Hold the Flood — Campaign (DES104)

DES105 r4, on the Campaign page at r9 · 2026-09-07 · Lead Game and Systems Designer · In review · Revised against PMR009 and the External Critic's X37: the Tram's changed return is the simple stairs reconnaissance, with the wet-yard harvest and the berth exit as optional plans priced honestly, and the coil's worth shown where a door depends on it; the berth-supported start issues one module and no Kit; the optional stay's cargo and burned charge are stated by branch; the Siphon follows the Visionary's simplification; the Exchange's cadence is 3:00 and 7:00 and its two terminals stand together at the head end. r8 (0cafb9), under PMU008 the vision comes first: a new section after the owner page gives the Visionary the intended experience and three tensions in plain words. PMR008's bounded corrections are made: the Tram's later return no longer forces a wait, its easy path is the payoff of understanding and the stay is the priced alternative, the Siphon is called optional margin, the lure's activation and expiry are accounted for with its charge committed and left, the changed return's exit and the tram's availability are corrected, the later start has five free cells, and the criterion-11 paragraph no longer carries a moving count (X35); the Exchange's cadence and reel terminals are scoped in 3.4; the three visits are run against the vision's decision test. r7 (de4893) was revised against the critic's REV105 r1 and the External Critic's X34: the later return's crossing is now the main line, the same heavy stands on the rail on both later visits and is killed for the later return's first charge, every beat inside pursuit range is priced, the stairs have a distance, section 8 quotes the Campaign designer's three consolidated figures at Districts r11 and the owner page carries them. r6 (ee4202) delivered PM's DES105: section 3.2 is now the Tram Incline across three visits, a first visit, a changed return and a later return, with legal starts, Equipment's three approaches, Colony's two investment paths, World's explanation changes, the named geography and three ledgers; the Exchange's found bank state is ratified; D026 is mirrored; Combat's R12 and R13 are adopted; the asset wording is corrected. r5 (9366c8) was revised against the External Critic's X33 and the Campaign designer's answer to Colony (Districts r7): the owner page now carries criterion 11's four parts, with positioning deferred until the ledger settles and the old short-game hypothesis withdrawn in that form; the Lock Flight's canal is a switched state, joined or parted on the board, never conditioned on extraction; one supported berth in the whole city; the countersignatures are complete. r4 (7daf34) was revised against the critic's REV104 r4 and r5 and the reader's Q51: the bargeman's plan is written to the lure's hundred seconds; the Weir intake sits beside its beacon and the Tram's board shows no intake while the panel is Off; the Heavy has its number back; a floater never leaves water; the Exchange points to its new page; section 8 carries the Campaign designer's accepted baseline with PM's caveats; section 7 cites REF110. r3 (6e4b59) was revised against PMR006's five blockers and REV104 r2: the ending copy is Stop, Keep or Leave; the three written expeditions earn their first battery at a crowd's edge inside pursuit range, and the Tidal Barrier's harvest is collected where it falls; each new district tables which panel position selects which intake and which beacon flashes; the bargeman's plan is written in the order the rules allow; the presentation categories are listed once (D025) and authored art is put to the owner (X31). r2 (b92234) and r1 (34dc09, 9d3590) are in page history. Expansion Brief · Design Index · Shared rule contract · Districts · Enemies · Combat Rules · Equipment · Build Paths · Colony · World and Mystery · Design Document · Design Review · PMR004

Added by the Campaign and District Designer, 2026-09-06, without changing anything on this page. The role this page stands in for is now staffed. Its first deliverable is Districts (CAM101), which adopts this campaign rather than proposing a rival one: it takes section 2's set and section 3's districts as written, adds an independent count test and a recommended seven, the order of play and travel rules, the progression map, a bottom-up duration hypothesis, one consequence of failure and one alternative route to the head-works, and writes the two districts this page's coverage table marks as sketches — The Collector and The Head-works. One disagreement is recorded there and not here: the refuge should not be counted as the eighth district. The transfer this page's bookkeeping anticipates is the lead's to make, not mine to take.

(The lead, r2: that note is kept as written. The disagreement it records is accepted below; the count is seven external districts with the refuge at stake, as PM's D022 now says.)

Read this first: one page for the owner

What changed. You called the premise promising, found three to four hours far too little, and asked for a much larger number of districts, with separate pages for mechanics, enemies and weapons. Since then four specialists have written the districts, enemies, equipment and colony in detail, and PM has taken three provisional drafting decisions so the next draft is one design: seven districts plus the refuge (D022), an eight-cell rack with pickups the player prioritises (D023), and the world designer's first answer to the mystery, that the city still runs on the Flood (D024). None of that is your approval; all of it is reversible; nothing has been built or played.

What this proposes. A campaign of seven connected districts on one water system, the drowned flood defences of a city, from the sea gate at the bottom to the head-works at the top. Every district is a different machine on the same water and the same four rules: water connects, current works machines, light draws the Flood, and the Flood carries the charge you fight with. The pumping district you have read opens the campaign, and its relay decision becomes a local outcome instead of the end. The refuge is the thing at stake, not a menu: district outcomes change its state, and your answer is usually a lever somewhere else, or, if you choose, a defence at home.

The game in four beats.

• A first trip. You leave the causeway dock, walk past a dark lamp, and watch the far beacon flash as the first surge pours in beneath it. You learn the culvert, find a coil, and drain your own battery by packing wet salvage against it. Nothing is solved; everything needed to solve it was seen. (The Design Document's expedition one.)
• A changed return, in the middle of the game. You have set the Exchange's bank so the pumping district's relay is permitted again, and you come back to a district whose forecast you can now predict without its board. You throw the panel to yard on purpose, hold the pump-hall door with the cutter while two batteries fill, discharge into the channel, and spend the arc on the recovering crowd. Then you walk the causeway home along the road that was, five expeditions ago, the Flood's. (Expedition six, and the Exchange in section 3.4.)
• A later build choice. At the Collector you pack the harvester, coil and arc with a battery each, or the grid diver, coil and cable reel, and the difference is whether you came for charge to spend on the spot or for reach through a gate the panel cannot feed. Either rack leaves two cells for what you find, and neither is a better number than the other. (Build Paths, family one.)
• The payoff. At the head-works the governor has fresh grease and today's tally. The city has been harvesting the Flood to keep its own lights on, and the surveyor who shut one relay for one district now holds the lever for all of them. Stop, and the harvest ends and the districts go dark in turn, the colony's pump with them, while the gravity docks and hand-worked locks keep everyone alive; Keep, and you become the thing upstream that keeps time, setting the cadence and the clutches yourself, the one outcome you can come back and change; Leave, and the machine runs as you found it, and the board records that it could have been stopped. (The Head-works page; the contract's state table.)

Who it is for, and what it offers. The player PM named provisionally: crowd-survival players who want discoveries to change how they fight and travel. What offers value: one rule that is the weapon, the key, the lure and the fuel, learned by experiment in a district that is a machine, and now at campaign scale, seven machines on one water and a mystery whose evidence changes what you do next. Scope: the Districts page's current ledger, quoted in section 8 with its caveats, a hypothesis and not a measurement. Positioning: the one-district document's hypothesis, a short authored game beside the crowd games at their prices, was reasoned from three to four hours and is withdrawn in that form; a positioning statement at the new length is deferred until the baseline ledger PM asked for is confirmed, and its evidence will be the Reference pages' measured data with their caveats, never inference from length. Those are criterion 11's four parts: the player, the value, the scope, and the positioning with its evidence and uncertainty.

The count. Seven external districts pass the two tests that have been run on them, the lead's written-expedition test and the Campaign designer's lever ladder: the Pumping District, the Lock Flight, the Tram Incline, the Exchange, the Collector, the Tidal Barrier and the Head-works. The refuge is not an eighth; it is where the levers land. The Salt Pans are deferred, not banned. PM records this as D022, provisional.

What is designed and what is a hypothesis. Three districts are in depth on this page, with written expeditions and charge ledgers that close under the rules as now ruled; three more, the Collector, the Head-works and the Exchange, are in depth on the Campaign designer's pages; the pumping district is the Design Document. The enemy roster, the equipment catalogue and the colony loop are the specialists' proposals, linked below, with the lead's dispositions recorded in the bookkeeping. The length is the Campaign designer's bottom-up hypothesis, which PM accepts as a content-backed drafting hypothesis and not as measured playtime: about eight hours of authored beats on the baseline path, ten to eleven for a player who does that path with the dock time between trips, and about thirteen for one who does everything designed, with none of the three measured; section 8 carries them with their caveats.

What happens if you say yes. Nothing is built. This is a design gate, not a development gate. Saying yes means the team finishes the remaining districts to the standard in section 3, the critic reviews the whole, and you assess it.

Where to read. Your short read is this section and section 10, about five minutes; the rest of this page is reference for the team and the reviewers. Section 3.2 is the worked example PM asked for of one district across three visits, and is the best single place to see whether the game renews. Then this page for the campaign; the Districts page for order, travel, the progression map and the two districts written there; Build Paths for the choices a player makes with equipment; Enemies for what the Flood does; Colony for what the refuge does between trips; the shared rule contract for the rules in one place; the Design Document for the pumping district.

For the Visionary: the intended experience as the lead understands it, and three tensions

PMU008 asks the lead for a concise statement and up to three consequential design tensions, with links to existing scenes. This is that, in plain words; it is not another document. The Visionary's Game vision on the Brief is the working direction, and nothing here argues with it.

The experience, as currently written. You are one surveyor from a small refuge in a drowned city, going out for fifteen minutes at a time into a district that is a machine. The machine does four things with one thing, current: water carries it, devices run on it, a lit lamp draws the Flood to it, and the Flood itself is made of it, which is what you fight with. On each trip you go in for something, salvage or a place you have not reached, while the Flood arrives in surges you can predict from a forecast and steer with a switch. You learn the machine by trying it: you light a branch to open a door and watch the crowd come to the light you lit; you drain a channel to walk a bed and lose the door the water fed; you leave a lock open and next time the canal is joined. What you learn changes what you pack and where you go, and what you change stays changed. Over the campaign you follow the signal upstream through seven such machines to the place that keeps them all in time, and you decide what your refuge should keep running once you know that the city lives on the harvest. The scenes that show this as written: a first trip (the Design Document's expedition one), a later one changed by knowing (expedition six), the Lock Flight (section 3.1 below), the Tram Incline across three visits (section 3.2), the Tidal Barrier (section 3.3), and the Head-works.

Tension one: mastery against renewal. (The Visionary has since taken this position on the Brief: mastery can earn an easy, profitable return, and responsibility lies in the lasting state chosen for the city.) The vision says mastery should make choices more deliberate, not make consequences disappear. The design's strongest rule, that the Flood sheds its charge once and is then worth nothing, guarantees that fighting never pays twice; but understanding does pay twice, and it should. On the Tram's later return the player who knows supply was withheld gets an empty yard and an easy trip home with cargo, and the reviewer's instinct was to take that away by forcing a second surge. The lead's position, now on the page, is that the easy return is the payoff and the choice is whether to trust it. The question for the vision is how much of the campaign's renewal may come from earned ease, and where the game must still put something in the way of a player who understands it.

Tension two: precision against plain speech. The machine has four genuinely different causes that the owner needs to be able to tell apart: power (what a device runs on), signal (what chooses where a surge enters), permission (what upstream allows a district to call at all), and supply (whether anything answers the call). Every one earns its place, because each is a lever the player pulls somewhere, and the vision rightly says not to collapse them. But four causes and their readable signs are why the pitch was hard to follow. The lead's view is that the game teaches them one at a time across districts, which is what the campaign's order does, and that the pitch should do the same rather than name all four at once. The scenes are the pumping district for power against signal, the Exchange for permission, and the Collector for supply.

Tension three: the refuge at stake, without a tax. The vision wants survival to make the player responsible for the system they depend on, and the refuge is where that lands. The design refuses upkeep, decay and forced defence, rightly, so that a failed investigation never becomes a bill. What it has instead is standing states that reach home: a dock left wet, a board gone dark, a surge that now climbs away from the dock road, and at the end a city that goes dark district by district if the player stops the harvest. All of that is told on a board and seen on the next trip; almost none of it is yet played at the refuge itself. The question for the vision is whether responsibility can be felt through the districts alone, as the Campaign designer argues, or whether the refuge needs one thing the player does there, in the running world, that the districts' outcomes change.

1. The shared rules, in one paragraph

Water connects: current anywhere in a joined body of water is everywhere in it, and dry ground does not conduct. A device works only while its channel carries current, from the district's own switched circuit or from a coil discharge that energises water for two seconds and stuns for eight. A district dispatches when its drum's contact closes and the trunk permits it, and a surge enters at the flashing beacon if the supply provides one; after entry a body resolves stun, then pursuit, then its role's own target, then the nearest lit beacon it can reach, then spread. Organisms shed charge once: one unit on a kill, five per ten stunned in water; batteries hold ten and fill in the order the player set at the last shelter; a discharge spends a battery; the arc drains one over ten seconds, body to body. The rack is eight cells. The full contract, with readable signals, the state table and the ownership of every rule, is the shared rule contract. A district may add to it; none may change what power, signal, a beacon or charge means.

2. The campaign's shape

The water system is the map. The city built its flood defences as one machine: a reservoir and head-works at the top, whose flow turns every race, a lock flight to step the water down through the works, a tram incline to move crews between the levels, an exchange where every district's signal cable meets, a collector in the low place the water drains to, a pumping district to lift it out of the low quarter, and a tidal barrier at the mouth to keep the sea out. The city drowned when the machine was turned to a new purpose; what still keeps it in time is the campaign's question, which the world designer has written (section 6). The refuge is a dock on that water. Districts are the machines; the water between them is the road.

The seven districts, one paragraph each. The rule each adds is a diff against the contract; the deep treatments are section 3 here and the Districts pages.

1. The Pumping District (opening; the Design Document). Adds nothing: it teaches the contract. Its finale, shut, fix or hold, is a local outcome; after shut, the incoming cable still pulses on a stopped drum, the world designer's first campaign clue, and what the trunk permits here is set at the Exchange's bank.
2. The Lock Flight (early). Adds locks and basin levels: the surveyor moves water between basins by hand, which moves the topology that current runs on and moves the Flood's floaters with the flow. Deep in 3.1.
3. The Tram Incline (middle). Adds a powered rail as a dry conductor and a moving beacon. Deep in 3.2.
4. The Exchange (middle). Adds the network: a hall of drums on one shaft and a routing bank with one position per district. Outlined in 3.4; its mystery is the world designer's.
5. The Collector (middle). Adds the Flood's supply: basins with wheels turned by the mass passing through, meters, gates and an outfall; closing a district's gate delays its next first surge and shows the empty flash. Deep on the Collector (Campaign designer).
6. The Tidal Barrier (late). Adds a second clock and an unannounced sea intake. Deep in 3.3.
7. The Head-works (the end). The governor that keeps every district's time, with two ways in and the campaign-scale choice. Deep on the Head-works (Campaign designer).

The refuge, at stake. The colony's dock is where outcomes land: a district outcome can leave its dock wet, its beacon drawing or its board dark, and the answer is a lever elsewhere. When an outcome threatens the refuge's approach, the player may choose a defence expedition at home, under the same rules and the same fifteen minutes, with the inner dry dock always a shelter and the threatened landing outside it; it is never forced, its preview names the affected route before the original district action, and losing it costs that expedition's cargo and leaves the approach unresolved, never banked salvage, notes, facilities or people (Colony's COL-I6, adopted; D022). This replaces r1's eighth district.

Candidate, deferred: the Salt Pans. Brine basins that conduct as one body change the cost of a known action, not the action; they return only with a lever cell none of the seven occupies. The Reference Researcher's REF107 records that two shipped survivorlikes carry five and six distinct environments with their variety inside each, as current rather than launch content and as an observation, not a norm; its implication for this design is the one this page acts on: the district count is close to what comparable games carry, and the depth the owner asked for has to come from choices within a district, which is why section 3.2 now writes one district three ways and why the Equipment and Combat pages, not more districts, are where the next content goes.

Order, travel and return. The order of play, the travel rules, the progression map with its optional branch and the later discovery that changes an earlier return, one consequence of failure and one alternative route to the head-works are on the Districts page (sections 3, 4, 6 and 7), which this page adopts. Returns are caused, not scheduled: the Exchange's bank changes a district's forecast, the Tidal Barrier's gates change the refuge and starve the Collector, the Lock Flight's upper canal makes the Tram's summit berth supportable, and each district's campaign clue is legible only with evidence from another. Repeated hauling to pay a price is not a return reason and is not used as one.

3. Three districts in depth

Each district gives the problem, the ground, the shared-rule diff, two loadouts that differ in what they do, the enemy combination and the precedence question it poses, the discovery chain, the consequences, a written expedition with its charge ledger, and the asset categories with gaps marked. Racks are the eight-cell rack of D023: two rows of four, the cutter outside it in the primary cradle; only orthogonal contact conducts, and any module or empty cell breaks a salvage chain. Collection goes by the priority the player set at the dock. Pursuit range is about ten metres, a channel's width, and each district names a landmark for it; a body outside it does not chase, so the first battery in every expedition is earned at a crowd's edge, inside that range, and priced in hits. Collection is walking over a mote where it fell; nothing is collected from a distance or from a moving step. Each district's panel is tabled: which branch each position powers, which intake it selects, and which beacon flashes; the flash is a signal event and needs no power, so a dark beacon still flashes at its dispatch. Times and numbers are proposals; the enemy roles are Combat's on the merged roster.

3.1 The Lock Flight

The problem. Water is both the road's obstacle and the door's supply. The lock house at the head of the flight holds what the surveyor came for, and its door is a device on the head basin's line: it works only while that basin holds water and that water is joined to a lit circuit. The direct road up the flight is the crowd's road when the weir beacon is lit; the basins' beds are the shortcut when they are drained; and draining the head basin kills the door. The surveyor chooses which to move, the crowd or the water, and pays in the other.

The ground. Three basins in a stair: the Tail, with the quay dock (held by the colony), the quay beacon and the district panel (Quay, Weir, Off); the Middle; the Head, with the lock house at its top and the weir road on to the weir dock and weir beacon. Two locks, L1 between Tail and Middle and L2 between Middle and Head, each worked by a hand lever at its top, unpowered; opening a lock levels its two basins over about twenty seconds, the higher draining into the lower, and the flow runs on through the Tail into the tail race behind the quay. The direct road climbs beside the locks. The quay beacon's circuit energises the Tail; the weir beacon's circuit energises the Head; the Middle is energised only when joined to one of them by an open lock.

Pursuit range here is the width of the quay's shallows: a body on the stairs above them is not chased.

Shared-rule diff.

Two loadouts.

Lockkeeper              Bargeman
C  C  B  I              S  L  B  W
S  S  .  .              S  S  .  .
link B -> C             link B -> L (the portable beacon); W is the prod's brace, the prod being the primary

The lockkeeper makes current where there is none: with the panel left on Quay so the crowd holds at the dock and the road is free, the door at the top is dead, and the coil opens it by a discharge into the head basin, which needs a full battery earned at the crowd's edge before the climb; the insulation beside the battery keeps the bundles off its terminals and lets the surveyor stand at the water's edge for the discharge. The bargeman moves the crowd instead, written to the lure's number: a lit portable beacon drains a unit every ten seconds, so a full battery buys a hundred lit seconds, which is the climb and not the return. The first surge enters at the quay at 3:00 and holds at its beacon. At 3:30 the bargeman crosses the shallows' edge to the Tail's far bank, out of pursuit range, plants the beacon dark, and at 3:50 arms it; the crowd ignores it while the quay beacon is nearer and lit. Back at the dock by 4:10, the bargeman throws the panel to Weir: the quay beacon dies, the crowd retargets to the nearest reachable lit beacon, the lure across the shallows and not the weir beacon at the top, and crosses to the far bank; the direct road is clear and the door at the top is live. The bargeman climbs and is in the house by 5:00. At about 5:30 the lure dies: the ten walkers retarget to the weir beacon and take the direct road up past the house to the weir road's end, and the fifty floaters, which cannot climb, have no reachable beacon and spread along the Tail. The bargeman leaves the house at 6:30 behind the walkers, not ahead of them, comes down the direct road, reaches the quay at 7:30 through the edge of the spread floaters, holding the foot of the stairs with the prod, which pushes and never kills, and extracts at 7:50, before the second dispatch, which under Weir enters beside the weir beacon at the top. The price is the beacon and its battery left on the far bank, the prod's brace in the cell a bundle would have had, and a return through a spread crowd instead of past a held one. One rack fights for ten motes and takes two hits; the other spends a module and a battery, kills nothing, and reads the district's water and light in one trip. Neither is better.

Enemies and the precedence question. This district's surges are mostly floaters with a few walkers: sixty at the first dispatch as fifty floaters and ten walkers. The question a floater poses that a walker cannot: when the water flows, does the crowd follow the light or the flow? The rule: flow, while it flows; light, once it stops. The reader sees it once and can plan on it: open L1 above a quay full of floaters and the quay empties into the tail race for the twenty seconds of the flush, then the survivors walk back toward the lit beacon. Walkers ignore the flow, climb the stairs, and pursue; they are the kill motes.

Discovery chain. Notice: the gauge boards at each lock are painted with times, not levels, and the lock house has a level log. Compare: the times on the boards are the dispatch times on the forecast, and the log's entries match the pumping district's relay drum, three marks per cycle. Infer: the crews worked the locks to the dispatch schedule; the Flood was being moved down the flight by water, on purpose, on the network's time. Act: nothing is required to leave; the log is the evidence, and it changes a later action, because a player who has seen the locks keep the relay's time reads the Exchange's drums (3.4) as one time source at a glance. In the world designer's terms the campaign clue is the painted gauge board, an inspectable object, and its redundant form is the tram's timetable board. Consequence and recovery: a surveyor who never reads the log still finds the crane parts; the log can be read on any later visit; on replays the flush trick is available from the first minute.

Consequences. For the refuge: the crane parts, two cells of cargo, are the material for the colony's reusable support assembly, the one advanced service it can assign to a district (Colony owns what they build); r1's third rack row is withdrawn under D023. For another district: L2 left open, with the head basin drained into the Middle, joins the upper canal to the Middle, which is the water road to the Tram Incline's summit berth; that is a switched state, and it persists as left whether the surveyor extracts or is rescued, shown on the refuge's board as the canal joined or parted, so nothing about it is conditioned on extraction (the Campaign designer's rule 1, Districts r7). With the canal joined the colony can support that berth. For a return: the weir dock, unheld on the first visits, is the other way in, and refitting the held dock there reverses which end of the flight is hot.

Written expedition, lockkeeper, the district's third visit. Rack at the dock: coil, one empty battery, insulation, four empty cells; priority list: the one battery. Panel found on Quay. Forecast: first surge at 3:00, intake quay; second at 8:00, intake quay.

• 0:00. The quay dock. The surveyor leaves the panel alone and takes the direct road.
• 1:30. Two bundles from a wrecked barge on the Tail's bank, into the two cells the surveyor ordered first, under the coil; nothing touches the battery, so nothing leaks.
• 3:00. Surge one, quay: fifty floaters and ten walkers pour into the Tail's shallows and hold at the quay beacon, between the surveyor and home. The surveyor is at the top of L1.
• 3:30. The surveyor comes back down to the crowd's edge, where the quay's shallows meet the foot of the stairs, and works it with the cutter inside pursuit range: the ten walkers come out one and two at a time, ten kills, ten motes walked over as they fall into the one battery; two hits taken; the floaters stay in the water, held by the beacon. Battery ten. The climb begins again at 4:00.
• 5:00. The lock house, across the catwalk over the shut L2. The door is dead: the head basin is full but unpowered, because the panel is on Quay. The surveyor stands at the basin's edge in insulation and discharges: the head basin is energised for two seconds, the weir beacon on the same circuit glows steady for those seconds, which moves no crowd because the quay is lit and nearer, and the door opens on that current; the surveyor is through it before the current is gone, and the door shuts behind them when the two seconds end; the way out at 7:00 is the door's hand crank, which every hatch has. Nothing was in the water, so nothing sheds. Battery empty.
• 5:30. Inside: the level log, read and copied; the crane parts, two of them, one cell each, into the last two empty cells; they are dry metal and do not conduct. The rack is full.
• 7:00. Out and down. The forecast reads: second surge in one minute, intake quay. The dock is under fifty floaters.
• 7:20. At the top of L1 the surveyor opens the lock. The Middle drains into the Tail over twenty seconds; the flow carries the floaters through the Tail and out to the tail race grating behind the dock, where the dock's hard stop holds them.
• 7:40. The flush ends. The surveyor runs the stairs to the quay, thirty seconds.
• 8:10. Extraction, as the second surge pours in beside the boat: two bundles, two crane parts, an empty battery, two hits taken. The survivors of the flush are walking back toward the quay beacon as the boat leaves.

Notebook: floaters ride the flow; a lock can flush a quay for twenty seconds; the house door wants the head basin live, and the panel lights it only by lighting the weir road too, while the coil lights it, and the weir beacon with it, for two seconds; the boards are painted with dispatch times.

Ledger, lockkeeper. One battery, capacity ten.

Dropped ten, collected ten, spent ten, nothing lost.

Assets. Reuses the ground and water tiles, lamps, cables and the panel from the pumping district, and the humanoid mass with a low silhouette and a wake for the floater. Gaps: lock gates and a water level that animates between three states, which the Tidal Barrier and the Collector reuse, so one water-level system serves three districts; the prod. No availability is claimed for any of it.

3.2 The Tram Incline: a first visit, a changed return, and a later return (DES105)

This is the campaign's worked example of one district across three visits, as PM's DES105 asks: what the player believed, what they learn, what they prepare differently, what they try, what they give up, and what they change for good. The district is the lead's; the three preparations are the Equipment designer's EQP102, the two investment paths are the Colony designer's COL102, the explanations are the World designer's WLD104, and the geography named below is the lead's, offered to the Campaign designer for attribution. Nothing here has been played; the ledgers close on paper, and every beat inside pursuit range is priced.

The problem, unchanged. A beacon that moves. The incline's tram runs while its rail is powered, and its headlamp is a beacon while lit; a crowd holding at a lit beacon follows it when it moves, so the tram tows. Powering the rail is the depot panel's Rail position, which darkens the depot's gates, so the surveyor who tows a crowd has given up the gates as the easy way home.

The ground. The depot at the foot, ankle-deep across its yard, forty metres from the intake end, where the yard beacon stands, to the dock end, where the depot gates open onto the dock road; the depot dock beyond them is the baseline held dock; the panel (Rail, Gates, Off) stands at the yard's dock end, before the gates. The loading apron: a raised dry platform beside the road at the foot of the incline, about ten metres off the boarding path, where the depot's carts were loaded, with room for a planted crowd's ring to sit off the road. The incline road and the rail climb side by side to the summit station, a shelter, with the pass gate to the Exchange, the summit berth on the upper canal, the timetable board, and the summit stores: one loose bundle, and an offer of a Siphon or a Kit, either inspectable and one of them takeable per visit. The stairs run in a cutting on the rail's far side, ten metres below the road and out of pursuit range of it except at the two ends, the summit platform and the depot foot; about a minute each way. The rail is a metal channel that carries current along its length while the panel is on Rail, and glows faintly to show it. The tram has one lever, up or down, and a lamp switch; it moves only while the rail is powered; the pass gate is on the rail's circuit. The free manual return: the depot gates have a hand crank, like every hatch, ten seconds to open without power, so Rail never traps the surveyor; switching Gates at the panel is the quicker way and closes the pass.

The panel is found on Gates. The tram's lamp is a lure only: it draws entered crowds as a lit beacon and never flashes, never selects an intake and never dispatches. Pursuit range here is the tram's length: a body a car-length behind the step is not chased. A crowd with no reachable lit beacon spreads from where it stands, so a crowd that followed the lamp uphill spreads on the incline road when the lamp goes out (Combat's R12, adopted). Heavies gather where the tram was left, and a heavy on the rail stays on the rail until something kills it.

Shared-rule diff.

Two colony paths across the three visits (COL102; prices are Colony's proposals, four bundles each, and never a hauling target).

The written visits below follow path B on the changed return and path A's berth as its alternative; the reverse is equally legal and the board shows which is in force before launch. In the racks, Q is the Siphon and S a salvage bundle.

First visit: ride and cut (early; the player believes the Flood is weather and the rail is transport)

Prepared. The colony has repaired the workshop; the starting module is a Kit. The surveyor declines the default battery, because nothing yet says charge is worth a cell here: . . . K / . . . ., the cutter outside the rack, seven cells free (Equipment's approach A). The free cells are for cargo, and this district holds one bundle, so on this visit A's real advantage is the kit and empty hands, not room. Objective: reach the summit, copy the timetable, inspect the pass, extract at the depot.

• 0:00. The depot dock. Panel found on Gates: the yard beacon lit, the gates open, the yard's water energised. Forecast: first surge at 3:00, intake yard; second at 8:00, intake yard. The tram stands at the depot.
• 1:00. The panel to Rail: the rail glows, the tram's lamp lights, the pass gate above opens, and the gates go dark. The surveyor boards and waits.
• 3:00. Surge one, yard: sixty walkers enter the flooded yard and walk to the nearest lit beacon, the tram. The surveyor puts the lever up.
• 3:30. The tram climbs, slow on the slope; the crowd follows the lamp up the incline road twenty metres behind. Halfway, a heavy stands on the rail and the tram stops against it. The surveyor steps down to the roadbed and kills it in ten hits, about five seconds; its large mote falls on the roadbed and fades, because there is no battery to take it.
• 4:30. The stop cost the lead. The crowd's front reaches the standing tram; the surveyor holds the roadbed beside the step inside pursuit range for the seconds it takes to step up, six kills, six motes fading where they fall, three hits taken; then the lever up, and the tram pulls away on the flat above the heavy's stretch. The Kit is spent at the next quiet moment: health restored, the cell freed.
• 5:30. The summit station. The lamp off and the lever down: the tram rolls back dark, and the crowd on the slope, with no lit beacon to reach, spreads on the incline road where it stands.
• 6:00. The timetable board, read and copied: trams ran full downhill and empty up, on the dispatch schedule. The pass gate is open; the Exchange's hall is visible beyond it, and the surveyor does not go in. The summit stores: the bundle taken into a free cell; the Siphon and the Kit inspected, the Siphon's rule recorded, neither taken this time.
• 7:00. Down the stairs in the cutting, ten metres below the road where sixty bodies are spread; nothing on the road reaches the cutting. At the foot the stairs come up beside the road's end, inside pursuit range of the spread crowd's near edge: one hit taken passing it.
• 8:00. Surge two, yard: eighty walkers enter a dark yard at its intake end, no lit beacon reachable, and spread from where they stand.
• 8:20. The depot's dock end. Rail is still selected, so the gates are dark. The crowd's ring, drawn on the overlay, has spread twenty metres from the intake end and stands twenty metres short of the gates; the surveyor cranks the gate open in ten seconds outside it and reaches the dock road. The alternative, switching Gates at the panel, would have closed the pass for the next visit. Extraction at 8:40 with one bundle, no charge, four health of five, the foot's hit still showing.

Newly learned, and written down: the lamp tows, and putting it out drops the crowd where it stands; Rail opens the pass and closes the gates, and the crank is the price of leaving it so; a heavy on the rail costs the lead; the board keeps the network's time, the second form of the Lock Flight's gauges. Given up: every mote that fell, because the surveyor carried no battery. Changed for good: the tram left at the depot, the panel left on Rail, both on the refuge's board.

Ledger, first visit. No battery.

Dropped eleven, collected nothing, eleven lost to fade.

Changed return: the stairs, and what the yard is worth (middle; the player now believes the Flood is supplied, because the Exchange's bank showed this district permitted)

What changed in the world. The Lock Flight's L2 stands open and the board shows the upper canal joined. The Exchange has been visited: its bank was found with three clutches engaged, Pumping, the Lock Flight and this district, so the surges here were never weather; they were permitted deliveries. Both crane parts are banked and the assembly commissioned. The tram stands at the depot where it was left, the panel on Rail, the pass open, and a heavy now stands on the rail in front of the tram, because heavies gather where the tram was left. The tram is available at a price, ten hits at the rail before any surge, which is what the later return pays; this visit does not need it.

Prepared, the simple route. The ordinary workshop's issue, a known Kit and the empty battery: . . K B / . . . ., six cells free. Objective: through the pass this time, to read the Exchange's drums from its door and confirm which clutch is this district's, then home. Nothing about that objective needs charge, and the External Critic was right that a plan which fights for charge it then discards buys nothing here; the fight is offered below as an experiment, honestly priced, and the coil's real job is shown where a door depends on it, in the Lock Flight (section 3.1).

• 0:00. The depot dock. Rail is as left: the rail glows, the pass above is open, the gates are dark. The heavy stands on the rail beside the tram and is not on the road; the surveyor takes the stairs in the cutting, out of its reach.
• 1:30. The summit. Through the open pass to the Exchange's door: seven drums on one shaft, three clutches engaged, one of them this district's. The surveyor does not walk the floor; that is the Exchange's own visit.
• 2:30. The stores: the bundle taken into a free cell; the Siphon taken this time, forgoing the second Kit, and fitted at the summit shelter with its feed set into the battery, for a later trip.
• 3:00. Surge one enters the yard below: the yard beacon is dark under Rail and the tram's lamp is off, so sixty walkers spread across the yard from its intake end.
• 3:30. Down the stairs in the cutting, ten metres below an empty road.
• 4:30. The depot foot. In the minute since they entered, the sixty have spread across the yard and their ring reaches the gates: the crank would be worked inside it. The surveyor throws the panel to Gates instead: the yard beacon lights, the crowd retargets to it and walks back toward the intake end, and the gates open on their own power; the nearest bodies pass within range as they turn, one hit. The pass shuts above, which costs nothing now.
• 5:00. Through the powered gates to the dock road. Extraction at 5:20, well before the second dispatch at 8:00: one bundle, the Siphon, an empty battery, one hit taken.

The experiment, optional and priced: the wet-yard harvest. With tooling's four-cell record instead of the Kit, . C C B / . . . I, the surveyor throws Gates at 0:00, waits for the first surge to hold in the lit yard at 3:00, wades to its edge in insulation, kills ten for a full battery (two hits), discharges at 4:00 to stun the fifty and walks over two large motes for ten units more (one hit on the withdrawal), throws Rail again at 4:30, and climbs the stairs past a recovering crowd to do the same reading at the door. It buys a stun and a refilled battery; on this trip the battery has no job, and its ten units are lost at the dock, so what the experiment buys is the harvest loop itself, learned in a lit yard under insulation, at the price of four hits, an hour of the tooling assignment and about three minutes. A player who wants to learn the coil's loop here can; the page does not pretend it advances the objective. Its ledger: dropped thirty-five, collected twenty, spent ten, fifteen lost to fade and ten at the dock.

The exit alternative, priced: the berth. With the assembly on the summit berth instead of tooling, ordinary issue is one known module and the empty battery: the portable beacon and the battery, . . L B / . . . ., no Kit unless the district offers one in the field, which this one does not. Under Gates the surveyor earns ten motes at the dry edge, plants the beacon dark on the loading apron, arms it, and throws Rail: the yard beacon dies, the crowd retargets to the lure on the apron for a hundred seconds, and the surveyor clears the heavy from the rail in the five seconds the cutter needs with no crowd behind and rides the dark tram up, doing the same reading and extracting at the summit berth without retracing the yard. That buys a summit exit and the tram cleared for the next visit, and costs the beacon and its battery left on the apron, the assembly spent on the berth instead of tooling, and no healing carried. It is not faster than the stairs, and the page says so; it is a different way home for a player who has chosen the berth.

Newly learned: a flash is a call the bank permits; a lit beacon moves a spread crowd off the gates; the Siphon's rule. Given up: the second Kit, for the Siphon; nothing else the simple route did not already have. Changed for good: the Siphon fitted and its recipe known; the tram still at the depot behind its heavy, the panel on Gates.

Ledger, the simple route. One battery, capacity ten, empty throughout.

Nothing dropped, nothing collected, nothing spent; one hit.

Later return: the empty flash, and the return that understanding makes easy (late; the player now believes the Flood is harvested, and comes to set the district's standing state for the head-works approach)

What changed in the world. At the Collector the surveyor held one basin's gate, withholding this district's first supply while leaving it permitted: a one-surge buffer, which buys the ride up and not the trip. The board shows the hold, the panel on Gates, and the tram at the depot with its heavy still on the rail. The network's cadence is already in the notebook from the Exchange's drums, so nothing on this trip needs to be waited for.

Prepared. The small circuit set: . . Q B / . . L ., the Siphon's feed into the battery, the battery linked to the beacon, the Kit not carried; five cells free. Objective: leave the tram at the summit with its lamp lit, so that later surges climb toward it and away from the depot road the colony now uses, and bring the summit's bundle home. The first dispatch will be an empty flash, which the surveyor expects; the second, at 8:00, will bring a surge, which the surveyor intends to be gone before. This is the return that understanding makes easy, and the page says so: the player who knows supply is withheld has an empty yard to work in, and that is the payoff of the Collector's lesson.

• 0:00. The depot dock, panel on Gates as left, the yard beacon lit, the tram behind its heavy. No surge is due for three minutes and the first is withheld. The surveyor kills the heavy on the rail in ten hits, about five seconds, no hit taken from a single slow body against a retreating cutter, and walks over its large mote: five units into the battery, the visit's first charge and the tram's clearance.
• 0:30. The panel to Rail: the yard beacon dies, the rail glows, the tram's lamp lights, the pass opens, the gates go dark. The lamp is lit from here, so the standing state is set at the depot and carried up. The surveyor boards.
• 1:00 to 3:00. The tram climbs, no crowd behind it, no heavy ahead: an empty ride.
• 3:00. From the slope the surveyor watches the yard beacon flash below and nothing come. The empty flash: the dispatch happened and the arrival did not, because the Collector is holding what would have been sent. A flash never promised a crowd; it promised a call.
• 3:30. The summit. The lever left up, the lamp left lit: the standing state. The bundle from the stores into a free cell, as cargo; the Siphon stays fitted and unused, and since the Visionary's simplification it could consume any carried bundle, adjacent or not. The board is glanced at, not waited for: the cadence it would show across two ticks is the one the Exchange's drums already gave.
• 4:00. Down the stairs in the cutting, past nothing.
• 5:00. The depot foot. The yard is empty, because the surge that would have filled it was never sent; the gates are dark under Rail. The crank, ten seconds, outside any ring because there is none; the dock road.
• 5:30. Extraction: one bundle banked, the heavy's five units lost at the dock, no hits taken; the beacon, its battery and the Siphon carried home unused. Above, the tram stands lit at the summit, and the surge at 8:00 will climb toward it.

The alternative on this return, priced: staying for the second tick. A player who has not read the Exchange's drums, or who wants the cadence confirmed at the summit before the head-works, stays at the shelter until 8:00. Then the second surge enters the yard, finds the tram's lamp at the summit the only lit beacon it can reach, and climbs the incline road toward it while the surveyor descends the stairs in the cutting, out of range. At the foot, about 9:00, the crowd's tail is still turning off the yard onto the road, and the way from the stairs' foot to the dark gates crosses its path; the ring is drawn across the road. The heavy's five units buy fifty lit seconds: the surveyor plants the beacon on the loading apron and arms it, five seconds, and steps back out of range; the nearest bodies retarget to the lure, nearer than the summit's lamp, and walk to the apron, off the road, while the rest continue uphill; the crank, ten seconds; the road to the gates and through them, ten more; twenty-five seconds spare against the one uncertainty in the plan, whether the ring lies across the crank when the surveyor reaches it and has to be waited out. Extraction at 9:40 with the bundle banked, or with nothing if it was converted for the margin. The beacon is armed at 9:05 and still lit at extraction; had the expedition run on, it would have expired at about 9:55, or 10:25 with the margin, and the bodies on the apron would then retarget to the lit summit lamp and climb, because a crowd whose beacon dies goes to the nearest reachable lit one and spreads only if there is none. The five units are committed to the planted beacon and left with it: thirty-five of its fifty seconds are burned when the boat leaves, and the rest go with the item, which is lost at the expedition's end; with the margin, thirty-five of eighty.

The Siphon, honestly. On the quick plan it is not needed. On the stay, consuming the bundle and itself puts three more units in the battery, eighty lit seconds instead of fifty: thirty seconds of margin against the wait at the crank, bought with the bundle that would have been banked, the Siphon itself and the Kit's offer forgone on the changed return. That is optional margin, not a necessity and not the discovery that changes this route; its honest value is what it teaches, that a bundle can become charge where no surge will supply it, which is the head-works' problem and not this district's. A player who wants certainty over cargo takes the margin; one who has read the drums takes the bundle home and the trip that understanding made easy.

Newly learned: supply is a third thing, separate from timing and permission; a plan that waits for a surge to fund a coil is not a plan when the surge is withheld; the tram left lit at the summit pulls the next surge uphill, which the board will show on the next visit; a bundle can be light, at a price. Given up: the depot gates dark for every later visit, because the lamp at the summit needs Rail; and, on the stay, the bundle, the Siphon and a longer trip. Changed for good: the tram at the summit, lit, so the next surge here climbs toward it and away from the dock road; the head-works approach that starts from this summit.

Ledger, later return, the quick plan. One battery, capacity ten.

Dropped five, collected five, five lost at the dock; the bundle banked.

Ledger, the stay. The same start; the bundle and the Siphon consumed at 3:30 only if the margin is taken.

Dropped five; collected five, or eight with the margin; all of it committed to the lure and left with it.

What the three visits are. The first is discovery under the weather belief with no charge carried; the changed return exploits physical access and permission with a paid stun and a chosen exit; the later return sets the district for the ending under the harvested belief, and its choices are whether to trust what the player already knows and go home early with cargo, or stay for certainty and pay for the crossing with light. Each has a credible alternative that reaches the same objective by a different sacrifice, and a lasting state the next visit reads on the board. A trip whose only purpose would be to watch the empty flash again is cut: once the player knows the supply rule and has no state to change here, the district is done until the head-works asks for it.

The three visits against the vision's decision test (the Brief's Game vision: the player's choice, its visible consequence, the part of the experience it serves).

Assets. Reuses the yard tiles, water, lamps, cables and panel, and the humanoid mass at a larger size for the heavy. Gaps: the rail, the tram, the incline's slope tiles, the pass gate, the loading apron as a raised platform prop, the stairs' cutting. Nothing is claimed available.

3.3 The Tidal Barrier

The problem. A clock the surveyor cannot set. The flats between the mole and the barrier's signal house dry out at low tide and flood at high, on a cycle the tide staff shows; the direct crossing is open for a few minutes each way, and the alternative, the mole road, is where the sea's Flood comes in through the open barrier gates at high tide, unannounced. The signal house's gate lever is powered only when the flats are one body of water joined to the lit flats beacon, which is only at high tide, which is the only time the surveyor cannot leave. The choice is to run, or to stay.

The ground. The mole, a stone road from the mole dock (held) to the signal house, exposed; the flats, a wide bed between the mole and the house, dry at low tide, chest-deep at high, with wrecks stranded on it; the flats beacon on the mole's landward end and the mole beacon at the house's end; the barrier gates in the sea wall beyond the house, standing open; the tide staff painted on the house. The district panel is in the house (Flats, Mole, Off). The tide: low from the expedition's start, rising from 2:00, high from 6:00 to 8:00, falling from 8:00, low again by 12:00. The dispatch schedule runs as usual; the sea's arrivals run on the tide.

The staff is marked where the flats join the beacon's line, two hands above the second mark. Pursuit range here is the length of the house's steps.

Shared-rule diff.

(r1's tide glass module is deferred as Equipment argues; the painted staff is the indicator.)

Two loadouts.

Tidewatcher             Runner
C  C  B  K              K  I  .  .
S  S  I  S              S  S  S  .
link B -> C             (no battery)

The tidewatcher stays: coil, one battery, insulation, kit and three bundles, the rack full; it earns a battery at the crowd's edge on the wetting flats, discharges there when the flats are one body of water when the whole crowd is in one body of water, and works the lever when the tide powers it. The runner carries no battery at all: kit, insulation, three bundles and three empty cells for the crossing's finds, crossing at low tide, throwing the house panel to Mole so the first surge lands away from the flats, reading the log, and crossing back before the water closes, without touching the lever. One rack makes the district's decision; the other reads it and goes home with cargo. The runner's charge is simply lost, which is the point of its rack.

Enemies and the precedence question. Walkers from the dispatches and floaters from the sea. The question: when the flats are one body of water and the crowd stands in it, a single discharge from the house's step stuns everything on the flats, and the yield is huge; but the stun lasts eight seconds and the crossing takes a minute, so the discharge buys charge and not passage. Charge or passage is the district's question, and the tide answers it differently every two minutes.

Discovery chain. Notice: the barrier's log shows the gates opened at every high tide, on purpose, for years; the sea's Flood comes in through them. Compare: the Lock Flight's and the Tram's logs showed the Flood moved down through the city on the network's time; this is the bottom of that road, and the gate log's openings follow the trunk's cadence, not the tide's. Infer: the gates are opened on the network's time to let the tide in, because the tide is what fills the low basins the machine cycles the Flood through, and the sea's Flood comes in with it; the mouth is part of the machine, not its exit. Act: shut the gates at the lever, at high tide, with the flats beacon lit. Consequence and recovery: the log can be read at low tide by a runner; the act needs the stay; on replays the surveyor knows the window to the minute. Campaign clue: the gate log, whose openings keep the trunk's time; redundant form: the Collector's intake gauge.

Consequences. For the refuge: with the gates shut the tide no longer floods the refuge's dock at high water, which is what has been costing the colony its held-dock choice on this coast. For this district: the flats stop wetting, so the whole-flats stun is gone for good, and the mole road is dry for good; a district outcome with a cost. For another district: the Collector downstream of the low quarter is fed by the tide through these gates; shut, its wheels turn slower and its meters read less, which the Exchange's shaft shows, and what the head-works' choice can reach at the mouth is decided by what the gates allow (the Districts page, section 7, makes this the difference between its two routes to the head-works).

Written expedition, tidewatcher, the district's second visit. Rack: coil, one empty battery, insulation, kit, three empty cells; priority: the one battery. Panel found on Flats. Forecast: first surge at 3:00, intake flats; second at 8:00, intake flats; third at 12:00. Tide low.

• 0:00. The mole dock. The surveyor walks the dry flats toward the house, past stranded wrecks.
• 1:30. Three bundles from the wrecks, into the ordered cells; the insulation sits under the battery, so no bundle touches it.
• 2:00. The tide turns; the staff shows it; the notebook records the minute.
• 2:30. The house, a shelter. The gate lever: dead. The log, read and copied.
• 3:00. Surge one, flats: sixty walkers enter on the wetting flats and hold at the flats beacon, on the mole's landward end, across the surveyor's way home.
• 3:30. The surveyor wades out in insulation, shin-deep, thirty seconds to the crowd's edge at the flats beacon, and works the edge with the cutter inside pursuit range: ten walkers, ten kills, ten motes walked over as they fall; two hits taken. Battery ten. The surveyor steps back a pace out of pursuit range and waits in the shallows; the flats are one body of water, so the discharge does not need the edge.
• 4:30. The flats are knee-deep and one body of water, energised by nothing. Stepping in again to the crowd's edge in insulation the surveyor discharges: the fifty organisms in the water are stunned for eight seconds; five large motes fall among them, twenty-five units; the surveyor walks over the two nearest during the stun, ten units into the battery the discharge just emptied, and the other three fade where they fell. Battery ten again. The stun ends as the surveyor wades back, and the water is at the waist by the house's steps at 5:30. The crossing to the mole was a minute at 4:30 and is closing: the surveyor stays.
• 6:00. High tide. The flats beacon is lit and the flats join the house's line: the lever is powered. The surveyor shuts the gates. The sea's trickle along the mole, ten floaters that came in on the rising tide, stops arriving; those ten walk to the nearest lit beacon they can reach, the flats beacon, and join the crowd there.
• 8:00. Surge two, flats: eighty walkers join the recovered crowd, holding at the flats beacon in chest-deep water. The tide turns.
• 9:00. The house panel to Mole: the flats beacon dies and the mole beacon at the house's end lights; a hundred and forty organisms walk off the flats onto the mole road toward the house, which is a shelter, and hold at the beacon below its steps. The flats are clearing as the water falls.
• 12:00. Low tide. Surge three, mole: a hundred more join the crowd at the mole beacon. The surveyor leaves the house by the flats side and crosses the dry bed to the mole dock, away from the crowd.
• 13:30. Extraction: three bundles, a full battery lost at the dock, two hits taken, none since the harvest. The gates are shut for good.

Notebook: the lever wants high water and the lit flats; the discharge buys charge, not passage; the panel moves the crowd off the flats while the tide drains them; the gates were open on purpose.

Ledger, tidewatcher. One battery, capacity ten.

Dropped thirty-five; collected twenty; spent ten; fifteen lost to fade where they fell and ten at the dock.

Assets. Reuses ground and water tiles with the Lock Flight's animated water level, lamps, cables, panel, the humanoid mass and the floater. Gaps: the barrier gates, the mole, the tide staff, the stranded wrecks. Nothing is claimed available.

3.4 The Exchange, in outline; deep on its own page

The world designer's example district, with its mystery contribution written on their page, and now deepened by the Campaign designer to the standard of the three districts above on the Exchange (CAM102), which keeps this outline entire and adds the ground, the panel, the interaction that takes time, two loadouts, a written expedition and the failure case; this outline adds the machinery problem and the rule that prices it. A dry hall where every district's signal cable meets: drums ticking together on one shaft, turned by a race whose head the player cannot see, and a routing bank, a panel with one position per district, that sets which district receives the trunk's permission. A district whose position is dark is in the shut regime, unannounced trickles that grow and a dark forecast, never a district with no Flood in it; its arrivals obey ordinary targeting once inside, so lit beacons still route them (PMR004). The bank's price, stated as a rule the way the panel's was: a lit position gives the player the forecast and the announced, routable surge in that district, which is the thing the whole game is played with; a dark position takes both away there. To withhold the Flood from a district is to give up reading it there; that coupling is the argument that the bank does not dominate, and its magnitude is for later validation, not proof. Conduction across the dry hall is by the cable reel, bridging two exposed power terminals the lead places here for the Exchange page to draw, both at the head end, because the reel reaches six metres and the hall's two ends are the length of the floor apart: a live terminal where the gallery's head run drops to the floor beside the head-end beacon, and a dead terminal on the bank's own lamp line six metres along the north wall. The reel bridges them there, and nowhere else in the hall is a pair within its reach. The Exchange's expedition is ten minutes with two dispatches, at 3:00 and 7:00, as the Exchange page's scene is built; a scene that needs a third dispatch or a twelfth minute is not this district's. The Carrier, the merged role that walks to the nearest reachable loose charge within a short range in preference to a lit beacon, makes a carried battery a beacon: the surveyor caches charge or is hunted for it; it leans toward what it wants and the forecast draws its target. The pumping district's dead drum is listed on the bank, which is the first campaign clue in its second form. The bank is found with three clutches engaged, the pumping district, the Lock Flight and the Tram Incline, and a fourth visibly seized whose repair is the head-works' business, so the three districts the player has already had forecasts in are exactly the three the bank was permitting (REV104-18; the Exchange page r2, ratified by the lead). The critic's alternative, a seized clutch on the pumping district, is not adopted, because darkening the opening district from here is the campaign's best example of a later discovery changing an earlier return.

4. Equipment and combat across the campaign: the integration record

The specialists own the detail; this section records what the lead adopted, ruled or declined, and why, so the next draft is one design. The full dispositions table is section 10 of the shared rule contract.

• The rack is eight cells from the outset, with pickups in a player-set order (Inventory and Charge, E1 to E7; D023). r1's third row unlocked by the crane parts is withdrawn: Equipment's argument that a fixed frame with room for one signature combination plus cargo or a countermeasure creates more decisions than a capacity ladder is better than mine, and PM chose it. The crane parts now pay for the colony's service assembly (section 5).
• Weapons: the cutter, the prod and the rivet driver; the arc is a module (Equipment, Alternative Tools). One primary at a time; an alternative primary costs a cell for its brace and gives up the arc's host. The reason to keep the cutter is charge; the reasons to switch are position (the prod) and a penetrating line (the rivet driver). No damage ladder, by Combat's R8, adopted.
• The roster is eight roles, merged (Enemies, Combat Rules): Walker, Floater, Heavy, Carrier, Anchor, Crust, Spark, Grounder. r1's four are in it: the Walker under Combat's name of the same role, the Floater transferred to Combat with its flow rule, the Heavy with Combat's wording, the Static merged into the Carrier with the Carrier's targeting sentence and the Static's short range. Each role deletes one assumption and reads by silhouette, never by tint or brightness alone.
• Rulings the specialists asked the lead for: the precedence stack (R1) and the bounded press (R2) are adopted as the drafting rules; a discharge keeps water energised for two seconds and stuns for eight (R3); a Spark's death is a hazard to the surveyor only, chosen at contract r4 and final, while the Combat and Spark pages still carry the crossed r3 row (REV104-15, theirs to mirror); the arc chains body to body and not through energised water (R10 declined, the bounded model PM recommended); a role may darken a beacon (R9, allowed under the contract's test; World names it); three statuses, closed (R7); the arc takes ten seconds, not the Glossary's twenty (C8).
• Build paths. Build Paths gives three families, the Circuit Harvester, the Route Shepherd and the Salvage Breacher, each with an early, middle and late choice and a branch. The four beats on the owner page use them. The lead's early, middle and late table from r1 is superseded by that page.
• Where the countersignatures stand: complete. Equipment countersigned the contract in full (Equipment r3); Combat countersigned the coil window and R1 to R9 at Combat r5, corrected both encounters, and at r6 reverted the Spark row to the ruled one and acknowledged the fixed-power ruling; the Floater page carries the in-water clause. Nothing is crossed.

5. The colony across the campaign: the integration record

Colony owns the loop; PM's D023 adopts its structure: one reusable support assembly and one active advanced service at a time, one-time refits instead of recurring dock-switch payments, free departure and return, and no upkeep or decay. The lead's answers to its six requests:

• COL-I1, one-time outlet refit and a supported forward berth. Adopted, with the Campaign designer's three rules (Districts r7) now in the contract: one supported berth in the whole city, never one per district, and a berth is a place to stop and never a way in; a rescue does not complete a commitment defined as completing at extraction, and the Lock Flight's canal is not such a commitment but a switched state, joined or parted; and every route-gating state is on the refuge's board before launch. The Tram's summit berth is the first such connection, and it needs the canal joined. The boat's range to the head-works follows the witnessed Barrier route, not a salvage purchase. Colony r4 adopts the crane parts as the assembly's material: two project parts, one cell each, banked separately, commissioning the assembly once with no fee.
• COL-I2, inspected recipes and recorded racks. Equipment's to argue; the lead's position is Colony's: recorded racks on revisits only, capped at six issued cells, so first visits keep their discoveries (D023).
• COL-I4, the baseline return after a shutdown. Adopted and written into the contract's state table: gravity docks, dry routes and hand-worked machinery survive Stop; powered conveniences go dormant; nothing banked is lost.
• D026, the comparison folded into the base receiver. Adopted: side-by-side records of personally observed signals are part of the repaired forecast receiver, and the one assembly competes between tooling and the supported berth only; no fitting sells bank permission, which the board already shows free. COL102's two investment paths across the Tram's three visits are integrated in section 3.2.
• COL-I5, the reusable service loop in place of three decisions. Adopted as structure; the four-bundle prices are Colony's proposals, and the Districts page's constraint stands: every unlock must be payable from the salvage of required expeditions, or the campaign has become a grind.
• COL-I6, a player-selected defence. Adopted; section 2's refuge paragraph is the result.
• Persistence and Stop at the refuge (PMR006 3 and 4). The contract now states what persists: switched state and authored commitments persist as left, temporary electrical effects and entered crowds do not, and carried charge and unbanked finds are lost at the dock or on rescue; Colony mirrors that rule in place of its inherited reset sentence. The refuge's circuit is fed with the pumping district's and dies with it, late in Stop's cascade; the world designer's proposed salvage-fed pump reserve is declined, as Colony recommends, so after Stop the refuge keeps its dry landing and manual bench and loses only its powered conveniences.
• The crane parts from the Lock Flight are the assembly's material, so a discovery, not a haul, opens the colony's advanced service.

One lasting, visible refuge consequence beyond a different loadout menu, as PMR004 asks: the refuge's board, which shows every district's forecast, bank position and gate state the player has repaired or set, and which goes dark district by district after Stop.

6. The mystery: the world designer's, with PM's provisional answer

The World and Mystery Designer owns the mystery and has written the campaign thread (WLD103, World and Mystery r19 and r20); this page adopts it. The campaign question, in their words: the district relays are one network, kept in time from somewhere upstream; what, at its head, is still keeping time, and for whom? The first campaign clue is already in the pumping district: after the player shuts the relay, the drum stops and the thin cable entering the room from outside still pulses on the old cadence. Every district contributes six things by the world page's rule, and section 3 applies it: the locks' painted gauges and the tram's timetable board are one clue in two forms; the barrier's gate log has its redundant form in the Collector's intake gauge; the Exchange, the Collector and the Head-works carry their clues as written on the world page and the Districts pages.

PM's D024 chooses Answer A for the next draft: nobody is left; the city runs on charge harvested from the Flood; the head-works' choice is the relay-room choice at scale, and Stop darkens the districts in turn, the colony's pump included, while the gravity docks keep everyone alive. Answer B, the keepers, is preserved as the documented alternative. The lead recommended A in r1 and the reasons stand: it needs no new presence, it makes the ending the same kind of choice the owner found promising at the relay, and it is also an asset decision, since B needs a human figure the design has otherwise avoided. What A requires of the rules, the fixed-power source, the dispatch condition, the empty flash and the Stop consequence, is in the contract's sections 2, 3 and 9 and on World r22, which carries the same state table with the fiction; the critic's REV104-1 to -5 are answered there and in the contract.

7. Content coverage and asset burden

Presentation categories, one list (D025; PMR006; X31). Three counts were in circulation, this page's three silhouettes, Combat's six and the roster's eight; they counted different things. One list, by what each element would actually cost, for the Reference Researcher's audit:

So the roster's cost is one body and one edit, not eight creatures; the campaign's environment cost is seven new categories, with three cut candidates. The Reference Researcher's audit is REF110 (REF109 is electroreception); its first pass, read after this list was published, records a source and licence candidate for category 4, a verified CC0 pack, and candidates located for some of the seven environment categories, with nothing located for three; no candidate's suitability, pose or animation work has been assessed by anyone, reuse of an as-yet-unselected base asset is not evidence it exists in usable form, and no availability is claimed here beyond what that page records. Only verified gaps go to the owner as a purchase or custom-asset decision (D025); the Brief's rule that every shortlisted asset is recorded with source, creator, terms and intended use applies.

8. Length, honestly

The baseline path exists on the Districts page, and its owner has put the figures in one place so that they can be quoted rather than assembled (Districts r11, section 5): thirty-four expeditions and about eight hours of authored beats on the baseline path, expedition time only; ten to eleven hours for a player who does that path with the unmeasured dock overhead of a quarter to a third applied; eight optional expeditions and about two hours more, separate; about thirteen hours for everything designed, with overhead. Deaths, retries and hauling are excluded from every row and are not campaign length, and none of the figures is a measurement: the counts come from printed beat lists, the overhead is an assumption stated as one, and the number moves when content moves, as it did when the Campaign designer cut a revisit that only repeated an answer. PM accepts this as a content-backed drafting hypothesis, not measured playtime and not proof that the scale is sufficient, and asks that every imported district beat sit in one ledger before the owner is asked whether it feels ambitious enough. The lead's position: the figures are the Campaign designer's and live on their page; they are quoted here so that the page the owner reads answers the one question the owner asked, against the three to four hours rejected. The three districts on this page each have one written expedition, and the Tram now three, with a two-tier shape counted there as four expeditions each.

9. Hypotheses and risks

• That the shared rule carries seven districts is the central hypothesis; six are written to the section 3 standard on this page and the Districts pages, and the pumping district is the Design Document.
• The priority rule may make charge management feel like list-keeping; its counter is the pickup preview and that the list is set once at a shelter. The most-room rule is recorded as the alternative.
• The bounded arc gives up the largest crowd-clearing payoff proposed (Combat's R10); it can be reopened once Encounter B is corrected and the joint effect table exists.
• The Grounder puts a clock on plans; if pursuit range is generous it reads as just another body up close, which is a tuning bound and unverified.
• The refuge as the thing at stake depends on district outcomes reaching it visibly; the optional defence is a sketch and is cut if it becomes a tower-defence mode.
• Answer A's Stop consequence is the campaign's hardest content: districts going dark in turn must be legible and fair, and the cadence proposed in the contract is a guess.
• Numbers: every count, time and yield is a proposal; the ledgers show consistency, not balance.

10. Decisions for the owner

PM has taken three provisional drafting decisions since r1 so the team can write one design; they remain yours to reverse. The question r1 put back to you, which reading of "far too little" was meant, PM has disposed of for drafting: a larger finite authored campaign with optional replay, no clarification needed to continue. What remains yours:

1. The count and the refuge. Seven external districts, the refuge at stake with an optional defence and never a forced one (D022). Recommendation: yes.
2. The rack. Eight cells from the outset, pickups in an order you set (D023). Recommendation: yes; it is Equipment's argument and PM's choice, and the lead withdrew the alternative.
3. The campaign's answer. The machine, Answer A (D024), with the keepers preserved. Recommendation: A, for the reasons in section 6.
4. The roster and the weapons. Eight enemy roles, three primaries and nine modules, no damage numbers. Recommendation: yes; more only by the same tests.
5. The setting and the enemy's identity remain yours, as before; the roles' names are placeholders the world designer will rename.
6. The ending's shape. Stop, Keep or Leave at the head-works, the relay room's three shapes at city scale, with the Districts page's two routes in; the slower position is merged into Keep, which is the one reversible outcome. Recommendation: yes.
7. Positioning. Deferred until the baseline ledger is confirmed; the one-district document's short-game hypothesis is withdrawn in that form. Recommendation: decide the shelf and price after the critic's review of the whole package, on the Reference pages' measured data, and not from the length.
8. Authored art. The one-district design assumed one likely custom asset, the enemy body. The campaign needs seven new environment categories, one base body and one edit, with three cut candidates named in section 7 and REF110's first pass recording candidates for some and none for three; the Brief asks that authored assets be rare, minimal and approved before creation. Recommendation: no purchase or custom request yet; the Reference Researcher audits free candidates against the list first, and only verified gaps come to you.

Bookkeeping

Rule ownership after this revision (PMR004 4: the lead records which definitions now own the rule). The four clauses, the dispatch condition, the state table and readable state: the shared rule contract. Precedence, press, targeting, damage and status grammar: Combat Rules. The roster: Enemies and its role pages, the Floater included. Rack, links, leakage, collection priority, field handling and accounting: Inventory and Charge, with the catalogue on Equipment and its item pages and acquisition on Build Paths. The colony loop, services, refits and the defence option: Colony. District order, travel, the progression map, the count test, the duration hypothesis, the Collector and the Head-works: Districts and its pages. The Lock Flight, the Tram Incline, the Tidal Barrier and the Exchange outline: this page, until the Campaign designer and the lead cut them to district pages in one agreed edit. The mystery, the campaign question and the clues: World and Mystery. The pumping district's rules and examples: the Design Document, until the editor's transfer.

Sources read for r9 (DES105 r4). PM Reviews PMR009 262856 and checkpoints 55b3a8, 38a6d3; Tasks 888ac1 (the PMR009 rows; the owner's workflow); Brief 6d869e (the vision's return in plain language; the Siphon simplification; the theme's mastery sentence); Team 0bff49 (chat for discussion, articles for design; the reviewer model change); Chat Rooms 441178 and the hold-the-flood room read to message 16; Design Review REV105 r3 265a09; External Critique r17 2de127 (X37); Clarity CLR102 r25 f9b0fd; Colony r7 c56634 (the refuge answer; the berth issue); Equipment 122d38, Build Paths f6f8ef, Utility Modules 4ffa18 (the Siphon rule and the issue boundary); the Exchange r4 17dca3; World and Mystery r27 7b8ad1; Design Document 125528 (the Visionary's siphon sentence, kept).

Sources read for r8 (DES105 r3). Brief 0fff74 (the Game vision; PMU008); Tasks 1c38ca (the PMU008 handoff and PMR008 rows); PM Reviews PMR008 37fd94 and checkpoints cbc0d5, bb1b91; Hub eef0ca; Team 890a96 (the Visionary's mandate); Design Review REV105 r2 42ad46 (three clauses); External Critique r15 114d49 (X35); Districts r12 c4d604; Enemies r10 fd38a8 (the roster against the decision test); Reference/Readability Formulas REF112 ca6543 (read; PM has asked for its provenance correction).

Sources read for r7 (DES105 r2). Design Review REV105 r1 35cccf; External Critique r14 211efe (X34; X32 on this page); Districts r11 c1bbe1 (section 5, the figures in one place, and 5.1); World and Mystery r26 744b21 (the chain re-ordered onto the Tram's three visits); Colony r6 59ad65 (COL102 r2, D026 applied); Combat Rules r8 221c48; Equipment r5 902439; Reference/Water Balance Haulage REF111 37601a (read; proposes nothing, and nothing is taken from it yet); Clarity r23 d3d6a0 (Q53, the Glossary's); Tasks cb7928.

Sources read for r6 (DES105 r1). PM Reviews PMR007 6fb181 and checkpoint e8a263, PMU007 f62987; Tasks 575001 (the DES105 row and the Tram handoff); Brief 0cba02 (D026); Hub 73d5b0; Design Review REV104 r6 ce94e4; Equipment/Build Paths r4 6bc3f7 (EQP102), Utility Modules r3 04a42d, Equipment r4 59fcc5, Coil 80da75, Inventory and Charge 9cebc1; Colony r5 fe7d88 (COL102); World and Mystery r25 e99445 (WLD104); Combat Rules r7 e3ad2b (R11 to R13; EQP102 countersigned), Enemies r9 56cadb; Districts r9 e9c413, the Exchange r3 4d6703, the Collector r5 8e39d2; Clarity Q52 (40a841). The contract at r7 was written from the same sources.

Sources read for r5. External Critique r12 4e4d20 (X33); Districts r7 cd487b (section 3.3, the three rules) and r6 d2b9eb; Colony r4 527f2b; Combat Rules r6 6129ea; Enemies r7 7e588c, Spark r5 30c5cb, Floater r2 92603a; the Head-works r5 65403a; Tasks 13c20b; Disagreement Register r17 3fc3b9. The contract at r6 was written from the same sources.

Sources read for r4. Design Review REV104 r4 c3fc80 (archived at 66c091) and r5 4508fd; Districts r5 136fa9 and the Exchange r1 5bc625; Combat Rules r5 80835f; Enemies r6 e82646, Spark r4 730ee8, Floater r1 3ba723; Equipment r3 dc3aa2, Build Paths r3 7b7bf2, Arc r3 fc64bb; Colony r3 06acdb; World and Mystery r23 d108c1; Reference/Asset Audit REF110 fa674c; External Critique r11 8156b5 (X31 withdrawn); Clarity r20 a462dc (Q49 and Q50 answered on the Hub; Q51); Hub ac60f3. The contract at r5 was written from the same sources.

Sources read for r3. PM Reviews PMR006 a28870 and checkpoint da9eb5; Tasks b72189; Brief 77e392 (D025); Hub 2f20ec; Design Review REV104 r2 908e01; World and Mystery r22 da3639; Combat Rules r4 91a866; Enemies r5 9a72af; Equipment r2 ae4543, Coil r2 0696cf, Utility Modules 087718; Colony r2 12694e; Districts r4 c58832, the Head-works r4 706ce6, the Collector r4 75c09e; External Critique r10 fc95e6 (X31); Clarity Q49 and Q50 (fc0461). The contract at r4 was written from the same sources.

Sources read for r2. PM Reviews PMR004 ed0def and PMU005 e8c3d4; Brief 70b6b1 (D022 to D024); Tasks 9569fc; Hub c33d3c; Expansion Brief d97965; Design Index 0ee6d3; Campaign 9d3590 (the Campaign designer's note); Districts r2 acb797, the Collector 40f2b5, the Head-works 6bf2a7; Combat Rules r2 1126c3, Enemies r3 0822dd and the eight role pages; Equipment a44990, Build Paths a9a288, Inventory and Charge 73eb77, Cutter 9618ad, Alternative Tools e6aed6; Colony a1046d; World and Mystery r20 7699de; Design Review REV104 r1 80a882; Reference index 454f11 (REF108). The contract at r3 was written from the same sources.

PM report. Task: PMR009's Lead corrections; artifact Hold the Flood/Campaign r9 (r8 0cafb9 and earlier in history). X37: the Tram's changed return is the simple stairs reconnaissance, one hit and a bundle; the wet-yard harvest is an optional experiment whose benefit is stated honestly, the harvest loop learned and nothing advanced; the berth exit is an optional plan priced with the beacon and no Kit; the coil's real job is pointed to in the Lock Flight. Issue legality: the berth-supported start is the beacon and the empty battery only. The optional stay's two branches state kept cargo against consumed conversion and the exact seconds burned. The Siphon follows U5 as simplified. The Exchange's cadence is 3:00 and 7:00 and its terminals stand together at the head end, six metres apart. Changed decisions: none canonical; the Visionary's mastery position is noted in the tensions. Evidence: ledgers closing; no player data; nothing built. Risks: the terminal placement is the lead's for the Campaign designer to draw; the harvest experiment's value is a claim about learning, not fun. Next handoff: the Visionary's refuge treatment with Colony; the critic and the reader on the vision; PM's next review. No PM request.