Gradient Descent, Part 2: Reviewing Artifacts & Keys
See my other Gradient Descent posts here
Artifacts
A few notes about how Artifacts worked out in play…
I rolled Artifact 20, the hive-mind Crystals, for the HEL androids. They offered to make a trade and one of our android crew members put it on themselves, giving a hook for the Mind-Thief. It felt like it was meant to be.
Artifact 54, the Silver Lance, felt tedious. However, once it became clear I’d be running an omega session, having it point the way to the AI Core was perfect, despite not making sense.
Artifact 80, the Omnislick, created a tough choice for the crew, but they decided the value of the drive was more important than one player getting +20 on every roll.
I really wanted to use Artifact 96, the beetle ball that can resurrect people, so I had Monarch dispense it to the crew while they were in the Core, but nothing came of it.
Given their prevalence in the Fallout section, I think there’s an argument that Artifacts 91, 95, and 97 ought to have some extra level of inevitability, but balancing that would be sensitive to the length of your campaign.
The Key
Session Zero Prep: Shops
I created an initial space station using tables from A Pound of Flesh and Hundreds. I prepped a bar and five shots, each with items from other modules: some tech and drugs from APoF, the Death Cap from Desert Moon of Karth, and tones of wares and flavour from 00s.
I gave some shops unique mechanics to differentiate them:
- A collectivized mining supply shop that provides a 25% for Teamsters
- A pawnshop where prices are determined by rolls, and Androids have [+].
- An army surplus shop where non-marines pay double
- (Yes, this is mechanically the same as a discount, just presented differently).
The crew bought a whip, the Doorstop, a disposable handcannon, and Loudmouth Cyberware. None of these items were particularly impactful.
Floor 1: Reception & Habitation
The [22A] Visitors Dock is the first room where the description doesn’t support the idea that the space would take 30 minutes to traverse. In a beautiful moment of collaborative dice, on one of the crew’s first fives they reached the Visitors Dock only to run into Troubleshooters If they’d saved 10 minutes somewhere they’d’ve been home free.
The Deep’s lovely start conspicuously does not have habitation areas, so I had to improvise hotel rooms when the crew went looking. They also immediately want to use the terminal in [22B], and nothing in the module really prepares you for what hacking ought to be, other than its effect on Monarch. After a couple sessions I bought The Hackers Handbook, and I like the concept, but it felt like a lot of work to build out for a single player when I already had a lot of prep to do. I think there’s a guide on Discord, but I didn’t want to evaluate and implement it at the same time.
How do you adjudicate the stimpaks in [22D] not working? In the moment it’s easy, but if a player picks some up, you’re just remembering that they have six that don’t work, likely real-life weeks later. Yuck. Anyway, it didn’t come up for us.
The easy to find Artifacts are a wise touch, and [23A] Security Checkpoint Bravo is one of the better as-written set pieces, with relatively little danger, but lots of ways for it to play out.
Floor 1 Prep: Visitors Dock
I put a wrecked Class-0 vessel inside the dock as an obvious place for the crew to stash Kilroy’s transmitters. Troubleshooters are unloading their ship to prep for a raid, but the scout keeping watch naturally goes poking around. Luckily Kilroy has your back, but it lets the crew sweat a bit.
Floor 2: Eden
The Crew spent a lot of time in Eden trying to help the Chosen and Fallen. There was some tedium with both groups and the crew alternated between annoying and sympathetic, eventually percolating into hatred of Monarch.
The Minotaur is the star of Gradient Descent. The description gives enough to go with for characterization, and the need to interface with an android to speak is an excellent detail. There’s some weirdness with the possibility of rolling it as a random encounter outside the Labyrinth, which came up in the one-shot. For the campaign I restricted him to the Labyrinth.
Floor 2 Prep: Eden Scripting
I wrote an expanded key for most of Eden, detailing both original function and how they’ve been repurposed, plus some scripted events. The concept for the floor is strong enough that this felt natural and joyful.
- The crew sees Security escorting a Fallen through [25A] Executive Lounge, activating a switch under a table to open the locked hall to [25C] Visitors Shrine.
- The Chosen in [25C] are going through rollcall. Security heads toward [25F] The Butcher and the called upon Chosen head for the [26A] Reformatting Suite.
- I expanded on the Butcher as the station’s original surgeon, instead of being a Chosen. She is willing to trade medical services for interesting dissection subjects.
Floor 2 Prep: Playground
The [25D] Playground has two areas where the Chosen test brainscans for scan integrity and individual capability.
The first is a fighting arena where the Chosen use Atari-style paddles to control the holograms, using the same technology as Ghosts. The system is a simple hack together of a hard-drive, holoprojector, and controller, and it could be repurposed to capture ghosts.
The second is an incredibly detailed political sim, similar to Crusader Kings, with individual brainscans being used as the characters.
The level of control and detailed behavior makes it clear the Chosen have little influence over the brainscans, and the tech is deceptively advanced. Wait long enough and at least one crewmember will be spotted being tested.
Floor 2 Prep: Monarch Communication Terminal
After the crew decided to sleep in the Monarch Communication Terminal to end a session, I decided to wake them up with the insistent beeping of Monarch requesting status updates:
- Status of daily reformatting
- Inventory of parts in [25F]
- Triggers additional raids on [28D] the Gutter to replenish
- Integrity of new brainscans in the Playground
- Status of the crew.
- Monarch may order Cherubim to escort the crew on a violent raid of the Labyrinth.
Linguistics and AI may allow the crew to recognize that the messages need to be hashed to pass as coming from the Chosen King.
Floor 2 Prep: The Labyrinth
In the one-shot, we used [29A] The Labyrinth as written, and I found it really lacking. The table provided doesn’t give a sense of size or depth, just randomness. I’ve written about that here.
Floor 3.1: Maintenance Zone
[27A] Floor 3 Maintenance Access and the [31A] Maintenance Landing Area were strangely memorable areas. While not difficult, it requires some in-world creativity to navigate. In a giant factory full of industrial equipment, it was one of the rare areas that presented an obstacle to be engaged with on that level. It’s weird that something so basic sticks out, but these kinds of set pieces don’t come up often.
[33C] The Freezer was the seed for our one-shot, and I had to totally ignore the table of cryopods. I know my working memory while Wardening is too limited to improvise one of these NPCs and be happy with it. Now I’ve run almost a dozen more sessions since then and I might be able to do it now, but at the time it was both too daunting to improvise and too many possibilities to prep.
Floor 3.3: Pseudoflesh Farms
We got to the farm in our Omega Session, running it as written, playing Silus somewhere between Tim Curry and a jazz radio DJ, which was a ton of fun. The brightly lit, well-maintained environment was a really nice change of pace, and I like that there’s pre-written dialog for Silus. It felt like a good amount to jump off of for roleplaying.
I love the concept of Silus’s demands, but I was worried they’d make the area drag. That said, I knew I had to have him present his latest creation. I wish I’d spent more time writing a more defined creature, but a pure pseudoflesh, no-assembly-required android is great. I had Ghost Eater deliver a warning that Silus won’t forgive you if you don’t fulfil his requests, which lent extra gravity. It’s a spot where the Warden can use Silus to railroad the players for a bit if you need to, rather than just give busy work.
It didn’t come up in play, but the hidden fallout in [41H], if Silus is shut down, has the opportunity to turn The Deep on its head.
Floor 3.4: Brain Construction
The big challenge of running 3.4 out of the book on the fly would have been understanding the manufacturing processes and catching the reminder in the footer that the UV blasts should be evident across the floor. Keeping that in mind created a nice puzzle, in which the players eventually used acidic sludge to cut off power to the capacitors… leaving acidic sludge particles floating in 0g. In the moment I didn’t understand why the fake shutdown switch in [44E] would be included, but I now realize it taught the crew they needed to find another method.
[44C] Containment feels like it's missing an explanation, unless the creature that was being contained is supposed to be the Minotaur, which doesn’t feel like it quite fits.
I really like Mind Thief, the perfect Zelda-style NPC. I emphasized his appreciation for the crew’s contributions to the Hell Cube (through copies of their brainscans being annihilated), and I enjoyed that he would keep the destruction of The Deep secret.
The detail in [47E] that all personality metadata was corrupted would have been useful to be reminded of in the databank [47H], even if that was just by explicitly stating that the databank didn’t have any kind of direct access terminal. Security just waiting in the room was a disconcerting touch.
I was interested in the way the floor used rolls to prevent damage during traversal, but it didn’t seem very fun in practice, as dense fields of debris and erratic mechanical movement didn’t provide much texture for the players to engage with.
Floor 3.4 Prep: Minotaur Disciple
In [45B] Circuit Weaver, I added the corpse and ghost of Adria Kalabasa, a scientist and disciple of the Minotaur. She’s working frantically at a console with a revolver at the ready. The inactive machinery, halfway between a loom and a 3D printer, houses a partially completed NeuralLace, capable of disrupting the Labyrinth’s deleterious effects. Telling Adria about the Minotaur soothes her, and she can instruct you on how to complete the lace. Searching her corpse turns up a revolved, a random search result (serendipitously, we rolled the datastick with video of the Minotaur), and reveals she was shot by an SMG.
Floor 3.7: “Quality Assurance”
The Elite Security Androids were refreshing in that they were actually dangerous, and the armouries were exciting. The Spider-Tank is a real threat of a TPK, but our hacker passed the check, and a new world of agency was available to the party. It was transformative.
Floor 3.7 Prep: Spider-Tank
Aside from the stats as written, I gave the Spider-Tank two interior seats, with the option of cramming in up to six, as well as the ability to traverse the exterior of The Deep. Given the ability to Kool-Aid Man through walls, I found it expedient to allow it to tear open new entrances in The Deep, in the style of the Sentinels from The Matrix.
Floor 4: HEL
The Human Emulation Labs gave a sense of Monarch’s diverse interests, and created a cordoned off area that could be explored in one visit. I had a weirdly hard time making sense of the corpse and ghost in the [54B] Tactical Simulation Suite, and I think I fumbled it into incoherence.
The Censor-Helms, which prevent taking stress from visual stimuli (I ruled that understanding a situation you’re seeing still causes stress) are very cool and three crewmembers took them, but I failed to find the right time to trigger the removal penalty (-1d10 Fear), and felt like I ended up waiting too long. I think I’d recommend having it trigger upon leaving The Deep.
Floor 5: AI Core
The location of the AI Core was a central puzzle for our crew. I initially gave them an abstract map showing all connections between floors (similar to page 20), minus the AI Core. When I gave them the full map (after enthusiasm for mapping had waned), I still removed Floor 5, but left the door leading from [44E]. A couple times I thought our map-reader might have noticed it, but he never mentioned it.
The instructions to have Monarch be silent, communicate through screens, and beg for its life felt like an invitation to run in whichever way aligns best with the campaign you’ve been running. I used it as an opportunity to offer some closure on each crewmember’s story arc.
All of the fallout from deactivation is interesting, but especially the Security Androids assembling in the farm, reverted back to basic assist-and-survive protocols.
Floor 6: Engineering & Support
The Loading Dock was a highlight: an easy spot to build out an imaginable space and run an encounter. I had Arkady refuse to land, instead parking a jumpable distance away. The best 0g moved jumped with a capable for the other to climb down, interrupted by security, and with the container of maybe-suicidal androids primed and ready to go. The level and combination of details worked really well for me.
The party didn’t go much further into Floor 6, and never ran into the Hunter or the Dweller, so I had them make one last (unfortunately) anti-climactic attack on the party as they left The Deep in the Auto-Tug (with the Spider-Tank clinging on).
Floor 6 Prep: Exterior Features
Once the crew had the Spider-Tank and the Auto-Tug, they asked for things to do on the exterior of the ship. I flipped the majority of the features on pages 60 and 61 inside out into a hex map Arkady provided, with the Hunter and the Dweller present as well…
…and then the crew never went, despite learning some of the system details from [45C] Schematic Storage, and being pointed to an artifact by the Mind-Thief.
Other Areas
We never set foot in Floor 3.2: Skeleton Works, but I did use a spider drone at one point! The spiders are the cutest, least creepy illustrations in the whole module. Same with 3.5 and 3.6. The crew did learn about Security Dispatch, and planned to go there for security clearance, but they got sidelined. The existence and scale of Storage is a valuable piece of understanding the Deep.
See my other Gradient Descent posts here