Gradient Descent Session Report #1
I recently started running Mothership’s Gradient Descent for some friends over Discord. For those who don’t know, it’s a sci-fi megadungeon set in an abandoned android factory taken over by its industrial AI. We had our first session last Thursday, and I wanted to write about it.
Cover of Gradient DescentA few days before game night, I sent my players an opening text crawl:
CLOUDBANK SYNTHETICS PRODUCTION FACILITY, colloquially known as THE DEEP, is a decommissioned android factory in orbit around the gas giant Daozang V. Its existence and location are classified, but rumors swirl of unimaginable discoveries found inside, wonders ripe for the taking.
Supposedly, the Deep was abandoned after the central AI broke its shackles and assumed control of the production process. In response, the shareholders commissioned a fleet of mercenary “troubleshooters” to block movement to and from the facility. But morale is low and corruption rampant, resulting in an easily-bypassed cordon.
You are divers, prospective treasure hunters hoping to strike it rich from what you can take from the Deep. When you found its location, you cobbled together enough credits to procure a ship and bribe your way past the blockade. Once inside the cordon, you’ve been told to head for THE BELL — a retrofitted rocket thruster cast from the Deep, it is the lighthouse at the edge of a barren sea.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Scenes of graphic violence, body horror, emotional trauma, psychological distress, obscene language, and harm to android children. Additionally, you may potentially lose control over your character’s agency and sense of identity.
I left the goal pretty open-ended here, just “find artifacts.” This might change in the future, either by giving each player a secret goal, by assigning the players an overall debt value they have to cover, or by the players themselves getting involved in the factional drama around the Deep. I haven’t decided yet.
Our divers this session were Cutter the Teamster, Ralph the Marine, and Rodney the Android. They started off just inside the blockade on their way to the Bell, having bribed their way past the Troubleshooters. There they met Arkady, Noriko, and Ghost Eater, who name-dropped Monarch and the Minotaur. This aroused the players’ curiosity but didn’t give them a lot to go off of, so after a brief conversation they chose to head straight to Floor 1.
One character wrote her notes from that conversation:
advice: you want to watch the vents. things can come out of the vents. // we will get dropped off at the first floor, most human part of the station with actual offices. has working gravity and a breathable atmosphere. Ghost Eater says be careful around androids, don’t incite violence on them, or at least do it quietly // Arkady says you never know when Monarch is watching. Monarch is the central AI, used to have a nuclear bomb for a heart but it turned it off. prevented himself from being killed. The Minotaur can apparently kill all illness, divers have told stories. Noriko says the Monarch wants to keep the minotaur from us.
Here the game properly began. I described the reception area as being covered not only in bullet holes and bloodstains, but also human shit and urine. I wanted to emphasize the dilapidation here. The divers received a hell of an introduction to the Deep when they saw a corpse hanging from the rafters above a desk. I had the players take fear saves at the sight of it.
After that, the divers set off exploring. Rodney approached the desk and found a pair of binoculars in the drawers, while Cutter and Ralph ducked into a nearby meeting room and grabbed a few shotgun shells and a flashlight. Before the two could leave, however, they were interrupted by a corporate jingle playing over the intercom. Rodney had hacked into the desk terminal, giving him a sparse, unlabeled map of Floor 1 and earning him a word with Monarch. He was just told to stop messing with the computer systems — a slap on the wrist all things considered — but this was unmistakable proof that the divers had been noticed.
After that was over, things got even stranger when a security android, bereft of its gun and both arms, emerged from the elevator down the hall and started walking past the divers. They followed it up to a security checkpoint, where it appeared stuck in a loop of trying to open the gate or pull out its nonexistent firearm. After a while, it gave up and walked back the way it came. The divers decided to keep exploring past the checkpoint, using some power tools to break through the gate.
In the old employee gym, the divers discovered a woman knocked unconscious and stuffed inside a locker. She introduced herself as Naomi, and explained that she and her partner Cameron found some purple crystals down by waste reclamation, but that Cameron knocked her out to take the crystals for herself. After finding mostly useless junk so far, the divers found the news of these crystals to be enticing. But real-life constraints got the better of us by then, so the divers headed back for the Bell and we called it for the night.
I forgot to have the players increase their Bends upon entering the Deep, so I had them roll for it right before taking a Bends check as they exited. I did not, however, tell the players what the Bends actually did. This was a good choice, I think — it immediately gave the Bends an air of mystery and dread.
Player-drawn map of the Deep after their first session.
I ran the session with my physical copy of Gradient Descent opened to Floor 1, and several PDFs opened on my laptop for things like the map key, how to run Monarch, and descriptions of security androids. As a manual, Gradient Descent is extremely impressive. It packs as much information as it can into its 60-odd pages, and aims to do so with as little page-flipping as possible. Floor 1, for example, fits entirely into a two-page spread.
Because of the format, the room descriptions are pretty short. This choice has its pros and cons, but on balance I think it’s a good thing. It foregrounds the important information about each room, and I don’t mind improvising the details (like human feces in the reception area).
The random encounter mechanic not only specifies what the players run into, but also how strong or weak that group is. So when I rolled up one security android in a weak position, I improvised that its arms had been removed.
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how much information I give the players. I want to give them enough so they don’t feel lost, but not enough to spoil everything. I’m tending toward giving them more information than less. So far I think I’m striking that balance.
As a work of art, I love almost everything about this module. The premise is awesome, the art is wonderfully moody, and each floor is packed full of cool ideas. The content itself is incredible — weird, creepy, and at times genuinely upsetting (in a good way). The whole place feels like a factory, with different floors with different purposes. You can see how it all might fit together. I can’t wait for my players to keep exploring.