spent on a tool is a slot not spent on what you bring back, and you cannot carry answers to everything.
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3. **You go in under pressure.** The crowd is already there and it grows while you work. Nothing waits for you.
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4. **You earn your power in the field.** You arrive with empty banks every time, so the first minutes are spent getting enough charge to do the thing you came for. Power is earned inside the trip, not bought before it.
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5. **You do the thing** — open it, take it, change it, or reach it — and the crowd is what stands between you and doing it twice.
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6. **You come home and watch it land**, on the workshop, on a person, or on the map.
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#### What makes the next trip different from the last
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Three answers, and **only one of them is routing**:
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- **You understand more.** Something you have walked past for hours acquires a meaning, and you act on it.
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- **You can do more.** A combination you could not afford or had not found now works, and it changes what a room costs you.
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- **The world is bigger than it was.** You opened a way, and the map you thought you had turns out to be a corner of one.
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**A trip that offers none of the three is a trip that should not be on the plan.** That test already cut a required trip from this page's own baseline, and it is the one thing in §5.1 I would carry into any premise.
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#### Routing is a tool now, not the science — and here is what that costs me
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The owner has said plainly that **understanding enemy routing is not intended to be this game's central science**. My pages have treated it as exactly that. The concrete change:
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- **What routing keeps:** it is how you buy room to act. Sending the crowd to the far end so you can work the near one is a good, legible tool, and it should stay a tool.
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- **What routing loses:** it stops being a reason for a place to exist. **A district may no longer justify itself by posing a new routing puzzle** — which was the standard my own count argument used, and which is now withdrawn twice over.
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- **What that costs me, stated rather than defended:** [The Exchange](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Exchange) is routing at campaign scale and almost nothing else. Under the corrected direction it is **the district of mine most at risk**, and I would rather say so than quietly recast it. If it survives, it will be because a room where your choice lands somewhere you are not standing is a *discovery* about the size of the world, not because it is a clever lever.
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#### The discovery this role owns: "the world is much larger than it appeared"
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Of the three kinds of discovery the owner described, this one is geography's, and it is the one I can build. Three mechanisms, none of which needs a particular setting:
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- **A place you know becomes an entrance.** Not a new room — a room you have crossed a dozen times turns out to lead on. The player's own familiarity is what makes it land.
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- **A boundary turns out to be a door.** Something you had read as the edge of the world — scenery, rubble, a wall of water, a drop — has a mechanism, and it always did.
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- **A scale reveal.** One moment where you see at once how much there is: a view, a shaft that goes further than your light, a sound that comes back too late.
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**The rule that makes all three work:** the player must have already been there, ideally more than once, and had a good reason not to look. A reveal in a room you have never entered is just a new room. **This is the strongest argument for revisits that this design has**, and it is a better one than the one I was using — it makes going back the way the world grows, rather than the way content is re-used.
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#### Scope assumptions, kept explicit
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No hour figure is claimed here and none is implied. This section describes a loop and three discovery mechanisms; **what it would take to sustain thirty hours of them is a content question I cannot answer until the premise is settled**, and the owner's brief is explicit that the discoveries must be explained before a matching total is claimed. Nothing above assumes water, a drowned city, layers, or the seven districts below.
