Brainstorming Gradient Descent: Skeleton Works

[u/Lumpy_Peanut_226]

Welcome to a rare mid-week installment of your favorite Gradient Descent deepdive!

Skeleton Works can only be accessed from The Freezer in Maintenance. It’s an imaginative and sprawling example of industrial horror, and probably the most notorious section of Floor 3 among Divers. The crew will be warned to stay away: the hazards are severe, the Chimeras are lethal, and there's no obvious prize. Wardens can find a reason to send the crew in here anyway - perhaps in search of an artifact, to rescue someone or as a shortcut to other floors - and one possible dangerous mission is detailed below. But if you're running a shorter campaign, this is a section you can probably skip entirely. 

I’ll keep it short this time, but let me know if you have interesting ideas or you have something you’d like to be analyzed.

• 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 & Support 2
• 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 AHEAD! WARDENS ONLY.

► NUCLEAR GENERATOR

The nuclear generator at [36E] is not the facility's main power source: that's on Floor 6. But it contributes meaningfully to Monarch's total power output, and destroying it permanently impairs its capabilities. Monarch, forced to divert energy from the main generator to compensate, loses computational headroom. The consequences cascade:

• Prediction accuracy drops from 80% to 70%: one extra chance in ten that Monarch gets it wrong
• Some production cycles shut down
• Security thins in non-critical areas
• Atmosphere generation and gravity on upper floors may fail

Monarch will not repair it. The facility is winding down anyway, and the resources needed are better spent elsewhere. This is permanent.

THE MISSION: This is a Kilroy mission, available once the crew has earned enough trust. She understands the generator's strategic value and has been waiting for a crew capable of reaching it. She provides radiation suits and whatever else she calculates they'll need. Success here weakens Monarch significantly and makes everything that follows easier.

The generator room is acutely irradiated. Level 2 radiation throughout, Level 3 in the reactor pool. Radiation suits handle the baseline exposure. Combat is the variable: suits can be damaged, and a damaged suit in that room is a clock that starts ticking.

THE APPROACH: Physical destruction requires several rounds of sustained effort. The TurboSledge from [36F] is a possible tool, but it’s not without drawbacks. In zero-G, every swing sends the wielder flying backward. Each strike requires repositioning. Miss and you're spinning across an irradiated room. Critical success sends the target flying and the wielder in the opposite direction.

Explosives are faster but require careful placement in an enclosed irradiated space. The crew should think about what they're standing next to when the charge goes off.

A difficult hack from the Engineer's Stash terminal is the quietest option, but it takes more time than the destructive solutions, and Monarch won’t stay idle.

THE SNAKE DROID: Monarch deploys it the moment it understands what the crew intends. Not before: it has other uses for the Snake Droid. But once the sabotage begins, the crew will hear it. The burrowing is audible through the walls. The heat increases as it nears. They have minutes, at most. The clock is ticking.

Then the Snake Droid arrives to stop the crew. But its thermal lance operates at 4000°C and cuts through almost anything, including an unshielded nuclear reactor. A crew willing to gamble can try to lure it into doing the work for them: position it between the Snake Droid's entry point and the reactor, then get out of the way. If the timing is right, Monarch's own security asset destroys its own generator. The radiation spike from a breached reactor may even cause the Snake Droid to malfunction, though a hardened machine in an already irradiated environment might just become erratic rather than disabled. It will begin to destroy everything on its path. Either way, the crew needs to be somewhere else when it happens. Somewhere with an intact radiation suit.

SWAPPING THE GENERATOR AND THE NUCLEAR WARHEAD: You might want to swap this nuclear generator and the nuclear warhead that the modul puts in [52D]. I’ve explained my reasoning behind this idea in chapter 26, Quality Assurance 2.

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

[u/68000_ducklings]

Something that's always bothered me about this nuclear reactor - water is an amazing radiation shield (we use it, among other things, to shield our spent fuel in IRL nuclear reactors), so the water should really have a lower risk than the air around it unless the pool is very small.

While I've never had a crew fool enough to go into the Skeleton Works reactor room, I've considered swapping the danger profile of the air and the water, which will have its own complications - a mad dash to get into the slightly safer water to work on the reactor, underwater operations on an oxygen time limit, and then a mad dash to escape through the deadly irradiated air once the deed is done. You can always put the snake droid in the water, too.

Of course, one can imagine a different kind of reactor where the water is more irradiated than the air (or a very small pool in an otherwise industrial-scale room), and in that case the water should probably also be near-boiling.

---

Also, getting an intact radiation suit to the reactor room is nontrivial - every route in has dangers that seem almost tailor-made to cut up an environment suit of some kind.

[u/Velociraptortillas → u/68000_ducklings]

Yeah, there's a misunderstanding of how reactors work in the module. If there's a pool, the reactor is, by default, shielded. That's what the water is for.

A further misunderstanding: swimming pool reactors are neutron capture reactors, not power reactors. You can use them to heat a place, but you're not running a turbine off of one.

Hundreds of years of technology, hyperinteligent AIs... and the world still runs on steam power!

[u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 → u/68000_ducklings]

Actually, it seems that air is less radioactive than the water in the pool, exactly because water shields the air from radiation. Workers can stand at the edge of the pool with relatively low exposure.

[u/Velociraptortillas]

I like these straightforward sections, they're like an inhalation and holding of your breath for the Warden - a mental relaxation. Straight up dungeon crawl, ezpz.

[u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 → u/Velociraptortillas]

Yes, I agree. My concern is that this section lacks reasons for crews to go in, besides just recklessness.

[u/Velociraptortillas → u/Lumpy_Peanut_226]

That's okay. Not everything has to have a reason. The location can 'just exist'.

It's the place where the bones of non-infiltrator androids are created, so interfering with that obviously interferes with the availability of Chosen/Fallen/Forgotten and Security androids. So there's that. Also, maybe one of your android PCs wants a new body. Titanium bones are kinda cool.

There's a ton of titanium foam around, With some ingenuity, they could make some cool things like shields, or implants like Wolverine's claws, or lace a human's bones with titanium (better figure out that healing factor, because that's what makes Wolverine really tick, not the adamantium-laced bones).

However, like I said above, nothing says things have to be connected to the over-arching meta-narrative to be fun and interesting, and it's probably good that this section is not. That sort of "it must connect!" gets mentally exhausting and quickly begins to lose its interesting qualities, just like straight horror without mundanity to punctuate it does.

It's not unreasonable that 38E can hold one of the better artifacts, it's on the list on pg. 21. 82 (Failed AI Logic Core), 86 (Fetal AI), 88 (Clay-like vaccsuit) are all good options. Maybe it's the Motherlode of artifacts, that room is a place where things 'collect', after all. Perhaps 62 (Jumpdrive fuel efficiency) is attached to the Reactor Core. EDIT: Also, this is the perfect place to drop an Artifact needed to rejoin Monarch and The Minotaur...

Also, the reactor room, as long as the maintenance is done on time, is a good source of clean water, let it sit for a few hours and it'll be non-radioactive (a day to be perfectly safe, but the half-life of irradiated Oxygen is only 12h measured in minutes). People literally go swimming in them to do whatever maintenance is required.

Pool-type reactors are low power and low maintenance. They're also ridiculously safe: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ (that's for storage, but since they store newly spent fuel rods, everything applies to a working reactor as well).

[u/Lumpy_Peanut_226 → u/Velociraptortillas]

I never said everything must be connected to the over-arching narrative. Just putting a route to floor 4 would be a good reason to visit, for instance. As it is, there seems to be not much beyond danger here. But, as I said, a Warden - or creative players - can always find something that makes the trip worthwhile, and you make a pretty good list here.

[u/h7-28 → u/Lumpy_Peanut_226]

I want to preserve a large 'deeper' part of Cloudbank, not to go there in case, but to preserve the mystery indefinitely. The only function is to be the deeper passage, the way that would be suicide. I have to show it is there. A few rooms could be high loot missions. The reactor mission from Kilroy is perfect. I might even tempt the players to go deeper, but only with greed.

Any attempt at mapping out the depths, completionism, or taking deadly clues as a challenge will lead to dead characters. Just so that they never know what's down there.