Mothership
Gradient Descent Session 11
July 5th, 2021
Players: Brendan, Evan, Stephen
More chit-chat with Silus as the party move through the Pseudoflesh Farms on his pointless errand to feed “the maw”. The party move past the giant lake of pseudomilk and on to the eel storage. Here they found rows upon rows of eels in cryrostorage. They are admonished by Silus for nicking a few pods to take with them. Who knows when a frozen eel might come handy. The parties android coterie each take an eel. The room is quiet otherwise, besides the hum of the refrigeration units.
Moving on the party enters the head sculpting room, a horrific sight. The group must make their way through the rows open rows of heads, each being sculpted by strange tongue like devices reaching out from the ground. It’s all quite dense, so making it through without getting licked by one of these tongues requires some swift reflexes from the group.
Finally the group find themselves in the Waste Flesh Reclamation room, where they try and placate Silus by feeding the huge maw that takes up the middle of the room. Conversation continues with Silus about whether the amount of food they are feeding the maw really is substantial enough to constitute a feeding, and then more conversation about its relationship with Monarch.
The group moves on, heading up into a small maintenance room. Hazard strips mark a access hatch on the floor. Silus chirps up once more, warning the players off. Do they listen? Of course not.
The hatch goes down down down for a long while. They lose gravity at some point. The air is super cooled helium, their vacsuits working overtime. They drift for hours. And then they are deposited into a large open space, a cavern of slate. In the centre of the space, an upside down mountain, wires and cables flocking around it. They have found Monarch. There is silence save for the hum of the supercomputers.
Their is an obvious tear in the mountain, one they enter. Behind them they can hear the sounds of pursuers. They explore the mountain, looking for a place to use their Helbox. Kjell is on guard, floating up above the entrance to the space. Suddenly a wave of security androids begins to pour into the room, searching for the intruders. The marine keeps those he can occupied and distracted.
The Hellbox does what it says on the box. Monarch is no more? Seemingly so. The security androids look to revert to non-hostile programming. They mill around like mall cops. The group push their way past the androids, and back up the shaft, back to the 3rd floor.
Commentary
Should I have thrown more obstacles in the players way: probably? I played Monarch a bit too passive in this first phase of the game. But surely a brilliant AI has some contingencies in place? Something for me to think about now!
I have some thoughts for what escaping from the station might look like: stay tuned!
I ended up writing a long review of this campaign and thoughts on running after we wrapped up this session.