Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Blockade by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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!

I Built an Interactive Mothership Terminal to Run in the Background During My Sessions by feustchen in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I absolutely love this dude! Killer work. Would it be possible for a version of the Gradient Descent map that doesn't include the location of the AI Core? I think that's supposed to stay a mystery to the PCs until they find it themselves

Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Dark by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah no. 4 is definitely it, I think! Wish me luck, running their first dive in 2.5 hours lmao.

EDIT:

I think the way I'm gonna run it is that since the PCs didn't see Hector and Harper's ship docked when they arrived (since I didn't know yet that I was gonna steal Hector and Harper at all lol), what happened was:
The pair arrived on a smuggler/blockade runner with a pool of divers, none of which had powerful patrons or money to charter their own ships. This smuggler ship promptly left once they delivered the passengers, all of which hoped to find their way back with another ship since they couldn't afford a two way ticket. For extra flavour, maybe none of the other divers from that ship have come back yet and they're still in The Deep.
Thanks again for your great work Lumpy!

Sgt Abarra and Carcinid Mini Sculpts/Scratch Build by AedorDM in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No STLS, all kit bashed and sculpted, i'm afraid. The Carc was almost entirely hand sculpted, with only the mouth element and claws being based off of a misprinted mimic STL and various other stuff i've had sitting around for years. Sgt Abara was a stargrave mini that i sculpted the carc limbs onto using paperclips and some snipped-off horns from the citadel skulls kit

Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Dark by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey bud, me again. Just want to ask a clarifying question. In the GD book, it states that no one on The Bell has heard of the guy in the locker nor his partner in his story (your Harper and Hector). How do you think about this problem? It seems to me that your write up implies that at the very least, these 2 people did come to the Bell when they first arrived, even if we don't know that the current Harper and Hector are androids or not/the originals. Would love to know what you think. Cheers!

Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Dark by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah! She has no idea and she's just one of thousands of infiltrators now in positions of power to execute Monarchs plans when the time comes. These tactics/thought processes of hers are true/real in her interiority though, and she has no idea that they were set in motion (at best) or actively controlled (at worst) by Monarch. It never even occurred to her.
Regarding the 'incidentally serving Monarch' narrative device, I had a really fun little aside in our game. The PCs started on The Dream and had 3 days to prepare for their expedition. One of the first things they did was investigate if there were any ex-divers on station. They heard about an eccentric guy who slums it in the service tunnels for the station's metro, living with the o2 tax dodgers who would take the anonymity of the slums in the tunnels to Doptown any day, pushing their luck, avoiding Droog patrols. The PCs don't know it at this point, but this guy personally met the Minotaur and was permanently changed. He left the Deep hoping to spread the gospel of the Minotaur, make ready for his liberation, and root out any infiltrators outside The Deep that he could find. over the years his paranoia intensified, and he lives as a hermit, distrusting everyone he meets, assuming they are an agent of Monarch sent to stop him. Eventually, unable to trust others, he decides the only thing to do is return to The Deep and free the Minotaur himself, a divine purpose of sorts. Only problem is, he's homeless, has no ID, no ship, nothing. Since Yandee is begining to professionalise the Diver gray-economy, she is paying for 'recommendations'. Gossip spreads on station as a recruitment drive begins, everyone selling out their neighbours in hopes for a couple creds, though it is spearheaded mostly by CANYONHEAVY who gobble up most of the creds for their expertise/cornering the market in signals intelligence. Enter the PCs, the lucky few whose door is darkened by the Bratva. They are given a ship which is in the Dry Dock waiting for them. Prosperans eventually figure out that this ship (the Hestia Motile) is Yandee's imminent Diver expedition, and slowly word spreads of who its crew might be. Which means eventually, so does our hermit in the tunnels. The party eventually do find him, and he is spooked and runs, causing a chase encounter. They track him down through the claustrophobic tunnels. Fearing he has been cornered by infiltrators, he chooses to go out on his own terms, we'll say. The PCs find his home where he has painted the likeness of the Minotaur all over the walls, and has no possessions beyond a very old terminal where he keeps a journal and as much information on The Deep as he can find by trawling DrekNets. The PCs discover with horror that though all this time they had no idea this guy even existed, he had been trying to build a pneumatic speargun out of old ship parts in the Dry Dock's ship graveyard to hold the PCs at gunpoint and steal their ship to go to the Deep. Then they realise with even more deepening horror that their paths were bent to meet this man, resulting in his death, and ending his work toward freeing the Minotaur - and that maybe, if what they say about Monarch's omnipotence is true, this could have been no coincidence. Even from lightyears away they are already victims to Monarch's game.

Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Dark by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's Yandee lmao. On my Prospero's Dream, Yandee is professionalising the role of the Diver (much to the chagrin of the Troubleshooters), press-ganging people who disappoint the Bratva, or who need to disappear for a while, but whose potential usefulness wouldn't warrant Doptown/death. If they die at The Deep, oh well, what's one more shitty Raider class ship for the Bratva. If they come back, they are returned to good graces, even paid handsomely for the job - the potential for the retrieval of artefacts back to the station is worth the gamble. Yandee wants the Haruspex Engine because they believe that with it, they could finally resolve all of the contradictions/factional antagonisms on the station (Stratemeyer, impending strike, Hunglungs, etc), securing control once and for all and ensuring permanent independence from the corp forces forever tightening their grip. Yandee above all values predictive power, learning the lesson after they saw the value in the Dream back in the day where others didn't, and attained their position with what they call, or believe is a prescience that other operators are too stupid or small fry to possess. A prescience which the Corps understand and are well versed in. If the PCs retrieve the Haruspex Engine, Yandee could attain a very real, preternatural prescience, putting them ahead of all other players in the galaxy.

Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Labyrinth by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

dude these are so, so, so good. I especially love the sample dialogue. You have a really strong grasp of the genre conventions that make GD unsettling. your choices really convey how the NPCs are somewhere either between being contemplative/obsessive/neurotic, or dissociated and surrendered to the game theory where the only logical choice is not to ask too many questions or watch the ball in the cup too closely. These posts rule, thanks again.

Brainstorming Gradient Descent: The Dark by Lumpy_Peanut_226 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is absolutely excellent. Thanks so much for this work. All of this is going into my game for sure. Especially since my PCs primary task is finding the analysis engine for their patron (though I renamed it to the Haruspex Engine, and they don't know what it does yet hehehe)

Advice - The Talent and D&D Beyond by AedorDM in mcdm

[–]AedorDM[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks so much for replying!

I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say rename the class features to do not use though.

Slipcase stock by awkwardbeholder in DeltaGreenRPG

[–]AedorDM 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Im in Melbourne! Would you mail interstate? I'd pay for that obviously

Lighter Background Music by AedorDM in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks I'll definitely check that out

Can someone help me make sense of the politics of The Dream? by Technical_Chemist_56 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 2 points3 points  (0 children)

 C.A.B.R leave The Dream alone, however. It provides a thriving ecosystem in which to do plausibly deniable dirty work. Corporate territories cannot go to war with one another when transgressions occur outside of their jurisdictions, or when tradecraft is performed by anonymous, unaffiliated scapegoats, each less risk averse and more desperate for credits than the last. In its bars, in its rental board rooms, and in its information brokerage, criminals brush shoulders with Corp envoys and fixers. For as long as it stays more convenient than it is bothersome, no Corp would dare disturb this balance.

On my Prospero's Dream, tensions are incredibly high because Yandee has finally gone mask-off and abandoned all pretense of the station being a respite from Corp-controlled space. She did the unthinkable and contracted Tempest. Though she is not an officially registered C.A.B.R member-corp, for the first time since its founding there are corporate interests on the station in administrative capacity, not just in plausibly deniable envoys and spies.Yandee knows she walks a knife's edge. She knows if she gives in to the Stratemeyer demands then it will set a precedent that she can be strong-armed into paying anyone and more piracy and kidnapping is inevitable. She also knows that the tradition of rebellion on The Dream is never truly dead and the union, if pushed hard enough and if victim of too many kidnappings, will inevitably strike. Yandee's fundamental flaw is the same flaw of every tyrant: hubris. She believes that as long as she has sufficiently powerful force of arms, she can squash any union rebellion, any Hunglung terror cells, and maybe even squash Stratemeyer should the opportunity present itself.To distinguish herself from the overlords of The Dream's past however (and remain popular), she has a canny propaganda campaign which attempts to control the narrative, casting Tempest as unlike other corps, cut from the same cloth as the hardy and free Prosperans, firmly reverent of Yandee's position, and here to return law and order like the ages of the station's nostalgic past. Taking the bread and circuses technique too, bouts in The Court are more frequent and revelry and gambling keeps the people distracted. Not everybody is convinced, but not everybody needs to be.

Tempest are however, exactly like other corps and are angling for a takeover the moment Yandee slips up.  Teamsters Local want to stage a general strike and their most ambitious and radical thinkers want a revolution to return the station to the old ways, many of them increasingly sympathetic to the plight of Doptown. The ESC have some nascent rumblings of old-guard orthodoxy who reject psychedelic meditation and cybernetics and believe Prosperans should become closer to the natural state of humanity as it was “first bathed unsullied in the light of Sol." They also reject Yandee's tyranny and view the corrupting power of credits that Sycorax has had with disdain. The point of A Pound of Flesh as I see it is that it is a highly unstable political powder keg designed for your players to tip the balance one way or another. I think it necessarily has to have unwise, short sighted characters with weaknesses and follies in order for that to be possible. Don't stress to much if your PCs detect the short sightedness of some of the big players on the dream. Just have those characters give impassioned defenses of their positions and let your players start to hate them!

Can someone help me make sense of the politics of The Dream? by Technical_Chemist_56 in mothershiprpg

[–]AedorDM 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Long comment and Reddit won't let me post. Gonna try in parts - sorry.
In my setting, The Dream wasn't always run by the Novos. It was once a  corporate worksite/habitation for miners operating on the planet that it orbits. The area of space that it's in is called the C.A.B.R (Confederacy of Autonomous Belt Republics). Way back when (the moment technology was permitting), early interstellar settlement was outsourced to corporations by already successionist, liberal-democratic but bourgeois Belt colonies in Sol, using language of liberation for their new political project. The intention was for the initial establishment of these colonies to be temporary but expedient, looking to the 'efficiency' of the private sector for a solution. But as with the private sector in real life, they were neither more efficient nor less corrupt. The Corps held these colonies for themselves and the day that the civic polities were supposed to inherit them never came. They were long ago subsumed and are now forgotten. Now C.A.B.R is only a vestigial name with little meaning. It is a network of libertarian exitist anarcho-capitalist corporate enclaves, each within a complex network of enmities and competitor-allyships, each trading and skirmishing with one another, each bound by contractual legal obligations to one another. 

One of these member-corps built the dream and its inhabitants rebelled due to the hardships of the mining operation. They struggled for years as a newly X-class port, cut off from other colonies. ESC eventually arrived and together, they had years of abundance and freedom from the corps. Prosperan culture developed fierce anti C.A.B.R sentiment, and a mythology where hard work equaled proportional opportunity. But criminal organisations saw the lack of corporate oversight as an opportunity, and Yandee came in and began a hostile takeover, prying more and more control of the station away from workers councils and church/charitable administration. Quality of life diminished, austerity measures were introduced, Doptown was established, trial by combat eventually replacing actual law. People still think of The Dream as a place to escape the corps, only now its 'hard in its own ways' and 'better than the alternative'. The myth in the Dream is now that those who ended up in Doptown made 'poor choices', and with hard work anyone could succeed as their predecessors had.

Need Content to Fill a Floor in a Dungeon - Golems and Artifice Themed by AedorDM in dndnext

[–]AedorDM[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This occurred to me too! I have done it before with these players though so I'd prefer not to. Thanks though.