Hold the Flood — Grounder

CMB101 · r2 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — proposed role, new. Depends on R9, which needs Lead and World rulings. Source rules it is built on: Design Document r14 ec1b6c §§3–4; World and Mystery r20 7699de's district contract; shared grammar: 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

"A light I set stays set."

Without this role, a routing decision is permanent for as long as the player leaves the panel alone, so "park the crowd somewhere else and go do the district" is a solved problem after the first expedition. The Grounder puts a clock on a plan without putting a clock on the player — and unlike a shortened timer, the clock has a location, a visible cause and four different answers.

Trigger, action, threat


Trigger	A live cable run within reach. A dark branch's cable is of no interest; it climbs what is carrying current
Action	Precedence line 2: walk to the nearest reachable powered cable run, climb it, and stay. While it is on the run, that run is grounded: the beacon it feeds flickers, then goes dark
Recovery	The beacon relights when the Grounder is killed, or when the panel moves power elsewhere and back. Nothing else clears it
Threat	Not to the player's health — to the player's plan. A crowd holding at a beacon that goes dark loses line 3 and falls to line 4: it spreads along its branch, both ways, including toward the dock. The threat is a hundred bodies changing state while the player is somewhere else
Hit count	Three, like anything else. It is trivially killable once you are standing under it, and where it stands is the whole problem
Conducts?	Yes. But it is up a cable, not in water, so a coil discharge in a channel will not reach it
Charge	Sheds once like anything else; killed, it drops a 1-unit mote at the foot of the cable

What it explicitly cannot do

This is the role most likely to be read as breaking the spine rule, so the limits are part of the specification:

It cannot cause a dispatch, touch the signal cable, or select an intake. The panel alone decides the intake (GDD §4) is untouched. A Grounder removes a light; it can never make one.
It does not change what a beacon means. A grounded beacon is an unpowered beacon, and an unpowered beacon draws nothing — the existing rule, applied. Dark still means dark.
It does not make an ordinary lamp draw the Flood, which is the other thing World r20's contract forbids.

That is the argument that R9 sits inside the contract rather than outside it. It is an argument, not a ruling; World and the Lead own the verdict (Combat Rules open question C5), and I proceed on it meanwhile.

Telegraph

An irregular flicker on the beacon — visibly not the dispatch pulse, which is a travelling flicker running along the thin signal cable from the panel. GDD §4 makes that travelling pulse the observable the entire attraction rule's fairness rests on, so the Grounder must never be confusable with it, and this is the distinction the presentation has to protect.
A spark on the thick power cable at the body's position, so the cause has a location.
The forecast marks that branch failing. One state on an overlay that already carries branch and crowd information.
The body itself is up a cable, off the ground — the strongest identification in the roster, because no other body is ever there. Under R4 role identity rides on position and silhouette, and this role is almost entirely position.

The warning arrives before the failure, not with it: flicker first, dark second. How long between is a tuning bound, and it should be long enough to cross the district and short enough to matter. Unverified.

Counterplay, and what each costs

Counterplay	Cost
Kill it. Three hits, and it does not run	It is at the far end of a powered branch, which is exactly where the crowd you parked is standing. The crossing is the cost, at one health per contact from five
Re-switch the panel. The other branch lights and the crowd retargets to it	It walks to the new light — which is wherever you now are, if you switched to be near your work. The panel's stated price, paid on the enemy's schedule instead of yours
Plant a portable beacon near the failing branch's far end	Two rack slots and a battery that runs down. It also happens to decoy Carriers, which is why the shepherd rack answers two roles with one module
Take the long way home and accept the spread	The route, the surge clock, and walking into a spreading crowd's thin edge

Four counterplays that cost four different things — health, position, slots, time — is the test I would want any pressure source to pass.

Machinery and equipment

Panel and beacons: the whole interaction, and the reason the role exists.
Portable beacon: the clean answer, and the second role (after the Carrier) that makes the shepherd rack worth its two slots.
Coil: no interaction. A Grounder is up a cable and out of the water, which is deliberate — the coil should not be the answer to everything.
Field pump / valves: none directly, but a district whose beacons are fed across a channel may let a player cut a run rather than climb to it. That is a district design question and belongs to Campaign.
Insulation: none.

Placement (for Campaign)

Placed on cable runs, not counted in a surge. Its threat is a location and a timer, not a body count, so it should never arrive as part of a wave.
One or two per district. Three would make routing feel futile rather than perishable.
Place where the run is defended by the very crowd the run is holding — that is the shape of the decision, and a Grounder on an undefended cable is a chore rather than a choice.
Counts toward the district's limit of three distinct non-Walker roles.
Late campaign only. A player who has not yet learned what a lit branch does should not first meet the thing that unlights it.

Asset note

Readable almost entirely from position — a body up a cable, off the ground, where nothing else ever is. If the base body can be posed, this role costs a pose. The new cues it needs are engine-drawn and asset-free: an irregular beacon flicker distinguishable from the travelling dispatch pulse, a spark at the cable, and one failing-branch state on the existing forecast overlay. No asset has been located, inspected or created, and no availability is claimed.

Open questions

Does grounding a run also close the doors on it? A hatch is on the same circuit as its beacon (GDD §4, the yard's hatch and beacon). My position: yes — a grounded run is an unpowered run, and the hatch shuts, which is consistent and is a second consequence the player can predict from a rule they already know. It also means a Grounder can shut a player inside the pump hall, and the hand crank inside is already the stated recovery.
Can it ground the junction circuit, or a run the panel never reaches? My position: yes, any live run — but placement should keep it off circuits whose failure has no readable consequence.
Does killing it relight the beacon instantly? My position: yes, instantly, with the beacon returning to steady. A delayed relight would be a third light state to read for no gain.
Does the Flood's fiction support a body that climbs? A real question for World, not a rhetorical one: everything else in the roster wades. If the answer is no, the role can be re-sited at the cable's foot, grounding it from the ground, at the cost of its strongest telegraph. My position: climbing, because position is the cheapest and clearest cue in the roster and I would rather pay for it in fiction than in art.

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.