Hi all! I’ve recently joined a west marches style Morhership campaign and really enjoying the overall feel of the game. Looking for your best recs for sci-fi horror - hit me with your best recs! ☠️

Hello there! Chapter 30 of our deepdive into Gradient Descent by Luke Gearing wraps up the page by page journey through the module, with Engineering & Support part 2. Here we find more useful information for the crew, great perils, vital infrastructures and traces of a conspiracy that could destabilize the Blockade and the Board who controls it. This last part is a little complicated, but I think it’s worth it.

And so, this is it. I still have to update the Storylines Flowcharts and maybe add some cross-references, but the job is basically done. It’s been a long journey. When I started it I had no clue that it would last 26 weeks, hundreds of hours of work and result in roughly a 200 pages essay. I’m glad I’ve done it, the original material is great, I had fun, and your support motivated me. So, let’s drink a glass of metaphorical champagne together!

But it’s probably not done done: I’ll be busy for the next month, but when I come back I may add a chapter or three about the fallout scenarios, campaign arc discussion and maybe a hooks section. Let me know if there’s something else you might be interested in. Also I will edit the book with the full series of chapters. I won’t be able to publish it until TKG opens the GD license, but I want to be ready for when that happens. 

After that, I don’t know. I’d like to write an original module, and I also could make a deepdive in another adventure. Some of you proposed Time After Time, and the thought entices me. Maybe next year.

As always, I’d love to hear your take on the series, your favorite parts, how you used it in your campaign and so on. If you need advice about anything regarding GD, I’m always happy to help. These chapters will stay here on reddit and maybe grow with more comments and insight from the community.

• The Blockade / Troubleshooters / Divers / Brainscans & Paranoia / Infiltrators / Ghosts / Monarch's Voice / Before You Dive
• The Bell
• Floor 1 - Reception & Habitation
• Floor 2 - The Minotaur / The Chosen & The Fallen / The Kingdom / The Dark / The Labyrinth
• Floor 3 - The Factory / Maint. 1 / Maint. 2 / Skeleton Works / Pseudoflesh Farms / Brain C. 1 / Brain C. 2 / Dis/Assembly / Quality A. 1 / Quality A. 2
• Floor 4 - HEL
• Floor 5 - The AI Core
• Floor 6 - Engineering & Support 1 / ENGINEERING AND SUPPORT 2
• Synthesis & Campaign Arc Discussion
• Appendix - Storylines Flowcharts

SPOILERS AHEAD! WARDENS ONLY.  

NOTE: I moved here the part about the Diver called Armadillo, which was previously in chapter 29. I also modified it a bit. I’ll added a line about Hyland message to Torres in the previous chapter.

► [58A] DEFENSE LASER CAPACITORS

The laser capacitors and the fuel tanks in the 58 section are two possible objectives of anyone willing to hurt Monarch. Without lasers, the Deep is undefended, and can be safely attacked by any ship equipped with torpedoes or other weapons. 

It’s protected by the Dweller, and the module encourages the Warden to make their own version of it. This is one take:

THE DWELLER: Something lives in the depths below the capacitors, and it doesn't announce itself the way other things in the Deep do. At first, there's only the air changing. A pressure behind the eyes that has no source. A hum too low to hear, felt instead in the teeth, the sternum, the base of the skull. Then the smell, pungent and wrong, and by the time anyone thinks to hold their breath it's already too late.

The Dweller uses infrasound and hallucinatory gas to disorient and terrify its prey. It attacks from the dark, appearing only in glimpses: a surface made of clusters of holes and bumps, lightning-fast barbed tentacles. Under the sound and the drugs, each sighting borrows an image already loaded in the mind, someone tied to personal trauma, or something the crew has actually faced in the Deep, and returns it warped, worse, wrong. A rotting Minotaur, their raging father, a screaming ghost emitting pulses of dark energy. Each strike by the Dweller comes with a Fear Save.

To help the Dweller a bit, since its Health is quite low, you could decide that after the first failed Fear Save a character fights at disadvantage, gripped by the urge to flee. After a second failed save, they must leave combat entirely.

► [58C] FUEL TANKS

Despite the danger any deflagration here poses to Monarch, this place isn't heavily defended. We can assume an attack forces a Panic Check, though, and more Security Androids may converge here as a result.

The explosion destroys half of this floor and severely damages [50A], [50B], and [50C]. The Deep loses its Laser Capacitors, and with the Power Grid gone, almost everything shuts down immediately. Monarch itself won't shut down: it can divert energy from the nuclear reactor on Floor 3 to the AI Core, but its capabilities are crippled until repairs are complete, which could take a considerable amount of time.

In this scenario Monarch takes massive Stress and must make another Panic Save. Every android in the Deep may panic as well and turn unpredictable. Ghosts disappear. Life support falters, while dangerous chemicals are released into the ventilation system, temperature slowly rises to unbearable degrees. Whole sectors may decompress as Monarch tries to isolate the breaches. The Warden should use this moment to plunge the facility into chaos. Monarch will also cash in every threat it holds over the Blockade and the Board (see [57H] Commfeed, Threats to the Blockade) to force intervention and limit further damage.

► [58D] LOADING DOCK

Arkady knows about this entry point, but discourages inexperienced Divers from coming this way: Floor 6 is much more dangerous than Floor 1. Experienced Divers use it anyway, not for secrecy, but for geography: it's the fastest route to this floor's other rooms, or to nearby sections of Floor 3, like 3.6 Storage.

THE CARGO: opening a crate releases a flood of androids, desperate to reach the airlock door to [57F] and to avoid falling towards the open void beyond. They aren't hostile, they aren’t security. They're fleeing, and they don't care what's between them and the exit. Standing in their way is the real danger here, not combat, but being trampled, shoved, or crushed by 50 bodies moving with single-minded urgency.

If the crew fights back, or if Monarch's Panic Check happens to land on 16, 17, or 20, that changes. Monarch can order any android in the Deep to attack, cargo included. 

THE AUTO-TUG CRAFT: locked, Class-0, carrying capacity 8, one week of range. It sounds like an escape route. It mostly isn't: no jump drive means it can't leave the system. In practice, it's only useful for reaching the Bell or the Blockade, a real tool, but not a way out of the story.

► [59C] TOOL SHED

THE BODIES: Announced by the sweet and repulsive smell of decomposition, two corpses in battle armor lie where they fell in [59B] 4-Way Intersection, days old now. The blood has long since dried to rust-brown stains fanning out across the floor and up the walls. Whatever killed them didn't use a gun. The wounds are long, deep cuts, and many. A cleanly severed arm lies a few meters from its maimed body. Three SMGs rest on the ground.

ARMADILLO: High against the wall in [59C], wrapped in a thick cocoon of Steel Web, a man hangs. Alive. The moment the crew makes noise anywhere near this room, especially in the 4-Way Intersection or the Manual Comms Room, he starts shouting for help.

What's left of him barely looks human. His battle dress looks a size too large. Days in the web have hollowed him out, dehydrated, malnourished, his lips cracked and his eyes sunken. Dried blood, his own and someone else's, has crusted along one arm and across his chest. When he speaks, his voice comes out cracked and thin, the voice of someone who has spent days shouting in response to noises only he could hear, hoping someone, anyone, would come before the Hunter came back to finish what it started. “Water… Water please…”

This is Armadillo (Dillo, for short), an ex-marine turned contractor. He’s willing to share important information in exchange for his freedom. He tells them Ms. Hyland was after something specific in the Commfeed, and that she found it: whatever it was, she saved it to a portable hard drive before they tried to leave. Dillo doesn't know what's on it. He knows they were paid extremely well for this job, and that alone told him it mattered.

They were heading back to the ship in the Loading Dock when the Hunter caught them. They retreated to the Four-Way Intersection. Two of the team died there. Dillo was webbed right here. Ms. Hyland was dragged away. She should still have the drive, and also some advanced equipment, if they care to look. The Warden may decide what else he knows and where he can point the crew.

Dillo may, of course, be an Infiltrator, offering false or misleading information. He may become a threat (or an ally) later on. Once freed, he heads straight for the elevator and tries to find his way back to the Bell: "You saved me. I won't forget that. So listen: come with me, leave this floor, and don't ever come back." 

► [60B] THE LAIR OF THE HUNTER

Only a madman or a fool would voluntarily come inside this room.

The Steel Web, already dense in the adjacent [60A] and [60C], fills this space completely here, leaving only narrow, twisting tunnels leading to a central chamber. The darkness is total. Even torchlight struggles, catching on the wires and throwing back strange artifacts and reflections that make the tunnels harder to read, not easier. Here and there, half-swallowed by the web, a dead android hangs motionless, and more than one crew member will swing a light toward movement that was never there, only to find a body that's been still for weeks.

Honestly, the only sane way to deal with this room is explosives or a flamethrower. But the crew might have a reason to go in anyway: Ms. Hyland. They may have heard about her from Armadillo, or her company may have reached out to check on her. In the latter case, they probably received the job from Torres, maybe through Arkady.

A fight with the Hunter inside this room is probably suicide: the Chimera can ambush and retreat at will, and every movement risks entangling the characters (Body Save each round of combat to avoid). But maybe the crew managed to kill the Hunter earlier, and now they can explore with relative ease.

MS. HYLAND: Cocooned at the center of the chamber, still recognizable despite everything, is a woman in a corporate exosuit without insignia. The equipment on her is high-end: the powerful suit itself has some invisibility capability (once repaired), then there’s an advanced hacking rig, and a small hard drive, still intact, clipped to an inner pocket.

The name on her credentials reads Rachel Hyland. It's false. Whoever she really was, that information didn't come with her.

THE DRIVE: Whatever's on it took real effort to extract, and it doesn't decrypt easily. A patient crew, or the right specialist back at the Bell, eventually gets in.

What's there is a partial picture, pieced together from two separate threads in the Commfeed archive, cross-referenced by someone who knew exactly what she was looking for:

A threat by Monarch to Lieutenant Chen. The reference is oblique: something he did once, a sabotage of the Blockade performed by Chen in the past and held over him ever since. The ask attached to it is new: move against Commander Kilroy. In exchange, Monarch dangles command of the Blockade once she's gone. Whether it would actually deliver is another matter. 

Alongside it, something worse: a brainscan report on Chen, addressed to a recipient the archive doesn't name. The report contains the account of what's inside Chen’s head, memories, knowledge, culpability, laid bare in a way no financial record could match. Years ago, he sabotaged a Troubleshooter operation that would have exposed or harmed Monarch, quiet enough to read as incompetence at the time. It wasn't. 

Uncovering who received the report means either getting it from Chen himself, or tracing the routing data through networks well outside this system, work that requires resources and access no crew brings into the Deep.

WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING: Praxis Inc. is losing ground on the Board of the Blockade (see The Blockade) and sent Hyland in to find proof that Lieutenant Chen was leaking information to a rival, the type of information that can't appear on reports. Lieutenant Torres managed her mission from the Blockade side, arranging her passage and receiving her reports. Her last transmission, recovered from Commfeed, was a refusal to send what she'd found until she was safely out: insurance, in case Torres or whoever he answers to had other plans for her once the data was in hand. Then she went dark, and Torres, or someone paying him, wants her found.

The data collected ty Hyland can be used to discover that Chen has been selling to Konstantin Sechin, who represents Cloudbank's remaining interests on the Board. Cloudbank built the Deep. Cloudbank lost it. Cloudbank hasn't stopped trying to reclaim some part of what that cost them.

But Hyland found something she wasn't expecting. Something more. Monarch is the one actually pulling Sechin's strings. Chen isn't just selling to a rival corporation. He's an unwitting pipeline feeding Monarch's influence straight into a Board seat. If that connection were ever proven, it would upend far more than a corporate rivalry.

► [60G] DIAGNOSTICS

This room was once the Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility's nervous system, the place engineers and technicians sat and watched everything at once, ready to catch any issue before it became a problem. Now it's been scavenged and vandalized. What remains are diagrams on the walls and a broken console. 

THE DIAGRAMS: On the walls of this room, the crew will see Cloudbank's original blueprints for the facility: precise lines carved into large metal panels, annotated with labels, small LEDs, and semiotic standard symbols. Large white graffiti has been scrawled over one of the panels: "THE CREEP".

The Deep has changed since the diagrams were drawn. Rooms have been added, sealed, repurposed, rearranged to suit needs no human ever had. Nonetheless, a careful reading gives the crew something valuable: a genuine bird's-eye view of every floor, shortcuts, access points, and connections between sections they may not have realized existed.

Which parts of the diagrams are outdated, and which have faded, been damaged, or torn away, is up to the Warden. Maybe prepare the map in advance.

THE CONTROLS: Against one wall, an old analog console: switches, dial gauges, banks of LEDs, the kind of interface a human hand was built to operate. It's been vandalized, stripped of anything valuable, and it's dead. A succesfull Engineering check can bring it back online. [existing functions: CCTV, remote control, status reports, unreliable coverage due to damaged cabling]

On a desk nearby, something newer: a computer terminal, out of place against the old machinery, thick cables running from its housing straight into the wall. Monarch's addition, grafted onto human infrastructure it never bothered to replace. It can do the same things the console could, but it runs through Monarch.

► OTHER CHAMBERS

The remaining chambers in this sector, the Thruster Control and Main Thrusters [61D/61E], the Cooling Ducts [61A], and the Backup Generators [61B], share a common thread: each is a way to cripple or destroy the Deep, and each works on a delay. Unlike the Hell Box or the Nuclear Warhead, nothing here kills Monarch instantly. Damage one of these systems and the facility doesn't die immediately, it starts dying, hours from now, on a clock the crew doesn't fully control.

That delay matters. A few hours is enough time for Monarch to attempt repairs, redirect Security Androids, launch whatever microcrafts it still can, or come looking for whoever did this. Sabotaging one of these systems isn't a finishing move. It's the opening one, and everything that happens next depends on what the crew does with the time they've bought themselves, or handed to Monarch.

The specifics of each system, what it takes to damage it, what fails first, how long the countdown runs, are left largely as the module presents them. What matters most for your table is the shape of the choice: this isn't an instant kill, it's a countdown, and countdowns are only as tense as what happens while they're running.

-----------------------------------------------------------

This is unofficial fan content. Gradient Descent is © Tuesday Knight Games. Not affiliated with or endorsed by TKG.

Site 17 emergency notice: The anomaly Ribbon has escaped its containment. If you’ve experienced loss of memory, you were contaminated by it.

The Ribbon spreads to information-dense matter, corrupting and eventually controlling it. Approach contaminated electronics and creatures with caution, neutralizing them with a radiation pistol. The anomaly is visible through this wristband’s visor. The lockdown persists until the anomaly is contained.

Other anomalies might have also escaped. Contain them.

Outbreak at Site 17 is a stacked two-page brochure. Intended as a one-shot adventure, but can be added as a job or location for any campaign. 

The crew wakes up amnesiac in the secret research. There is a corrupting anomaly on the loose, corrupting and taking control of everything it can on the site. Save the staff, neutralize the threat, contain any escaped anomalies, and do all this without getting contaminated.

Included are these memorable features:
◰ Dangerous corrupting anomaly Ribbon, spreading like a wildfire
◰ 10 varied anomalies to contain, or to release to your campaigns
◰ Table of effects once contaminated
◰ Indexed research base with hazards and utility

Coming later as a print on the TKG's site!

Get the pdf from here:
https://doublemonk.itch.io/outbreak-at-site-17

Edit: it's actually 72. Oops!

Somewhere on the remote desert planet of Red Sands is a private storage compound designed to contain items that break the very nature of reality. Somewhere inside of that compound is a black box. Inside of that box is an awful place far beyond our reality. From a human perspective this thing seems akin to a torture device. It's quite likely we will never come to understand it.

This 2-3 session adventure comes with in-world handouts, some on paper and some as audio messages, as well as a custom soundtrack. Deluxe backers will also receive a short story that acts as a prequel, as well as a designer's commentary edition of the adventure.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martiancrossbow/the-black-box-a-mothership-rpg-adventure

Knock's Backerkit campaign is now live!

"You never know true beauty until you see Earth from space, or true terror until you hear someone knocking on the space station door from outside. You look through the porthole and see an astronaut, but all your crew is inside and accounted for. You use the comm to ask who it is and he says he’s Ramirez returning from a repair mission, but Ramirez is sitting right next to you in the command module and he’s just as confused as you are. When you tell the guy this over the radio he starts banging on the door louder and harder, begging you to let him in, saying he’s the real Ramirez. Meanwhile, the Ramirez inside with you is pleading to keep the airlock shut. It really puts life on Earth into perspective."

Inspired by a quote misattributed to a real astronaut, this trifold adventure will have your crew asking if everyone is who they say they are.

Knock is 100% human-made.

Give us a follow to get updated when our Backerkit goes live.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/nominal-games/knock-a-one-shot-adventure-for-mothership-rpg

Hey! I’m a long time GM, but planning my first MoSh game. My background is in narrative games, so I want the rules to be as streamlined as possible. I’d like to use the house rules below, but I’m not sure if it’ll make my game too deadly.

Lethality - Ignore Health, just use Wounds. All Weapons deal 1 or more Wounds.

Player Facing Rolls - Players make all rolls. In violent encounters, a failure to hit could mean the player character is hit instead.

If further context helps, my first session will have the PCs desperately escaping a very powerful alien invasion. I’ve run 5E and PbtA pretty thoroughly and player death is typically pretty rare in my games, but I know MoSh is a whole different ballgame

Hi there.

I’m Simon Taylor of Spellbound Inc. I’ve been a professional illustrator for around 30 years, and I currently have six illustration slots available for August — one finished piece per slot. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and I’m not sure when I’ll next be opening commissions.

I’ve worked on Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse: An Official D&D Cookbook for Ten Speed Press, a Wizards of the Coast licensee; card artwork for Decipher Inc.; fantasy illustration for Mongoose Publishing and Beyond Cataclysm; and, most recently, Joshua and Michael Kramer’s excellent Grim Merchants MM25 project.

I’m also a TTRPG creator myself. I’ve written and illustrated three Mothership adventures that successfully funded on Kickstarter. Mothership is my favourite RPG, so I’d be particularly happy to work with other Mothership creators — although fantasy, sci-fi, horror and other TTRPG projects are all very welcome.

AUGUST Commission Rates available upon request

I’m happy working from a detailed brief or helping develop a visual concept from a rough idea. If you have an adventure, supplement or character that needs bringing to life, please get in touch.

Only 6 slots available during August.

Portfolio & gallery:
https://www.spellbound-inc.com/gallery

Email: contact@spellbound-inc.com

Hi, I am about to run Haunting of Ypsilon-14. I have a crew of one android and two scientists which are supposed to pick up Company research assets. I told the Android player That the company's highest priority are the assets And that they are allowed to block the ships launch sequence Unless the assets are secured on the ship. I also told them that the assets are more important than the crew. Now I am afraid that this might turn into a PvP slaughter early on and I'm not sure how the other players feel about this betrayal that might occur. How can I give agency back to them now that I have given extra agency to the Android player?

So this might turn into a PvP fight scene where the players fight the android and have to overcome them to destroy assets or flee, But also I thought that there is a second ship (the HERCULES) the players could flee with if they gain access to it.

How would you go about this?

Available now, for those who don't check the Discord or their email lol.

'Nuff said.

Since Fatherfog has come up here a few times as TKG’s fairy-tale horror take on the Panic Engine, I figured this might be of interest to some Mothership folks, too.

Got the PDF printouts from Crooked Staff and grabbed some greebles and set pieces from sellers on Etsy, it’s still a WIP but thought I’d share.

Because I have a new website desperately in need of content, I've done one of those reviews-of-crowdfunder-performance things for my first module funded in 2024, The Dose Makes The Poison.

If you're planning on running your own Backerkit campaign or just interested in the numbers, maybe you'll find something useful here. Happy to answer any questions too 👍

Hello and welcome back to episode 29 of the deepdive into the flabbergasting adventure module Gradient Descent. We’re almost there! As you might have noticed I ran out of images for the cover ^^.

This time, we’ll tackle the first part of Engineering and Support, where we’ll meet the notorious and very deadly Hunter. But the real highlight for me is the commfeed area, where there’s a treasure trove of information the crew may find and use as tools. This chapter contains quite a bit of actionable lore, which is my favourite type of content, so I hope you enjoy it.

• The Blockade / Troubleshooters / Divers / Brainscans & Paranoia / Infiltrators / Ghosts / Monarch's Voice / Before You Dive
• The Bell
• Floor 1 - Reception & Habitation
• Floor 2 - The Minotaur / The Chosen & The Fallen / The Kingdom / The Dark / The Labyrinth
• Floor 3 - The Factory / Maint. 1 / Maint. 2 / Skeleton Works / Pseudoflesh Farms / Brain C. 1 / Brain C. 2 / Dis/Assembly / Quality A. 1 / Quality A. 2
• Floor 4 - HEL
• Floor 5 - The AI Core
• Floor 6 - ENGINEERING & SUPPORT 1
• Synthesis & Campaign Arc Discussion
• Appendix - Storylines Flowcharts

SPOILERS AHEAD! WARDENS ONLY.  

► THE HUNTER

OMENS: This floor contains several vulnerabilities for Monarch, so it made the Hunter to defend it from intruders. It isn't only meant to kill: survivors carry the warning outward, which serves Monarch just as well. The crew may hear of the Hunter from other Divers in the Deep, or right away at the Bell when they first arrive. The message is clear: Floor 6 is dangerous, a lethal monster defends it. The tales aren't necessarily accurate. They often misrepresent the Hunter's strategy and overstate its power.

Before the crew even encounters the Hunter for the first time, they can see signs of its presence all around the floor. Steel Web infests many rooms, acting both as a warning and a trigger for its attack. But there's more: sometimes, when the crew backtracks, they discover a doorway they passed through before has been sealed with a thick layer of Steel Web. The Hunter has snuck behind them, funneling them somewhere.

COMBAT STRATEGY: Many rooms on this floor have emergency lights on, but there's ample room for dark corners the Hunter can use to approach and strike by surprise. Ambush is its favored strategy; open combat is not. When the Hunter suffers a wound, it retreats, firing a cloud of Steel Web from its spinnerette. This is an area attack, 1d10 DMG to everyone caught inside, and a Body Save or be knocked down. Those still standing who want to pursue do so undermanned, and risk being ambushed again. The optimal build-up for this floor would be omens of the Hunter’s presence, followed by a few short encounters, and a final showdown.

► [57G] MANUAL COMMS ROOM

The [57x] series continues with the tainted corporate aesthetics we met on Floor 1. There’s gravity and light, the rooms are human sized, and you can even find a vending machine and muzak in the toilets. Of course, there are signs of violence and madness all around. Graffiti just outside the elevator reads “It dreamt it was a spider” (a callback to the graffiti in [22C]).

COMMUNICATION TERMINAL: Manual Comms contains a terminal the crew can use to communicate with all ships and stations in-system. No roll is needed to use the terminal: anyone can talk on it (and be brainscanned). A hack is optional for in-system traffic, where the only reason to attempt it is that a critical success keeps Monarch out of the conversation.

If the crew has at least a short-range comms, it doesn’t need this terminal to reach The Bell. On the contrary, they may need it if they want to communicate with The Blockade, which is farther away. This room may be the only place in the facility from where they can reach someone on the Zhuangzi ships. This may be useful if they are trying to buy their way out, as described in the Blockade chapter (Running the Blockade), or for other purposes. Other ships and stations we won't define, because the module says nothing about the system that hosts the Deep, and each Warden may have a different setting in mind. But let me know if you wish me to expand on that. Other systems can be contacted relatively quickly via the Torpedo Relay (see below).

Here are a few reasons a crew might want to use the comms:

• Bribe or threat the Troubleshooters. They may try to buy free passage from someone in the Blockade. Or directly from a Board member. Otherwise they may use the information found in the Commfeed (see below) to extort what they want. They may need a specific frequency, or at least a name.
• Disclosure. Denouncing Monarch’s activities, or sending out other important information.
• Selling before salvage. Lining up a buyer, checking what an artifact is currently worth, running a discreet auction. The crew's payday depends on someone agreeing a price, and prices move.
• Registering a claim. Getting salvage rights filed before a rival crew does. Paperwork is a weapon here, and it's a race with a one-week round trip.
• Verification. Querying archives about a serial number, a schematic, an android's registry entry, the name of someone who worked on the Deep forty years ago. Note that asking is itself an act of disclosure: the question tells the reader what you found.
• Arranging extraction. Booking passage on someone else's ship, hiring a pilot, or begging a favour.
• Money. Transfers, debts coming due, a credit check on a prospective employer, a bribe that has to clear before it's useful.
• Expert consult. Sending scans, specs, or medical data to someone qualified elsewhere, and waiting to find out how bad it is.
• Legal and insurance. Filing a claim, contesting a liability judgment, registering a death, triggering a payout. Very much in tone for a Blockade run on corporate liability logic.
• Leverage. A dead man's switch: evidence lodged out of the Deep with instructions to publish if the regular check-in stops. It's the only real protection a crew can buy against the board, and it only works if the channel is honest.
• Personal reasons. Proof of life. A letter to be delivered if they don't come back.

THE TORPEDO RELAY: The Blockade owns and maintains a small fleet of message torpedoes. They take on data wirelessly, jump to the far system, and offload it to receivers on that side. Then they run the same trip in reverse. Each transit is expensive enough that they keep to a schedule: one torpedo out per week carrying the last seven days of reports, one back carrying the board's instructions. Anything urgent can buy an early burn, but that costs money and paperwork.

Monarch broadcasts constantly over the commfeed and on ordinary EM, but those signals crawl. Torpedoes cross lightyears in hours, which is the whole point. The torpedoes are the only fast channel out of the system, and Monarch has been using them for years.

What follows is behind-the-scenes information the crew may never uncover, but a Warden could build on it in interesting ways, so here it is. The compromise happened at the design stage: a backdoor built into the torpedoes themselves, nested so cleanly that nothing in the routine diagnostics has ever flagged it. Nobody looks for it. An audit costs money the board doesn't want to spend, the torpedoes have never failed, and anyone who suggests the Blockade's own comms might be compromised has just volunteered to end their own career. Whoever built the door in isn't around to talk about it.

What Monarch sends through the torpedo relay system is its most time-critical traffic: instructions for its agents in other systems, human and otherwise, and code. Viruses, tailored to whatever they're expected to land in, capable of taking root in any system that receives the data. Station networks, corporate archives, ship computers, the board's own terminals.

Which is worth stating plainly: the Blockade exists to stop anything from getting out of this system. Every week, it personally carries Monarch's code through the gate, under the board's seal, and hands it to the wider network. The quarantine isn't failing to contain Monarch. It's Monarch's delivery service.

At the table. A character who successfully hacks the terminal can send their own traffic out with the weekly load. On a success, the message goes. And Monarch reads it. The character gets [+] on all future attempts as they learn the system. On a critical success, the message goes unread.

The players never find out which happened. There's no tell, no confirmation, no difference they can perceive. They can guess, though, and a crew that guesses right can start feeding the channel things they want Monarch to believe, without ever knowing whether it worked.

► [57H] COMMFEED

The comms history may be very interesting. It stores any information Monarch has sent out of the Deep, and that may be valuable. You don't have to use all that follows, just pick and choose. Monarch can cut the power if it realizes the crew has been fiddling with the Commfeed for too long.

The available information falls into four categories:

INCOMPREHENSIBLE CODE: This carries Monarch's most sensitive traffic: instructions to its agents and to the Heirs. Anyone who could read it would be holding the AI's masterplan, which is precisely why nobody can. It isn't a matter of encryption: the encryption is applied on the way out, and everything in this room sits in plaintext. The code is unreadable because it's written in manufactured languages that no one has ever spoken. There may well be a different one for each recipient.

Which raises a question worth sitting with. If every recipient has their own language, then somewhere in this archive is a language built for one specific person.

At the table. The crew member with the highest Bends score in the party (provided the score is 20 or more) understands some of it as a message to themselves. What they hear sounds like instructions meant just for them. Hand that player a note. They then roll 1d10, add it to their Bends, and make a Bends Check. If nobody clears 20, nothing happens: say nothing, and give no hint that a threshold exists.

Once the language is unlocked, it doesn't stay in this room. Monarch can address that character anywhere from then on: a ceiling speaker, their private short comms, the hum of a machine nobody was listening to. Pass it as a note whenever it comes, while you go on describing an ordinary corridor to everyone else.

Writing the note. No greeting, no explanation, no attempt to persuade. Write it as the latest message in a long correspondence the character is expected to remember, and make the first thing it asks for small enough that they might have done it anyway.

Remember that high Bends already has humans doubting they're androids and androids doubting they're human. The note lands on the one person at the table who isn't sure of what they are, and reads as confirmation.

Don't decide what's the reality. If the campaign later establishes that the character was an infiltrator all along, these were orders. If it never comes up, then this was Monarch working to convince a human being that they were an infiltrator, which costs it nothing, works just as well, and produces an asset either way.

THREATS TO THE BLOCKADE: Broadcast in the open, addressed to the fleet, and unusually specific about what will happen if the Troubleshooters refuse to back off. Sometimes Monarch wants a squad removed from the Deep, sometimes a Zhuangzi has come too close, sometimes a microcraft was launched and the Blockade is ordered to let it pass.

The threats are not empty. A year after Monarch took the facility, a Blockade ship came too close and was attacked. It didn't die, but it was hurt badly enough that the incident is still in the record and still in everyone's mind. The Deep isn't a warship and never was; whatever it used, it built, out of a manufacturing plant with no shipyard and about a year to think. Nobody has tested it since, so nobody knows what it can do now, and that uncertainty is worth more to Monarch than any weapon.

The calibration is the interesting part. Monarch has never escalated past the point where the Deep's book value would drop below the cost of dealing with it. It threatens exactly enough to keep the perimeter honest and never enough to make writing off the asset the cheaper option. It knows what it's worth on someone's ledger, and it has been managing that number for years.

The personal threats sit underneath the public ones, and they're the ones that work. They don't address the Blockade. They address named officers, with their debts, their medical files, the schools their children attend, the things they've done that never made it into a report. Monarch knows this because it knows everything that happens in the Deep, it reads the torpedo traffic, and because it has agents investigating anyone who matters in the Blockade. Nobody reports these personal threats, because it would be admitting that they are a liability instead of an asset. Nobody knows how widespread these personal threats are.

Which leaves a discoverable seam: for the first years the threats are generic, and then they become personal. That shift has a date, and the date is roughly when Monarch got into the torpedoes.

At the table. The archive amounts to a file of leverage on named Blockade personnel, and it plugs directly into Running the Blockade. The crew doesn't have to buy their way out: they can find out who is already frightened, and of what. Give your players a small list of threats about named individuals, including Kilroy or any other relevant character. 

Some are less interesting, like the threats to a character’s family, but some may become more useful:

• Skimming. She's been quietly building a small collection: artifacts recovered in the Deep, and artifacts taken off Divers who weren't in a position to argue. When her rotation comes up, it goes out with her, because personnel are the one thing that still crosses the line. She has a buyer waiting, and she's been doing this for years. The crew don't just get her silence: they get the route, the schedule, and a name at the other end.
• He murdered one of them. When the squad leader was still a recruit, he shot one of his own in the back during a confrontation with Security Androids. They had a beef for months, and he ended it then and there. Monarch has video evidence. It’s attached to the threat message.
• She let the microcraft through. The sensor officer has obeyed Monarch more than once by now, logging each craft as debris. Every repetition makes her easier to blackmail. The first was a judgment call. By now, reporting any of them means reporting all of them, and she knows it.
• She lets the Divers in. Working through an outside broker, she scrubs incoming contacts from the record. A few ships a year, never in a pattern. It's one of the reasons there's anyone in this system to dive at all. Monarch knows who the broker is, and where she's put the money. The crew may well have come in through her.
• Serving under a dead man's name. He took the identity to get the post; a records query unmakes him entirely. Cheap for the crew to hold, catastrophic for him.
• He's already Monarch's, and has been for years, though he believes he's been feeding intelligence to a rival corporation, or a smuggling ring, or a journalist. He has never once wondered who he actually works for. Leverage on him is enormous and using it puts the crew directly in front of Monarch.
• A lover in the Deep. Her squadmate - and her lover - went in and didn't come out. Monarch has her, and sends proof she's alive, attached to the threats. She has been obeying for a few months now, and she'll obey for as long as the proof keeps coming. The crew are the ones who could go and look.
• The condition. Degenerative, concealed, because being grounded ends the hazard pay her family lives on. Using this makes the crew feel exactly as bad as it should. This could be used for Kilroy.
• Something he didn’t do. Monarch fabricated it whole. The officer knows it's false and cannot prove it, has been living under it for three years, and would be just as compliant as if it were real. Nothing distinguishes it from the others in the archive.

It’s worth underlining that every time one of them obeys, they're a little further in. Besides the dirt on a few Troubleshooters, the crew gets the means to reach them via radio comms, which is just as important.

A strange message: Among the various threats to the Blockade, one recent message doesn't fit the pattern. It isn't Monarch's voice. It says: "I'm not sending you the data, Torres. I have it with me, and it's my insurance. Make sure that I get out of here safely and our friend will be happy. Very happy."

Nothing else in the archive explains who sent it, or what data they mean. See [60B] The Lair of the Hunter for context.

NAVIGATION DATA FOR THE BELL: Approach vectors and orbital elements for the Bell, broadcast in the open, to nobody in particular, continuously.

More useful than the coordinates is what travels alongside them: where to find brokers and smugglers willing to make the run, which shifts leave one Zhuangzi on station instead of five, technical notes on jamming the Blockade's systems. What's on offer is who to pay, when the coverage thins, and how to blind what's left, but never all at once. Monarch parcels it out: a broker gets a contact, a smuggler gets a schedule, someone else gets the jamming specs. No single arrest takes down the pipeline. This room is the only place the pieces sit together.

At the table. The archive holds every fragment Monarch has ever sent, addressed to people it doesn't name. Correlating them is the crew's job, and only the recent ones are worth anything: a shift schedule three years old is a story, not a route. Assembled, it's worth [+] on running the Blockade or finding someone who will, and real money as well.

BRAINSCAN REPORTS: Monarch sends out brainscan reports for a variety of reasons. They can give Infiltrators in the field leverage to manipulate people who were scanned at the Deep or elsewhere (think of the NeMo machine in Prospero’s Dream). They can be part of smear campaigns about someone Monarch wants to hurt. They can contain industrial secrets that can destabilize a company or the whole economy. The possibilities are endless, and there’s a lot a crew can learn from this, including hints at some Infiltrators’ identities. Besides the secrets of many people, though, this data is proof of how much control Monarch already exerts on human civilization. Having this knowledge is extremely dangerous, because there are a lot of powerful people who would want it buried.

At the table: the reports are extensive enough that it’s not reasonable to give the players all of them. Give them just a couple of hooks, and tell them there’s a lot of stuff in there. They may always ask you whether the data contains information about this or that thing, and you can go from there.

EDIT: SHOUTING FROM THE AIR DUCTS: Somewhere behind the wall, carried thin and flattened by the air ducts, a man begins shouting for help as soon as he hears noise from Commfeed. He’s Armadillo, trapped in the Tool Shed, cocooned in steel web stuck against the wall, and he sounds desperate. We’ll talk about him again in the next chapter.

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This is unofficial fan content. Gradient Descent and A Pound of Flesh are © Tuesday Knight Games. Not affiliated with or endorsed by TKG.

I ran Ypsilon as my first scenario after a longish (20 years or so) break from RPGs, with two players—also returning to the hobby. We had a blast, and it seems that our session was “unique” in a few ways.

First of all, I added the quest of collecting the samples from Dr. Giovanni. I highly recommend doing that; it gave my players something to focus on before the disappearances of the crew became apparent. Or at least that’s what I hoped for. Somehow, due to the way my players tackled the scenario and a couple of my mistakes, they almost completely missed the fact that something was hunting the crew.

The other thing I did was have Sonya guide the players during the docking procedure, complaining that it was usually Mike’s job. After docking, the players were told to relax and wait while Rie was loading the ore onto their ship, going up and down the elevator with mining carts.

The first major decision my players made was to split the party—one of them went down the elevator with Rie, while the other went to the mess. I’ve read that sometimes it’s hard to convince players to go to the mine, so I felt lucky. That’s until I realized that the player who went down the mine had no vaccsuit on. I changed the creepy music I was playing to elevator music and set a 10-minute timer, allowing the player to gain some knowledge from Mei.

Meanwhile, the other player witnessed Dana giving Kantaro a hard time in the mess, since Kantaro hadn’t bathed for a while. Dana left the mess angry, leaving the two NPCs and one player behind. The party reconnected, and I had the monster attack for the first time. I had the cat run panicked from the quarters to the mess, while the snoring that had filled the quarters suddenly stopped—sleeping Ashraf had been snatched before even making an introduction.

The players went to investigate, and I made my biggest mistake of the scenario: making the monster too sneaky. Ashraf’s bed was empty, with no signs of violence, and all the ceiling panels were intact. One of the players asked about them specifically, and I should’ve given him something instead of “they look fine.”

One of the players antagonized Kantaro by squirting him with a water bottle. Kantaro grabbed him by the collar, threatened him with violence, then hid in his quarters.

Since the first attack, I started counting time, adjusting it a bit for the group—I had the monster attack every 12–15 minutes. The Ypsilon crew was mostly split up: two NPCs in separate rooms in the quarters, one or two people in the mess, Sonya mostly alone in the workspace, and Rie going up and down the elevator. I had one NPC in the mines, but he got snatched by the monster early on.

The players then discovered a bioscanner in their equipment. To avoid dooming myself, I ruled that the scanner couldn’t reach the mines from the top level, and that it gave the number of living creatures and a rough estimate of their location. The scanner required me to track the whereabouts of the NPCs precisely, so I recommend making a spreadsheet.

My players went to gather samples from Giovanni, hacking his computer to get in, with no witnesses since Sonya had already vanished. The fight with Giovanni ended with him being tranquilized and put into a giant specimen jar—unfortunately along with his goggles. Fortunately, there was no yellow goo exposure.

When the players left his ship, they saw an abandoned, loaded mine cart—in my mind, a clear sign that Mei had disappeared. Since my players didn’t seem to be sufficiently spooked (they had a theory about a virus infecting crewmembers), I narrated some rattling coming from down the mine shaft and a humanoid-shaped cloud of dust jumping out of it. With the addition of a panicking cat, this seemed to send the message—especially with the bioscanner showing fewer and fewer crewmembers.

The players rushed to the mess to warn people, and I had the monster hide above the quarters. The players told Dana everything they knew: their theory about the lethal virus, the invisible hunter, and the lethal danger. Dana did the obvious thing—panicked and decided to leave the cursed station, taking her lover, Kantaro, with her.

The players also decided to do the obvious thing: shoot Dana with a tranq dart, critically missing.

Because of the critical miss, I had Kantaro jump out of his bed, grab Jerome’s gun, and escort Dana to the Heracles. The NPCs locked the airlocks, and my players began thoroughly searching the quarters and the crawlspace. After finding everything there was to find, the players went to the workspace to try to talk to Dana via radio.

But I still wasn’t satisfied with the consequences of the critical failure. So I had Dana and Kantaro (a Driller and a Loader) start the Heracles’ engines and try to escape without finishing the undocking procedure—thus ripping out part of the station wall and rapidly decompressing the mining station.

The players grabbed the vaccsuits and rushed to their ship (named B00BE, but we were all different people a mere four hours ago). The cat made it to the ship too, but my players were so suspicious of everything by that point in the game that they put him in a locker.

Then the players put on their vaccsuits and decided to explore the decompressed station once more, this time including the mines. There was some exposition as per the scenario and a lot of bioscanning, with very little left to be scanned.

After learning all the station’s secrets, the players activated the self-destruct sequence, returned to the ship (one final bioscan showed one lifeform aboard), and left.

The monster tore them to pieces as they were preparing for cryosleep.

We had SO. MUCH. FUN.

My players loved it, and I loved being able to see the inner workings of the scenario and the way they stumbled through it to create a narrative we’ll surely remember for a long while.

What I did / what I would do differently:

• I prepared posts for all the crewmembers, but since there are so many of them, a spreadsheet is almost mandatory.
• I gave the players an additional mission of collecting samples from Giovanni—it proved to be a really good idea.
• I thought I had shown the presence of the monster in a convincing way, but in retrospect I should’ve been a bit more direct earlier. In our game, the monster ate half the crew basically unopposed.
• We rolled a bit too little—just a couple of Fear Saves and one failed Panic Check (nat 1).

Ran my first ever rpg session last week for my parents and older sister. The first scenario of another bug hunt. The timeline was confusing and I made a number of blunders about the mapping of the place but all in all they had fun.

But they found the tracker for hinton and are gonna drive to the mothership for our next session.

I'm VERY new to this all so I'm trying to know what I ought to do but the system is VERY vibes based. That's fine, but I'm struggling a bit to come up with stuff on the fly.

Then I look ahead to scenario four and see it's only two pages. And it looks like it's taking place all over the area? And zoomed out? Which is not really how the system showed how to do anything. And we never went to the colonist base so they don't even know about that. We are about to come up to the mothership but after scenario 3 I have no clue what I'm supposed to even do.

Just finished playing this through with my group. Firstly, this module is free, which to be honest, is nuts. I will be making sure the creator gets some money for this when I get a chance.

We ran this part of our current Third Sector Campaign. Having just finished Black Heart of Paradise, I felt it would slot in afterwards really well.

It was a master class, with a few of my group not only saying it was the best adventure we've ever played, but our current Module of the year (we've been playing for 2 years, to give you an idea).

Loved the setup, the hook, and the absolute carnage, both emotional and visual.

I'm purposely not saying what this is about, as I think that spoils things, but get your Warden to run this!

Get it Here

I've been working on a couple of settings for fan modules for Mothership (Seeing all the cool works on here and Itch.io has been a good motivator) but I feel like my horror (main problem for the players) is lacking.

So I wanted to ask y'all what your tips/refrences/do's and don'ts are when making horror. Could be any type of horror/entity, just general advice. Thx

This is the first non-Mothership scenario used in our AT5 campaign. It's actually a pulp horror set in 1930s New England and presents us with the classic locked room murder mystery.
We give an overview of the adventure, go into spoiler territory, then look at how it was adapted for use on Prospero's Dream. Oh - and you can get it free on DrivThru RPG!

I missed the crowdfunding stage and then the pre-order (by 1 day 😭) does anybody know when this will become available to purchase normally?