r2 adopts this page from PM's seed and answers the assignment on it: six behaviour roles, two contrasting mixed encounters checked against the declared rules, an elites-and-bosses recommendation, and the early/middle/late campaign arc. The shared grammar the roles are written against is on the new [Combat Rules](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) page. **Renamed nothing; removed nothing but the r1 assignment brief, which is preserved below and in [r1 c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228).**

Sources read: [Design Document r14 ec1b6c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) §§3–6, 8, 12–16, App. A; [Enemies r1 c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228); [Power and Attraction 8afc3c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction); [Cutter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter); [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment); [Colony](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony); [Pumping District](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/Pumping%20District); [World and Mystery r20 7699de](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de); [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief); [Design Index dd01c7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index?revision=dd01c7); [Tasks eb8c03](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks?revision=eb8c03); [PMR003](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR003); [Design Review REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review); [Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief); [Glossary](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Glossary); [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions).

[Design Index](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index) · [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief) · [Glossary](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Glossary) · [Combat Rules](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)

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

| **[Drifter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Drifter)** | 3 — attraction | *(none — it is the assumption)* |

| **[Anchor](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Anchor)** | 2 — nearest wet ground | "Re-routing the crowd clears the ground." |

| **[Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier)** | 2 — nearest loose charge | "If I am not standing near a light, nothing is coming to me." |

| **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust)** | 3, but does not conduct | "One discharge stops everything in the water." |

| **[Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark)** | 3, and discharges when killed in water | "My weapon firing can only help me." |

| **[Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder)** | 2 — nearest powered cable run | "A light I set stays set." |

**The credible alternative I rejected.** The obvious sixth role, and the one most survivorlikes would pick, is a **tracker**: an enemy that, once it has seen you, pursues without limit and never drifts back, converting your mistakes into a growing tail. It is a good role and it would work here. I left it out because it is the one role on my shortlist that adds a clause rather than subtracting one — "some bodies ignore range" is a new fact about pursuit, where the other five are all "this body answers a different question". It is also the role most easily faked by a Carrier: a player carrying twenty units of charge *has* an escort that does not give up, and the way to shake it is to spend the charge, which is a decision rather than a footrace. If a later authorized phase shows the roster needs unrelenting pressure, the tracker is the first thing I would add and I would add it knowing it costs a clause.

---

Full pages carry each role's trigger, action, threat, counterplay, machinery and equipment interactions, placement conditions, telegraph, asset note and open questions. This table is a summary; the pages win.

| Role | Trigger — what makes it act | Action | Threat | First counterplay | Costs the counterplay carries |

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

| **[Drifter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Drifter)** | A dispatch; then any lit beacon it can reach | Walks to the nearest lit beacon, holds, presses, chases within range | Mass. 40–140 per surge | Route it with the panel; thin an edge; stun it in water | Lighting a branch is what brings it there |

| **[Anchor](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Anchor)** | Nothing. It is already standing in the water when you arrive | Walks to the lowest wet ground and stays | A permanent contact hazard on the wet route; unmoved by any routing you do | Kill it; drain its channel with a field pump; route around | A bundle for the pump, or the time and health to kill, or the longer road |

| **[Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier)** | Loose charge within reach — a mote, your battery, a planted beacon's battery | Walks to the nearest loose charge and takes it | It comes to you regardless of light, and it eats your harvest | Spend the charge; plant a beacon as a decoy; kill it and take the mote back | Spending is irreversible; the beacon costs two slots and a battery |

| **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust)** | A dispatch, like a Drifter | Walks to the beacon; **does not conduct** | It stands unstunned inside your stunned crowd, and it ends an arc chain | The cutter, and where you stand | It is the one body you must kill by hand, while collecting |

| **[Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark)** | Being killed while standing in water | Energises the connected water for 1 second | Your own automatic weapon does this to you | Insulation; kill it from dry ground; leave it alone | A slot, or a worse position, or leaving a body alive behind you |

| **[Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder)** | A powered cable run within reach | Climbs it and grounds it; the beacon on that run flickers, then goes dark | Your routing plan expires while you are elsewhere | Kill it; re-switch the panel; plant your own beacon; take the long way | Crossing the crowd you parked, or moving the crowd onto yourself, or two slots, or time |

---

**Contrast:** defensive, mid-expedition, one surge, preparation-light. **Roles live:** Anchor + Crust (2 — within the [composition budget](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)). **Where:** the [Pumping District](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/Pumping%20District) yard channel — the district that already exists, so the encounter needs no new geography. **What it teaches:** that a stun is not the same as a cleared floor.

**Declared setup.** The player has learned the electrician play in GDD §5 and is running that rack: coil, battery, insulation, two bundles, link battery→coil, battery full at 10 units. Panel thrown from causeway to yard at 7:30, so the yard beacon is steady and the pump-hall hatch is open. Four Anchors have been standing in the yard channel since the player arrived. The first surge — 40 bodies — has been holding at the causeway beacon since 3:00.

| Time | What happens | Which rule says so |

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

| 7:30 | Panel causeway→yard. Yard beacon steady, hatch open, causeway beacon dark. The 40 held at the causeway lose their light, retarget to the yard beacon and begin crossing the junction. The forecast shows both crowds' new targets and their rings. | GDD §4, the panel's stated price; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) for the rings |

| 7:30–8:00 | The four Anchors do not move. Throwing the panel is a free, repeatable experiment that proves it, and it is available on the first visit. | Stack line 2 |

| 8:00 | Second dispatch. The pulse travels the thin cable to the yard beacon and it flashes; **60 bodies begin entering the yard channel over 30 seconds — 54 Drifters and 6 Crusts.** | GDD §4: the panel alone selects the intake, and the travelling pulse is visible |

| 8:00–8:25 | They wade down the channel toward the beacon. The player waits on the dry bank, outside pursuit range. The cutter has no target and fires at nothing. | Stack lines 1 and 3 |

| 8:25 | About 44 are in the water — 40 Drifters and 4 Crusts. The player steps into the channel edge and discharges the coil. Battery 10 → 0. | GDD §5: a discharge spends the whole battery, and to reach a channel you must be in it |

| 8:25 | **The stun takes 44 bodies: 40 Drifters and the 4 Anchors.** The 4 Crusts standing in the same water do not conduct and do not stop. | [R7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat); [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) |

| 8:25 | **The shed: one 5-unit large mote per complete ten stunned. 44 stunned → 4 large motes, 20 units**, lying along the stunned mass. The four Anchors are now spent and stop glowing; the channel's charge is gone for the rest of the expedition. | GDD §4 clause 4, §5; [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 8:26 | The water goes inert. The insulation was load-bearing for exactly that one second. | **[R3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) — open question C1; this beat is where it bites** |

| 8:26–8:33 | Seven seconds of stun left to collect in. The battery is empty and holds ten, so **at most two of the four motes can be banked**; the other ten units cannot be taken however fast the player moves. | GDD §5 (a battery holds 10; a full one takes nothing) and §6, which states this break-even in the same words |

| 8:26–8:33 | Six Crusts are loose — four of them standing among the stunned bodies. Any within pursuit range chase. Each takes three cutter hits. The cutter fires at the **nearest** body, which among 44 stunned Drifters is usually not the Crust closing on you; the target line shows which one it has picked. | Stack line 1; GDD §3; [R6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 8:33 | Stun ends. The 40 Drifters resume toward the beacon. **The four Anchors do not move.** The channel is still occupied, and re-routing will not change that. | Stack lines 2 and 3 |

| after | The 40 crowd moved off the causeway arrives at the yard beacon and its ring grows. The player should already be gone; the ring is how they knew when. | GDD §4; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

- **Composition legal?** 54 Drifters of 60 is 90%, above the 85% floor. Two non-Drifter roles are live (Anchor, Crust), at the limit of two per surge. Anchors were standing before the expedition began, as their placement rule requires. No Sparks are placed, so the dry-ground rule is not engaged. ✔

- **Arithmetic.** 54 + 6 = 60 entering. At 8:25, 40 Drifters + 4 Crusts = 44 in the water; 14 Drifters + 2 Crusts = 16 still entering or on the bank; 44 + 16 = 60. ✔

- **Stun count.** Conducting bodies in the connected water = 40 Drifters + 4 Anchors = 44. Crusts excluded by their own rule. ✔

- **Shed.** 44 ÷ 10 = 4 complete tens → 4 large motes → 20 units. ✔ *(The "one per complete ten" rounding is a proposal; the source states the ratio but not the rounding.)*

- **Bankable.** Capacity 10, so 2 motes. This reproduces GDD §6 exactly: "a discharge spends ten, a stunned surge of forty sheds twenty, and a single battery can hold only ten of them". ✔

- **Anchors shed?** They were stunned in connected water, so yes — and they are therefore spent for the expedition, which is why the channel is worth nothing on a second visit that hour. ✔ Consistent with once-per-organism.

**The six Crusts convert "collect everything" into "collect exactly two and leave."** The third and fourth motes are worth nothing to a one-battery rack, so a player who understands the battery cap takes two and walks out before the Crusts close. A player running the **harvester** rack — two batteries, GDD §5 — genuinely wants all four, and must therefore accept Crust contact to get them. **The composition prices the loadout without a single stat existing anywhere in it.** That is the whole argument for [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) in one scene.

**What preparation changes.** Without insulation the discharge costs one health under R3, which is survivable — the insulation slot is bought for the *water*, not for the discharge. Without knowing what an Anchor is, the player throws the panel expecting a clear channel and is wrong. Without knowing what a Crust is, they step into the mote line expecting 44 stopped bodies and meet four that never stopped. **Neither mistake kills; both cost the harvest**, which is the right severity for a mid-campaign lesson.

---

**Contrast:** offensive, late-expedition, the whole precedence stack live at once, preparation-heavy, and it turns on a decision made twenty minutes earlier at a shelter. **Roles live:** Grounder, Carrier and Spark — three in the district, at the limit; two in the third surge, at the limit. **What it teaches:** that a plan can expire, and that hoarding charge is itself a threat.

**Declared setup.** Late campaign. The panel has been on causeway since 3:00, so the first two surges (40 and 80) both entered there and are held at the causeway beacon — about 110 bodies after kills, drawn as one ring. The player is in the yard, having come by the culvert, running the **harvester** rack (GDD §5): coil, arc, two batteries, insulation, no cargo. Both batteries are full: 20 units. Two Grounders climbed the causeway's power cable at about 10:30. The third dispatch is due at 12:00 and will bring 140.

| Time | What happens | Which rule says so |

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

| 11:20 | The causeway beacon begins an irregular flicker, plainly not the dispatch pulse, which travels the *thin* cable from the panel. The forecast marks the causeway branch failing. Two bodies are visible on the thick cable at the causeway's interior end, off the ground. | [R9](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) (position identifies the role) |

| 11:40 | The beacon goes dark. Line 3 stops applying to the held crowd and line 4 starts: **about 110 bodies spread along the causeway both ways**, including toward the causeway dock — the player's default way home. The ring stops being a ring and becomes a lengthening line. | GDD §4: with no reachable lit beacon a crowd spreads along its branch, both ways; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 11:40 | The player has four options and about twenty seconds to choose. Three are live; one is closed by the rack they packed. | below |

| 12:00 | Third dispatch, to whichever branch the panel now names: **140 bodies — 122 Drifters, 8 Carriers, 10 Sparks.** | GDD §4 |

| Option | What it buys | What it costs | Verdict at 11:40 |

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

| **(a) Panel → yard** | The causeway and its dock clear immediately: the spread crowd retargets to the yard beacon (line 3). The hatch opens. The 12:00 dispatch enters the yard channel, which is *water* — where the coil and the arc are worth most. | The 110 walk the junction and channel **to where the player is standing**, and 140 more land on top of them. | **The aggressive answer, and the right one for this rack.** It is the only option that turns the problem into the payoff. |

| **(b) Kill the Grounders** | The beacon relights; the crowd re-gathers at the causeway's far end; the parking is restored. | Crossing about 110 spread bodies to reach the cable. Two bodies at three hits each is trivial; the crossing is not, at one health per contact from five. | **Correct earlier, wrong now.** The crossing and the re-gather do not finish before 12:00. |

| **(c) Plant a beacon at the causeway's interior end** | Relights the far end without going near the cable, pulls the crowd off the dock road, and — because a planted beacon's battery is loose charge — decoys Carriers away from the player. Two problems, one action. | Two slots and a battery, and the battery runs down while planted. | **Not available.** The harvester rack has no beacon; the coil took its two slots. This option was decided at the shelter. |

| **(d) Do nothing; culvert home** | Costs no charge and starts no fight. | The culvert exits at the causeway dock end, which is exactly where the spread is heading; the player walks into the thin edge, with the evacuation window still to come. | **Viable, and the correct answer for a different rack** — see the contrast below. |

| Time | What happens | Which rule says so |

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

| 11:42 | Panel → yard. Yard beacon steady, hatch open. The spread causeway crowd retargets and begins crossing. Forecast updates both rings. | GDD §4; [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 12:00–12:30 | 140 enter the yard channel: 122 Drifters, 8 Carriers, 10 Sparks. The player is on the dry bank, insulated. | GDD §4; composition budget: 122/140 = 87% Drifters, two non-Drifter roles, Sparks placed in water ✔ |

| 12:00–12:25 | The Carriers do not go to the beacon. They walk to the nearest loose charge, which is the player's two full batteries. The forecast draws the surveyor as their target. | Stack line 2; [Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier) |

| 12:25 | About 100 are in the water. Discharge. Coil battery 10 → 0. **Stun takes every conducting body in the connected water — Drifters, Carriers and Sparks alike.** | GDD §5; [R7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 12:25 | **100 stunned → 10 large motes, 50 units.** The coil's battery is empty (holds 10) and the arc's is full (takes nothing). **At most 10 of the 50 units can ever be banked.** | GDD §5; the once-per-organism yield |

| 12:26–12:33 | Collection, against opposition: the eight Carriers are stunned for the same eight seconds and then walk to the motes and take them. Motes the player does not reach are not merely fading — they are being carried off, and killing the thief drops the mote again. | [R5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 12:33 | Stun ends. The crowd recovers, packed in the channel and the doorway. | GDD §13's stated 8 s |

| 12:33–12:43 | **The burst.** Arc battery 10 → 0 over ten seconds; cutter hits chain body to body. These bodies have already shed, so the burst returns **no motes** — it is a pure spend, exactly as GDD §13 says. | GDD §6, §13 |

| 12:33–12:43 | **The Sparks.** Each Spark the chain kills in the water energises the connected channel for one second, and while the water is energised the chain travels through the water as well as body to body — so it reaches every conducting body the channel connects, not only the ones adjacent in the chain. With ten Sparks spread through the crowd, the channel is re-energised repeatedly across the burst. | **[R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), open question C7 — the largest single power spike in this submission and the one most in need of a ruling** |

| 12:33–12:43 | The player is on the bank and insulated. An uninsulated player standing in that channel takes one health per second of energised water and dies inside the burst they triggered. | GDD §3; [R3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| after | Both batteries are empty. The Carriers still alive have nothing to walk toward and revert to line 3, the yard beacon. **Spending the charge is also how you stop being the target.** | Stack lines 2 and 3 |

- **Composition legal?** 122 of 140 Drifters = 87%, above the floor. Two non-Drifter roles in the surge (Carrier, Spark); three in the district counting the Grounders, at the limit. Grounders are placed on a cable run rather than counted in a surge. Sparks enter water, not dry ground. ✔

- **Does the beacon go dark legally?** A Grounder removes power from a run; a beacon with no power is dark; a dark beacon draws nothing. No new meaning is given to a beacon, no dispatch is caused, and the panel's monopoly on the intake is untouched. This is the argument that R9 sits inside [World r20](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de)'s contract, and it is the argument World should check. ✔ *(pending C5)*

- **Does the crowd really spread both ways?** Yes — GDD §4 states that with no reachable lit beacon a crowd spreads along its branch, and specifically that "off darkens both: every crowd spreads along its own branch, toward the docks as much as the interior". A Grounded branch is the same state arrived at differently. ✔

- **Stun and shed arithmetic.** 100 in water → 10 complete tens → 10 large motes → 50 units. Coil battery capacity 10, arc battery full and being reserved for the burst → 10 units bankable at most, 40 not. ✔

- **Does the burst fit inside the stun?** **No, and deliberately not.** The stun is 8 s and the burst is 10 s, so the burst is spent from 12:33 on a *recovering* crowd, not a stunned one. This is the correction [PMR003](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR003) item 1 required of GDD §13 and which r13 supplied; this scene is built on the corrected sequence rather than re-introducing the error. ✔

- **Does the burst return charge?** No. Every body in the channel shed at 12:25, and a shed body yields nothing further. The burst is funded entirely by the surge before it. ✔

Run the identical composition against the **arc hauler** rack (GDD §5: arc, battery, insulation, three bundles). No coil, so no stun and no bulk harvest. No second battery. No beacon. At 11:40 that player cannot take option (a) profitably and cannot take (c) at all; their correct play is **(d)**: culvert home through the thin edge, bank three bundles, and see none of the payoff.

**They finish the expedition successfully.** That is the design working, not failing: the rack chosen at the dock decided which game this expedition was, and both are legitimate. It is also the concrete answer to the Expansion Brief's demand for "a reason to prepare a different build, with an alternative viable approach and a real tradeoff" — the two racks do different things, not different amounts.

---

The [Cutter page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter) asks what develops basic combat across a campaign when the weapon is fixed and there is no XP. The answer this roster gives:

| Stage | Roles live | What the player learns to do | The crowd-clearing payoff | The room left to investigate |

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

| **Early** — opening district, first expeditions | Drifter; Anchors as terrain | One true sentence: light moves the mass, and one thing in the water does not answer it | The first coil discharge. A whole crowd stops and twenty units land in the water. It needs no new enemy and no new module beyond the coil | One role live, small rings, and a genuinely quiet interval. This is where the district gets read |

| **Middle** — districts two to four | + Crust, + Spark | The **shape** of a clear matters, not its size: an arc chain routes around Crusts, and where you stand relative to water decides whether your own weapon hurts you | The coil-then-arc double already written in GDD §13 — stun, collect, burst on the recovering crowd — now with a reason to aim it | Shelters plus the ring. You can bank a route and come back for the thing you saw |

| **Late** — districts five and beyond | + Carrier, + Grounder | The crowd contests your **tools**: your charge is bait and your lights decay while you are elsewhere | Encounter B's layered play: panel, coil, collect against thieves, burst through Sparks in water under [R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) | You now buy time with equipment rather than with distance, so investigating becomes a purchase — which is the right late-campaign shape |

**What the owner should press on.** Whether "four precedence lines live at once" *reads* as growth to a survivorlike audience the way a rising damage number does is **unverified and unverifiable in the design phase.** It is the central bet of this page and it is the same bet GDD §6 already makes about the arc. I believe it is the right one, because the alternative — a stat ladder — has to be invented from nothing here and would immediately compete with the thing the game sells. But it is a bet, and it is the first thing an authorized play phase should look at.

---

The assignment asks for an assessment only with a reason. Mine is against creature bosses and against stat elites, and for two elite-*shaped* things that fit this design.

**Against creature bosses**, for three reasons specific to this game rather than to taste:

1. **A boss is a damage race, and this game has no damage curve.** No XP, a fixed cutter, and an arc bounded three ways (GDD §6). To make a boss killable you would either invent a stat ladder — contradicting the no-XP bet and the Expansion Brief's warning about damage-bonus catalogues — or make it a machinery puzzle, in which case it *is* a machinery puzzle, and the design already has those and does them better. The relay room is the proof.

2. **A boss is understood once and then repeated.** This design's promise is the opposite: "the same place means something different once you know what its light means" (GDD §7). A set-piece that is solved and then re-executed inverts the one thing the game is selling.

3. **Asset cost.** A boss is a unique body, unique animation and unique cues. GDD §14 already records one enemy sprite as the project's first likely approval request. A boss per district would multiply the one line item PM has been asked to worry about.

**Against stat elites** — a bigger, tougher, faster Drifter — because that is precisely the "more health or a new tint" the Expansion Brief forbids, and because under [R8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) there is no health to add.

**(i) The declared surge.** The forecast already tells the player the intake and the countdown. Let it also declare the next dispatch's **composition** — "third dispatch: carriers" — once the player has repaired the [colony's](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony) forecast relay or has learned to read the cadence.

*Player action:* repack at a shelter, or change the panel, before it lands. *Visible information:* one more row on the overlay that already exists. *Consequence:* you meet the surge you chose to meet. *Cost:* knowing costs a colony repair or a learned convention, and acting on it costs slots or a route. *Concrete interaction:* seeing "carriers" and deliberately spending a battery **before** the dispatch, so there is nothing left to walk toward.

It converts an elite into a preparation decision, which is what this game is about; it gives Campaign a difficulty dial made of composition rather than numbers; it gives Colony something worth repairing; and it costs no creature and no asset.

**(ii) The standing problem** — a district's one persistent, named concentration that is a **place, not a fight.** The pattern: a district's lowest channel permanently occupied by a mass of Anchors, because Anchors go to the lowest wet ground and never leave it. It is never cleared and never respawns, because it never left.

*Player action:* route around it, drain it with a field pump, or spend a battery on it. *Visible information:* it is standing there on arrival, every time. *Consequence:* it is the reason the district's shortest route is expensive. *Cost:* a bundle for the pump, or the longer road, or a battery. *Concrete interaction:* it is also the district's single richest harvest — one discharge, once, sheds proportionally to its size and then it is spent and worth nothing for the rest of the expedition, so *when* you spend the battery on it is a real decision.

This is a "boss" as geography, under adopted rules, with no new creature. **Placement is Campaign's**; I am proposing the pattern, not its location.

**The one condition under which I would revisit a creature boss.** If a later authorized phase shows that the arc's payoff lands too rarely because a crowd is never dense enough at the right moment, then a single large, slow, high-hit-count body that is *reliably* a valid arc target would be a targeted fix for a measured problem. I would not build one before that evidence exists, and **no such evidence can exist in the design phase.**

---

Stated as positions with my recommendation attached, not as routed decisions (Wiki Conventions §11a).

| To | What I need | What I proceed on meanwhile |

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

| **Lead** (D014) | Rulings on [R1–R3, R9, R10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), all of which touch §4 and clause 1. R10 is the one that changes a power ceiling | The positions in Combat Rules §10. The roster stands without R10 |

| **Equipment** (EQP101) | Accept, amend or reject the closed grammar: targeting, no damage numbers, three statuses. A weapon that picks targets differently is a new weapon; a weapon that does more damage is not | R6–R8 as written. If Equipment needs a fourth status it should say which and why, and I will revise this page rather than have two systems |

| **Campaign** (CAM101) | Placement, using the composition budget: at least 85% Drifters, at most two non-Drifter roles per surge and three per district, Sparks only where there is water, Anchors standing on arrival, Grounders on cable runs | The budget as written; the pumping district as the setting for both encounters, so nothing here depends on geography that does not exist |

| **World** (WLD103) | The Flood's fiction and the roles' names. Mine are **functional placeholders** with the mechanic in the name; rename freely. Also: whether a Grounder darkening a beacon sits inside r20's district contract — my argument that it does is in §4 above and [Combat Rules §5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) | Placeholder names, and the argument that removing a light never changes what a light means |

| **Colony** (COL101) | The forecast relay as the unlock that turns the declared surge on. It is a repair that changes preparation, which is what the Colony page asks for | The declared surge as a proposal contingent on that unlock |

| **Editor** | [Glossary](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Glossary) says the arc drains a battery over about twenty seconds; GDD §6 r14 says about ten and §13's scene is built on ten. **Reported, not edited** | Ten |

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Full statement in [Combat Rules §9](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat). In short, and honestly: **the roster's readability costs six distinguishable silhouettes**, five more than the current one-enemy proposal, and that is the largest consequence of this submission. Three of the six (Anchor, Carrier, Grounder) are readable primarily from **position and attitude** — half-submerged and still; leaning toward a target the forecast already draws; up on a cable and off the ground — so if the base body can be posed, those cost poses rather than creatures. Two (Crust, Spark) are silhouette edits of the base body, and whether that is legal depends on the individual asset's licence, not its host's general statement ([Asset Licences](/Reference/Asset%20Licences)). **No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded, purchased or created, and no availability is claimed.**

The roster is **neutral** on GDD §14's decision 2, the humanoid Flood: what conducts is bodies standing in water either way, and posture-based roles work at least as well on a humanoid body. Nothing here pushes the owner toward the custom-art request.

The gap I cannot close is audio: the Spark's fairness leans on a rising whine as it enters cutter reach, and sound is not designed. The visual fallback is the cutter's target line plus the flicker, which I believe suffices and cannot claim does.

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r1 of this page was PM's seeded source summary of GDD r13 §§3–4 and 15, plus the CMB101 assignment brief. Its factual summary of the existing single enemy is superseded by §§1–2 above, which now state the same behaviour as the Drifter role. **Its assignment text is deliberately not retained inline**, because this revision is the answer to it; it is preserved in full at [r1 c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228). Nothing else was on the page. The seed's ownership line — Combat and Enemy Designer intended owner, Lead interim — is now discharged: this role is staffed and this page is adopted.