Here are some of my thoughts on the mothership Megadungeon Gradient Descent as my players have just reached the end of the sixth session.

I get Megadungeons Link to heading

Starting running RPGs with D&D 5th edition put me into a bit of a weird space. I read a lot of the critique online and just didn’t understand the problems until I ran a campaign. My players spent hours creating their characters, picking out abilities and writing in some cases some really cool backstories; which immediately meant nothing. I had a story to force them down and I just kept feeling like I wasn’t a good enough DM to squish together their complex creations into the pages of the book and craft something greater.

Jesus could I not have been more wrong. Yeah I suck as a DM, but 5th edition (especially their pre-written adventures) does not help you with this at all. The idea of writing characters into an existing story as you are improvising and trying to juggle what “must happen” is so difficult that I would love to see someone pull it off so I can learn from them.

Jumping into Gradient Descent felt overwhelming at first. How do I keep track of all the rooms? How the hell do you roleplay an AI that is beyond human intelligence? Will the players actually enjoy this kinda empty space station? It just works though. The structure of the megadungeon means that story develops as we play and really I barely do any prep at all between sessions and just see what my players do at the table.

The brilliant Designing Dungeons Course talks about designing dungeons as an exercising in building up narrative potential energy and man does that hold up for Gradient Descent. It’s full to the brim of killer robots, traps and social dilemmas that meant I had to figure out how to put all the pieces together in my head but after that it’s just a case of seeing which pieces my players pick up each session.

I have been running this as a open table and it’s also been brilliant to get new people sat down and rolling dice with very little fuss about anything that have missed. I think it helps that it’s a single big location but also everyone knows that AI is going to destroy the human race so it’s easy to get your head straight into it.

What are the robots in tubes? Link to heading

That isn’t to say it has always been easy. Gradient descent has the osr feel of sparse descriptions. Which makes it a breeze to run sure but I also found myself breezing over things that maybe would have made the game better?

A particular scene that stood out were some androids in stasis in a room the player’s travelled through. It’s not really clear why they are there? I guessed as a security counter measure but what sets them off? Are they just triggered by too much movement? Is this a puzzle? In my panic they stayed off as the players went through but later on they tripped an alarm so they dropped out the ceiling. But the book specifically describes security being sent from another floor.

This could just all be me getting this confused or making it more complicated than it needs to be. But I felt like I didn’t get the purpose. Which to be fair to book it gets bang on in some floors where it really clearly says “these guys are religious fundamentalists, they worship monarch” which really was about that many words but it helped me to feel like I knew what the direction was.

I’m too nice Link to heading

The main issues for sure though are me! I really need to be more brutal, especially earlier on in the campaign. I think setting the scene of “you will die here” would have helped to get the players into the osr mindset from the start. So:

  • Play the rules as written (I messed up a few rules here and there that gave the players more of a chance).
  • Don’t be afraid of dragging the fights out There were so many cool three way battles going on at points and I often let the players slip away in the melee.
  • Make the ending tough. Right now they are onto the home stretch trying to take out monarch. It makes sense that a super powerful AI in command of a space station isn’t going to go down easy.

In summary the book is amazing and I’m on the megadungeon hypetrain.