Hold The Horde — Expedition Proposal

A proposal for the owner 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, which gives each trip its own rise from vulnerable to dominant. Under current rules, a living return preserves the current arrangement and population: defeated creatures stay defeated, releases you resolved stay spent and no source refills merely because you went home. Surviving creatures can still move. That is what makes the station yours. The grille you shut, the cap you closed and the canister you dropped are all still there.

Together those rules create a problem for a careful player. The ship's dock never moves, so every trip starts from the same door. Within one life, pushing the same route deeper can leave more cleared ground between that door and the next unresolved frontier. A death reshuffles the unjoined station and brings new crowds, but at the cost of position, known routes and unfinished work, so dying must not become the way to shorten a walk. By the third trip into a region you can walk out at starting strength across rooms you already emptied, and the first thing that can grow your build may be the climax itself.

Both directions below keep the rules above (see the Owner Brief); changing them would be a different proposal.

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.
• Reach further. Canisters packed at a working bench carry more air in the same space, and a dropped canister waits where you left it. Real shortcuts shorten real walks where they exist: a cut crawl that comes out past a jammed door, an opened hoist, or rooms you have joined so their route survives later deaths.
• Push on, or leave it. Growth reaches a climax if you push on in the same trip, which costs the air for the walk back. Alternatively, a source you never wake stays occupied, so a transfer bay's corrective test can wait for a trip that needs a climb. That asks a horde-game player to walk past a fight they want now, 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 canisters and dropped objects; Connecting The Station owns joins.

Cost. No rule changes, but the station must show clearly which sources are occupied, sealed or spent. Shortcuts can bypass cleared rooms and substantially shorten particular walks.

2. Ride a carriage line — new rule

A carriage line is a service carriage running between two carriage stations.

• Endpoints. One station is aboard the ship, inside the airlock's inner door. The other is a forward station in a room you have reached on foot. Only one forward link exists at a time; linking another moves it.
• Activation. A forward station is found dead. Restoring it takes time while the game runs and is done while its room is quiet or separated; then you commit the link. The carriage runs in the service conduit along the rooms you walked to get there, never through space you have not walked.
• Riding out. From the ship the ride is much shorter than the walk, and you breathe suit air throughout. You arrive at starting strength and look through the carriage's port before its door opens. The room is as it now is, not as you remember it: bodies you left alive may have moved, and nothing promises the platform is clear. If something waits in the ring, you can stay shut in and ride back, which ends the trip aboard. This sealed turn-back is allowed without opening the door or clearing the ring; the exposed boarding guard below applies only once the door has opened.
• Riding home. A forward station's start-up takes a few exposed seconds. It refuses while any creature stands inside its marked ring and stops if one enters, so pursuers must be cleared or shut out first. Room hazards, such as a vessel still drawing across a lane, do not stop it; you time them. Arriving at the ship station is arriving aboard: your temporary upgrades end.
• 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.
• Survivors still walk. A rescue works because the person opens their own door and crosses under their own power on a short route you prepared. A carriage would make any linked room a rescue route without that preparation, send someone away from you mid-transfer, and raise the question of a death during their crossing.

What it buys. The line replaces walking as far as its one current forward station; later frontiers can still lie farther away. Joined rooms pay off on repeated trips, and a short ride home lets a trip spend its air pushing into a climax instead of saving it for the walk back. Dying breaks unjoined lines, so death stays costly.

Cost. A new fixture with link, carriage and interrupted-ride state, conduit presentation in every room a line follows, and station placement in every region. The rooms between endpoints stop being revisited, along with their oxygen pressure.

Separate option: sending cargo home. The carriage could also take one carried object home without you. That frees space mid-trip, so you can carry more finds. It also weakens the shared-carrying tension, because full packs stop forcing a choice. It is not needed for the outings below, and the line can be taken without it.

Which to take

Recommendation: ride a carriage line, with direction 1's closing, reach and shortcuts kept as ordinary play. For a careful player on a long life, current rules make successive pushes along the same route longer, and pushing into a climax means paying twice for the same walk. A line lets the station you connected shorten your trips and gives the joining puzzle a felt benefit. Neither direction creates a new climb once a route's ordinary releases are spent: outing 3 below still fights at starting strength.

Three outings

Your rig throughout is the four starter parts: Threat Sensor and Pulse Projector firing automatically, and Manual Trigger raising the Barrier Plate.

The shield and disc launcher share power. Raising the shield can briefly delay the next disc, and a disc already launching can briefly prevent the shield from starting. The build reference explains this tradeoff.

Outing 1 — the knocking ward

Goal: reach the woman behind the green-lit window. Preparation: the starter rig and one spare canister, leaving space for what the ward holds. On the way you photograph the label painted on her window.

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 Rebound Disc: your shots become discs that bank off the bollard and walls through the bodies. 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 and pass her travel air through the sleeve. You 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.

Home. Rebound Disc is gone. Yeva is aboard; the Arc Emitter sits in storage, too large for your four-space rig and with nothing yet to charge it. Shown your window photograph, she says the painted 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 starter rig and a spare canister.

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 it early. You fight pillar to pillar, throw both locks and clear the bodies inside. You take Rebound Disc again. Mastery is remembering that a seal counts as much as a clear, and reading which walls will bank a disc.

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 and hand-close one vessel's cap. You photograph the counter, work the core free and unclamp the Impact Dynamo from the loop's impact plate. With the Siphon down, you find a dead carriage station on the dry outer arc, restore it and link it to the ship.

The gallery. From the loop's far threshold you see broad floor, two feeding mouths, a heavy creature behind the fixed shelter rib and vessels frosting on the loop's three beats: anticipation. Because the ride home will be short, you spend your air going in. When the release commits, both mouths pour. Your discs bank off the fixed rib and the gallery walls and cut lines through the packed ranks, up to three in flight at once until heat makes the Projector pause. You shut the nearer mouth mid-flood, hold the rib and seal the far mouth. The stage resolves, and you choose Fragment Wake: each disc now ends in a fan of fragments through the front ranks. For a minute the build does what you built it for. But the heavy creature and half a floor of bodies remain, and your air is low. You fall back to the loop; two bodies follow you into the ring, you put them down, the start-up cycle completes, and you ride home.

Home. Both upgrades are gone. The core goes into the ship, and the Arc Emitter and Dynamo sit together in storage: an arc build waiting for more rig space, which only the still-missing navigation coupler provides. Yeva lays your counter photograph beside her wall. 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 ship and the gallery can grow your build, so instead of a long walk you ride.

Through the carriage port the loop looks almost as you left it: one body you missed stands by the valve. You clear it before stepping far, and the uncapped vessel warns and draws again. In the gallery, the heavy creature and the bodies you left are waiting, and no release remains to pay for fighting them.

It is won with what you know. On the loop's rhythm you close the vessel drawing across the cap control. You drive bodies onto both plates so the chamber holds near neutral while you work one moving rib, using the handrail when the balance slips. You make both cutter releases and seat the pin, fixing that rib; the other still swings, and the fixed shelter rib stays where it always was. That completes the gallery's checkpoint toward the exchanger core. In the exchanger room you free the core, then carry it back to the loop and ride home.

What this trip is. A short ride to a starting-strength fight is not a renewed build climb. What is enjoyable is mastery: a room you understand, a threat you can read, and earlier work — the capped vessel, the knowledge of the plates — paying off. What is missing is the survivorslike rise. Regular growth from defeated enemies, if the owner chooses it, might add some growth from those leftover bodies.

Home. Three of the ship's four assemblies are aboard: the isolation bridge from the station's opening, the regulator core and the exchanger core. The fourth, the navigation coupler, would also give the rig the space to mount the Arc and Dynamo waiting in storage. That is the next trip's reason. Mara's refuge lies past the gallery, but her walk to the ship is still too long for a short crossing, 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 and stop feeling oxygen until the last room, and every trip becomes "find the next carriage station". The one-link limit and station placement are what hold that back, and both are guesses. Outing 3's fight at starting strength may feel like a chore rather than mastery under either direction.

Open questions

• How long a ride should take.
• How many stations a region holds.
• Whether sending cargo home is worth its cost.
• Under direction 1, whether shortcut placement keeps each new frontier close enough during a long life.
• Whether survivors may ride a carriage line (the proposal says they walk); if they do, the rescue rules change.
• Whether there is regular growth from defeated enemies (the growth rhythm is the owner's choice), and how much outing 3's leftover bodies would then give.
• Whether players enjoy a climax won by knowledge after the growth has gone (only learnable in play).
• These rules are untested; numbers are proposals.