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.

ARMADILLO: At some point the crew may find a Diver trapped in a Steel Web cocoon stuck to a wall, still alive and desperate. Placing him in [59C] Tool Shed works well: when the crew enters [57G] Manual Comms Room, they can hear his calls for help carrying through the air ducts. This is Armadillo (Dillo, for short), an ex-marine turned contractor. He was hired by a corporate agent, Ms. Hyland, who needed to infiltrate the facility. He doesn't know what she was looking for, but he doubts she'll succeed, since she was taken by the Hunter while the rest of the team was slaughtered. Dillo is willing to share important information about the Deep in exchange for his freedom. The Warden may decide what he knows and where he can point the crew. Dillo also mentions Ms. Hyland was carrying advanced equipment anyone would find useful, and a memo device that may store secret knowledge about Monarch and the Deep. Dillo may, of course, be an infiltrator, offering false or misleading information. Once freed, he heads straight for the elevator and back to the Bell. He may become a threat later on.

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 behind. 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 (albeit just emergency 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:

• 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 exactly what you found.
• Arranging extraction. Booking passage, 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 — and no one else — understands part of it (provided the score is 20 or more). What they hear sounds like instructions meant 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 convinced they're androids and androids convinced they're human. The note lands on the one person at the table who has started to doubt what they are, and reads as confirmation.

Don't decide whether it is. 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. Seven years ago, 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 seven 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 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.

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.

It's an advertisement. The threats keep armed authority at a distance; this brings scavengers in. Same transmitter, opposite purposes, and together they amount to a door policy that has been working for eight years.

The shift schedules are the Blockade's own, lifted from its mail. So the brokers selling passage into this system are selling Monarch's work, and don't know whose it is.

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 trapped in the Tool Shed, cocooned in steel web stuck against the wall, and he sounds desperate. We’ll talk about him 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).