Gradient Descent - Session 001 Warden Notes
>>>>> ACCESS RESTRICTED: NO PLAYERS ALLOWED! <<<<<
Players have 10 seconds to disengage or face punative cerebral recalibration. 6… 5… 4… 3… 2…
The office has a games evening on the last Wednesday of each month, and I'd promised on several occasions to referee a game of Mothership. I had some reservations about the system because my first attempt with another group took much longer than expected (we barely made it halfway through The Haunting of Ypsilon 14). However, I committed to run a session on the 30th and decided that Gradient Descent was the best option for an open table. Suffice to say, it was reasonably successful.
What went well
April was a very busy month and I didn't have much time to prepare for the session, so I was pleasantly surprised with how smoothly it ran from start to finish. The players grasped the rules quickly, even those with little or no prior experience playing TTRPGs. They took responsibility for calling out their characters' skills when applicable and keeping track of their gear. It was usually obvious when the situation demanded a check or a save, and Stress accrued naturally as they started delving the Deep.
Only two of the characters were equipped with headlamps, and only two had Zero-G training, so they were forced to work together from the start to overcome environmental challenges. I was really pleased to see how quickly they started to work as a team, especially when it became clear that they were in a dangerous location. Even when they split up, they made good use of short-range comms to coordinate their actions (which also meant I didn't have to do anything fiddly to keep player knowledge separate from character knowledge).
I used a kitchen timer to remind me to call for a random encounter check every 10 minutes of real time, which kept things moving at a decent pace. This is a technique I've often used when refereeing games where time itself is a scarce resource (which, given IRL demands, is always). However, I simplified the Random Encounters rule on page 5 to a roll of 1 on a d10. This was fine because it was similar odds and the encounter distance part of the roll wasn't needed in most cases. Toward the end of the session, I decided to up the pressure slightly by increasing the encounter rate to 2-in-10. It had the desired effect.
What could have gone better
One thing that surprised me was that even the experienced players needed a minute to get their heads around percentile dice. The Warden's Operation Manual specifically says on page 23 to explain how they work and I should have heeded that advice. We got there in the end, but it was a bit of friction that could have been easily avoided.
Gradient Descent is an incredibly dense and evocative creative work. For the most part, the text is reasonably easy to parse, but there are sections where my tired eyes struggled to pick out important pieces of information, particularly those with deep red lettering on a black background.
The one thing I found sorely lacking was a complete map of each floor in its entirety for my own reference. The "circuit diagrams" are fine for effect, but somewhat frustrating to use in play, particularly when flipping between pages of connected areas. I searched for an overall map of the facility online, including the official Discord channels, but the images I found were either out-of-date or simply wrong when compared against the module itself. This feels like a major oversight, and I wish Tuesday Knight Games would publish a supplement.
The players rolled the Waste Disposal encounter twice consecutively, which had an unexpected side-effect. I decided that for it to make sense in the otherwise zero-G environment, the artificial gravity had to come back on for brief periods so that debris or unsecured equipment could fall on the characters. However, when this happened a second time, they immediately concluded that a malevolent intelligence was deliberately trying to do them harm, which was not my intent, at least not at this stage. That bird has flown its coop now, though, so I'll just have to carry on and somehow make it work.
My biggest mistake by far was that, in the heat of the moment, I portrayed Silus as terse and dismissive when page 40 describes them as "chatty", "gentle", and "curious"--this has a significant bearing on the Pseudoflesh Farms on floor 3.3. Also, being ordered to return to his cryopod turned out to be the final straw for the explosives expert Teamster… who also happened to be carrying explosives.
Thus, I probably have an explosion—likely explosive decompression—to adjudicate at the start of the next session.
Such fun.
For next time
We didn't have any panic checks in the first session.
There will definitely be panic checks early in the next session.
Other ideas
Mandatory Health and Wellness™ Survey
I remember reading somewhere about a Warden who asked his players to journal about how their characters' experiences made them feel. Not only did this help to deepen their connection with the setting, but it provided a ready source of psychological ammunition for encounters with Monarch.
I'd like to do something similar, but I'm pretty sure my players aren't interested in keeping journals. However, a brief survey with some odd and slightly disturbing questions might just serve the same purpose. Now, if only I can find the brain power to come up with those questions…