**Nothing on this page has been built, prototyped, simulated or played.** Every number is a proposal. Where I check a written scene against the rules, I am checking arithmetic and precedence on paper, not reporting behaviour.

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1. States the **order** in which a body resolves competing reasons to move, so that a roster of more than one enemy is designable at all.

2. States the **closed grammar** of targeting, damage, status and charge, so that [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) and this page cannot invent two incompatible systems.

3. Proposes **ten numbered revisions** to gaps the roster exposes, each with a readable signal, a cost, and the choice it improves.

Where I restate an adopted rule it is a copy for legibility and the Design Document wins. Where I propose something it is marked **[Proposal]** and numbered.

---

The strongest thing about this design is that one rule answers four questions, and every reviewer on this wiki has said so. **A roster of enemies is the most likely way to wreck it.** The usual way a survivorlike grows a bestiary is by adding rules — this one flies, this one shields, this one summons — and after six of those the player no longer has one rule, they have a lookup table, and the district stops being readable.

So the roster is built on a constraint rather than a licence:

Concretely, the six roles in [Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) introduce exactly **two** new facts about bodies, and both are already in the player's vocabulary:

| New fact | Already in the vocabulary as |

| --- | --- |

| Some bodies do not conduct | **Insulation** — the module that stops current, in the rack and on the surveyor (GDD §5) |

| Some bodies discharge | **The coil** — a stored discharge that flows into whatever conductive thing it touches (GDD §5) |

Everything else a role does is *not answering the light*: it targets something else, or it stops something else being lit. The Flood's mass — 85% or more of every surge, by the composition budget in §7 — obeys the attraction clause exactly as written. **A player who knows only the spine rule still predicts almost every body on screen**, and the exceptions announce themselves before they act.

The credible alternative is the one the genre normally takes: give enemies stats, and give the player numbers to beat them with. I am against it for a reason specific to this game rather than for taste. This design has **no damage curve at all** — no XP (GDD §6), a fixed cutter, and an arc that is a spend bounded three ways. A stat ladder would have to be invented from nothing to give stat enemies something to be beaten by, and it would immediately compete with the thing the design actually sells, which is that understanding changes the outcome and nothing else does. See **R8**.

---

GDD §4 states pursuit range and attraction in one paragraph and does not order them: *"Two things move organisms besides beacons: pursuit range… and press."* With one enemy type that is enough. With six it is not — and neither is it enough for the existing scene in §13, where the player stands inside a crowd that is also being pulled by a beacon.

| # | Clause | Applies when | Source |

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

| 0 | **Stunned** | It is inside the 8 s stun of a coil discharge, and it conducts | Adopted; GDD §13 states 8 s |

| 1 | **Pursuit** | The surveyor is within its pursuit range: break off and chase; drift back when out of range | Adopted; GDD §4 |

| 2 | **Role target** | Its role names a target other than a beacon — Anchor: nearest wet ground. Carrier: nearest reachable loose charge. Grounder: nearest reachable powered cable run | **[Proposal]** — the only new line |

| 3 | **Attraction** | A lit beacon is reachable: walk to the nearest one, re-evaluated continuously; hold on arrival; never leave a held beacon for a farther light | Adopted; GDD §4, World W1 |

| 4 | **Spread** | No lit beacon is reachable: press outward along the entry branch, both ways | Adopted; GDD §4 |

Two consequences worth stating, because they are the ones a designer will get wrong:

- **Pursuit outranks attraction.** A crowd holding at a beacon still peels off to chase a surveyor who walks into it — which is what the cutter fires at, and why harvesting motes inside a held crowd costs health. GDD §4 already implies this when it says harvesting means "working at the crowd's edge inside its pursuit range". R1 only writes the order down.

- **Line 2 sits below pursuit and above attraction.** A Carrier standing next to you chases you as a body, not as a battery, and at that distance the two are indistinguishable, so nothing new has to be read in a scrum. The role only shows at range, which is where the player has time to read it.

**Cost of R1:** none to the player; it removes an ambiguity. **Risk:** if pursuit range is generous, line 1 swallows lines 2–4 near the player and the roles read as identical up close. The mitigation is a short pursuit range, which the source already proposes. That is a tuning bound, and it is unverified.

---

**Adopted:** a gathered crowd's edge creeps outward along its branch during the quiet interval; each surge is larger, so the held crowd's radius grows; "quiet" means a moving line you can read. **Adopted tuning bound** (GDD §15): on a first expedition with the panel untouched, the causeway crowd's press must not reach the causeway head before the evacuation window closes.

**The problem.** Press is the only thing that makes a *held* crowd more dangerous over time, and it has no stated rate and no stated stop. As written it is an unbounded timer, which means (a) the §15 tuning bound is a bound on an unbounded process, which is fragile, and (b) I cannot compose an encounter around a held crowd without knowing whether its edge reaches the doorway in twenty seconds or two minutes. GDD §15 already lists a cheaper alternative — "press as a fixed radius that grows on a timer rather than simulated crowding" — and REV104 has pre-registered a demand for exactly this kind of computable claim.

**[Proposal R2].** Press is a crowd **relaxing to a radius set by its size**, not creeping indefinitely.

- A crowd holding at a beacon occupies a radius proportional to the number of bodies in it. When bodies join — a new surge arrives, or a neighbouring crowd merges — the radius grows to the new size over a few seconds. When bodies leave or die, it shrinks.

- Press is that relaxation seen from outside: after the second dispatch the crowd's edge moves outward because the crowd is bigger, not because time passed.

- A crowd with **no** beacon (line 4) has no centre, so it spreads along its branch without that bound. That case keeps the current behaviour, and it is the dangerous one — which is the point of §5 below.

**Visible information.** The forecast overlay already draws each entered crowd's current target (GDD §3). R2 adds one **ring per crowd** on the same overlay: the crowd's current extent, drawn on its branch. Engine-drawn, no asset. A player reading the overlay can see *how much of the causeway is full* before deciding whether to cross it.

**Player action and cost.** Killing into a held crowd now visibly shrinks its ring, which gives the cutter and the arc a purpose against a crowd nobody intends to clear: buying ten metres of road home. The cost is standing inside pursuit range to do it, and the charge spent if the arc does it.

**Why this beats the alternative.** The alternative is to leave press as simulated crowding and tune it. That is the one behaviour GDD §15 itself names as "the one real engineering risk", and it produces a number nobody can predict from the page. R2 makes the danger a function of a quantity the player can already see — how many came in — and it makes the §15 tuning bound checkable on paper: the first surge's radius must be smaller than the causeway. It is strictly less simulation, and it is the version I would ship first. **This is a proposal to the Lead, who owns §4; I have not edited that page.**

---

**Adopted:** a killed organism drops a small mote of 1 unit; a mass stunned in water sheds one large mote of 5 units per 10 stunned; **each organism sheds once per expedition and is visibly dimmer afterward**; motes fade in seconds; walking over one banks it; a full battery takes nothing; a battery the arc is drawing takes nothing.

The once-per-organism rule is the best economic rule in the document and I am not touching it. It is what stops the harvest loop becoming a farm, and it is why the arc is a spend rather than an engine. Two things around it need work.

**The collision.** "Visibly dimmer after shedding" puts *spent-ness* on brightness. The roster wants to put two more things there: a body that never glows because it does not conduct (Crust), and a body that glows brightly and unstably because it is about to discharge (Spark). That is four values on one channel, read at a glance, in a crowd the source sizes at 40 to 140. I do not believe that is readable, and I cannot test it.

**[Proposal R4].** Collapse the cues where the consequences collapse.

- **Glow carries exactly one bit: has charge to shed, or does not.** An unshed body glows; a shed body does not. That is all a player needs from brightness, because the only decision brightness informs is *is there anything to take here*.

- **Role identity rides on silhouette and attitude, never on colour or brightness.** The Anchor is half-submerged and still; the Grounder is on a cable, off the ground, and its position alone identifies it; the Carrier leans toward what it wants, and the forecast draws its target; the Crust is the base outline broken by encrustation; the Spark's outline flickers, which is motion, not brightness.

**Cost:** six readable silhouettes, which is the real asset consequence of this submission (§9). **Competing choice:** none for the player; this is a presentation rule that makes the others fair.

**[Proposal R5].** A Carrier that reaches a mote on the ground consumes it and carries it; the mote is gone from the floor. Killing that Carrier drops it again as a mote. Nothing else can take a mote but the surveyor and a Carrier.

Today a dropped mote is bounded only by a fade timer, so "collect during a stun" is a stopwatch problem. R5 makes it a **contest**: the 20 units lying in the channel after a stun are being walked toward by the Carriers that came in with the surge. **Player action:** which motes, in what order, and whether to spend the burst now — which clears the collectors but empties the battery the motes were going to fill — or collect first and take contact damage. **Visible information:** Carriers lean toward the motes and the forecast draws their target. **Consequence:** charge you did not take is charge that walked away rather than charge that faded, and it is recoverable by killing the thief. **Cost:** you fight for a harvest you already paid a battery for.

This is also the honest answer to a fair criticism of the coil loop: at present the only things between the player and 20 units are a fade timer and the size of their battery. R5 puts an opponent there.

---

**Adopted and load-bearing, restated here as a limit on my own roster:** *the panel alone decides the intake.* Current the player injects travels power, never signal; it can light a beacon steady and open a hatch, but it can never choose where the next surge enters (GDD §4). [World r20](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de) states the same as a contract on Campaign and Combat: a district *may not* change what power, signal or a beacon means, or make an ordinary lamp draw the Flood.

**[Proposal R9], and the argument that it is inside that contract.** One role, the **[Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder)**, can darken a beacon: it climbs a live cable run and grounds it, and the beacon on that run flickers and then goes dark until the Grounder is killed or the branch is switched.

- It does **not** change what a beacon means. A grounded beacon is an unpowered beacon, and an unpowered beacon draws nothing — the existing rule, applied. Dark still means dark.

- It **cannot** cause a dispatch, touch the signal cable, or select an intake. It removes a light; it never makes one. The panel's monopoly is untouched.

- It is **announced before it acts**: an irregular flicker that is visibly not the dispatch pulse — the dispatch pulse is a *travelling* flicker along the thin cable, panel to beacon, which GDD §4 makes the observable the whole rule's fairness rests on — plus a spark at the body's position on the thick cable, plus the forecast marking that branch failing.

**Why the roster needs it.** Without it, a routing decision is permanent for as long as the player leaves the panel alone, so "park the crowd and go elsewhere" is a solved problem after the first expedition. R9 puts a **clock on a plan** without putting a clock on the player: the plan decays because something is eating it, visibly, in a place you can go to. That is a better pressure source than a shorter timer, because it has a location, a cause and four different counterplays — kill it, re-switch, plant your own light, or take the long way — each costing something different.

---

This section exists so that [EQP101](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) and CMB101 cannot invent two systems. **I propose it as a contract and ask Equipment to accept, amend or reject it in writing.** Where it constrains Equipment it constrains this page equally.

| Rule | Status |

| --- | --- |

| The cutter fires by itself at the **nearest** organism in reach while you move; you aim by where you stand | Adopted, GDD §3 |

| One target at a time; reach is a radius, not a cone | **[Proposal]** — implied but unstated |

| **The cutter cannot be withheld.** There is no hold-fire | **[Proposal R6]** |

| The cutter draws a **thin visible line to its current target** | **[Proposal R6]** |

**R6 answers the question the [Cutter page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter) asks — "what must remain automatic, and what meaningful action does the player control?"** If the weapon fires by itself and cannot be stopped, then **what enters its reach is a decision the player is making continuously**, and the target line is what turns that from an accident into a choice. It costs one engine-drawn line, and it is what makes the [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark) fair: walking within reach of a Spark standing in the water you are standing in *is* the mistake, and the line shows you making it half a second before it lands.

A hold-fire button would defuse this entirely and I recommend against it. The contrary view is that taking control away feels bad. The answer is that the genre's premise *is* an automatic weapon; this design should charge for it rather than apologise for it.

**Any Equipment weapon must state its targeting rule against this list**: what it selects (nearest, densest, ahead of you), whether it can be withheld, and what its line looks like. A weapon that picks targets differently is a genuinely different weapon, which is what the Cutter page asks for. A weapon that does more damage is not.

- An enemy has a **hit count** — the number of cutter hits that kill it — not a health pool. The basic organism is three hits at roughly two hits a second (adopted, GDD §3).

- There are **no resistances, no multipliers, no elements, no armour values**. A body either conducts or does not; a body either can be reached or cannot.

- The player has five hits of health. Contact costs one, with a moment of immunity after. Unprotected energised water costs one per second. (Adopted, GDD §3.)

**Why.** With no XP and no weapon-damage ladder, damage numbers would be a system with one number in it and nowhere to go — and the first thing anyone would do with it is build the stat progression the [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief) explicitly warns against ("a catalogue of damage bonuses alone does not solve this"). Closing the door now is cheap; closing it after Equipment has thirty items priced in percentages is not.

**The cost of R8 is real and I will state it:** it removes the easiest lever for making a late district harder, and puts the whole difficulty burden on composition, topology and the clock. §7 and the campaign arc in [Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) are my argument that this is enough. If PM or Equipment think it is not, this is the decision to have now rather than later.

| Status | Caused by | Duration | Effect |

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

| **Stunned** | Current reaching a conducting body through connected water | 8 s (adopted, GDD §13) | Does not move or act; sheds its large-mote share once |

| **Spent** | Having shed, by any means | Rest of the expedition | Yields no further charge; does not glow (R4) |

| **Chained** | Being hit while an arc burst is running | The burst | The hit conducts onward to another body |

No slows, burns, poisons or fears. Three is a small number on purpose: this design's interest is in *where bodies are*, not in what conditions they carry, and every added status is another thing to read off a crowd of a hundred.

Canonical on the Design Document; copied here so an Equipment reader has the contract in one place. Kill mote 1 unit; a stun sheds one 5-unit large mote per 10 stunned; each organism sheds once, then is spent; motes fade in seconds; a battery holds 10; a coil discharge spends a whole battery; an arc burst empties one battery in about 10 s; a battery being drawn accepts nothing; a collected mote goes to the battery with the most room. **Plus [R5]:** a Carrier may take an uncollected mote.

**One gap I could not close from the source, and it belongs to the Lead [Proposal R3].** How long does a coil discharge keep the water energised? The stun is 8 seconds, but the *water's* energised window is never stated — and the uninsulated player's cost, one health per second in energised water, cannot be computed without it. This matters directly: the electrician loadout spends a slot on insulation, and the price of not spending it is currently unknowable.

**I propose 1 second**, so that an uninsulated discharge costs 1 health — a real but survivable mistake — and so the water is inert for the 8 seconds the player spends collecting inside it. If the Lead prefers the water to stay hot for the whole stun, insulation becomes close to mandatory for the coil, which is a different and defensible balance of the rack. It should be chosen, not left blank. My recommendation is stated rather than routed (Wiki Conventions §11a); I proceed on 1 second and the encounters in [Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) say where it is load-bearing.

**[Proposal R10].** While a body of connected water is energised, an arc chain propagates **through that water as well as body to body**, so it reaches every conducting body the water connects, not only the bodies adjacent in the chain.

This is not a new clause. Clause 1 already says current flows through water to everything the water connects, and an arc hit is current. But the document never states what happens when the arc's current and energised water meet, and the answer is the single largest power spike in this submission, so it should be written down rather than discovered. **This is a proposal to the Lead, who owns clause 1.**

Where it bites: a [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark) killed in water energises that water for 1 second (R3's window, the same quantity). A burst run through a channel crowd that still contains living Sparks therefore keeps re-energising the channel, and the chain stops being local. That is the late-campaign crowd-clearing payoff, and it costs five separate preparations to reach: the arc, a full battery, Sparks deliberately left alive, a crowd routed into connected water, and insulation or dry footing. Encounter B in [Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) walks it through against these rules.

**If the Lead rejects R10**, the roster still works: the Spark remains the role that makes the automatic weapon a liability, and the late payoff falls back to the adopted coil-then-arc double in GDD §13. R10 is the upside, not the foundation.

---

Campaign owns placement ([Expansion Prompts](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Team/Expansion%20Prompts)). This page owns what a legal composition is. **Proposed budget, per surge:**

| Constraint | Value | Reason |

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

| Anchors | **standing before the expedition begins**, not arriving in a surge | It is a feature of the terrain; the player must be able to see it and plan around it on arrival |

**Difficulty is composition and topology, never numbers.** A late district is harder because the water connects differently, because two roles are live at once, and because the routes home are longer — not because the same bodies take four hits. That is R8 stated as a rule Campaign can build against.

**A district's shared-rule diff** — the check [REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) pre-registered for REV104 — should, for combat, name: which roles are present, which precedence line each exercises, what announces it, and what the player can do about it with the equipment available at that point in the campaign. A district that cannot fill that in has decoration, not encounters.

---

The [Cutter page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter) asks this directly, and it is the fair question to ask a game whose weapon fires itself. Under the rules above, the player is deciding five things continuously, none of them by pressing an attack button:

1. **What is inside the cutter's reach** — because it cannot be withheld (R6). Near a Spark in water this is the whole game; near a Crust it decides whether an arc chain has anywhere to go.

2. **Which precedence line they are standing in.** Inside pursuit range you are a target; outside it you are scenery and the crowd is doing something predictable. Moving in and out of that line is the moment-to-moment skill, and R2's ring is how you read it.

3. **When to spend.** A coil discharge needs a full battery, a crowd in connected water, and a crowd that has not shed. An arc burst needs density and a battery you are willing to empty. Both are irreversible for the expedition.

4. **Where the water is, relative to both of you.** Water is the weapon and the hazard on one clause. Standing in it makes the coil possible and the Spark lethal.

5. **What to walk away from.** Every second fighting is a second not spent on the district, and the district is the reward (GDD §6). Nothing here rewards clearing a crowd for its own sake: no XP, and spent bodies are worth nothing.

**And one thing decided before the expedition:** what the rack can answer. Insulation answers water. A second battery answers a big harvest. The beacon answers Carriers and Grounders both, for two slots and a battery. A rack cannot answer everything, which is the point.

---

**No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded, purchased or created by this role, and none is authorized.** GDD §14 already records the enemy sprite as the project's first likely approval request, and the [Asset Licences reference](/Reference/Asset%20Licences) records that "free" is not one thing and that tinting or resizing is an adaptation some licences forbid.

**What this submission adds to that cost, honestly:** the roster's readability depends on **six distinguishable silhouettes**, five more than the current one-enemy proposal. That is the single largest consequence of this page and PM should weigh it as such. Three mitigations, in the order I would apply them:

1. **Three of the six are readable from position and attitude rather than from a new creature.** A Grounder is *on a cable, off the ground*. An Anchor is *half-submerged and not moving*. A Carrier *leans toward its target, which the forecast overlay already draws*. If the base body can be posed, these three cost poses, not creatures.

2. **Two of the remaining three are silhouette edits of the base body**: the Crust is the base outline broken by encrustation; the Spark is the base outline with a flicker. Whether that is legal depends on the individual asset's licence, not its host's general statement. **I claim no availability and have inspected nothing.**

3. **If the owner takes the humanoid option in GDD §14 decision 2** — the Flood as a humanoid mass, which is among the owner's own examples of the Flood — the roster does not change: what conducts is bodies standing in water either way, and posture-based roles work at least as well on a humanoid. This roster is **neutral** on decision 2 and does not push it either way.

**New non-creature cues this page needs, all engine-drawn, no asset:** the cutter's target line (R6); the press ring per crowd on the forecast overlay (R2); the Grounder's irregular beacon flicker, which must be distinguishable from the dispatch pulse's travelling flicker, plus a spark at the cable (R9); and a flat, mote-less feedback on a discharge into an already-spent crowd, so a wasted battery reads as wasted.

**The gap I cannot close.** The Spark's fairness leans on a rising audible whine as it enters cutter reach. GDD §14 says sound is not designed. Without audio the visual fallback is the target line plus the flicker, which I believe is enough but cannot claim is enough. **Recorded as a gap, not as a request.**

---

Stated as positions, not as tickets (Wiki Conventions §11a). None blocks the roster; each names what I proceed on.

| # | Question | Owner | My position, on which I proceed unless ruled otherwise |

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

| C3 | Do damage numbers exist? (R8) | Lead + Equipment | No. Decide now; cheap today, expensive after a catalogue. |

| C4 | Is the status list closed at three? (R7) | Equipment | Yes, and I will extend it only by revising this page with a reason. |

| C5 | May a role darken a beacon? (R9) | Lead + World | Yes, under the three limits in §5. It removes a light and can never make one, so the panel's monopoly and W1 both stand. |

| C8 | The [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. | Editor + Lead | Ten. **Reported, not edited** — the Glossary is not mine. Encounter B in [Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) uses ten. |

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- **[Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies)** — the six roles, why each exists, the two mixed encounters checked against the rules above, the elites-and-bosses assessment, and the early/middle/late campaign arc.