Hold the Flood — Spark
CMB101 · r1 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — proposed role, new. Depends on R3 and, for its late payoff, R10. Source rules it is built on: Design Document r14 ec1b6c §§3–6; shared grammar and the precedence stack: Combat Rules. Enemies · Design Index · Expansion Brief · Glossary
Name is a functional placeholder. World and Mystery owns the Flood's identity and fiction.
The assumption it deletes
"My weapon firing can only help me."
This is the role that makes the automatic attack a decision. The cutter fires by itself at the nearest organism in reach and, under R6, cannot be withheld. So while a Spark is in the water you are standing in, and inside your reach, you are not choosing whether to shoot it. You already chose, by standing there.
Trigger, action, threat
| Trigger | Being killed while standing in water. Not proximity, not a timer, not a wind-up it performs on its own |
| Action | Precedence line 3 while alive: entirely ordinary, nearest reachable lit beacon, chase within pursuit range. On death in water: the connected water is energised for one second (R3's window — the same quantity as a coil discharge, deliberately, so the player learns one number) |
| Threat | An unprotected body in energised water loses one health per second (GDD §3). From five health, that is a fifth of the player, delivered by their own weapon, in water they walked into. Killed on dry ground it does nothing at all |
| Hit count | Three. No more health than anything else |
| Conducts? | Yes, ordinarily. It is stunned by a discharge like anything else, and a stunned Spark is not dead, so it does not discharge |
| Charge | Sheds once like anything else. Its death discharge is not a shed and yields no motes; the energising is a hazard, not a harvest |
Telegraph
Three layers, in the order the player receives them:
- The outline flickers. Under R4 glow carries only "has charge to shed", so a Spark cannot be signalled by being brighter — it is signalled by motion in the silhouette, which reads at crowd density where brightness does not.
- The cutter's target line (R6) draws to the body the weapon has selected. Seeing the line snap onto a flickering outline standing in the same water you are standing in is the warning, and it arrives about half a second before the hit lands.
- A rising whine as it enters reach. This is the cue I would most like and the one I cannot promise: GDD §14 states sound is not designed. Recorded as a gap. Without it, layers 1 and 2 must carry the whole warning, which I believe is enough and cannot claim is enough.
Counterplay, and what each costs
| Counterplay | Cost |
|---|---|
| Wear insulation | One rack slot, which is a bundle of cargo or a second battery not carried |
| Kill it from dry ground. The cutter's reach crosses the channel edge; the discharge energises the water, not the bank | You are not in the channel, so you are not collecting motes and not discharging the coil |
| Leave it alive. Nothing makes a Spark dangerous except killing it | You cannot leave it alive, because the cutter cannot be withheld — so this counterplay is really "do not be within reach of it", which is a movement decision, continuously |
| Stun the crowd first and collect around the stunned Sparks | A stunned Spark is still alive and still lethal the moment your automatic weapon reaches it |
The third row is the one that makes the role. The counterplay to a Spark is not an action; it is a position, held continuously, in a game whose weapon takes the shooting decision away from you.
Machinery and equipment
- Cutter: the interaction. This role exists so that "the weapon aims itself" has a cost as well as a convenience, which is what the Cutter page asks Combat to supply.
- Insulation: promoted from a rack-management module to a field-survival module. Currently insulation's main job is stopping leakage between a battery and wet bundles; this role gives it a second job the player feels.
- Coil: a discharge stuns Sparks with everything else, and the stun does not kill, so a discharge does not set off a chain of them. The two systems do not fight.
- Arc, and the late payoff [R10]: a Spark killed by the chain while in water energises the connected channel, and while the water is energised the chain travels through the water as well as body to body, reaching every conducting body the channel connects. With Sparks spread through a channel crowd, a burst re-energises the channel repeatedly across its ten seconds. That is the late-campaign crowd-clearing payoff, and it costs five separate preparations: the arc, a full battery, Sparks deliberately left alive, a crowd routed into connected water, and insulation or dry footing. R10 is a proposal to the Lead and the roster stands without it.
- Field pump: draining a channel disarms every Spark in it. A cheap, non-obvious counterplay that costs a bundle.
Placement (for Campaign)
- Zero Sparks in a surge entering dry ground. A Spark that cannot reach water is a Drifter with a worse silhouette, and placing one is a wasted role slot. This is a hard constraint in the composition budget, not a preference.
- Arrives in a surge; counts toward the limit of two non-Drifter roles per surge.
- Proportion: around 7% in Encounter B (10 of 140). Enough that a channel crowd reliably contains some; few enough that a player wading a channel is not in continuous danger.
- Not in the opening district's first expeditions. A player still learning that water is a weapon should not simultaneously learn it is a trap. Middle campaign is the right entry point, and by then insulation is a module they have met.
Asset note
A silhouette edit of the base body: the same outline with a flicker. The flicker is motion rather than a second sprite. Whether editing a sprite is permitted depends on the individual asset's licence rather than its host's general statement (GDD §14; Asset Licences). No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded or created, and no availability is claimed. The audio cue is a recorded gap, above.
Open questions
- Does a Spark killed in water hurt other organisms? My position: yes — energised water conducts to everything the water connects, and clause 1 does not care what a body is. Consequence: a dense crowd wading with Sparks in it is partly self-destroying, which is a nice thing for a player to discover rather than be told. It also means the discharge is a legitimate weapon when the player is on the bank.
- Does a stunned Spark killed during a stun discharge? My position: yes. Stun prevents acting, not physics; the body is still full of charge. Flagged because a designer implementing "stunned bodies do nothing" would get this wrong.
- How long is the energised second, exactly? Tied to R3 / open question C1, which the Lead owns. The Spark deliberately reuses whatever number the coil uses, so there is one quantity to learn rather than two.