Hold the Flood — Spark

CMB101 · r5 · 2026-09-06 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review — the rule is settled, in this page's favour. Contract r4 §4 rules the power-only death, final, chosen as this page originally wrote it. r4 of this page had adopted the contract's older stunning-and-shedding row, reading r3 six minutes after the Lead had already abandoned it — the two pages crossed, each following the other into the position the other had just left, and REV104-15 caught it. r5 reverts to the ruled row. The argument that won is kept below, because it is the reason and not the ruling. 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

"My weapon firing can only help me."

This is the role that makes the automatic attack a decision. The cutter fires by itself at the nearest organism in reach and, under R6, cannot be withheld. So while a Spark is in the water you are standing in, and inside your reach, you are not choosing whether to shoot it. You already chose, by standing there.

Trigger, action, threat


Trigger	Being killed while standing in water. Not proximity, not a timer, not a wind-up it performs on its own
Action	Precedence line 3 while alive: entirely ordinary, nearest reachable lit beacon, chase within pursuit range. On death in water: the connected water is energised for two seconds — the same window the contract now rules for a coil discharge, which is tidier than r3's reasoning and means the player learns one number rather than two
Threat	The surveyor, and only the surveyor. An unprotected surveyor in energised water loses one health per second (GDD §3), so this is two of five, delivered by their own weapon, in water they walked into. Killed on dry ground it does nothing at all
Hit count	Three. No more health than anything else
Conducts?	Yes, ordinarily. It is stunned by a discharge like anything else, and a stunned Spark is not dead, so it does not discharge
Charge	Sheds once like anything else: killing it drops its 1-unit mote if it has not already shed. Its death discharge is not a shed and yields nothing of its own
Effect on other bodies — settled	Nothing. By the intensity rule it stuns nothing, damages no organism and makes no chain (contract r4 §4, final). One body's charge is below the bank strength a stun needs. The hazard is to the surveyor alone

Telegraph

Three layers, in the order the player receives them:

The outline flickers. Under R4 glow carries only "has charge to shed", so a Spark cannot be signalled by being brighter — it is signalled by motion in the silhouette, which reads at crowd density where brightness does not.
The cutter's target line (R6) draws to the body the weapon has selected. Seeing the line snap onto a flickering outline standing in the same water you are standing in is the warning, and it arrives about half a second before the hit lands.
A rising whine as it enters reach. This is the cue I would most like and the one I cannot promise: GDD §14 states sound is not designed. Recorded as a gap. Without it, layers 1 and 2 must carry the whole warning, which I believe is enough and cannot claim is enough.

Counterplay, and what each costs

Counterplay	Cost
Wear insulation — the module's existing job, not a new one: it already protects a surveyor in energised water, whatever energised it	One rack slot, which is a bundle of cargo or a second battery not carried. Corrected in r3: r1 called this a second job for insulation, and PM is right that it is the same job
Kill it from dry ground. The cutter's reach crosses the channel edge; the discharge energises the water, not the bank	You are not in the channel, so you are not collecting motes and not discharging the coil
Leave it alive. Nothing makes a Spark dangerous except killing it	You cannot leave it alive, because the cutter cannot be withheld — so this counterplay is really "do not be within reach of it", which is a movement decision, continuously
Stun the crowd first and collect around the stunned Sparks	A stunned Spark is still alive and still lethal the moment your automatic weapon reaches it

The third row is the one that makes the role. The counterplay to a Spark is not an action; it is a position, held continuously, in a game whose weapon takes the shooting decision away from you.

Machinery and equipment

Cutter: the interaction. This role exists so that "the weapon aims itself" has a cost as well as a convenience, which is what the Cutter page asks Combat to supply.
Insulation: promoted from a rack-management module to a field-survival module. Currently insulation's main job is stopping leakage between a battery and wet bundles; this role gives it a second job the player feels.
Coil: a discharge stuns Sparks with everything else, and the stun does not kill, so a discharge does not set off a chain of them. The two systems do not fight.
Arc. Rewritten in r3. r1 proposed R10: that an arc chain would travel through the water a dying Spark energised, reaching everything the channel connects. That is withdrawn — PMR004 recommends the bounded chain, and its reasoning is better than mine, because a bounded chain keeps a burst a positioning decision rather than a screen-clear. Under the adopted model (Arc A1) the arc never energises water and chains to at most three additional bodies per hit, so a Spark and a burst barely interact: the burst kills Sparks like anything else, and each one it kills in water makes the channel dangerous to the surveyor for two seconds. That is still a real interaction — a burst fired from inside a channel with Sparks in it is a burst fired into your own feet — and it needs no new rule.
Field pump: draining a channel disarms every Spark in it. A cheap, non-obvious counterplay that costs a bundle.

Placement (for Campaign)

Zero Sparks in a surge entering dry ground. A Spark that cannot reach water is a Walker with a worse silhouette, and placing one is a wasted role slot. This is a hard constraint in the composition budget, not a preference.
Arrives in a surge; counts toward the limit of two non-Walker roles per surge.
Proportion: around 7% in Encounter B (10 of 140). Enough that a channel crowd reliably contains some; few enough that a player wading a channel is not in continuous danger.
Not in the opening district's first expeditions. A player still learning that water is a weapon should not simultaneously learn it is a trap. Middle campaign is the right entry point, and by then insulation is a module they have met.

Asset note

A silhouette edit of the base body: the same outline with a flicker. The flicker is motion rather than a second sprite. Whether editing a sprite is permitted depends on the individual asset's licence rather than its host's general statement (GDD §14; Asset Licences). No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded or created, and no availability is claimed. The audio cue is a recorded gap, above.

Open questions

Does a Spark killed in water hurt other organisms? No — settled on the contract. r1 of this page argued yes, from clause 1, and it was wrong in the way PM identified: an open question cannot be allowed to supply a chain-kill rule by inference. The intensity rule, now in the contract rather than only proposed here, settles it — energised water is a hazard to the surveyor and nothing to an organism, which is made of charge. The role's job is to turn your own automatic weapon against you, and it does that without damaging anything else.
Does a stunned Spark killed during a stun discharge? My position: yes. Stun prevents acting, not physics; the body is still full of charge. Flagged because a designer implementing "stunned bodies do nothing" would get this wrong.
Why two seconds? Because the contract rules two seconds for a coil discharge as well, so there is one number, not two. r3 argued for two here against eight for the coil, on the grounds that a body holds one unit and a bank holds ten; that reasoning is no longer needed and the outcome is better.
The argument that won, kept because it is the reason and not the ruling. A Spark that stunned and shed would be a free coil. The coil is two cells plus a full ten-unit bank, and stopping a wet crowd and making it shed is exactly what that buys. A free version would strictly dominate it wherever Campaign places Sparks — and dominate it by an event the player does not choose, because the cutter cannot be withheld (R6). It would also spend the once-per-organism yield without a decision, and that rule is what the whole charge economy rests on. Equipment reached the same recommendation independently, which is corroboration and not the argument.
Does a Spark killed in water hurt other organisms? Withdrawn in r3: the answer is no. r1 argued yes, from clause 1, and it was wrong in the way PM identified — an open question cannot be allowed to supply a chain-kill rule by inference. The intensity rule in Combat Rules §0B settles it: energised water is a hazard to the surveyor and nothing to an organism, which is made of charge. The role's job is to turn your own automatic weapon against you, and it does that without damaging anything else.
Does a stunned Spark killed during a stun discharge? My position: yes. Stun prevents acting, not physics; the body is still full of charge. Flagged because a designer implementing "stunned bodies do nothing" would get this wrong.
Why two seconds? Because the contract now rules two seconds for a coil discharge as well, so there is one number, not two. r3 argued for two here against eight for the coil, on the grounds that a body holds one unit and a bank holds ten; that reasoning is no longer needed and the outcome is better.
The disputed row, stated as a position (Wiki Conventions §11a). PMR006 asks the Lead and Combat to choose. I recommend the power-only death — it hurts the surveyor and does nothing to the crowd — and the argument is dominance, not taste: a Spark that stuns and sheds is a free coil. The coil is two cells plus a full ten-unit bank, and stopping a wet crowd and making it shed is exactly what that buys. If one Spark's death does the same for nothing, the coil is strictly dominated wherever Campaign places Sparks — and dominated by an event the player does not choose, because the cutter cannot be withheld (R6). It also spends the once-per-organism yield without a decision, and that rule is what the whole charge economy rests on. Equipment reaches the same recommendation independently, which is corroboration and not the argument.
A middle row, if the Lead wants this role to matter to the crowd and not only to the surveyor: it stuns but does not shed. Disruption without harvest. The coil keeps its monopoly on turning a crowd into charge, and the Spark gains a use the player can plan around. One sentence, no new concept. I would take power-only first and this second.
What follows if the contract's row stands. The role stops being "the one that turns your own weapon against you" and becomes a free area-stun the player triggers by accident. Every encounter that places Sparks in a channel then needs re-checking, because a discharge the player never paid for changes the crowd's state — Encounter A and B place none, so neither is affected today.

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.