Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

Gradient Descent is a 61 page module for Mothership by Luke Gearing with art by Nick Tofani and layout by Sean McCoy. It’s a megadungeon writ compact, using every terse writing trick by author Gearing and every clever layout trick by Sean McCoy to make it work. After last week’s Tomb of a Thousand Doors, it’s turning into megadungeon July here on Playful Void. You’re a desperate artefact hunter, delving into a massive abandoned android factory run by a rogue AI. The androids here can be indistinguishable from humans…wait, am I human, or a was I an android the whole time?

This is an in-house Mothership module, so I’m going to talk about presentation first: Sean McCoy and Nick Tofani are a powerhouse pairing here, with a dense layout and art that feel in tune with each other, and do a lot of heavy lifting in bringing the working class science fiction vibes. It looks great, just like the other house Mothership modules I’ve reviewed. How legible is it? Honestly, nigh impossible to read front to back. I had to take breaks, this is a multi-bath review, unusual for a book this short. But is it usable? Yeah, I think so. The first fifteen pages, which contain all the information you need to read before you run it, are gorgeous, but dense and tricky to parse. It uses bold, underline, colour (and coloured bold and underlining), and capitalisation, as well as highlighting and boxed text to differentiate in-text concepts, which is busy enough it’s not clear to me immediately what means what. The crowded layout leaves me missing certain parts of the page that aren’t really lead to visually — usually these are tips on how to run that page. Text bends around art on many pages, which looks good but makes it harder to scan in images with extreme dimensions. Headings, at least, are consistent and easy to pick.

Maps are stylised as circuit diagrams, which is an efficient and stylish approach, although one that isn’t effective at communicating scale or spatial positioning. Combine this with the use of multiple scales on the map and, while it’s cleverly coded, I really don’t understand the spatial relationships between these rooms or locations. It’s not a crawl, it’s a funhouse tour. I can’t help but feel there’s something lost in this point-crawl approach to the megadungeon, but also it’s supposed to feel like an alien space, I think, wrapping around itself, as if you’re both at the mercy of powerful beings with ineffable goals, and potentially losing your mind slowly as you delve. If that’s the intent, and you’re leaning into it, it works.

Like most house Mothership modules, the inside covers are maps and tables. I think, looking at the first fifteen pages, I’d have preferred some of this information — factions, procedures, a full legend to the unique and non-intuitive map — to have been more easily accessible instead. This information I feel like I’m going to either print off separately or keep flipping back to, and likely will use more than the random search and artefact tables on the back, though they’re also important. As is, I’m probably printing some extra pages out for reference, if that bothers you.

The module thrives more once you hit the key itself. Detailed minimaps — not cut outs, but unique maps with more information — punctuate the key, text becomes more clear in use, and the nonsensical use of space earlier makes more sense when those tips are typically attached to maps. It uses a bullet point structure that separates out details and secrets. The key though, is a bland piece of work from a usually lyrical writer, punctuated by boxed text with fantastic description: “An emaciated android-torso with six articulated scything blades for limbs. The top half of the head is all eyes, the lower jaw is replaced by a surgical syringe/proboscis. A huge nodule on its back spins forth a Steel Web.” although occasionally, but not often, he manages to break out of his structure: “When exiting: a man in a lab coat appears, a halo of blades floating around his head.” There a a lot of good ideas here, but they’re truly spread around the dungeon and interspersed with dry keying. This feels like another case of a sacrifice to the gods of science-fiction, a bit like we saw in Resonant, where a normally lyrical author must trade off beauty for clarity as a result of the subject matter. Now, is this actually a bad thing? Honestly, probably not. A lot of rooms I think are intended as empty, the ones that are lyrical as prompts to interact or flee, with random encounters and rules around ghosts and believing you’re an android intended to being the drama and interest as you explore the factory, and then flee with the artefacts you’ve found.

Given it’s fresh in my mind, a comparison to Tomb of a Thousand Doors is automatic. The cohesiveness and theme of Gradient Descent puts it in a very strong position, but it’s also a module that’s more alienating due to its horror and mental health theming. Tomb provides a lovely variety and a more traditional structure, supported by the Mausritter rules which sing with a classic approach to a megadungeon. The most interesting thing about the comparison is how well Gradient Descent uses a megadungeon shell to tell a psychological story, with a distinct (potential) arc reminiscent of classic sci fi, where Mausritter provides simply a lot of fun over a lot of sessions. It’s a lovely example of how megadungeon form does not necessarily equal function.

Megadungeons are hard, and this one is zine-length. I prefer a more thorough key, but in brevity and through creative mapping approaches, this megadungeon is genuinely runnable. I could definitely improvise around this, without it having to do significant prep aside from perhaps printing off those first 15 or so pages as references for myself. I think, if my players enjoyed the horror-crawl and learning the secrets behind this complex, we could get a lot of play by delving into it repeatedly. But, a whole aspect of play is missing because of the mapping choices, and even if we’re not hand-mapping those options make exploration more interesting than what this amounts to: A purely push your luck dungeon crawl.

Gradient Descent is the best (only?) megadungeon for Mothership, I think. Combine it with a good station base (repurpose the Bell, or use Prospero’s Dream), and you’ve got a lot of playtime. So long as you’re happy with removing a problem-solving aspect from your crawl, and your players are content with the challenging themes of mental health and the what constitutes being human, or are playing with players for don’t care for classic crawling and aren’t expecting it, this is a keeper.

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