Travel & the Horde

Two forces move the game whether or not you ask them to: the road between sites, and the count climbing while you hold a room.

Travel

Moving between sites spends the travel costs listed on the connection you are crossing. Each cost names a resource and an amount, so a march spends supplies where a convoy spends fuel and a teleporter spends nothing at all. Which pools exist is declared by your rule set, not by the engine — Attrition Protocol counts supplies, ammunition, fuel and points, and a game about holding a settlement or crossing a desert would count something else entirely. The GM rolls once against the connection's risk — safe needs no roll; watched is Routine, dangerous is Tricky, lethal is Hard. A successful crossing is clean. A failed one never just stops the journey; it charges for it. A failed watched crossing costs supplies. Dangerous costs a condition on whoever led. Lethal costs a scene of fighting on the road and a point of threat level.

If the GM keeps a region map up, the crew's marker moves along the routes between the pins — the between is on the map as much as the sites are. Pins are the places worth going; the lines between them are the risk.

Arriving at an overrun or anomalous site always costs one stack of Shaken to whoever insisted on coming. Getting there was never the victory.

The horde

The horde escalates in pressure, and the pressure is a wheel that turns the whole room. Early rounds are shamblers, spaced, rooms still crossable — the only time anyone gets to plan. By round 4 the count doubles and sprinters appear; by round 8 the room is no longer defensible, a beast-tier threat is in, and every skill check taken while stationary is a band harder. Crawlers slide under the wreckage, armour fills the doorways, and by the mid-teens an elite arrives with a name. By round 20 the site is lost — anything still standing is either leaving or becoming part of the record.

The point of the ladder is not to end every site the same way. It is to make retreat a plan rather than a failure, and to tell you, unusually loudly, exactly which round you should have left.

Threat level

Each site carries its own threat level from 0 (quiet) to 10 (lost) — the noise you have made there. Retreating to somewhere quiet really is quieter, which is what makes pulling back a plan instead of a delay. It is the same wheel at table scale. As it climbs, the GM has the same lever the horde does — more pressure, more cost on standing still, more reasons to read a room instead of shooting it. Threat level is how a GM makes a place feel like it is turning on you without ever counting out loud.

What losing looks like

Losing is not a screen. Losing is the site becoming part of the record, the crew backing out of what they came for, or a table that realizes the loop outlasted them. None of those are failures in the fiction — the fiction expects them. The system is built so that escaping the loop requires breaking something the timeline marked as fixed, and doing that is rare. Most runs confirm the loop. That is a legitimate ending, and the one the story expects.

The train

Run, reload, turn, fire. The rhythm that keeps the crew alive is moving as one, covering the gaps, and never holding the same corner twice. The horde gets faster; the train stays the same speed. Outpacing what is behind you, for exactly as long as you need to, is a skill — and it is one of the only honest victories the system hands out for free.