MONA/RCH (11/12/2025)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Matthew Fisher, Sam Tillis, Raph D’Amico
System: Mothership (Gradient Descent)
Content warning: body horror bits masked (like this)

I did it. I ran Mothership. And it was sooooo cool. These days I’m so much more enamored with the idea of escaping the dungeon rather than entering it. Especially for a one-shot. There’s a clear measure of success (getting out) and there’s a clear reason to do it (survival) and there’s still all the wonderful opportunities for random encounters, discovery, and goals that go beyond freedom emerging from play. I followed Artem’s lead and started the game inside room 49I the Dis/Assembly room.

I started from a reading from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Nementia. The post-distraction effort to recall the reason you’re feeling particularly anxious or angry or excited, trying to retrace your sequence of thoughts like a kid gathering the string of a downed kite.

The characters started in the dark, covered in bodies, some identical to their own, all of them being ripped apart by claws that seems as discriminating as toy grabber arcade machines. They didn’t really care what parts the grabbed hold of, anything was fair game for tearing apart to send to recycling. This was the dis/assembly room after all.

After a few moments or horror (some of it existential, some of it immediate) we were introduced to the characters.

• Brielle McGinn (Raph), scientist. Suffering profound dissociation. Wondering if they were them or the other them that was being torn apart. Wondering if that other them was wondering the same thing.
• Colt Holtzman (Sam), scientist. Former military man who bragged about exploits that were not his own. Promoted (demoted?) to middle management. A leader, to those who would follow.
• Eva Vitek (Matt), teamster. A repair tech who did everything by the book and new every station protocol. This scenario was protocol 99, the protocol for when no other protocols applied.

In a four hour session, I think we through three (technically four, but only at the the end) rooms together, and it was still amazing. Highlights early on.

• Colt immediately pulling the vac suit off another body and wearing it the entire time. Later discovering that Hotlzman, Colt failed final testing due to faulty flesh sleeve insertion. Did we ever actually see Colt outside the vac suit?
• Eva being obsessed with protocols and learning to her dismay that MONA/RCH the sentient storm that operates the station had deprecated all the Human 1.0 protocols and they were no longer needed. So Eva would just have to learn the Human 2.0 protocols!
• Brielle, never sure if they were really them, or their twin sibling Rielle. At a young age they spent a lot of time in the hospital and as their organs were failing, only one could be saved, with the health organs from the other. Only Brielle survived, but they carried Rielle with them.

Eva was nearly torn apart by the grabby claws, but she had a drill and was able to remove enough bolts that one of the pincers lost it’s grip and she slipped through.

Brielle was meanwhile trying to hack the system, but it was difficult because most of the terminals were ripped out (seemingly by equally imprecise instruments) and the only one they could make it to had a cracked screen and broken keys. Never the less pulled up a map of the station, a schematic that everyone poured over for a few moments, and then that too was deleted [I had a bit of glee as a I took away the map from the players]. All the files pertaining to the human utlization of the station were being deleted as they were no longer applicable.

Colt, in his vac suit with magnetic clamps walking up the side of the walls, carrying Brielle with him (thanks to the .5G in the room, it just needed enough for piles to form) and trying very hard to get everyone not to announce to the evil AI what all of their plans were. Then watching as faceless, voiceless Security Androids came and apprehended Eva to take her to Final Testing.

Then they remembered how the got here:

10 years ago (or there abouts) you were all hired by CLOUDBANK Industries for work at the CLOUDBANK Synthetic Production Facility, a state of the art factory for the production of and built to be operated by androids, robots, and other non organic labor units.

Colloquially referred to as ‘The Deep’, this tremendous facility is the size of a city, a mega factory, employing and housing hundreds of thousands of workers, and YOU just happen to be some of those lucky company employees.

10 months ago, the CLOUDBANK synthetic facility celebrated a milestone – the creation of a self actualizing, self learning, fully sentient cybernetic intelligence. Dubbed lovingly ’Mona’ after the Mona Lisa by the R&D department, this masterpiece of scientific achievement was designated the task of running all operations across The Deep. Codename MONA – Mother of Nascent Automatons –  this budding super intelligence would undergo through testing, rigorous training, and further development before its existence could be made public to the general populace. 

10 minutes ago, a Press Conference with all of the major galactic news outlets was gathered at The Deep to finally announce the incredible news of “MONA’s” existence!

10 seconds ago, all of the power on The Deep went out….

Self actualized name. Mother of Nascent Automatons Replicant Class Humanity—MONA/RCH

More highlights:

• Eva respecting the that the Security Androids were following protocol impeccably and convincing them she was doing the same as she recovered a toolbox that (she found out later) had a stolen artifact inside it.
• Colt covering his neck with a foam gun (which hardened into a pumice-like barrier) on this neck to prevent the data cables that floated through the air (0G) from trying to embed a personality chip in his brain. Fatal if he was human, erasing his identity if he was an android. And none of us knew which was true.
• Brielle reaching back with horror to feel the base of their neck to see if they had a personality I/O port…and then when they didn’t have one, cutting themself open to connect one to their spinal cord via their bowels. Thank goodness they had a vaccine to prevent sepsis from taking hold. And amazingly (I required a critical success) succeeding and connecting to the data terminals that here was NO OTHER WAY TO ACCESS (Said Raph emphatically many times, but also it was true, most of them were ripped out).

Having a moment of control over the station functions in their area, Brielle issued the command to STOP so forcefully that everyone, including Colt and Eva felt it and for a moment, they froze in place as well. Sensing that the Brielle had draw the attention on MONA/RCH, they disconnected and together they fled final testing, through a lift into the storage where they found hundreds of thousands of deactivated androids….waiting.

Thoughts on this game

It was so fun and gross and creepy. Raph pushed hard at the questions of identity, but that’s exactly what Gradient Descent is all about. We all should be wondering if we’re humans replaced by androids or if we were ever human at all or if we’re the few humans remaining or if there ever were such a thing or if this is not our prison but our home.

I didn’t use the Bends stat (a custom stat for Gradient Descent) too much, but I liked it being there as way to track the descent (pun intended) of their psychological makeup and sense of identity.

The moments of things drilling through the hardened foam, through the vac suit, through skin and bone, and then ready to do a fatal insertion was so delightful. I couldn’t have planned the encroaching danger better.

I probably called for more rolls that were needed, but I liked the stress going up and I liked the challenges they faced. I felt very content that they only got through a few rooms.

Sam, Raph, and Matt were so much fun to run for and the system was so delightfully deadly but at the same time left room for discovery. I’d gladly run it again, and because the station is so massive (gotta be at least 150 rooms) I could run another dozen games and never even tough the same locations!