zoydraft  / Pink Sleeves

Gradient Descent, Part 1: Reviewing Mechanics & Tools

See my other Gradient Descent posts here

Over the past nine months I ran Gradient Descent, Luke Gearing’s 2020 megadungeon for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, never having run an adventure for half that time. As a novice Warden, what experiences did the module provide?

This is a personal retrospective, collecting my thoughts after holding the zine in my head for most of a year. There is some play report and some prep material, but the focus is on howGradient Descent holds under the stress of play. You can find reviews talking about the prose, the ideas, the layout, and the art. I’m more interested in sharing what I saw in actual play.

Spoilers abound, but some of this may be incomprehensible without a copy of the module in hand, or at least a past read-through. More than anything, this is (not secretly) a time capsule for a time in my life where I spent a whole bunch of time thinking about a single zine and then playing through it with people I love.

Part 1: Mechanics & Tools

[4-7] Basic Procedures

Gradient Descent leans on time-keeping and random encounters. This lent a great, effortless structure, but not without challenges.

To manage the basic procedures I created a spreadsheet that made all my encounter and reaction rolls for me. Before each session I’d print out a couple pages of timestamps in 10-minute increments. As we played I would record the path taken. This worked great for notetaking and timekeeping, and I liked always knowing when a random encounter was a few rooms away. For fast travel I used the “Deep Crawl” method, but made players tell me the route, room by room.

The random encounters were tough to flesh out. I usually had an idea of where the crew was heading, but the station is navigable enough they could easily end up on another floor with another random encounter table. There was some amount of prep I could do, but it had to be location agnostic, so it was tough to set up situations with a lot of potential energy in the environment.

I resorted to more scripted situations, against the spirit of the procedure. For example:

There’s also no guidance on developing Divers. It’s not hard to come up with a random NPC, but it’s just one more thing. The Hundreds zine by Quadra was indispensable for providing details that aren’t present in the module.

It’s absolutely true that violence was almost always avoidable, and reaction rolls reinforced that. Unfortunately, “everything in The Deep wants to talk to someone” gets tedious when they don’t have much to say. Having a good stock of secrets at the ready worked sometimes, but a lot of encounters were forgettable. That’s absolutely partly down to me not being a great Warden, but the module didn’t help.

Scale, Wayfinding, and Maps

Despite being a dungeon crawl, the scale of rooms (10 to 30 minutes to cross) and sparse details make it hard to really imagine PCs in the space without abstracting it. It often felt more like navigating a board game semi-blind than inhabiting a space.

The scale of The Deep is haunting, yet it’s difficult to be consistent in conveying it. Do we need a list of synonyms for “big”? We’re told, “emphasize the space. Remind them.” I am personally not a good enough storyteller, improviser, or poet to reinforce that around a third of the rooms are really big and/or difficult to get through for hours on end. When everything is, nothing is, and I felt annoyed at myself describing yet another big industrial space.

For players, how do you decide where to go? It’s rare that anything makes one door more enticing than any other, unless you’re leaning on NPCs to provide information. I did pick up from Actual Plays that doors could be sticking points, so I went with the approach of treating “Airlock Doors” as bulkheads like on a ship. Maybe the tech is different, but these doors provide some security and safety in case of de-pressurization, not the function of an airlock.

Now, I would want to try to make my own map if I was playing, and I made my players do the same. After a couple sessions though, it got tedious. There was more fun to be had by providing the map of the station and having them try to figure out where they wanted to go. Suddenly choices weren’t so arbitrary. However, it didn’t help the abstracted board game feel, further hurt by only one player being invested in understanding the circuit board style.

[8] Monarch

I treated Monarch as a mostly unspeaking presence. Knowing I didn’t want the campaign to go on indefinitely, I had it offer a bounty on the Minotaur on its first Panic Check to provide some direction.

Monarch Stress accumulated quickly, and the Panic Table was a mixed bag, which meant I used it less than written. The hostile security encounters, reward for killing the crew, and secret radio messages threw PCs nicely off balance when they’d got overcomfortable chatting up everyone they met. At one point I rolled the “powered doors collapse on people” condition and forgot to use it as the crew made a quick retreat back to the Bell, but damn, 1d5 days is a long time to be making Body Saves between most rooms! I was open to the nuclear warhead or the spider-tank ending the campaign if that’s how the dice landed, but the crew was luckier than that.

More than anything, Monarch was great for providing an antagonist who players assumed they had to work around. Partway through the campaign, as crewmembers’ stress pushed past 20, I offered that The Bell could be used for Shore Leave. They declined, (correctly) worrying that Monarch would undo their progress with factions in The Deep.

[9] The Bends

Gradient Descent says it’s about, “what does it mean to be human?”

Looking at what the crew did, being human is getting attached to weird little guys, which: definitely, but I think it’s supposed to have something to do with The Bends.

Unlike Monarch Stress, Bends felt slow. Around session 7 I stopped tracking, but the crew was sitting between 30 and 50 each. We had:

The Bends seem impossible to balance across different kinds of games. Unless you’re running an epic, they’re too slow. On the other hand, the effects are very final. Whatever else players are interested in, these effects (if adjudicated strictly) will derail the game. That’s great if The Bends are a constant presence and the game focuses on them, but that’s not naturally going to be the case.

The full list of effects is a weird mix of things the Warden needs to track, and actions and beliefs the players are forced to take on without mechanical backing. I’d like to see mechanical tweaks for more consonant experiences. For example:

These would create compulsions and paranoia, which is exactly what they’re supposed to portray.

Let’s Talk About Androids

How the hell do Androids get The Bends? The zine suggests any android encountered may be a human suffering from The Bends. Androids thinking they’re human doesn’t work on the same axis as a human being replaced by a replica that can only be distinguished upon death. It’s not that it can’t work, but it just functions so differently that the entire Bends system becomes incomprehensible for Android PCs.

I took the easy route and decided it was just whether Monarch had replaced them with duplicates.

[10, 11] Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility User’s Manual

Infiltrator Androids: indistinguishable from humans unless you see they succeed on an Instinct check by rolling a 79.

Security Androids: shit, I did not remember that they’re supposed to be silent. That would have changed a lot of encounters.

Forgotten Androids take a while to make sense of. The big question to me was whether a group of 1d5 should have matching defects and/or adaptations. There’s a ton of overhead to rolling an encounter, exasperated when I interpreted page 11 as four independent tables, when it’s supposed to be (I think) just two.

[12] Ghosts in the Machine

Running an NPC in a traumatic loop, who stays stuck in it until provoked or soothed is tiresome, and I can’t help but imagine players getting more and more sick of me maintaining the tedious schtick. As written, they were awkward, since after the first violent encounter with one the crew reacted with a routine, “this is a ghost, we don’t have to take damage, do we?” This was made worse because I usually forgot about the trauma relay.

I used Ghosts a few times, including for an important NPC, so I think they’re useful, I just dreaded running into one with a negative reaction.

[13] Fallout

Gradient Descent and The Deep are static. Any momentum is provided by the crew and Warden.

But that’s not to say there aren’t hooks and consequences. I like that the Fallout section gives concrete consequences. We play to find out, but the ending isn’t purely up to the table’s imagination. The lack of control in response to the players’ agency makes it feel real and horrific, even if it’s a little rigid.

Whether to kill Monarch and free the Minotaur were obvious questions at our table, but I was delighted that whether to reveal the truth about the Infiltrators occurred to the players as a dilemma as well. Unfortunately they didn’t come across the three artifacts associated with fallout, and I wish I had nudged at least one of them into the crew’s path.

It’s worth noting that there are a handful of other places in the module where you can trigger other outcomes, so this table isn’t the full extent of the aftermath.

[14, 15] The Blockade

The Blockade first succeeds as a reason why even altruistic crewmembers need Artifacts.

The Troubleshooters are formidable: probably a TPK if attacked head on, but since they’re methodical, a more reckless crew can outrun them. The Warden can use a raid to shepherd the crew to new areas, or add pressure.

The radio transmitters mission was a great first hook in both my one-shot and the campaign. Giving the exosuits (AP:10 DR:3 plus other bonuses) as a reward was massive overkill, and completely changed the texture of violence, especially since I like to use the Armor Degradation difficulty setting (Warden’s Operations Manual page 52). I didn’t appreciate how strong Advanced Battle Dress and the like is. It was extremely rare for crewmembers to take more than a couple points of damage, and I can only recall a single wound after the crew got it. It would have been better to give only one or two suits instead of everyone.

The forward operating base mission was a lot less interesting to the players; they’d found other things to care about. The download of the brainscans may have been interesting, but they didn’t need Kilroy to prompt them to find Floor 5 or kill Monarch.

I did prep a Troubleshooter assigned by Kilroy as a replacement character, which felt like a good alternative to yet another amnesiac, but it never came up.

Blockade Prep

I have the crew the option of paying their way through the blockade, or trying to sneak through:

They went with Sunny and were captured by Troubleshooters. Kilroy gives them their first mission, and they go from there to the Bell.

[16-19] The Bell

The Bell and its residents are charming. Arkady feels like a character everyone has a take on, and they all fit. Noriko is a creep, and the trick was getting people to realize she’s pretty trustworthy, especially after infecting players’ nightmares with her portrait.

Being unlit and 0g is nice practice for the Warden. I love the hashmarks on Arkady’s wall, suggesting a timeline of around 10 years since Monarch took over, which helped me answer questions the players had throughout the campaign.

Ghost Eater’s request for ghosts not having a specific mechanic attached is fun until the players ask the immediate obvious follow-up: “how?” It’s a trap! There’s an artifact, and I added another method in the Playground, but it’s awkward to be in that position upon meeting one of the very first characters in the game.

Rumours

Rumours are a little weird. They do an incredible job of defining the Bell’s three characters and establishing the world, but once the crew starts going, they’re going to have specific enough questions that using them as random tables isn’t very useful.

After a few sessions I came across the “Lazy DM” prep method, which includes stocking a list of secrets to give to the players at any appropriate time. These tables were great fodder for those, and giving Ghost Eater’s “Try Silus, he can tell you where Monarch is” to the Butcher ended up being a major thread the crew followed until the end.

Downtime & Shoreleave

After seven sessions, some crewmembers were in dire situations with their Stress. Normal rest mechanics are far too harsh to possibly recover, so I think Wardens and crews need to know whether using the Bell as a C-Class Port for the purpose of Shore Leave (PSG page 39) is on the table. It always comes with the big caveat of giving Monarch time to counteract faction play or other actions the crew has undertaken.

The Bell Prep: Sacrament of the Minotaur

I used and loved Ben Laurence’s Sacrament of the Minotaur, reducing the eight provided experience to my five favourites for ease of rolling.

[20, 21] The Deep

This spread is a great overview for orienting the Warden, and the write-up and map can be used as the basis of the introduction for the crew. The random table of locations is one of those things that doesn’t have a prescribed use, but having it in your back pockets means you find uses for it. Similarly, is there any specific reason you need a list of external entrances? Not really, but it’s nice to have.

Could the crew have just constantly asked me for random searches, every room? Especially since rooms are so spacious, surely there’s some junk. They didn’t, and that certainly kept their Bends down as well.

The map to a location 10 rooms away was specifically fun for pulling the crew towards some prepped material. The whispering android head was great. On the other hand, I failed to sell the ammunition for everyone. I think the players took it as a winking contrivance instead of a creepy happening.

Warden Screen Prep

I went into the campaign with a cheat sheet with the following:

The page numbers, stat blocks, and random encounter rules were not helpful. As we played it was helpful to track the artifacts that had been found, which had been analyzed, and how much they were worth. I also tracked how sessions aligned with in-game days.

I used ToddMoonBounce’s Warden’s Player Reference, which really just helped me remember player skills during prep.

See my other Gradient Descent posts here

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