Hold The Horde — Expedition Proposal
A proposal for the owner and PM to react to. It shows how three successive trips from the ship can each be worth taking. The rooms follow Arrangement A of the Station Room And Module Inventory; the people, fiction and details are examples and remain revisable.
The problem with coming back
Every return home ends your temporary power. The owner chose that, and it gives each trip its own rise from vulnerable to dominant. A living return also leaves the station exactly as you left it: rooms you cleared stay clear, releases you resolved stay spent and nothing refills. That is what makes the station yours. The grille you shut, the rib you pinned and the canister you dropped are all still there.
Together those rules create a problem. The ship's dock never moves, so every trip starts from the same door, and the ground between that door and anything still unresolved grows as you clear the station. By the third trip into a region you walk out at starting strength across rooms you already emptied, and the first thing that can still grow your build may be the climax itself.
Two answers are off the table: shifting the station on a living return, and refilling what you spent. Dying brings a new arrangement and new crowds, so any answer must also keep death from becoming the sensible way to refresh a region.
Two ways to keep returns worth taking
1. Plan the station you leave behind — current rules
Nothing new is added. Each trip shapes the next.
- Close the road, fight the frontier. Shutting a source before its release commits buys lasting safety and access but no upgrade, which suits a route you will walk many times. Letting a release commit, then clearing or sealing it, earns a choice, which suits the trip you mean to push.
- Carry the climb to the climax. A dropped canister stays where you left it, and completed work — a capped vessel, a released rib, a cut panel — persists. You can leave air near a climax and weaken it a trip ahead.
- Wake it or leave it. Many releases commit only when you do the loud work beside them. A source you never wake stays occupied, so a transfer bay's corrective test can wait for a trip that needs a climb. The experience cost is real: it asks a horde-game player to walk past a fight they want now to have growth later, and some releases, like a hall whose wards open as you cross it, cannot be left.
Combat Rules and Build Rules own releases and upgrades; Survival And Loadout owns dropped objects.
Cost. No rule changes, but the station must show clearly which sources are occupied, sealed or spent. Nothing shortens the walk, which keeps growing for the rest of the campaign.
2. Ride a line you built — new rule
Changed rule, proposed. Some rooms hold a line collar, a fixture like the latch collars proposed for joining rooms, and the dock has one.
- Endpoints. The dock and one forward collar you have reached on foot. Only one forward link exists at a time; linking another moves it.
- Activation. Restore the forward collar with world-time work while its room is quiet or separated, then commit the link. Its carriage runs in the service conduit along the rooms you walked to get there, never through space you have not walked.
- Riding. A short, exposed start-up cycle, then a ride much shorter than the walk. You breathe suit air throughout, and the carriage brings no oxygen out. Riding out leaves you at starting strength. Riding home is returning aboard, so your temporary upgrades end. A collar will not start while its room holds a live threat, so it is no escape hatch.
- Sending cargo home. The carriage can take one carried object home without you, so a trip can bank its prize and keep going with its growth. Nothing rides out except you and what you carry.
- Survivors walk. A rescue still needs a short walked route; nobody is sent down the line.
- Shifts. A living return changes nothing. After a death the line survives only if persistent joins still hold every room between its endpoints together; otherwise it goes dark until you rebuild that route.
What it buys. The walk stops growing with the station, and joining rooms pays off on every trip. A trip can send its prize home and carry its growth into the climax. Dying breaks unjoined lines, so death stays costly.
Cost. A new fixture with link, carriage and interrupted-ride state, and conduit presentation in every room a line follows. Collar placement is authoring in every region. The rooms between endpoints stop being revisited, along with their oxygen pressure, and sending cargo home weakens the carrying tension of the walk back. An arrival shows the room as you left it, which is only as safe as what you left there.
Which to take
| 1. Plan the station | 2. Ride a line you built | |
|---|---|---|
| Rule changes | None | Line collars, riding and cargo home |
| Quiet travel before the frontier | Grows with every region cleared | A short ride plus the rooms past the collar |
| Growth reaching a climax | Only if you push on or leave sources unfought | Send the prize home and push on |
| Authoring and state | Readable source states | Collar placement, link and carriage state, conduits |
| Main risk | Long walks; skipping fights you want | Rooms become a lobby; oxygen pressure fades on linked ground |
Recommendation: ride a line you built, with direction 1's closing and preparation kept as ordinary play. Under current rules the quiet walk grows for the whole campaign, and the only way to bring growth to a climax is to skip fights or turn back early. A line makes the station you connected shorten your trips, which gives the owner's joining puzzle a felt benefit. Neither direction creates a new climb once a route's ordinary releases are spent: outing 3 below still meets its fight at starting strength. The line changes how long you wait for that moment. This is a proposal for reaction; no owning rule changes yet.
The growth rhythm is still the owner's choice. If temporary growth also came from defeated enemies with larger milestones, the bodies left in a room you withdrew from would feed growth and outing 3 would no longer be cold. The recommendation would stand.
Three outings
Outing 1 — the knocking ward
Goal: reach the woman behind the green-lit window. Preparation: the starting rig and one spare canister, leaving room for what the ward holds.
The junction past the dock is the only way in, and a grille in its side wall shows where the crowd will come from. It comes: a river of bodies from the quarantine wing, splitting round the central bollard while fast flankers take the far leg. You hold the dock mouth as a funnel, push to the grille's wheel and shut it mid-flood, then clear what already came through. In the journal's pause you choose your first upgrade. The junction goes still with the refuge door in view: relief.
Yeva wants her grease-pencil wall photographed, and you spend the time. You stock the abort vestibule, walk the short crossing and confirm it is quiet; she opens her own door and follows under her own power. Before leaving you lift the arc grid from her ward's service edge: an Arc Emitter your rig can use.
Home. The upgrade is gone. Yeva is aboard and the Arc Emitter is on the bench. Shown your photograph of the label painted on her window, she says the hand is Dorn's, her work partner, who sealed a section she has not seen since. Attachment starts here.
Outing 2 — the long hall, the loop and the gallery
Goal: the pressure regulator core, one of the ship's missing assemblies, in the sampling loop beyond the long pressure hall, plus a photograph of the loop's pressure counter for Yeva. Preparation: the Arc Emitter replaces the Barrier, and a spare canister buys time.
The junction is silent, the grille still shut. The long hall is not. A flanker pack comes down the side gallery first; then, halfway along, both ward doors open. Their locks sit mid-hall, where the release commits, so you can only seal them early. You fight pillar to pillar, throw both locks and clear the bodies inside. You choose Echoing Arc: your discharge now jumps to more nearby bodies. Mastery is remembering that a seal counts as much as a clear.
The loop has no release of its own, but paired vessels draw on a three-beat frost warning and a Glass Siphon waits at the valve. You learn the rhythm, hand-close one vessel's cap, photograph the counter and work the core free. In the quiet after the Siphon falls, you find a dead line collar, restore it and link it to the dock. The core rides home without you.
The gallery. From the loop's far threshold you see broad floor, two feeding mouths, a heavy creature across a fixed rib and vessels frosting on the loop's three beats: anticipation. With your growth and your air you go in. When the release commits, both mouths pour, and your arcs jump through the packed front ranks in white chains — the build doing what you built it for. You shut the nearer mouth mid-flood, hold the rib against the rest and seal the far mouth. The stage resolves and you take a second upgrade. But the heavy creature and half a floor of bodies remain, and your air is low. You pull back to the quiet loop, the collar cycles, and you ride home.
Home. Both upgrades are gone; the core is already aboard. Yeva lays your counter photograph beside her wall. (Example fiction.) Her tally follows the counter beat for beat until one date, then doubles: something else began drawing on that line. The gallery's vessels are the obvious suspect. She wants to know, and so do you. Curiosity survives the reset because it belongs to a place and a person, not to your power.
Outing 3 — back to an unfinished gallery
This is the second living return after the route's ordinary releases were spent. Nothing between the dock and the gallery can grow your build, so the line earns its keep. Instead of a long walk across the junction, hall and loop, you ride.
Preparation: the Barrier goes back in place of the Arc Emitter; the gallery still holds a heavy creature and the bodies you left, and no release is left to pay for fighting them.
The loop's open vessel warns and draws again; the capped one does not. In the gallery, everything you left is waiting. This fight offers no upgrade, so it is won with what you know. You close the vessel drawing across the cap control on the loop's rhythm. You lure a knot of bodies onto one plate; the floor tips their way, the rib swings, and for a few beats its cutter releases are in reach — surprise turned into a plan. You make both releases and seat the pin, fixing that rib while the other still swings, and the gallery's checkpoint toward the exchanger core is done. In the exchanger room you free the core, carry it back to the loop and send it home, then ride after it.
Home. Three of the ship's four assemblies are aboard. Mara's refuge lies past the gallery, but her walk to the ship is still too long for a short crossing, and she will not ride a line, so she waits. Yeva has part of an answer and a sharper question for Dorn, wherever the station has put him.
How this could fail
The line turns the station into a lobby. Players ride past the rooms they changed, stop feeling oxygen until the last room, and every trip becomes "find the next collar". The collar count and the one-link limit are what hold that back, and they are guesses. Outing 3's fight at starting strength may also feel like a chore rather than mastery, whichever direction is chosen.
Still open
How long a ride should take, how many collars a region holds, and whether sending cargo home is too generous. Whether players enjoy a climax won by knowledge after the growth has gone can only be learned in play. The growth rhythm remains the owner's choice, and no owning rule has adopted the line.