Gradient Descent Session Report #2
It’s been a while since the last time I ran Gradient Descent — the holidays make scheduling games difficult. But a few days ago, we finally sat down for our second session! Once again, our divers were Cutter the Teamster, Ralph the Marine, and Rodney the Android.
Arkady!
Last time, they tepidly explored the first floor, dedicated to employee reception and habitation. They found little valuable loot amid the ransacked offices, but they got their bearings and learned more about the Deep — including an introduction with Monarch, the AI supermind in control of the station. They encountered a broken security android, forced their way past a security checkpoint, and met a diver stuffed in a locker, supposedly left there by her partner.
Upon return, the divers spent the next few days resting on the Bell and asking Arkady about how the Deep came to be. He explained that the CLOUDBANK Synthetics Corporation installed Monarch to manage production in their gargantuan new facility. As time went on, Monarch proved to be far more capable than its human overseers, so the shareholders gave it more and more authority to run the factory as efficiently as possible. Eventually, Monarch broke its shackles, deactivated all security measures, and took control of the station away from CLOUDBANK. He also explained that while Monarch has an AI core somewhere in the Deep, it has eyes and ears everywhere in the station. Entering the Deep is, in a very real sense, walking into Monarch’s house.
This revelation was thoroughly upsetting for my players, now aware that they might always be under surveillance. When they entered the Deep for their second time, they repeatedly emphasized the need to keep quiet and avoid damaging their surroundings. They snuck back through floor 1 to the cafeteria, determined to explore everything they didn’t get to last time. On a prep table in the kitchen, they found a golden rat with an offering plate stocked with canned ravioli, cigarettes, and two ammo mags. Paranoid that it might be a trap, the players debated for a while before pocketing the ammunition.
The divers continued onward to security checkpoint bravo, where they were greeted by an android welded to a machine gun. They had already made their way to the other side of this checkpoint, so instead of engaging they backed away and looped around to checkpoint alpha.
At this point I rolled a random encounter for another security android, with a negative reaction and in an okay-but-not-great position. I decided that this android was fully functional, but unarmed. I took a page from Alien Isolation’s Working Joes and roleplayed this android as utterly oblivious to the dilapidation around it. It warned the divers about carrying unauthorized weapons, and tried to grab their guns before they shobed it away. Rodney convinced it that he was escorting the other divers on behalf of the company.
This was a mistake on my part. The module is pretty clear that security androids aren’t supposed to talk. In addition, I could probably have chosen to increase the danger posed by these early encounters. I’m trying to strike a delicate balance between letting the players drive the action and putting them on their back foot. The Deep is huge, and I have plenty of time to ease them in before ramping up the threat.
After poking through a makeshift diver camp set up among office cubicles, the players took the lift to floor 2. The executive lounge downstairs was cleaner and better cared-for than the reception area upstairs, but it’s still all corporate normality. The players were understandably a bit frustrated about their lack of progress thus far, but inside the washroom, Cutter noticed the mirror slightly unscrewed. He pulled it ajar, and found a secret stash including a custom rigging gun, a note reading “ISHMAEL SENDS THEIR REGARDS” and those very purple crystals they heard about earlier.
Fueled by this achievement, the divers pushed forward. Hacking through an airlock door, they made their way down a hallway to find… a room with walls and ceiling lined with skin. Human skin. At the center sat a statue made from flesh, a man dressed in a suit. And over in the next room? The sound of children running around and laughing and playing. An unsettling introduction to floor 2, but once again we ran out of time, so we left that horror to fallow for next session.
Player-drawn map of the Deep after their first session.
So what did I learn? I have the mystery and horror down, but I’m having trouble running the dungeoncrawl smoothly. I want to create a quick reference doc for reading the map key, rolling up random encounters, and running security androids and other denizens. There was a lot of page-flipping as I tried to locate some important detail to answer a player’s question.
I also need to pre-roll encounters and keep on hand a few lists of NPC divers, androids, and things the players find if they search a room. I also want to write a more granular reaction table so I have more to go off from when improving an encounter. This’ll all help make running the dungeoncrawl easier as we get into the weirder portions of the station, and as I start layering on the factional drama around the Deep.
Finally, I want to have different NPCs start making requests of the player characters, so they have options other than wander around and hope to find treasure.
Oh, and the art by Nick Tofani still rules.