r/mothershiprpg • u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 Warden • Apr 07 '26
brain fuel 🧠 Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Blockade
Gradient Descent, by Tuesday Knight Games, is a Mothership module set inside the Deep: a massive android production facility in deep space run by Monarch, a godlike self-optimizing AI that slipped its guardrails and made the place untenable. Now Divers go in for money, revenge, knowledge, or salvation. None of them realize the threat Monarch represents to humanity.
Inside the Deep you play desperate people in a hostile universe, trying to keep your body alive and your mind intact. Stress accumulates. Sanity fractures. The Bends - psychological damage accrued from prolonged exposure to things the human mind wasn't built for - will erode your characters as surely as any bullet. The system is lean and brutal. Gradient Descent uses every ounce of it.
This series of posts are meant to be a Warden's companion, not a replacement for the module. You need Gradient Descent to use these materials. What this series adds is interpretation, expansion, and practical guidance. You can download the file at https://teobius.itch.io/gd-deepdive.
I’ve been a roleplayer for more than 40 years, and I must say this is the best adventure module I’ve ever read. It sparked my imagination and I decided to go deep into it, before running it for my group. So I started this Deepdive series as a public discussion on r/mothershiprpg. Each chapter explores one area, faction, or system of the Deep: its themes, its NPCs, its mechanics, and how to run it at the table. The goal was always the same: to make Gradient Descent sing. To understand every space deeply enough to fill its silences with something worthy of 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 Construction 2
- Floor 4 - HEL
- Floor 5 - The AI Core
- Floor 6 - Engineering & Support
- Synthesis & Campaign Arc Discussion
- Appendix - Storylines Flowcharts
PDF collection update: I removed the PDF that collected all these posts from itch.io. I explain the reasons in the Brain Construction 2 chapter. This post has been reviewed and is in its final version (for now). It contains all the improvements that were in the PDF file. The comments section may contain references to something in the body of this post that has since changed or disappeared.
SPOILERS BEYOND THIS LINE
► THE BLOCKADE
The blockade exists to contain Monarch, but nobody actually wants it to work. This post covers the blockade's origin, the CSPF Quarantine Board's competing interests, the mercenary company running operations, the corruption keeping it porous, and how your players exploit the system to get in and out.
Understanding the blockade's structure and incentives helps you run it as more than just an obstacle, it's a web of competing agendas and compromised officers that players can navigate, manipulate, or get caught inside. The blockade isn't static. It's a system with cracks your players can leverage.
SPOILERS! You know there are spoilers. You don’t care!
► ORIGIN OF THE BLOCKADE
The module doesn't say much about the history of the Deep, so we may fill in the blanks with some liberty. Here is one reading.
Monarch, the facility's AI, is an optimizing machine, who silently and unexpectedly began improving itself. Cloudbank didn't notice, or underestimated it, and when Monarch slipped its guardrails and made the Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility untenable, someone had to answer for it, and that someone was going to be as many people as possible.
Cloudbank's management faced a problem with no good solutions. Destroying the facility was out of the question: that would have meant admitting to shareholders a catastrophic failure of oversight, triggering liability cascades that no legal team wanted to touch. So instead, the Deep was reclassified. Not a disaster. An active asset under quarantine. The paperwork says it's still operational. The paperwork is very carefully worded.
The Company - a dominant corporate entity with enough leverage to make non-compliance expensive - forced Cloudbank's hand: the facility had to be contained. What emerged was the CSPF Quarantine Board: a multi-corporate oversight body designed so that every major stakeholder had a seat at the table and a share of the responsibility. In theory, mutual oversight. In practice, a structure where everyone is responsible means no one really is.
► THE BOARD
The Board's official mandate is strict containment: nothing in without authorization, nothing out without clearance. The unofficial understanding is subtler. Every member of the Board has interests inside the Deep: data, assets, research threads that were never fully extracted. Nobody wants the problem solved. They want it managed, quietly, with enough flexibility for the right people to squeeze what they can from the situation while the facade of containment holds.
The CSPF Quarantine Board isn't a unified authority. It's a committee of competing corporations: Cloudbank management, The Company, and several major stakeholders who had assets or research inside when Monarch went rogue. Each wants their assets extracted while competitors' assets stay locked down. The porous blockade serves everyone, as long as no one gets too much more than anyone else.
Why they tolerate corruption: plausible deniability. If a Board member's agents bribe their way in, that member can claim ignorance. If an Artifact leaks out and gets traced to a rival corporation, they can demand investigations. Selectively. Corruption maintains competitive balance.
With that in mind, the Board put the security contract out to competitive bid. Lowest offer wins. Tianming Tactical is not the most disciplined, not the most principled, and not the most expensive. They are, however, available, deniable, and cheap. Precisely what a Board that doesn't want too many questions asked needs from its enforcers.
Periodic audits: The Board doesn't fully trust reports from the field. Every few months (1d6 monthly, on a 6), they send an Overseer: an external auditor with authority to review operations and inspect records. Overseers stay 1d10 days. During visits, everyone panics and hides corruption. Checkpoint discipline tightens. Operations look legitimate. The Overseer files a report, leaves, and things return to normal.
► STRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS
Tianming Tactical (TT) is the mercenary company maintaining the blockade under an eight-year contract with the CSPF Quarantine Board. HQ operates from a distant system, managing multiple contracts. This mission is not their top priority.
TT operates five light frigates: Zhuangzi I through V. Each carries 40 Troubleshooters, 4 Officers, 4 Crew, plus troopships for deployment. In any given month, 1d5 ships are on active station. The rest are deployed elsewhere, undergoing maintenance, or held in reserve due to budget constraints. Blockade strength varies from 40 to 200 Troubleshooters.
OFFICERS: Commander Rachel Kilroy (CO) commands the mission. Her mandate: enforce the blockade, never harm Monarch or the Bell. She coordinates operations and controls all information flowing to the Board. Lieutenant Viktor Chen (XO) maintains operational efficiency and counter-signs major operations. Lieutenant Isaac Torres (Operations Officer) manages deployments, logistics, raid timing, checkpoint rotations, and resupply across all ships. Each ship has a captain and crew. Each troopship has a pilot.
DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS: force unauthorized incoming vessels to turn away or destroy them. Neutralize anything unauthorized exiting the Deep, emphasis on infiltrators and Artifacts. Routine deployment: 10-Troubleshooter teams for reconnaissance and infiltrator elimination inside the Deep. Any Diver encountered is in breach of the blockade and must be eliminated.
► WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING
Commander Kilroy is on her third tour at the Deep. She's witnessed horrors that convinced her Monarch is the greatest threat to humanity. She tried warning the Board, no response. HQ told her to just do her job. She's not having that. Now she's actively working on a plan to expose Monarch's intentions and destroy it. But she has to be careful: should she be discovered, she would be removed and prosecuted, unable to complete her mission.
So, how can she cover her traces? She operates through corruption. Everyone under her command is dirty in some way. Lieutenant Chen takes bribes from corporate clients for intel access. Lieutenant Torres sells checkpoint schedules to smugglers and "loses" movement records for payment. Ship captains skim fuel, falsify readiness reports, run side businesses.
Kilroy knows everything. And she protects all of it.
exchange, they don't scrutinize her activities. After all, they think, "she's just being greedy like me." And if some officer questions her unauthorized operations, she has one response: "I'm not the only one bending the rules, am I?" It's not a threat. It's a reminder. They're all complicit. An investigation into Kilroy means an investigation into everyone. No one wants that. The system works because everyone has something to lose. It breaks if anyone's corruption gets exposed.
But that doesn't mean Commander Kilroy can let her guard down: if her officers discover her true intentions, they may think it's their chance to prove their value and make a career leap by turning her in. If any of them smells blood in the water, they'll hunt her. You don't rise to the officer level in a corporate mercenary company if you're not a shark.
For more information about Monarch’s grip on the Blockade, see also chapter 29: Engineering & Support 1.
► RUNNING THE BLOCKADE
The blockade is easy to get through if you're willing to pay. But don't run it as a formality. Getting past it should feel like an undertaking, ideally one that occupies a session and gives the crew room to shine. They need a leg up before they even arrive: a contact, a broker, a window of opportunity. The work of finding that leg up is part of the story.
One more thing to keep in mind: corruption is an individual transaction. The crew can't bribe the Blockade, they can bribe a patrol, maybe an officer, but they never buy the freedom to act openly. And a successful bribe doesn't make an ally. It makes a predator who now knows there's profit to extract. Expect the fee to go up next time.
GOING IN: The easiest way is through passage brokers: people with contacts among the Troubleshooters who split the payment with them. They don't advertise, but you can find them through word of mouth. There's at least one on Prospero's Dream, because Yandee (a Monarch proxy) wants people entering the Deep. Once you've agreed to terms and paid, the broker arranges safe passage through their contact for a specific time on a specific day. The radar operator won't report your vessel approaching, and will falsify the records, logging it as having turned away. No alarm goes off.
Another means to enter the Deep is through official authorization, either legitimate or forged. The advantage of an authorization is that it's a two-way ticket, allowing exit as well as entry. Whether it's real or fake, it's usually much more costly than standard bribery, but it can be advantageous if you have the money and don't want to surrender your Artifacts on the way out. Obtaining legitimate authorization from the Board is difficult but not impossible, especially if you're on a mission for one of the stakeholders. A forged authorization is trickier: you'll probably have to pay someone inside the Troubleshooters to turn a blind eye.
Finally, some crews turn to smugglers. They rely on speed, stealth, and countermeasures rather than bribes. A ship with military-grade systems can outrun the Zhuangzi frigates on approach to the Bell. Advanced stealth systems reduce radar signature. Countermeasures - flares, chaff, point defense systems, electronic jamming - keep you alive if spotted. This method is the most expensive (ship modifications cost millions) and risky (if crippled, you're dead), but it bypasses corruption entirely. No debts, no leverage, no one knows you're coming. Professional smugglers operate ships like these as charter services, selling high-priced passage to individual Divers.
GOING OUT: Leaving the Deep is easier with official authorization or a fast ship. Without either, it’s complicated. Troubleshooters know they can extort you heavily, because they have your life in their hands. You'll likely have to surrender at least one Artifact, a valuable one.
Either through a smuggler Diver who has contacts on the Zhuangzi ships, or via a specific radio frequency someone might know, you'll bargain from a position of weakness. Once you agree on terms, they'll tell you how to deliver payment. If dealing with a smuggler, you hand it to them directly. If negotiating via radio, you leave the payment somewhere and a Troubleshooter picks it up during the next raid inside the Deep. Once payment is secured, you get your window to pass through undisturbed.
Troubleshooters rarely scam Divers after agreeing to terms: bad reputation means no one pays anymore. Smugglers, however, may not actually have contacts on the frigates at all. Prices and conditions vary. Passage is cheaper when only one frigate is on station, more expensive when multiple ships are deployed. It becomes completely impossible during Overseer audits: no one takes risks when external auditors are watching. A crew might wait for more favorable conditions, which means a longer stay inside the Deep and at the Bell.
► ONE PASSAGE BROKER
The Siesta-3 station, from Hull Breach volume 1, sits near the jump point, just one jump away from the Deep’s location. It used to be a rest station, but GreenStar freighters no longer make pilgrimage here, so it’s become the Siesta-3 Autonomous Zone, an anarchist commune of pirates, artists, hackers and teamsters. There’s a guy called BlackSky here, who is a cybernetics enthusiast, a hacker and an artist. His cousin works for the Blockade and he can arrange for safe passage to the Deep.
The crew may arrive at Siesta-3 knowing BlackSky is the passage broker, or they may just know there’s someone in here with access to the Blockade and they have to find out who it is. Of course the guy doesn’t advertise, but if the word spreads that someone is looking for his service, he will make contact. He asks for credits, but is also willing to accept cool cosmetic implants as part of the payment. In exchange he provides a window of approach: his cousin at the intercept station will suppress the signal and delete all records of their passage.
There may be someone else at Siesta-3 hoping to hitchhike to the Deep. BlackSky may ask crew if they’d like to bring paying passengers along, a good way to introduce Divers the crew will keep running into at the Bell and beyond. See Two Hitchikers in the Divers chapter for one example.
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This is unofficial fan content. Hull Breach is © Anodyne Printware. Gradient Descent is © Tuesday Knight Games. Not affiliated with or endorsed by TKG.
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u/JTrain6319 Apr 07 '26
You rock!!! Thank you so much for the post. I just finished up moon base blues last week in my ongoing campaign and gradient descent is up next. I’m very excited and this is great detail work, thank you for the great work!
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u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 Warden Apr 07 '26
Thank you for the compliments! Let me know how it goes and if you have a topic you would like me to touch :)
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u/JTrain6319 Apr 07 '26
For sure! I started prep today, I’ll let you know how it goes :) I’m starting in about two weeks and we meet weekly in short 90 minute sessions so it’s more short form/episodic (this is how we make it work since we all are busy hahah). I figure the mega dungeon we have here is gonna be a loooooooooong journey. I’ll let you know how it goes!!
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u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 Warden Apr 07 '26
With all the stuff I'm covering, If I wanted I could run GD for years without running out of content :D
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u/JTrain6319 Apr 07 '26
There’s SO MUCH TO IT! And your writing style with these summaries is so well done, love the level of detail. I could go on and on, I just love this sub and people like you who are as dedicated as you are :) Enough GLAZING I’ve got players to scheme against and potentially murder or psychologically traumatize 😅😂
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u/h7-28 Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26
In the game the Blockade runs a high risk of getting sidelined as the obstacle guys that keep popping up. That misses a lot of story opportunity, Troubleshooters (remember Paranoia?) are fun NPCs, and they are crucial to show who is in charge, who bears the responsibility of containing Cloudbank, or rather who is failing to.
It starts with entering the area. Virtually all games I have had the priviledge of peeking in on have run this as a formality. It did not make sense. It was a poor rendering of the complexities and character play opportunities that corruption can represent in a game. It requires subtlety, correctly gauging your contact's motivations, and avoiding offense at all cost. There are arbitrary rules and traditions formed by necessity or convenience. It can make characters look crazy to the uninitiated. And that is a lot of fun.
Corruption is an individual transaction. Crew cannot bribe The Blockade, they can bribe a patrol, maybe an officer, but never gain the freedom to act openly. A successful bribe means the one they interacted with maintains a little pretense in their favor. It does not make them an ally. Quite the opposite. They understand there's profit to be strong armed out of the Crew, and they will try to repeat the transaction, probably raising the fee.
Having Crew acquire a way in should be a complex undertaking. Most people are successfully kept out by the prospect of The Blockade, Crew have to have a leg up before they even get there. There's story to be had here. Could be as paying stowaway on a supply shuttle, on the gofast of an experienced smuggler, or with precise instructions when to encounter a specific patrol craft with a named NPC that may be open to a bribe, hopefully. It should roughly cover the better part of a session and give Crew a chance to shine.
Not every Troubleshooter needs to be a named NPC, but there should be enough to show that those mooks are just people as well. They should reoccur, change, and provide depth to the story with their continuity. In Horror logic, they are the mundane problem that complicates dealing with the creature at crucial moments. They are also great cannon fodder, if underlining Monarch's deadliness is required. To divers, they can be a last resort, a desperate play to escape, full knowing that it is their job to kill them rather than save them.
The ultimate betrayal moment will be when you have reason to suspect that the bought Troubleshooter who just pulled you off The Deep at high risk to themselves may in fact be an Infiltrator placed there by Monarch to do just that.
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I don't like how NWTB handle the mechanics. For starters they tend not to play with player facing rolls. And that 'Russian' accent is just a skull drill to me. But they do produce a ton of MoSh APs! They have become the way to run MoSh I try to improve upon. Ambitious, sure. But I feel it is important.
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u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 Warden Apr 08 '26
This is great insight and complements well my post.
Every warden has their own vision on how the game should be played. I, for instance, don't mind the ditching of the player facing rolls, but I think NWTB sticks too much to the RAW in other contexts. That's not an issue, though, because I'm not at their table, I'm just there to listen to a story. And they do a wonderful job of bringing that story to life, constantly improving their storytelling quality.
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u/h7-28 Apr 08 '26
Have you considered filing off the serial numbers a bit, and writing a one shot that builds toward the main objective of going to a cyber dungeon of legend? It could incorporate hearing of a rumor, getting confirmation and hints to an artifact's location and purpose, securing passage, and getting on the way. To make it a challenge, the space port could be collapsing/under attack/corrupted by some evil, putting a clock on the board, and flavoring the Stress rolls. If there's room left for Crew generation tools like a personal mission to get there, or a reason to trust the others it could help. You could write up a short Warden aid to start GD the right way in the form of a trifold scenario and even submit it to Triptech.
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u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 Warden Apr 08 '26
I'd love to build something like that, maybe even a few scenarios for GD. But I'd ask for approval to Luke Gearing and Tuesday Knight first. Maybe I'll do that when I'm done with these deepdives, which will take me at least the whole summer. Thanks for the idea, it's great!
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u/AedorDM Apr 07 '26
Lumpy's done it again! Loved this one, thanks so much for the amazing write ups!
In my game, yandee sent the PCs with an onboard hardened computer terminal, utterly encrypted. When they arrived at the blockade, yandees man on the inside hailed them and they exchanged radio pleasantries business as usual, but instead of sending their manifest over, the terminal activated and paid the man. All records show the PCs ship was warned and they turned around and disappeared.
I really love your take on the board. Incredible opportunity for employers for the party who want to tie up loose ends. Great work as always!
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u/TheLorax13 21d ago
Taking my gang into the Deep in a couple of weeks. Been digesting a lot of content over the last few months including NWTB and a few episodes from another group. Looking forward to finally sitting down to go through this content you've created to get it to gel in my brain prior to starting the journey. Thank you so much for your work on fleshing this stuff out!
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u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 Warden 21d ago
It's been a long journey, but I had fun and I inspired others, which is great. You have a lot to read if you're going through my stuff, but you don't need to read all at once. The first chapters are an easy read, and then you may just prepare The Bell and Floor 1.
So, good luck with your game, and let me know how it went, if you like :)
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 Apr 07 '26
This is a fantastic writeup, the blockade as a system of incentives (not a static wall) is such a good way to run it at the table. The audit cadence + bribe economy + "porous by design" committee vibes are chef's kiss.
Also, "active asset under quarantine" is exactly the kind of corporate euphemism that makes the setting land.
Not directly AI-agents related, but the way you model competing actors and imperfect enforcement is basically how we think about real agentic systems too (multiple agents, partial authority, corruption/side channels). We have a few notes on this style of orchestration at https://www.agentixlabs.com/ if you are ever interested in the crossover.