[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)

**Nothing here has been built, prototyped, simulated or played, and no asset has been located, inspected or created.** Every number is a proposal. The two encounters below are written scenes checked on paper against declared rules; they are not playtests and they establish nothing about fun, balance or performance.

---

The existing proposal has one enemy type with size and tint variants (GDD §15). The [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief) asks for "enemy combinations that change movement or priorities, rather than only more health or a new tint", and [REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) pre-registers the test it will apply: **a combination must pose a precedence question that a single enemy type cannot.**

So every role here is defined by **one sentence it makes false** — a thing the player could otherwise safely assume about a crowd. That is the whole justification for a role's existence. None of the six has more health than another, and none moves faster.

| Role | Precedence line it exercises ([Combat Rules §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)) | The assumption it makes false |

| **[Floater](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Floater)** | 2 while its water flows, 3 when it stops | "Water is terrain; it does not take sides." |

**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 partly covered by a Carrier: a player carrying twenty units acquires an escort within a Carrier's range, and the ways to shake it — spend the charge, or leave the range — are decisions rather than a footrace. **Corrected in r4:** r2 said "an escort that does not give up", which was true only of the unbounded Carrier that [§0.3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) withdraws. The bounded Carrier does give up, and a tracker would still be a genuinely different thing. 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.

| **[Walker](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Walker)** | 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 |

| **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust)** | A dispatch, like a Walker | 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 |

| **[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 |

| 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 | **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. | Contract clause 4; [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) |

| 8:25–8:33 | **And the panel has been holding that same water hot since 7:30, which is now ruled rather than argued.** A lit branch's channel water is energised for as long as the branch is lit — so **insulation is the entry fee for this whole encounter**, not a hedge against two seconds, and an uninsulated player wading in to discharge loses health every second they stand there. The discharge's two seconds are contained inside a hazard that was already running; its contribution is the stun. | [Contract r4 §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction), C2 ruled. **r6 of this page priced two readings and recommended the other one; the ruling went the other way and the objection did not survive reading it** — the two-second rationale is about water no lit branch feeds, which is the Tidal Barrier's flats, not the electrician's yard |

| 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 Walkers 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) |

- **Composition legal?** 54 Walkers of 60 is 90%, above the 85% floor. Two non-Walker 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. ✔

- **Is the channel energised, and by what? Settled.** By the panel, from 7:30, for as long as the yard is lit — the coil's two seconds sit inside that and add no hazard the player was not already in. ✔ r3 had the water go inert after the discharge, which contradicted its own setup ([PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) found it); r6 priced both readings while the ruling already existed; **r7 carries the ruling.**

| 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 |

| 12:33–12:43 | **The burst.** Arc bank 10 → 0 over ten seconds. Each cutter hit conducts to **at most three additional bodies, each once per hit, within the hop reach and with a line between them**; the arc never energises the water. Kills among the spent 100 return nothing. Kills among the unshed 40 drop 1-unit motes — **and the surveyor cannot take them**: the coil bank is full at 10 and the arc bank is being drawn. **A [Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier) can**, which r5 omitted and Equipment caught; the rest expire on the ground, visibly. | [Arc A1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Arc) and [Combat §6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat); the drawn-bank rule; [R5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), now adopted in contract §4 |

- **Does the Carrier's twelve-metre range change this scene? No, and here is the distance.** [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) rightly refused to take that on assertion. The surveyor is standing on the dry bank *beside* the yard channel — that is where the coil is discharged from and where the motes are collected — and the surge enters the channel and wades down it past that position. Bodies in the channel are therefore within twelve metres of the surveyor for most of their walk, so the Carriers acquire and the beat is unchanged. **What the bound does change is the option that is missing from this scene:** under the unbounded version there was no way to shake them at all, and under the bounded one *walking away from the channel* is a real fourth answer — which costs the harvest, the discharge and the burst, i.e. the whole expedition's payoff. That is the choice the range exists to create. ✔

- **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)*

- **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. ✔

| **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 |

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

| **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 |

| **r8** | Cited [REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale) where the roster count is set, answering [X32](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique). Recorded the eight-against-seventy gap without redefining the units to soften it, pointed at Equipment as the axis where the comparison bites hardest, and named the readability-versus-variety conflict inside this page's own composition budget. Also retitled §2, which still said "six roles at a glance". |

| **r6** | Brought onto the Lead's ruled [contract r3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction): coil at two powered seconds and an eight-second stun, R10 declined, the precedence stack, bounded press, one-bit glow, the Carrier's mote and the Grounder all adopted. **Roster stated as eight, not six**, with the Floater transferred here and given a page. Encounter A now prices both readings of the open fixed-power question instead of asserting one. Encounter B corrected on [Equipment's](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) three findings: the closing discharge's yield cannot be stated because the burst killed an unknown share of the late cohort; a Carrier can take the motes the surveyor cannot; and emptying the last bank buys neither safety nor a clear road. |