2026-09-07 14:34:59
Anonymous:
Power and Attraction r8: the page's standing changes to the retained rules the World Below's scenes use (no longer a universal contract; a rule still means one thing wherever used); section 4 adds the Echo Relay and the Choir Cascade as Equipment E9 and Combat section 12 wrote them, with the lead's ruling that the origin cap is the tuned landmarks the player prepared, authored per place (Combat's fixed four recorded as the alternative); a chained hit kills a stunned ordinary body; R10 stays declined; dispatch, the state table, Stop and the cascade marked superseded and kept; section 10 dispositions. Countersign by Combat and Equipment pending; PM disposes.
hold the flood/mechanics/power and attraction.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Power and Attraction: the shared rule contract
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**r7 · 2026-09-07 · Lead Game and Systems Designer · In review · The rules every district must obey. r7 adopts two Combat proposals the Tram's scenes need (R12: a crowd with no reachable lit beacon spreads from where it stands; R13: a held crowd follows the beacon it holds to when that beacon moves), records Combat's R11 as its own targeting grammar, and notes the Exchange's found bank state and D026. r6 added three rules from the Campaign designer's answer to Colony (Districts r7, section 3.3): a rescue is not an extraction, so a commitment defined as completing at extraction does not complete on a rescue, and no district so far defines one; one supported berth in the whole city, a place to stop and never a way in; every route-gating state on the refuge's board before launch. r5 answered the critic's REV104 r4 and r5 on the contract: Stop is the brake on the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop nothing is permitted and nothing flashes, and the empty flash stays a permitted dispatch the Collector did not supply (REV104-12); the cable reel is Equipment's U6, a bridge between exposed power terminals (REV104-11); a floater does not leave water (REV104-8); the Spark row of r4 is final and the crossed copies are Combat's to mirror (REV104-15); Combat's request that fixed power not energise open channel water is declined with its reason; the Collector's lift, not its gates. r4 answered PMR006's blockers and the critic's REV104 r2 on the contract: the two-second coil window is confirmed canonical and countersigned by Equipment; the Spark's death is chosen as Combat wrote it, a hazard to the surveyor and nothing to organisms; the intensity rule that separates fixed power, the coil, the arc and a Spark is adopted; what persists between expeditions is stated; the refuge's place in Stop's cascade is stated and the pump reserve declined; lines conduct when dry, motes are collected by walking over them, a dark beacon still flashes, and pursuit range has a value. Validated against Design Document r15 (5f9fbb), World and Mystery r22 (da3639), Combat Rules r4 (91a866), Enemies r5 (9a72af), Inventory and Charge r2 (9b0547), Coil r2 (0696cf) and Colony r2 (12694e).**
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**r8 · 2026-09-07 · Lead Game and Systems Designer · In review · The one statement of the retained rules the World Below's scenes use. Since the owner's direction of 2026-09-07 and the Visionary's replacement proposal ([Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#visionary-replacement-proposal-the-world-below)), this page is no longer a universal contract every scene must obey, and the rows that belonged to the harvest premise are marked superseded and kept. r8 adds the Echo Relay and the Choir Cascade to section 4 as Equipment ([E9](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay)) and Combat ([section 12](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)) wrote them, with the lead's ruling that the origin cap is the tuned landmarks the player prepared rather than a fixed four; marks dispatch, Stop, the cascade and the fixed-power source as superseded; and records the dispositions in section 10. The lead's assessment and the layered progression are on [Campaign, section 0](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign). r7 adopted two Combat proposals the Tram's scenes need (R12: a crowd with no reachable lit beacon spreads from where it stands; R13: a held crowd follows the beacon it holds to when that beacon moves), records Combat's R11 as its own targeting grammar, and notes the Exchange's found bank state and D026. r6 added three rules from the Campaign designer's answer to Colony (Districts r7, section 3.3): a rescue is not an extraction, so a commitment defined as completing at extraction does not complete on a rescue, and no district so far defines one; one supported berth in the whole city, a place to stop and never a way in; every route-gating state on the refuge's board before launch. r5 answered the critic's REV104 r4 and r5 on the contract: Stop is the brake on the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop nothing is permitted and nothing flashes, and the empty flash stays a permitted dispatch the Collector did not supply (REV104-12); the cable reel is Equipment's U6, a bridge between exposed power terminals (REV104-11); a floater does not leave water (REV104-8); the Spark row of r4 is final and the crossed copies are Combat's to mirror (REV104-15); Combat's request that fixed power not energise open channel water is declined with its reason; the Collector's lift, not its gates. r4 answered PMR006's blockers and the critic's REV104 r2 on the contract: the two-second coil window is confirmed canonical and countersigned by Equipment; the Spark's death is chosen as Combat wrote it, a hazard to the surveyor and nothing to organisms; the intensity rule that separates fixed power, the coil, the arc and a Spark is adopted; what persists between expeditions is stated; the refuge's place in Stop's cascade is stated and the pump reserve declined; lines conduct when dry, motes are collected by walking over them, a dark beacon still flashes, and pursuit range has a value. Validated against Design Document r15 (5f9fbb), World and Mystery r22 (da3639), Combat Rules r4 (91a866), Enemies r5 (9a72af), Inventory and Charge r2 (9b0547), Coil r2 (0696cf) and Colony r2 (12694e).**
**What this page is.** The one statement of the shared rules, which every district, enemy, item and colony service must obey. Everything here is a proposal and nothing is owner-approved or played. A district may add to this contract with a readable signal and the choice the addition improves, published as a shared-rule diff (section 7); it may not change what power, signal, a beacon or charge means. Where this page states a rule in one sentence and a domain page states it in full, the domain page owns the detail and this page owns the sentence; the ownership map is in section 10.
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**What this page is.** The one statement of the retained shared rules: a rule stated here means the same thing in every scene that uses it. Under the owner's direction of 2026-09-07, a scene uses these rules where it earns them and is not bound to use all of them; what a scene may not do is use a rule here to mean something else. Everything here is a proposal and nothing is owner-approved or played. A district may add to this contract with a readable signal and the choice the addition improves, published as a shared-rule diff (section 7); it may not change what power, signal, a beacon or charge means. Where this page states a rule in one sentence and a domain page states it in full, the domain page owns the detail and this page owns the sentence; the ownership map is in section 10.
**What r3 established (kept).** Eight cells and player-set collection priority (D023); dispatch needs the drum and the trunk, arrivals need supply, the empty flash is a state (D024, REV104-1, -3); fixed power has a source under Answer A with the Stop cascade and the baseline return (D024, REV104-4, COL-I4); the precedence stack, bounded press, glow as one bit, the Carrier's mote, the Grounder allowed, the arc bounded (R1, R2, R4, R5, R9; R10 declined).
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## 3. Attraction: the signal chooses the intake; light draws the crowd
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- **Dispatch (D024, REV104-1).** 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 position on the Exchange's bank withholds the trunk; either alone stops announced surges. Stop at the head-works is the brake on the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop no district is permitted: no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, the drums turn to no effect, and the Flood arrives by each district's sluice as trickles that grow, the shut regime everywhere (REV104-12, chosen; World r22's rows say the same). A dark district is in the shut regime, unannounced trickles that grow and a dark forecast, and never a district with no Flood in it; its arrivals obey ordinary targeting once inside.
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- **Dispatch (D024, REV104-1).** *Superseded as the campaign's rule on 2026-09-07 with the harvest premise; kept as written for any retained scene that uses a drum and a forecast, whose meaning is now the Visionary's.* 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 position on the Exchange's bank withholds the trunk; either alone stops announced surges. Stop at the head-works is the brake on the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop no district is permitted: no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, the drums turn to no effect, and the Flood arrives by each district's sluice as trickles that grow, the shut regime everywhere (REV104-12, chosen; World r22's rows say the same). A dark district is in the shut regime, unannounced trickles that grow and a dark forecast, and never a district with no Flood in it; its arrivals obey ordinary targeting once inside.
- **Intake and supply (REV104-3).** At a dispatch the chosen intake's beacon flashes, and a surge enters there if the supply provides one. A flash with nothing behind it is the empty flash, a readable state of its own: the beacon flashes on the cadence, no bodies come, and the forecast shows the next slot. The flash is a signal event and needs no power: a dark beacon still flashes at its dispatch and is dark again after it, so a crowd that entered under it retargets or spreads. The Collector's gates decide supply (Districts, the Collector). Only the panel selects intake; powering a beacon by any other means, including a coil, lights it but never makes it flash. Every district tables its panel: position, powered branch, intake selected, beacon that flashes (Campaign, section 3).
- **After entry, in one order (R1).** Every body resolves the first line that applies: 0, stunned (inside the eight-second stun, and it conducts); 1, pursuit (the surveyor is within its pursuit range: chase, and drift back when out of range); 2, a role target other than light (the Floater's is the flow while water flows, and a floater never leaves water, so it pursues nothing on dry ground; the Anchor's the lowest wet ground; the Carrier's the nearest reachable loose charge within its acquisition range; the Grounder's the nearest reachable powered run); 3, attraction (walk continuously to the nearest lit beacon it can reach; hold on arrival; never leave a held beacon for a farther one; retarget to a nearer reachable lit beacon when its own goes dark); 4, spread (no lit beacon reachable: press outward from where the crowd stands, along the ground it occupies; for a crowd that never left its entry branch that is the branch, and for a crowd a lure moved it is the place the lure died, never a teleport back; Combat's R12, adopted). Holding attaches to the beacon and not to the ground: a crowd holding at a beacon that moves, the Tram's lit car, walks after it and keeps holding at it (Combat's R13, adopted). The cutter's tie-break and target stickiness are Combat's own grammar (R11). Pursuit outranks attraction, which is why harvesting inside a held crowd costs health; role targets sit below pursuit and above attraction, so up close every body is just a body. (Owner: Combat Rules.)
- **Pursuit range** is about ten metres, a channel's width, and each district names a landmark for it. A body outside it does not chase; a crowd does not cross a district to reach the surveyor. The first battery in any written expedition is therefore earned at a crowd's edge, inside that range, and priced in hits (REV104-8). Contact costs one health with a moment of immunity after; the surveyor has five.
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- A Carrier that reaches a mote on the ground takes it and carries it; killing that Carrier drops it again (R5). Nothing but the surveyor and a Carrier can take a mote.
- **A coil discharge** needs a full linked battery and spends it. It energises the water the surveyor is touching for two seconds and stuns every conducting body in that water for eight (R3, ruled at r3 and confirmed: Equipment countersigned at Coil r2 and Equipment r2; Combat's effect table still carries eight seconds of powered water and is to be brought to this row, PMR006 1). An uninsulated discharge costs two health; after the two seconds the surveyor can collect inside the water without insulation. Stunned bodies that have already shed yield nothing; stunning again buys control, not charge.
- **The arc** drains a full linked battery over about ten seconds, one burst per battery; a body hit while the burst runs is chained and the hit conducts onward to at most three further bodies within a short reach, body to body, needing proximity and line of sight; the chain does not travel through energised water and the arc never energises water (R10 declined; the bounded model preserves spatial limits and is recorded as the alternative's counterpart). The burst returns no motes from bodies that have shed. Starting a burst reserves its battery until it ends; an interrupted burst discards the unused fuel. The Glossary's "about twenty seconds" is wrong; ten is the number.
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- **The Echo Relay and the Choir Cascade** (Equipment E9 at [Echo Relay e3ffcf](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay?revision=e3ffcf); Combat section 12 at [600893](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat?revision=600893); adopted at r8 as the working rule, countersign pending, PM disposes). The Relay is a one-cell module that stores no charge and takes no link. Its legal chassis is the coil with its own full battery, the arc with its own full battery, and the Relay: six cells, one bank per module as the link rule already says. Fired at a connected wet footprint with at least one tuned landmark visible, it spends both banks at once: the coil's two-second pulse energises the footprint and stuns every conducting body in it for eight seconds, and each visible tuned landmark in the footprint becomes an origin that seeds one ordinary arc chain, three further bodies within reach, body to body, line of sight, nearest first, one origin per body, origins resolved nearest the surveyor first. **A chained hit kills a stunned ordinary body outright** (Combat's ruling: the stun is what makes the arc lethal); an unstunned body takes one ordinary hit; a Heavy is not an ordinary body and survives; the Crust is neither origin, target nor hop; the chain still never travels through energised water and the arc never energises it, so R10 stays declined and the Relay does what unbounded propagation was asked for by seeding origins instead. The Relay is then spent until the next shelter whatever the batteries do. **The origin cap is the lead's ruling.** Combat proposes a fixed four, at most sixteen bodies, and records it as the dial; the lead rules instead that every tuned landmark the player prepared and can see in the footprint is an origin, and that the number is authored per place, seven at the Bell House and, in the furnace hall, enough for the hall's crowd. The clear then scales with the player's own preparation, which is the reaction the owner named, and stays legible because each origin is a landmark the player tuned by hand and Equipment's preview numbers them. The furnace hall's first Cascade must be able to clear the ordinary Flood in its footprint as the Brief writes it, and the place's landmark count is authored to its crowd. The price is unchanged: twenty charge, six cells, the Relay spent, no Kit or insulation unless the last two cells hold them, Heavies and the second wave surviving. Combat's four is the recorded alternative; damage numbers (R8) stay closed; nothing on any page says what a given count feels like.
- **A Spark killed in water** energises that water for two seconds, the same window as a discharge, and by the intensity rule it stuns nothing and damages no organism; it hurts an uninsulated surveyor standing in that water and it makes no chain (PMR006 2, chosen as Combat wrote it; r3's stun clause is withdrawn; this row is final, and the Combat and Spark pages' carrying of the r3 row was a crossing written against r3 six minutes after this page ruled, theirs to mirror back, REV104-15). Its own kill mote is the yield, if it had not shed.
- Charge never leaves a district with the player; charge left in a battery at extraction is lost at the dock. What a district's own machines meter or move is that district's design.
- Accounting, on every written expedition: dropped, collected, stored, spent, and lost, with lost annotated as fade, overflow, leakage, interruption or dock (E6).
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## 9. Power and dispatch: the state table (Lead with World; World r22 carries the same table with the fiction)
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*Superseded on 2026-09-07: this table describes the harvest network. Its rows for fixed power's source, trunk permission and enemy supply, and the Stop paragraph below it, are kept as design material; no World Below scene uses them unless it says so.*
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| State | Source | Connection | What changes it | What survives exit |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Fixed power | The head-works' switch-house store of harvested charge, filled by the Collector's wheels | Thick cables from the switch-house to each district's panel and on to its branch; a lit branch's channel water is energised | The district panel (which branch); a Grounder (one run, until cleared or re-switched, within an expedition); the head-works' Stop (all districts, as the store drains) | Panel positions persist as left; a grounded run recovers between expeditions with the mass |
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| Cues (C9) | This page, section 8 | Glow, encrustation, flicker, silhouette and position, scale: stated |
| Glow and silhouette (R4); the Carrier's mote (R5); the Static and Carrier merge; the Heavy's hit count | Enemies | Adopted; the Heavy's count stays a number (PMR005) |
| A role may darken a beacon (R9, C5) | This page, section 2 | Allowed; World names |
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| Arc through energised water (R10, C7) | This page, section 4 | Declined; Combat has withdrawn it |
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| Arc through energised water (R10, C7) | This page, section 4 | Declined; Combat has withdrawn it; the Echo Relay seeds origins instead (r8) |
| Eight cells (E1); leakage (E2); collection priority (E3); links and activation (E4); field acquisition (E5); accounting (E6); advance preparation (E7); combat boundaries (E8) | Inventory and Charge, with Build Paths | Adopted; Inventory and Charge r2 accepts the transfer |
| The tide glass | Equipment | Deferred |
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| Rescue against extraction-conditioned commitments; one berth city-wide; the board before launch (Districts r7; Colony r4) | This page, section 6, with Districts and Colony | Adopted; the Lock Flight's canal named as a switched state |
| Spread from where the crowd stands (R12, C13); a held crowd follows a moving beacon (R13, C14); the cutter's tie (R11) | This page, section 3; Combat Rules | R12 and R13 adopted; R11 Combat's |
| The Exchange's found bank state (REV104-18) | The Exchange page, ratified on the Campaign page 3.4 | Three clutches engaged on the pumping district, the Lock Flight and the Tram; a fourth seized |
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| The Echo Relay's origins; a chained hit kills a stunned ordinary body; eligibility and order; the origin cap (E9; Combat section 12) | This page, section 4; Echo Relay; Combat Rules | Adopted as written, with the lead's ruling on the cap: the tuned landmarks in the footprint, authored per place; Combat's fixed four recorded as the alternative; countersign pending; PM disposes (r8) |
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| The harvest rows: fixed power's source, the trunk, the Collector's supply, dispatch's meaning, Stop and the cascade | This page, sections 2, 3 and 9 | Superseded with the premise on 2026-09-07; kept as design material (r8) |
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| Fixed power in a lit branch's water (C2), the Spark's death and the intensity rule, opened for build expression | This page, sections 2 and 4 | Open; Campaign section 0.4 lists the prices; no change until a World Below scene needs one (r8) |
| D026: comparison in the base receiver; one assembly between tooling and the berth | Colony, mirrored on the Campaign page 5 | Adopted; no fitting sells bank permission, which the board shows free (section 6) |
| The mystery's answer | World and Mystery | Answer A provisional (D024); B preserved |
| District set and count; the ending's three positions | Districts, with the Campaign page | Seven external districts and the refuge at stake (D022); Stop, Keep, Leave (Head-works r4) |
