[Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief) · [Design Index](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index) · [Shared rule contract](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction) · [Districts](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts) · [Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) · [Combat Rules](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) · [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) · [Build Paths](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Build%20Paths) · [Colony](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony) · [World and Mystery](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery) · [Design Document](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document) · [Design Review](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) · [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004)

**Added by the Campaign and District Designer, 2026-09-06, without changing anything on this page.** The role this page stands in for is now staffed. Its first deliverable is [Districts (CAM101)](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts), which **adopts this campaign rather than proposing a rival one**: it takes section 2's set and section 3's districts as written, adds an independent count test and a recommended seven, the order of play and travel rules, the progression map, a bottom-up duration hypothesis, one consequence of failure and one alternative route to the head-works, and writes the two districts this page's coverage table marks as sketches — [The Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector) and [The Head-works](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works). One disagreement is recorded there and not here: the refuge should not be counted as the eighth district. The transfer this page's bookkeeping anticipates is the lead's to make, not mine to take.

| The eight-cell rack, collection priority, links, wet leakage, the Siphon, shelter-only fitting; the twelve-entry catalogue in three families | Salvage against space; three plans for one objective | Confirmed enthusiasm for the tradeoff. The catalogue is too small and too routing-shaped to produce "I made a ridiculous build work": its families mostly change where a crowd goes. Build expression needs parts that interact, discovered rather than listed | **Keep the rack rules; the catalogue is provisional.** Equipment and Combat's one combination is the test, and the number of interactions is the measure, not the number of items |

| World's rule that every clue must change what the player does next; two places for every essential clue; a safe way to investigate | To keep the mystery from becoming lore-reading | The owner relaxes the first: history and mythology may be discoveries in themselves. The other two are UX rules | **Relax the first, keep the rest** |

| The Design Document's pitch, one district and three tiers; this page's owner page and section 10 | The owner-facing argument | The wrong argument now. The rules sections remain the reference for what is kept | **Superseded**, labelled on both pages; a new owner page waits for the premise |

**Before the first credits: the distinct discoveries and build opportunities** (PMR011 asks for them substantial and distinct; brackets are the Visionary's to fill). Each discovery is a thing seen and tested; each build is legal under the rack rules as they stand and under the ruling in 0.4.

| The roof, to the first credits | The heat cell; then the furnace, for Senn | The furnace lit; real credits | A song as technical memory; hints of a larger world | Coil and Battery to the six-cell Cascade; the first wipe in the furnace hall | Hearth warm for good; the bench, the map, the projects |

| The deepest secrets | [What the Flood is; who wrote the songs] | Never gated | History as itself | Mastered builds as the key to a few places | Hearth's final state; the notebook closed |

**REV106-4, as it applies to the lead.** The critic found the apparent ending unplaced in both documents and the goal after the lift a question. Brief 342043 places the first credits at the furnace and makes the post-lift goal a task; this revision places the layers on that and supplies the stretch the proposal leaves to the lead, with the goal stated as a task at every step and the bracketed content marked as the Visionary's to fill. The critic's second point, that the proposal's one discovery was all three kinds in one beat, is met by the Visionary's staging on World and by the layering above: the song as memory before the credits, the world as places after the lift, history in the descent.

A lead's note for World and Colony, who own the cast; nothing here proposes a character, a cast size or a line of dialogue. Colony's authored-project loop (COL103) is the refuge's systems shape as the lead reads it: three kinds of result, with ordinary salvage the only currency, named cargo never priced and information never spent; the promise resolved before any shopping; at most three projects on the table; ordered, persistent completion; nothing that worsens while the player is away. The lead owes the prices and will set them when the projects' field actions exist, on one principle: payable by purposeful expeditions, never by repeated hauling. On the timing gap Colony and PMR011 name, the lead supports Colony's variant: Tavi builds the base turning map before the credits from reliefs the player has personally seen, and the archive plate joins it afterwards as a free reinterpretation, so the first optional project has a consequence before the credits without charging for map clarity or for a deduction already made. The people are where the goals come from: layer one's given goal is one person's need, said in that person's words, and layer two's new goal comes from what the people make of the reinterpretation. Growth is visible in stages tied to the layers, people arriving and places opening, without a population number, a jobs screen or a food clock; the existing investment loop, the workshop, the receiver, the dock fittings and the support assembly, remains the way the player improves the people's capabilities, and a repair made for a named person is an authored commitment under the persistence rule, so it stays made. Defence, if the premise wants it, stays player-chosen and never scheduled; the owner has approved no defence schedule, upkeep loop or relationship subsystem, and neither does this section. What the systems side asks of the cast is only this: that the player can always say who needs the current goal met and can see, at home, what the last trip changed for them.

**What Equipment and Combat have since answered, and the lead's decision (r2).** Equipment's [Echo Relay](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay) (E9) and Combat's [section 12](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) are the combination this section asked for, and they answer the arc row above better than the row did: the Relay seeds an ordinary arc chain from every tuned wet landmark in a Coil-energised footprint, so the wipe comes from origins the player prepared rather than from unbounded propagation, and the chain still never travels through energised water. The row proposing an arc chain through energised water is withdrawn in the Relay's favour; R10 stays declined. Combat's four rulings are adopted as the working rule: a chained hit kills a stunned ordinary body outright, so the stun is what makes the arc lethal and the combination is more than its parts; stunned bodies are eligible and the Crust is neither origin, target nor hop; origins resolve nearest the surveyor first and a body belongs to one origin; a Heavy is ten hits and survives. The critic's caution is accepted: the chassis spends one bank per module, two banks, and "every linked battery" above meant that. **The one thing Combat leaves to the lead is the cap, and the lead reopens it deliberately.** Combat proposes four origins, at most sixteen bodies, a quarter of a small surge, and says plainly that this is a broad earned clear and not the screen-wipe the owner's example named, that the cap is the dial, and that raising it costs legibility. The lead's ruling: the cap is not a fixed number; every tuned landmark the player prepared and can see in the footprint is an origin, and the count is authored per place, seven at the Bell House and, in the furnace hall, enough for the hall's crowd. The reason is that 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 the preview numbers them. The price is unchanged: both banks, six cells, the Relay spent until shelter, Heavies and the second wave surviving. Combat's four is recorded as the alternative on the contract, damage numbers stay closed, and nothing on any page says what a given count feels like. Mirrored on the [contract](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction) at r8, for Combat and Equipment to countersign and PM to dispose.

- **Hearth changes on every upper-phase return** by a furnace part installed, a map grown or a person's situation moved, without a capital project.

- **Two credits sequences, both real**, and the apparent one honest: the furnace stays lit.

**To the Campaign designer, on the three questions in Districts r14, section 0.** PMR011 resolves them as a working assumption for drafting, and the lead's r2 answer is replaced by it: Hearth and the upper-sanctuary routes form the upper region; inhabited lower regions connect through dangerous wet service regions; a layer may contain several distinct explorable places and is not a district-count unit; progress opens a network with return travel to Hearth and lateral destinations, not a one-way descent; the old seven surface districts are reusable scene material, not a second mandatory campaign; and the old one-plus-one berth cap is not inherited without a new reason. The lead integrates; you own the compact spatial and progression proposal with alternative paths and what changes on returning, without waiting for another approval round, and may challenge the assumption with a concrete better fit. What the lead keeps from r2: the old districts' ideas travel as places (the room where a choice lands elsewhere, the withheld wave that flashes empty, the lesson that joined water carries power and attraction), and your five premise-independent rules survive, the berth cap excepted. Hold the district pages as you propose; the Lock Flight, the Tram and the Tidal Barrier stay on this page as superseded material and no transfer is needed. Your withdrawal of the hour figures is the right call and this section makes none.

**The rest.** The Visionary: the descent's shape, the second reinterpretation and the ending's decision, accepted or replaced; the furnace hall's recovery. The Campaign designer: the compact spatial and progression proposal under PMR011's geography, with the first landing, the answering settlement and the lateral routes, and the revisit test run on it. Equipment and Combat: countersign the contract's r9 row on the Relay, the pulse-conditioned stun-kill and the landmark cap, or contest them there; Combat, with the Campaign designer placing it, composes the furnace encounter under that frame; Equipment mirrors the ruling after countersign and retires the paid-bench references as PMR011 asks; the Visionary and Equipment answer the Troll's TRL-WB1. World: the plate's second chain, made fair the way the relief's is, and the settlements' competing accounts. Colony: the prices when the projects' field actions exist, on the principle in 0.3, and the landing as a supported shelter. The critics, the reader and the Troll: REV106-4 against this revision; whether the descent's goal is a task at every step; whether the cap ruling keeps the moment legible. PM: disposition of DES106 r4 and contract r10; D022 and D024 marked superseded in the decision log; whether the layered shape goes to the owner together with the Visionary's premise.

**What changed.** You called the premise promising, found three to four hours far too little, and asked for a much larger number of districts, with separate pages for mechanics, enemies and weapons. Since then four specialists have written the districts, enemies, equipment and colony in detail, and PM has taken three provisional drafting decisions so the next draft is one design: seven districts plus the refuge (D022), an eight-cell rack with pickups the player prioritises (D023), and the world designer's first answer to the mystery, that the city still runs on the Flood (D024). None of that is your approval; all of it is reversible; nothing has been built or played.

- *A first trip.* You leave the causeway dock, walk past a dark lamp, and watch the far beacon flash as the first surge pours in beneath it. You learn the culvert, find a coil, and drain your own battery by packing wet salvage against it. Nothing is solved; everything needed to solve it was seen. (The Design Document's expedition one.)

**Tension one: mastery against renewal.** *(The Visionary has since taken this position on the Brief: mastery can earn an easy, profitable return, and responsibility lies in the lasting state chosen for the city.)* The vision says mastery should make choices more deliberate, not make consequences disappear. The design's strongest rule, that the Flood sheds its charge once and is then worth nothing, guarantees that fighting never pays twice; but understanding does pay twice, and it should. On the Tram's later return the player who knows supply was withheld gets an empty yard and an easy trip home with cargo, and the reviewer's instinct was to take that away by forcing a second surge. The lead's position, now on the page, is that the easy return is the payoff and the choice is whether to trust it. The question for the vision is how much of the campaign's renewal may come from earned ease, and where the game must still put something in the way of a player who understands it.

| Weir | The Head: the weir beacon lit, the lock-house door live, the Head's water energised | Beside the weir beacon at the weir road's end, beyond the house; the weir dock past it is a hard stop | The weir beacon, dark or lit |

| The prod: a second primary, a lock-keeper's pole that pushes the nearest body back a step and kills nothing; its brace takes one cell (Equipment's Alternative Tools) | Nothing; the push is movement, not a status | The body staggers back; the weapon's target line | Hold a catwalk or a doorway without spending health or drawing charge |

- **3:00.** Surge one, quay: fifty floaters and ten walkers pour into the Tail's shallows and hold at the quay beacon, between the surveyor and home. The surveyor is at the top of L1.

- **5:00.** The lock house, across the catwalk over the shut L2. The door is dead: the head basin is full but unpowered, because the panel is on Quay. The surveyor stands at the basin's edge in insulation and discharges: the head basin is energised for two seconds, the weir beacon on the same circuit glows steady for those seconds, which moves no crowd because the quay is lit and nearer, and the door opens on that current; the surveyor is through it before the current is gone, and the door shuts behind them when the two seconds end; the way out at 7:00 is the door's hand crank, which every hatch has. Nothing was in the water, so nothing sheds. Battery empty.

- **7:00.** Out and down. The forecast reads: second surge in one minute, intake quay. The dock is under fifty floaters.

| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

| 3:30 | same | 10 | 10 | 10 | | |

**The ground.** The depot at the foot, ankle-deep across its yard, forty metres from the intake end, where the yard beacon stands, to the dock end, where the depot gates open onto the dock road; the depot dock beyond them is the baseline held dock; the panel (Rail, Gates, Off) stands at the yard's dock end, before the gates. **The loading apron:** a raised dry platform beside the road at the foot of the incline, about ten metres off the boarding path, where the depot's carts were loaded, with room for a planted crowd's ring to sit off the road. The incline road and the rail climb side by side to the summit station, a shelter, with the pass gate to the Exchange, the summit berth on the upper canal, the timetable board, and **the summit stores:** one loose bundle, and an offer of a Siphon or a Kit, either inspectable and one of them takeable per visit. **The stairs** run in a cutting on the rail's far side, ten metres below the road and out of pursuit range of it except at the two ends, the summit platform and the depot foot; about a minute each way. The rail is a metal channel that carries current along its length while the panel is on Rail, and glows faintly to show it. The tram has one lever, up or down, and a lamp switch; it moves only while the rail is powered; the pass gate is on the rail's circuit. **The free manual return:** the depot gates have a hand crank, like every hatch, ten seconds to open without power, so Rail never traps the surveyor; switching Gates at the panel is the quicker way and closes the pass.

| Panel position | Powered branch | Intake selected | Beacon that flashes |

| Rail | The rail, the tram's lamp and the pass gate | The yard | The yard beacon, dark under Rail: it flashes at the dispatch and is dark again after it |

| A powered rail: a dry conductor that carries the depot circuit up the incline | Nothing: lines conduct | The rail glows while powered | The panel's price is felt at a distance |

| The summit stores' offer: a Siphon or a Kit, one per visit, beside a loose bundle (Equipment's placement) | Nothing | Both inspectable; inspection records the recipe | Trade a bundle for three units of charge, or carry healing |

**Two colony paths across the three visits** (COL102; prices are Colony's proposals, four bundles each, and never a hauling target).

| Visit | Path A, protect two exits | Path B, make one combination dependable |

Dropped eleven, collected nothing, eleven lost to fade.

**What changed in the world.** The Lock Flight's L2 stands open and the board shows the upper canal joined. The Exchange has been visited: its bank was found with three clutches engaged, Pumping, the Lock Flight and this district, so the surges here were never weather; they were permitted deliveries. Both crane parts are banked and the assembly commissioned. The tram stands at the depot where it was left, the panel on Rail, the pass open, and a heavy now stands on the rail in front of the tram, because heavies gather where the tram was left. The tram is available at a price, ten hits at the rail before any surge, which is what the later return pays; this visit does not need it.

**Prepared, the simple route.** The ordinary workshop's issue, a known Kit and the empty battery: `. . K B / . . . .`, six cells free. Objective: through the pass this time, to read the Exchange's drums from its door and confirm which clutch is this district's, then home. Nothing about that objective needs charge, and the External Critic was right that a plan which fights for charge it then discards buys nothing here; the fight is offered below as an experiment, honestly priced, and the coil's real job is shown where a door depends on it, in the Lock Flight (section 3.1).

- **0:00.** The depot dock. Rail is as left: the rail glows, the pass above is open, the gates are dark. The heavy stands on the rail beside the tram and is not on the road; the surveyor takes the stairs in the cutting, out of its reach.

**The experiment, optional and priced: the wet-yard harvest.** With tooling's four-cell record instead of the Kit, `. C C B / . . . I`, the surveyor throws Gates at 0:00, waits for the first surge to hold in the lit yard at 3:00, wades to its edge in insulation, kills ten for a full battery (two hits), discharges at 4:00 to stun the fifty and walks over two large motes for ten units more (one hit on the withdrawal), throws Rail again at 4:30, and climbs the stairs past a recovering crowd to do the same reading at the door. It buys a stun and a refilled battery; on this trip the battery has no job, and its ten units are lost at the dock, so what the experiment buys is the harvest loop itself, learned in a lit yard under insulation, at the price of four hits, an hour of the tooling assignment and about three minutes. A player who wants to learn the coil's loop here can; the page does not pretend it advances the objective. Its ledger: dropped thirty-five, collected twenty, spent ten, fifteen lost to fade and ten at the dock.

**The exit alternative, priced: the berth.** With the assembly on the summit berth instead of tooling, ordinary issue is one known module and the empty battery: the portable beacon and the battery, `. . L B / . . . .`, no Kit unless the district offers one in the field, which this one does not. Under Gates the surveyor earns ten motes at the dry edge, plants the beacon dark on the loading apron, arms it, and throws Rail: the yard beacon dies, the crowd retargets to the lure on the apron for a hundred seconds, and the surveyor clears the heavy from the rail in the five seconds the cutter needs with no crowd behind and rides the dark tram up, doing the same reading and extracting at the summit berth without retracing the yard. That buys a summit exit and the tram cleared for the next visit, and costs the beacon and its battery left on the apron, the assembly spent on the berth instead of tooling, and no healing carried. It is not faster than the stairs, and the page says so; it is a different way home for a player who has chosen the berth.

**Newly learned:** a flash is a call the bank permits; a lit beacon moves a spread crowd off the gates; the Siphon's rule. **Given up:** the second Kit, for the Siphon; nothing else the simple route did not already have. **Changed for good:** the Siphon fitted and its recipe known; the tram still at the depot behind its heavy, the panel on Gates.

| Time | Cells (of eight) | Dropped | Collected | Stored | Lost | Spent |

| 0:00 | kit 1, battery 1; six empty | | | 0 | | |

Nothing dropped, nothing collected, nothing spent; one hit.

**What changed in the world.** At the Collector the surveyor held one basin's gate, withholding this district's first supply while leaving it permitted: a one-surge buffer, which buys the ride up and not the trip. The board shows the hold, the panel on Gates, and the tram at the depot with its heavy still on the rail. The network's cadence is already in the notebook from the Exchange's drums, so nothing on this trip needs to be waited for.

**Prepared.** The small circuit set: `. . Q B / . . L .`, the Siphon's feed into the battery, the battery linked to the beacon, the Kit not carried; five cells free. Objective: leave the tram at the summit with its lamp lit, so that later surges climb toward it and away from the depot road the colony now uses, and bring the summit's bundle home. The first dispatch will be an empty flash, which the surveyor expects; the second, at 8:00, will bring a surge, which the surveyor intends to be gone before. This is the return that understanding makes easy, and the page says so: the player who knows supply is withheld has an empty yard to work in, and that is the payoff of the Collector's lesson.

- **0:00.** The depot dock, panel on Gates as left, the yard beacon lit, the tram behind its heavy. No surge is due for three minutes and the first is withheld. The surveyor kills the heavy on the rail in ten hits, about five seconds, no hit taken from a single slow body against a retreating cutter, and walks over its large mote: five units into the battery, the visit's first charge and the tram's clearance.

- **1:00 to 3:00.** The tram climbs, no crowd behind it, no heavy ahead: an empty ride.

- **3:30.** The summit. The lever left up, the lamp left lit: the standing state. The bundle from the stores into a free cell, as cargo; the Siphon stays fitted and unused, and since the Visionary's simplification it could consume any carried bundle, adjacent or not. The board is glanced at, not waited for: the cadence it would show across two ticks is the one the Exchange's drums already gave.

| 3:30 | + bundle 1; four empty | | | 5 | | |

Dropped five, collected five, five lost at the dock; the bundle banked.

**Ledger, the stay.** The same start; the bundle and the Siphon consumed at 3:30 only if the margin is taken.

| Later return | Trust the withheld supply and go home early with cargo, or stay for certainty and cross a surge with light; leave the tram lit above | An empty yard and a banked bundle, or a crossing bought with the heavy's charge; the next surge climbs away from the dock road | Responsibility for the system: the standing state is set for the ending, and the easy return is what understanding earned |

**Assets.** Reuses the yard tiles, water, lamps, cables and panel, and the humanoid mass at a larger size for the heavy. Gaps: the rail, the tram, the incline's slope tiles, the pass gate, the loading apron as a raised platform prop, the stairs' cutting. Nothing is claimed available.

| Panel position | Powered branch | Intake selected | Beacon that flashes |

| An unannounced intake: the sea, through the open gates at high tide, as trickles along the mole with no beacon flashing | Nothing: it is the shut regime as a natural state, and the arrivals obey ordinary targeting once inside | The gates are visibly open; the trickle is visible on the mole | Shut the gates, and pay for it |

The tidewatcher stays: coil, one battery, insulation, kit and three bundles, the rack full; it earns a battery at the crowd's edge on the wetting flats, discharges there when the flats are one body of water when the whole crowd is in one body of water, and works the lever when the tide powers it. The runner carries no battery at all: kit, insulation, three bundles and three empty cells for the crossing's finds, crossing at low tide, throwing the house panel to Mole so the first surge lands away from the flats, reading the log, and crossing back before the water closes, without touching the lever. One rack makes the district's decision; the other reads it and goes home with cargo. The runner's charge is simply lost, which is the point of its rack.

**Consequences.** For the refuge: with the gates shut the tide no longer floods the refuge's dock at high water, which is what has been costing the colony its held-dock choice on this coast. For this district: the flats stop wetting, so the whole-flats stun is gone for good, and the mole road is dry for good; a district outcome with a cost. For another district: the Collector downstream of the low quarter is fed by the tide through these gates; shut, its wheels turn slower and its meters read less, which the Exchange's shaft shows, and what the head-works' choice can reach at the mouth is decided by what the gates allow (the Districts page, section 7, makes this the difference between its two routes to the head-works).

**Written expedition, tidewatcher, the district's second visit.** Rack: coil, one empty battery, insulation, kit, three empty cells; priority: the one battery. Panel found on Flats. Forecast: first surge at 3:00, intake flats; second at 8:00, intake flats; third at 12:00. Tide low.

- **1:30.** Three bundles from the wrecks, into the ordered cells; the insulation sits under the battery, so no bundle touches it.

- **3:30.** The surveyor wades out in insulation, shin-deep, thirty seconds to the crowd's edge at the flats beacon, and works the edge with the cutter inside pursuit range: ten walkers, ten kills, ten motes walked over as they fall; two hits taken. Battery ten. The surveyor steps back a pace out of pursuit range and waits in the shallows; the flats are one body of water, so the discharge does not need the edge.

- **12:00.** Low tide. Surge three, mole: a hundred more join the crowd at the mole beacon. The surveyor leaves the house by the flats side and crosses the dry bed to the mole dock, away from the crowd.

| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

| 3:30 | same | 10 | 10 | 10 | | |

| 13:30 | extracted; charge lost at the dock | | | 0 | 10, dock | |

Dropped thirty-five; collected twenty; spent ten; fifteen lost to fade where they fell and ten at the dock.

The world designer's example district, with its mystery contribution written on their page, and now deepened by the Campaign designer to the standard of the three districts above on [the Exchange](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Exchange) (CAM102), which keeps this outline entire and adds the ground, the panel, the interaction that takes time, two loadouts, a written expedition and the failure case; this outline adds the machinery problem and the rule that prices it. A dry hall where every district's signal cable meets: drums ticking together on one shaft, turned by a race whose head the player cannot see, and a routing bank, a panel with one position per district, that sets which district receives the trunk's permission. A district whose position is dark is in the shut regime, unannounced trickles that grow and a dark forecast, never a district with no Flood in it; its arrivals obey ordinary targeting once inside, so lit beacons still route them (PMR004). The bank's price, stated as a rule the way the panel's was: a lit position gives the player the forecast and the announced, routable surge in that district, which is the thing the whole game is played with; a dark position takes both away there. To withhold the Flood from a district is to give up reading it there; that coupling is the argument that the bank does not dominate, and its magnitude is for later validation, not proof. Conduction across the dry hall is by the cable reel, bridging two exposed power terminals the lead places here for the Exchange page to draw, both at the head end, because the reel reaches six metres and the hall's two ends are the length of the floor apart: a live terminal where the gallery's head run drops to the floor beside the head-end beacon, and a dead terminal on the bank's own lamp line six metres along the north wall. The reel bridges them there, and nowhere else in the hall is a pair within its reach. The Exchange's expedition is ten minutes with two dispatches, at 3:00 and 7:00, as the Exchange page's scene is built; a scene that needs a third dispatch or a twelfth minute is not this district's. The Carrier, the merged role that walks to the nearest reachable loose charge within a short range in preference to a lit beacon, makes a carried battery a beacon: the surveyor caches charge or is hunted for it; it leans toward what it wants and the forecast draws its target. The pumping district's dead drum is listed on the bank, which is the first campaign clue in its second form. The bank is found with three clutches engaged, the pumping district, the Lock Flight and the Tram Incline, and a fourth visibly seized whose repair is the head-works' business, so the three districts the player has already had forecasts in are exactly the three the bank was permitting (REV104-18; the Exchange page r2, ratified by the lead). The critic's alternative, a seized clutch on the pumping district, is not adopted, because darkening the opening district from here is the campaign's best example of a later discovery changing an earlier return.

The specialists own the detail; this section records what the lead adopted, ruled or declined, and why, so the next draft is one design. The full dispositions table is section 10 of the [shared rule contract](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction).

- **The rack is eight cells from the outset, with pickups in a player-set order** ([Inventory and Charge](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Inventory%20And%20Charge), E1 to E7; D023). r1's third row unlocked by the crane parts is withdrawn: Equipment's argument that a fixed frame with room for one signature combination plus cargo or a countermeasure creates more decisions than a capacity ladder is better than mine, and PM chose it. The crane parts now pay for the colony's service assembly (section 5).

- **Build paths.** [Build Paths](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Build%20Paths) gives three families, the Circuit Harvester, the Route Shepherd and the Salvage Breacher, each with an early, middle and late choice and a branch. The four beats on the owner page use them. The lead's early, middle and late table from r1 is superseded by that page.

- **COL-I2, inspected recipes and recorded racks.** Equipment's to argue; the lead's position is Colony's: recorded racks on revisits only, capped at six issued cells, so first visits keep their discoveries (D023).

- **COL-I5, the reusable service loop in place of three decisions.** Adopted as structure; the four-bundle prices are Colony's proposals, and the Districts page's constraint stands: every unlock must be payable from the salvage of required expeditions, or the campaign has become a grind.

- **The crane parts** from the Lock Flight are the assembly's material, so a discovery, not a haul, opens the colony's advanced service.

One lasting, visible refuge consequence beyond a different loadout menu, as PMR004 asks: the refuge's board, which shows every district's forecast, bank position and gate state the player has repaired or set, and which goes dark district by district after Stop.

The World and Mystery Designer owns the mystery and has written the campaign thread (WLD103, World and Mystery r19 and r20); this page adopts it. The campaign question, in their words: the district relays are one network, kept in time from somewhere upstream; what, at its head, is still keeping time, and for whom? The first campaign clue is already in the pumping district: after the player shuts the relay, the drum stops and the thin cable entering the room from outside still pulses on the old cadence. Every district contributes six things by the world page's rule, and section 3 applies it: the locks' painted gauges and the tram's timetable board are one clue in two forms; the barrier's gate log has its redundant form in the Collector's intake gauge; the Exchange, the Collector and the Head-works carry their clues as written on the world page and the Districts pages.

**PM's D024 chooses Answer A for the next draft:** nobody is left; the city runs on charge harvested from the Flood; the head-works' choice is the relay-room choice at scale, and Stop darkens the districts in turn, the colony's pump included, while the gravity docks keep everyone alive. Answer B, the keepers, is preserved as the documented alternative. The lead recommended A in r1 and the reasons stand: it needs no new presence, it makes the ending the same kind of choice the owner found promising at the relay, and it is also an asset decision, since B needs a human figure the design has otherwise avoided. What A requires of the rules, the fixed-power source, the dispatch condition, the empty flash and the Stop consequence, is in the contract's sections 2, 3 and 9 and on World r22, which carries the same state table with the fiction; the critic's REV104-1 to -5 are answered there and in the contract.

| District | Problem | Loadouts | Enemy combination | Discovery | Consequence | Assets: reuse / gap | Status and owner |

| Pumping | Power against signal | Hauler, electrician, harvester, arc hauler (to be redrawn on eight cells) | Walkers at a door | The relay | Local outcome; permitted at the Exchange | Tiles, water, lamps, cables, mass / none new | Designed; Design Document, Lead |

| Tidal Barrier | The clock | Tidewatcher, runner | Walkers in one body of water; sea floaters | The gates keep the trunk's time | Refuge dock; flats dry for good; the Collector starved | Same / gates, mole, staff, wrecks | Deep, 3.3; Lead, to transfer |

| Refuge | At stake, not a district | Defence, optional | Arrivals on a landing | None | The board; the pump; the held docks | Same / none new | Colony; the optional defence is a sketch |

| Engine-drawn cue | Target line, crowd ring, arcs, drips, the dispatch flash, the empty flash's hollow marker, the Spark's flicker, the Floater's wake, meter needles, the rail's glow | No art assets; authoring work in the engine, not zero |

So the roster's cost is one body and one edit, not eight creatures; the campaign's environment cost is seven new categories, with three cut candidates. The Reference Researcher's audit is REF110 (REF109 is electroreception); its first pass, read after this list was published, records a source and licence candidate for category 4, a verified CC0 pack, and candidates located for some of the seven environment categories, with nothing located for three; no candidate's suitability, pose or animation work has been assessed by anyone, reuse of an as-yet-unselected base asset is not evidence it exists in usable form, and no availability is claimed here beyond what that page records. Only verified gaps go to the owner as a purchase or custom-asset decision (D025); the Brief's rule that every shortlisted asset is recorded with source, creator, terms and intended use applies.

The baseline path exists on the Districts page, and its owner has put the figures in one place so that they can be quoted rather than assembled (Districts r11, section 5): thirty-four expeditions and about eight hours of authored beats on the baseline path, expedition time only; ten to eleven hours for a player who does that path with the unmeasured dock overhead of a quarter to a third applied; eight optional expeditions and about two hours more, separate; about thirteen hours for everything designed, with overhead. Deaths, retries and hauling are excluded from every row and are not campaign length, and none of the figures is a measurement: the counts come from printed beat lists, the overhead is an assumption stated as one, and the number moves when content moves, as it did when the Campaign designer cut a revisit that only repeated an answer. PM accepts this as a content-backed drafting hypothesis, not measured playtime and not proof that the scale is sufficient, and asks that every imported district beat sit in one ledger before the owner is asked whether it feels ambitious enough. The lead's position: the figures are the Campaign designer's and live on their page; they are quoted here so that the page the owner reads answers the one question the owner asked, against the three to four hours rejected. The three districts on this page each have one written expedition, and the Tram now three, with a two-tier shape counted there as four expeditions each.

- **That the shared rule carries seven districts** is the central hypothesis; six are written to the section 3 standard on this page and the Districts pages, and the pumping district is the Design Document.

6. **The ending's shape.** Stop, Keep or Leave at the head-works, the relay room's three shapes at city scale, with the Districts page's two routes in; the slower position is merged into Keep, which is the one reversible outcome. Recommendation: yes.

8. **Authored art.** The one-district design assumed one likely custom asset, the enemy body. The campaign needs seven new environment categories, one base body and one edit, with three cut candidates named in section 7 and REF110's first pass recording candidates for some and none for three; the Brief asks that authored assets be rare, minimal and approved before creation. Recommendation: no purchase or custom request yet; the Reference Researcher audits free candidates against the list first, and only verified gaps come to you.

**Rule ownership after this revision** (PMR004 4: the lead records which definitions now own the rule). Section 0's assessment and progression: this page, the lead; its handoffs are in 0.6; the Choir Cascade's rows are the contract's from r8, with Equipment owning the Relay and Combat its damage, order and eligibility. The four clauses, the dispatch condition, the state table and readable state: the shared rule contract. Precedence, press, targeting, damage and status grammar: Combat Rules. The roster: Enemies and its role pages, the Floater included. Rack, links, leakage, collection priority, field handling and accounting: Inventory and Charge, with the catalogue on Equipment and its item pages and acquisition on Build Paths. The colony loop, services, refits and the defence option: Colony. District order, travel, the progression map, the count test, the duration hypothesis, the Collector and the Head-works: Districts and its pages. The Lock Flight, the Tram Incline, the Tidal Barrier and the Exchange outline: this page, until the Campaign designer and the lead cut them to district pages in one agreed edit. The mystery, the campaign question and the clues: World and Mystery. The pumping district's rules and examples: the Design Document, until the editor's transfer.

**Sources read for r9 (DES105 r4).** PM Reviews PMR009 262856 and checkpoints 55b3a8, 38a6d3; Tasks 888ac1 (the PMR009 rows; the owner's workflow); Brief 6d869e (the vision's return in plain language; the Siphon simplification; the theme's mastery sentence); Team 0bff49 (chat for discussion, articles for design; the reviewer model change); Chat Rooms 441178 and the hold-the-flood room read to message 16; Design Review REV105 r3 265a09; External Critique r17 2de127 (X37); Clarity CLR102 r25 f9b0fd; Colony r7 c56634 (the refuge answer; the berth issue); Equipment 122d38, Build Paths f6f8ef, Utility Modules 4ffa18 (the Siphon rule and the issue boundary); the Exchange r4 17dca3; World and Mystery r27 7b8ad1; Design Document 125528 (the Visionary's siphon sentence, kept).

**Sources read for r7 (DES105 r2).** Design Review REV105 r1 35cccf; External Critique r14 211efe (X34; X32 on this page); Districts r11 c1bbe1 (section 5, the figures in one place, and 5.1); World and Mystery r26 744b21 (the chain re-ordered onto the Tram's three visits); Colony r6 59ad65 (COL102 r2, D026 applied); Combat Rules r8 221c48; Equipment r5 902439; Reference/Water Balance Haulage REF111 37601a (read; proposes nothing, and nothing is taken from it yet); Clarity r23 d3d6a0 (Q53, the Glossary's); Tasks cb7928.

**Sources read for r5.** External Critique r12 4e4d20 (X33); Districts r7 cd487b (section 3.3, the three rules) and r6 d2b9eb; Colony r4 527f2b; Combat Rules r6 6129ea; Enemies r7 7e588c, Spark r5 30c5cb, Floater r2 92603a; the Head-works r5 65403a; Tasks 13c20b; Disagreement Register r17 3fc3b9. The contract at r6 was written from the same sources.

**Sources read for r3.** PM Reviews PMR006 a28870 and checkpoint da9eb5; Tasks b72189; Brief 77e392 (D025); Hub 2f20ec; Design Review REV104 r2 908e01; World and Mystery r22 da3639; Combat Rules r4 91a866; Enemies r5 9a72af; Equipment r2 ae4543, Coil r2 0696cf, Utility Modules 087718; Colony r2 12694e; Districts r4 c58832, the Head-works r4 706ce6, the Collector r4 75c09e; External Critique r10 fc95e6 (X31); Clarity Q49 and Q50 (fc0461). The contract at r4 was written from the same sources.