The Return of Jovian Chronicles!

Hello all! As I mentioned in my last post about the gaming year 2016, it's time to finally get Jovian Chronicles to the table. Both the roleplaying game and the miniatures game. My spark was well and truly rekindled when DP9 announced the release of the new fleet scale fighters for the game and then continued to tease about possible upcoming fleet scale EXO armors as well. Initially I thought it was finally time to play some Lightning Strike, but then I got more and more into the idea of playing through the Odyssey Seed campaign that is an updated version of the Odyssey presented in the first green book when JC was still a part of Mekton. It's something I've been wanting to do for a long time and 2016 will be the year it actually happens!

Of course there's no guarantee that we will actually play through the entire thing, but later this month we'll at least have our first session where we create characters and play a short intro scenario. Exciting stuff! I've put together a shared cloud folder full of different kinds of text and video that serves as good inspiration for JC. Gundam is of course a huge influence, but so is proper hard scifi as well. In fact The Expanse works great as inspiration with the very hard scifi feel and political intrigue.

Since the Odyssey is a very broad campaign that incorporates many different milieus it can be tough (although perhaps a fun challenge!) to go through it all with just a single set of characters so I think we'll take more of an ansemble cast approach to it. Each player will have have two characters or one main character and one or more side characters. I'm leaning toward the first option, but the second could be interesting as well. We'll start off simple though, with the players making a Jovian Armed Forces EXO pilot each - the gundam influences simply are too strong to ignore and I think we all want to have fun with it. For later sessions the focus will probably shift to other types of charaters with more interpersonal and investigative skills instead. Still first thing's first - pilots and mecha!

For the most part we'll use the abstract rpg rules for everything, including space combat, but I'm toying with the idea of using the tactical rules for larger or more "important" battles. They are fairly detailed and would definitely take up the lion's share of a play session but a tactical battle now and then might be a nice change of pace and work well to remind the players of how different space is as well as creating more of a feeling of actually controlling a vehicle. We'll at least give it a try and see how we feel about it.

I don't have enough EXO miniatures to properly represent everything on the tabletop as my collection is rather eclectic, so instead we'll use the standies that come with the demo game. Should work well enough with my large hex space mat. If we ever see the fleet scale EXOs from DP9 I expect this to change though. I actually don't mind the big scale difference between EXOs and ships, and larger EXOs would look better while playing the rpg anyway, but at the moment there's no room in the budget to spend on the amount og 28mm EXOs I would need for us to play.

As for the rpg rules, I actually think Silhouette/Core Command is a pretty solid system. The basics are quite easy and intuitive (yes, you do have to do some simple arithmetic) so we'll be playing it pretty much as written when we start out. My biggest worries are its lethality and the many skills built into it. Skills are easy to cut down on though, so shouldn't be a problem if we feel the need for it. As for the lethality factor... we'll wait and see... :D

And that's about it for this update. I will be writing more about Jovian Chronicles soon, but from a miniature game perspective. I'm prepping a bunch of ships for painting and DP9 have some interesting ideas for the future of the game that I really hope will come to fruition!

Until next time.