Hold the Flood — Carrier
CMB101 · r2 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — proposed role, new. Depends on R5. Source rules it is built on: Design Document r14 ec1b6c §§3–6; shared grammar and the precedence stack: Combat Rules. Enemies · Design Index · Expansion Brief · Glossary
Name is a functional placeholder. World and Mystery owns the Flood's identity and fiction.
The assumption it deletes
"If I am not standing near a light, nothing is coming to me."
This is the role that turns the project's own hook back on the player. The provisional hook is machinery whose useful power can also attract the horde. The Carrier says: so does the power on your back.
Trigger, action, threat
| Trigger | Loose charge within reach — a mote lying on the ground, a battery with units in it in the surveyor's rack, or a planted beacon's battery |
| Action | Precedence line 2: walk to the nearest reachable loose charge, using exactly the grammar the player already knows from beacons — nearest, reachable, continuously re-evaluated. It ignores fixed beacons entirely: they are on the district's mains, not a battery, and there is nothing to take |
| On arrival | At a mote: takes it, and the mote is gone from the floor (R5). At the surveyor or a planted beacon: it is simply there, in contact range, doing contact damage |
| Threat | It comes to you regardless of your routing, and it eats the harvest you spent a battery to create. A player carrying twenty units has an escort that does not lose interest |
| Hit count | Three. No more health than anything else |
| Conducts? | Yes. Stunned by a discharge like anything else |
| Charge | Sheds once, like anything else. Plus: a Carrier killed while holding a stolen mote drops that mote again — so the theft is recoverable |
Why "nearest", not "richest". A ranking rule would make the player do arithmetic about which of their batteries is more attractive. "Nearest reachable loose charge" is the same sentence as the beacon rule with one noun changed, so it costs the player no new concept — which is the constraint the whole roster is built on.
Telegraph
Three cues, all on things that already exist:
- It leans toward what it wants, and what it wants is often not where the crowd is going — so a Carrier reads as a body walking across the grain of a surge.
- The forecast overlay already draws each entered crowd's current target (GDD §3). A Carrier group's target marker is drawn on the surveyor, or on the motes, rather than on a beacon. That is the strongest cue and it costs nothing new.
- When it is holding a stolen mote it glows, having something to shed; when it has taken nothing and already shed, it does not (R4).
Counterplay, and what each costs
| Counterplay | Cost |
|---|---|
| Spend the charge. An empty battery is not loose charge; there is nothing to walk toward, and the Carriers revert to line 3 and go to the beacon | The spend is irreversible for the expedition, and you have just used your coil discharge or your arc burst on a schedule the enemy chose |
| Plant a beacon as a decoy. A planted beacon's battery is loose charge, so Carriers nearer to it than to you go there instead — and the same act relights a branch | Two rack slots, the beacon, and a battery that runs down while planted. Retrieval needs two free slots (GDD §5) |
| Kill them, and take back any mote they are holding | Three hits each, inside contact range, usually while you are also collecting |
| Collect faster and accept the losses | The charge you did not reach walked away rather than fading |
| Carry no battery at all — the hauler rack | You harvest nothing, all expedition |
The competing choice this role creates is the good one: hoarding charge for the finale makes you hunted; spending it makes you safe and poor. Nothing else in the design puts a cost on having resources rather than on getting or using them.
Machinery and equipment
- Battery: the interaction. A full battery is bait; an empty one is not.
- Portable beacon: promoted from a niche module to a genuine answer, because planting it solves a routing problem and a Carrier problem with one action. This is the strongest reason in the roster to carry the shepherd's rack.
- Coil: a discharge stuns Carriers with everything else — and then creates exactly the motes they are walking toward, so a discharge sets up its own contest. That is deliberate.
- Arc: the burst empties the battery, which is both the payoff and the way to stop being a target.
- Siphon: converts a bundle to three units, which is loose charge you did not have a moment ago. A player who siphons in the open has just rung a bell.
- Fixed beacons and the panel: no interaction. Carriers cannot be routed by light, which is the whole role.
Placement (for Campaign)
- Arrives in a surge, and counts toward the limit of two non-Walker roles per surge.
- A few, not many: eight in a surge of 140 is the working proportion in Encounter B. A surge that is mostly Carriers would stop being a crowd and start being a chase.
- Best placed in a district where the player is expected to be carrying charge — after a harvest, near a finale, on a route with no shelter — so the role bites the player who is doing well.
- Not in the opening district's first expeditions: a player who has not yet learned that light moves the mass should not first meet the body that ignores light.
Asset note
Readable primarily from attitude and the forecast marker — leaning toward its target, walking across the grain — rather than from a new creature. If the base body can be posed, this role costs a pose plus one overlay behaviour that already exists. No asset has been located, inspected or created, and no availability is claimed.
Open questions
- Does a Carrier target charge inside the rack, or the surveyor as a body? My position: the surveyor, treated as one charge source whose size is the total units carried, and it stops being a source at zero. Targeting individual slots would expose rack internals to the world, which crosses the Equipment interface for no gain.
- Does it steal from a battery on contact? My position: no. Contact damage only. Theft from the rack would make the player's loss invisible and unfixable, where a stolen mote is visible on the thief and recoverable by killing it. Raised because it is the obvious next step and I think it is the wrong one.
- Does it interact with the Colony's banked salvage? No. Charge never leaves the district (GDD §4 clause 4), so there is nothing at the dock to want.
Reconciliation with DES104 (added in this revision)
The Lead published Campaign 34dc09 and the shared-rule contract Power and Attraction r2 69024c while this page was being drafted. Two consequences for this page. The rule source is now the contract, not GDD §4 — where this page cites the Design Document for a shared rule, cite the contract; the rules are the same and it is the one to cite. The base role is called Walker there, and this page's Drifter is the same role; Walker is the surviving name and the role page is at Walker. The full reconciliation — what held, what conflicts, and the merged roster — is in Enemies §0.
And one collision specific to this role. The Campaign page proposes Static: "drawn to stored charge within a short range, over a lit beacon; sparks toward it." That is the same idea as this page's Carrier, designed twice. They must not both exist, and the merge I recommend is stated with its reasons and with what Static does better in Enemies §0: keep this page's targeting sentence, which is the beacon rule with one noun changed, and keep Static's short range, which stops a player who is carrying charge from being hunted district-wide. The Lead decides; this page proceeds on the merged version, and the only beat that depends on it is Encounter B's, where the surge enters the channel the surveyor is standing beside, so a bounded range changes nothing there.