*The [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision) sets one test: **name the player's choice, its visible consequence, and the part of the experience it serves.** If those cannot be stated plainly, simplify or combine; if the element still contributes nothing, remove it. It adds that a feature's origin, its author and its prior acceptance do not answer the test. Here are the seven, plainly, with no task codes and no revision numbers, because a reader should be able to use this table without any of them.*

| District | What the player chooses | What they see happen | What it is for |

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

| **Pumping District** | Which road to light | The next wave comes in on the road you lit, and the door on that road opens | Teaches the whole game: every door you open invites the crowd to it |

| **Lock Flight** | Whether to move the water or move the crowd | Basins fill and drain; a drained bed becomes a road, and a filled one becomes a circuit | Shows that the water is a tool, not just terrain |

| **Tram Incline** | Whether to tow the crowd or send it away | A lit tram climbs, and the crowd follows the light up or is left behind it | Shows that a light can be carried, not just switched |

| **The Exchange** | Which districts stay readable | Somewhere else, on a later trip, a wave arrives announced — or doesn't | The first choice that lands in a place you are not standing in |

| **The Collector** | How much of the Flood another district gets, and whether to hold it, harvest it or let it through | A wave that was scheduled to arrive somewhere simply doesn't: the light flashes and nothing comes | Shows the Flood is being moved on a schedule, not spawned |

| **Tidal Barrier** | Whether to shut the sea out | The flats stop flooding, the refuge's dock stops flooding, and the Collector runs short | The first choice that helps home and costs the machine |

| **The Head-works** | Stop, Keep or Leave | Every district's schedule changes at once, on a timetable you can watch approach | The same choice as the first district's relay, with the whole city on the other end |

**What I am withdrawing.** §2.1 offers the lever ladder as a cheaper count test than the lead's, and §2.2 runs the seven through it. **As a justification for the count, it is withdrawn.** It was doing something worse than being wrong: it made seven look inevitable, so an eighth district would have had to find an empty cell in a grid rather than a decision worth making — which is the reasoning the vision says should not settle it. *(An earlier draft of the same argument derived the count from a two-axis grid of water states and intake control. It was never published. I mention it because it is the purest form of what the vision is challenging, and abandoning it before it reached the wiki is not the same as being right about it.)*

**What survives, restated in the vision's terms.** The ladder never required a district to add a *rule*; it required each district's consequence to land in a different place and time from the others. Read that way it is the vision's own test applied across districts rather than one at a time, and it is still what catches a reskin. **A district earns its place by the choice it gives the player, not by the rule it adds** — and by that standard the Exchange is the interesting case, because it adds nothing at all to the shared rules and is still the first place a player's choice reaches a district they are not standing in.

**Already applied, before the vision said it.** *"Change or cut when a visit exists to meet an hour/count target."* At r10 a required trip was cut from the baseline for exactly that reason — its only purpose was to watch a clue the player would see anyway — and the baseline fell to 34 expeditions and 8.1 hours. I mention it because the vision asks designers not to defend a feature by its documentation, and the cheapest way to show that is to have cut something before being asked to.

**What I have not done.** No district is added, none is expanded and no catalogue is touched: [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) defers that while the direction is under review, and this role's job meanwhile is to support coherence and correct live contradictions. If a later vision pass changes what a district must do, the table above is where the damage shows first, and I would rather revise it than argue for it.

*Answering **COL-I1** in [Colony r4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony), which asks this role to own the physical approach and return paths, to say whether a second berth is acceptable, and to rule on rescue. Colony is right that the Colony preview cannot claim these on Campaign's behalf; here is Campaign's answer, in three rules.*

**Rule 1 — a rescue cannot complete a commitment that is defined as happening at extraction.** Colony asks that rescue must not falsely satisfy the extraction-conditioned canal commitment, and I agree, but the reason is general and belongs here rather than in one district: **a rescue is not an extraction.** The campaign already turns on persistent states the player sets and then leaves with — the pumping district's relay, the Collector's ways-on, the Exchange's clutches — and every one of them is set by an action performed *in* the district, which a rescue does not undo. A commitment made *at* extraction is a different animal: it is completed by leaving properly, and a player who was carried out did not leave properly. So: **physical state persists as left; a commitment conditioned on extraction does not complete.** That also gives the failure case its honest shape — you do not lose the lock you opened, you lose the trip that would have made it count, and the fix is one more expedition.

**Which physical state on the Lock Flight expresses this is the lead's**, not mine. I own the rule; DES104 owns the lock. What I would ask of that mechanism is only that the incomplete state be *distinguishable on sight* from the complete one, so a player reading the board can tell "lock open, canal not connected" from "canal connected".

**Rule 2 — one additional supported berth, campaign-wide, and I support it with one condition.** Colony proposes an explicit exception to the one-dock-per-district limit: a baseline held dock plus one additional supported berth, paid for with the advanced assembly assignment. **Campaign's position: accept it.** It buys a real route decision — enter below, tow a crowd with the Tram's own machinery, work above and extract at the summit without retracing that crowd — and a route the player pays for with a capability they wanted elsewhere is exactly the kind of choice this campaign is short of, not long on.

**The condition, which is the part only this role would think to add: one additional berth in the whole city, not one per district.** Per-district it would be seven extra hard stops by the late campaign, and every route price in [DES104 §3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#3-three-districts-in-depth) and on these district pages is set against the assumption that a district has one guaranteed way out. **The exception is interesting precisely because it is scarce**: assigning the berth to the Tram summit is a decision only if it is a berth you are not putting somewhere else. Colony's own baseline requirement — that arrival and return stay possible without buying the option — I adopt unchanged and would enforce district by district as new districts are written.

**Rule 3 — route-gating state is readable on the refuge board before launch.** Colony asks for canal state and summit eligibility to be shown before the choice is offered. Agreed, and generalised, because this page has already required it three times in three places and it should be one rule: **every persistent state that gates or prices a route appears on the refuge's board before the expedition launches** — the Collector's ways-on, gauges and starting level; the Exchange's engaged clutches; the pumping district's relay; the Stop cascade's schedule; and now the canal's state and the summit's eligibility. A player must never discover at the dock that the route they planned is not available. **This is a design constraint on every district page including my own**, and it is the readability half of what makes persistent cross-district state a decision rather than a trap.

**What Campaign does not concede.** Colony's list of what the berth does not do — power the rail, hold a lock open remotely, suppress enemies, move a boat through a closed canal, open the Exchange from a menu — is right, and I would add one: **a berth is a place to stop, never a way in.** Districts open by physical access (§3.2), and no colony purchase may become the thing that opens one, or the campaign's knowledge gates quietly become a shop.

**Closed: World chose the recommended route.** [WLD104 r26](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery) re-orders the chain onto it, keying the campaign's turns to the Exchange's found bank state and to the Collector's intake-gauge-against-outfall-meter difference — both of which are the district pages' own observables, so nothing on either side had to be invented to make the orders agree. §3.1's numbering stands as the recommendation, and the table above stands as what the map actually allows.

**The optional discovery: the Holding Basin.** A sealed wing of the Collector, behind a gate the crews shut and gauged. Reachable only by holding the Collector's own water low enough to walk its inflow — which means giving up the outfall lever for that expedition. Inside: the intake gauge with a full log, and the crews' notes on why they sealed it. Nothing required depends on it. What it gives is certainty rather than capability: a player who finds it reaches the head-works knowing which of the two candidate answers on the [World page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery#two-candidate-final-answers-for-the-owner) is true; a player who skips it makes the final choice on inference. Both are complete campaigns, and they are not the same experience. That is what optional content is for in a mystery game, and it is why this one is a wing rather than an eighth district — it costs the Collector's assets and no new ones.

- **Counts derived from beats I wrote, on pages I own:** the Collector, the Head-works and now the Exchange. These are mine to defend and mine to be wrong about.

- **Counts proposed against ground the lead authored:** the Pumping District (10, adopted from the lead's own 10–12 rather than my earlier 5–8), the Lock Flight (4), the Tram Incline (4) and the Tidal Barrier (4). **The lead's r3 gives each of those a panel table and one written expedition, not a tier list**, so my four-expedition counts are Campaign's reading of their districts and not the lead's estimate. They are the three numbers most likely to move, and they should move on the lead's word rather than mine.

| The weir dock, the depot gates, the mole (the lead's optional exploration) | 3 | 42 |

| The approach to the head-works not taken (§7) | 1 | 18 |

| Evidence beyond the minimum for narrowing the final answer | 2 | 30 |

| **Optional total** | **8** | **120 (2.0 h)** |

| What | Expeditions | Hours |

| --- | ---: | ---: |

| Optional branches with the same overhead | 8 | 2.5–2.7 |

**And the three parts of criterion 11 that X33 finds missing are not Campaign's to supply.** Which player the game serves, what specific experience offers value, and the evidence behind commercial positioning are the integrated owner document's, which is the lead's, with the External Critic on the evidence and PM on whether it is deferred. **This role supplies the length and nothing else about the product**, and it should not be read as having an opinion on price or shelf by supplying an hour count. If positioning is restated, the rows above are what it should be restated against; if it is deferred, this page has no objection and no standing to have one.

**The baseline stands: a rescue never costs banked salvage, notes, observed rules or colony state** ([Design Document §3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document#3-core-play) and §10). I am not proposing a loss spiral. What a campaign adds is that a failure can leave a *district* half-changed, and one of those costs a route rather than a resource.

**The case: the Collector's outfall, left shut.** Shutting it is what withholds another district's next first surge (the empty flash). While it is shut, this basin has nowhere to drain.

- **Player action.** Shut the outfall on the lower gantry, then extract.

- **On failure.** If the expedition ends in rescue with the outfall shut, the state persists — the same rule that makes every district outcome meaningful. On the next visit the Collector starts one level higher: the lower gantry is under water, so the short crossing between the second and third basins is gone, and the outfall is reachable only the long way round the upper walkway.

- **Visible in advance.** The outfall's indicator and the starting level are both on the refuge's board before launch, so the player launches knowing which Collector they are getting.

- **Recovery, and its cost.** The outfall can always be opened from the upper walkway, which is above every level the basin reaches. It costs the long crossing and, for that visit, the delay lever: you cannot both withhold another district's surge and have your short route back.

- **Why this is the right shape.** Failure makes the world less convenient for one visit, is fully recoverable by an action the player already knows, and is caused by their own successful lever rather than by a penalty bolted onto dying. It never makes the campaign longer, and it never makes the player poorer.

---

**The head-works can be reached two ways.** The lead's colony section unlocks the boat's range from the Tidal Barrier's dry dock, which is the reservoir approach from the water. I propose a second, and it is the reason the Collector is worth mastering rather than visiting.

- **The boat route (the lead's).** Requires the Barrier's dry dock, which requires shutting the barrier gates. Arrives at the reservoir from below, at the weir. The approach is a conduction problem: the reservoir's own water is the first thing the player meets, and everything they learned about joined bodies applies.

- **The race route (mine).** Up the head race from the Collector. Requires the Collector's water held low — outfall open, gates set to drain — so the race channel above the third basin is walkable rather than submerged. Arrives at the head-works from the side, in the governor gallery. The approach is a *timing* problem: the race is walkable only between dispatches, because each one raises the level behind it.

**What this buys.** A player who bounced off the Barrier is not locked out of the finale, and vice versa; the redundancy WLD103 rule 5 asks of clues becomes structural as well; and the optional content in §5 has an obvious thing to be — going back and arriving the other way, which shows the player the half of the head-works they did not see. **The two routes also matter to the ending**: the boat route arrives with the Barrier shut, which starves the Collector; the race route arrives with the Collector open and running. The head-works' governor reads differently in the two states, which is detailed on [its page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works).

**A second, smaller alternative:** districts five and six are order-free. A player who takes the Collector first learns how much Flood there is before they learn there is a second source; one who takes the Barrier first learns the reverse. Both reach the head-works.

---

**No availability of any free asset is claimed anywhere on this page, and nothing here authorises creating one** ([Brief D009](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief); no AI-generated art of any kind, including concepts and placeholders). The lead's §7 covers the campaign-wide burden; this adds only the two districts written here.

- **The Collector.** Reuses: water planes and wet/dry tinting, gates and valves, cable, lamps, beacons, panels, walkway and gantry props, boards, signs, the humanoid mass. **Gaps:** turning wheels with readable meters; a stepped-basin drainage set; and the *held mass* — a crowd standing still in water in numbers larger than a surge, which is a crowd-rendering question as much as an art one.

- **The Head-works.** Reuses: races, weirs, drums, cable, boards, gallery and walkway props. **Gaps:** a large reservoir and dam exterior, the campaign's biggest single art ask; and the governor as an oversized multi-position panel. **And one conditional gap the owner should see attached to a decision they are being asked to make:** if the World designer's Answer B (the keepers) is chosen, the head-works needs one human presence, which is an asset category this design has otherwise avoided entirely. The lead recommends Answer A; that recommendation is also an asset decision and it should be said out loud when it is put to the owner.

---

- **The refuge is not a district (§2.3).** The lead's own risk note is right and I think the risk is structural. My recommendation to PM and the owner is seven, with the refuge as the thing at stake rather than an arena.

- **The Salt Pans should be closed rather than left a candidate**, with the reason in §2.2: they change the cost of a known action, not the action. Leaving a candidate open with no lever cell to fill invites it back later on grounds of variety.

- Whether the Collector's held mass is legible at survivorlike crowd density is a runtime question and no design page can answer it. The Collector page states a cheaper fallback.

- Whether a campaign whose first district ends in a persistent choice makes the later districts' outcomes feel smaller. I think not — the head-works is the same choice at scale, which is the point — but it is a real risk and I have not resolved it.

- The duration bounds in §5 are wide because the expeditions-per-tier assumption is unvalidated, and it is the single number most worth checking first if a play phase is ever authorised.

---

**Task:** CAM101 ([Tasks eb8c03](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks?revision=eb8c03), listed *Blocked — role not yet created*; the role is staffed by this submission). **Artifacts:** this page r1; [The Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector) r1; [The Head-works](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works) r1; a campaign-role section added to [Pumping District](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/Pumping%20District) preserving PM's seed. **Status: In review.** I do not mark my own task accepted.

**Delivered against the assignment.** An eight-district campaign evaluated with a purpose stated for every district and an independent test (§2); a recommended count of seven with reasons and the eighth's cut argued rather than asserted (§2.3); three contrasting districts in depth, the pumping district as the candidate opening and two areas of my own with genuinely different decisions (§1 and the three pages); entry and revisit conditions, machinery problem, enemy and build pressure, discovery, outward consequence and asset reuse or gap for the districts I own, and the lever-cell audit for all of them (§2.2 and the pages); a progression map with a main route, an optional discovery and a later discovery that changes an earlier return (§4); a bottom-up duration hypothesis separating required, optional and repeated content, with its method and its sensitivity (§5); one consequence of failure (§6); one alternative route through the plan (§7); asset reuse and gaps (§8); explicit dependencies (§9).

**Not delivered, deliberately.** Pages for the Lock Flight, the Tram Incline and the Exchange: their content is current and authored on the lead's page, and duplicating it would create a divergent second copy. Any enemy, item or colony design, which belongs to the roles those pages name. Any claim about fun, balance, performance, feasibility or asset availability, none of which a design page can establish.