Gradient Descent - Session 002 Warden Notes
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When all 8 of us finally took our seats around the meeting room table after work for our second session of Mothership, I began to wonder if perhaps I'd bitten off a little more than I could chew…
What went well
I'm slowly reading Solaris by Stanislaw Lem—only a few chapters in thus far—and boy howdy does it bring the creepy space horror vibes. Perfect brain fuel for getting in the right frame of mind for a game of Mothership.
Overall, I feel that things went smoothly even with 7 players, though it was full-on for me the entire time. I probably missed a few saves or panic checks here and there, but nobody seemed to mind.
The key was to keep going around the table steadily, asking each player in turn what their crew member is doing. If they couldn't decide in a reasonable amount of time (at most 30 seconds), I'd explain what would happen "by default" if they didn't tell me their action at the start of their next turn, and then I'd move on to the next player. Similarly, I generally limited the number of questions from each player to about 3 before asking them to make a choice.
Sketching out the "battlefield" on the whiteboard and using tokens to indicate the relative positions of everyone involved worked fairly well, though I took pains to emphasise that the diagram of the warehouse-sized Gym was not to scale. Most crew members stuck to the "floor" to take advantage of the available cover, but at least 2 ended up floating in the null-G environment, adding a third dimension. I used a d10 to determine how close they were to the floor (0) or ceiling (9) when that was important.
Having an android (K3V-1N) who was adamant that he is a human being was hilarious. I worked with K3V-1N's player to come up with this idea before we started play.
After botching my portrayal of Silas in the last session, I had a lot of fun hamming it up as a chatty, slightly loopy, pleased-as-chips-to-meetcha personality, trying to make smalltalk and laughing awkwardly at their own lame jokes.
When asked about the station, Silas name-dropped Monarch in hushed tones, which the crew naturally concluded was the voice that directed them to return to their cryopods. I was pleased that I didn't have to retcon anything to make that work, and it had the desired effect when Monarch finally addressed the crew directly.
What could have gone better
The 1-in-10 encounter roll every 10 (real-time) minutes is starting to feel stale. We didn't get even one in the second session. I need to do something about that.
The new players needed a good 5 to 10 minutes to establish where they were and what they were doing. Ideally, I should have started the session with just them ahead of the others, but fortunately the returning players we very patient.
It seems obvious in hindsight, but I should have used something other than d20s as markers on the whiteboard, since these were needed for panic checks. If we do it again, I'll probably use d8s since they can be "pointed" in a given direction and they could double as altitude indicators as well.
Silas promised that the decontamination process "doesn't hurt much" and that made them very suspicious. Possibly I oversold it a little. Not sure if I'll get a chance to walk it back.
For next time
I need to spice up the 10-minute encounter check a little. Perhaps it's time to incorporate some version of the classic Necropraxis encounter die, maybe in combination with the "hunter die" concept from this post. I don't want to go OTT, but the default encounter rate just isn't cutting it for me. I need to give this priority.
It's possible that the crew will leave the Deep during the next session. I need to remember to roll for the Bends, and I feel like it might be time to introduce at least one Artifact that the crew may or may not have already collected somewhere along the line.
Other ideas
I have this silly little idea to somehow display sparkline graphs for each crew member's body temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure (systolic), beta waves, and so on, as they might appear on a tactical HUD.
The graphs would vary based on the crew member's current condition: stress levels, general health, exertion, that sort of thing. Probably beyond my ability, but it would be very evocative if I can pull it off somehow.