|
I binge-bought most of the Jovian Chronicle first edition and then SilCore and the 2nd edition PHB, but never got to play much of either. I remember hating SilCore after finding it did nothing to stop the snake-eyes-and-box-carts problem whilst adding layers of needless complexity. And eventually realising I'd have preferred Heavy Gear even if I really like the idea of Giant Robots cutting space ships in half. I have no idea where my books are these days. In the history section does it just ignore the original developer campaign basically defining 90% of the setting (featuring, if I remember correctly, THE MAN THEY CALL RAMBO GARAND, "It's a Gundam!" and a multi-session trip in a slow haul freighter pretending to not be The Main Characters) or are you saving that for later on? A lot of the setting gets absolutely cringe worthy (you have three rival intelligence organisations with codenames based on the Greek version of the Norns?), but it's sort of interesting to excavate the roots and see how fan-fictiony they really are. There's probably also some interesting exposition to be done on the state of Dream Pod 9 itself - them hopping between games and being film extras (specialising in militaries and police?) and eventually just hiring fans to save the product line before settling back into selling pewter is probably worth a post all on its own.
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2015 21:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Jan 18, 2025 04:11 |
|
|
Actually, yeah, the more I think on it the more it hits the big notes from my very hazy recollections. Jovian Chronicles started as a homebrew and eventually got written up with the original campaign as key lore, a bit like Ravenloft. I seem to remember the whole Mars incident was that the players got their slow-boating cover blown whilst escorting the Doctor and had one of the three or so mecha battles to actually occur (the first almost certainly related to the lunar incident, the third being the big conflict at the end involving prototype mobile suits). I think they got around the problem of only one player having exo-piloting skills by having the others play temporary NPCs or even the main antagonist (who may or may not have been wearing a mask and may or may not have switched sides repeatedly until a final duel with a player pilot), which was pretty clever for the time, but I could just have inferred that as they never explicitly put together a play log. Things eventually moved away from Gundam homages and more towards a mix of the pacific and cold wars (complete with fleet books on carrier designs!), much like Heavy Gear/Terra Nova was super-heavily influenced by WW1/2 Europe.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2015 22:30
|
|
|
The linear frame thing is stupid as gently caress anyway - I think it was one of the technologies The Doctor invented, with the thought-control system being the next extension. I think the Gundam of the setting, the un-statted Prometheus which debuted in the final battle of the Odyssey, was originally the linear frame test bed, which was later ret-con'd to give most current exos linear frames / a reason to exist at all? Older exos still have the same controls as a fighter. I believe that at one point the reasoning behind exo armour being superior to fighters is that, as a humanoid fighting machine, human reflexes and behaviour are better suited to take the machine to the limits. So crazy martial arts manoeuvres are actually expected of all pilots. You can't reflexively Char Kick in a fighter shuttle. But then there's a nod to harder sci-fi with the CEGA Syreen/Fury and Jovian-Trojan Hephaestus(?) which get rid of legs because legs are stupid in zero-g. In one of the books they explained (and alluded to in one of Doresh’s earlier posts) that the reason exos exist at all is that the Jovians had lots of the big worker suits and retrofitted them for military purposes (Zaku I stlye) when CEGA started to show up – not because the technology was actually any good, and it works only because CEGA’s pilots are mostly earthlings and not used to fighting in space. Mechanically, Silhouette and SilCore prefer units that don't get hit to ones with armour, especially if you house rule rolling dodge once and letting it stand against all attacks that turn. The net result is that fighters, which can go really fast and thus be hard to hit, are actually pretty good despite having manoeuvrability/dodge penalties. (All of this is just coming from my horrendous memory, I haven't managed to find my books)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2015 00:01
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:So outside the promise of getting to have robot fights the whole thing feels very "wait, why are we even doing this again?" I think that this, in addition to the loving awful copy editing, is why I ended up not liking Jovian Chronicles. If the balance of the material produced hadn't decided to meander between hard and soft sci-fi it would have probably bothered me less. This is despite my enjoyment of most things Giant 'Real' Robot. Even though the Gears are still a little odd from a physics point of view (let's not get started on land ships) and the history factions/politics are a cheap pastiche on the 1920s-1950s, I really like Heavy Gear because I never noticed them really contradicting themselves over the use of Gears. Core Command is the Gunbuster one, right? Where Heavy Gear = VOTOMS, Jovian Chronicles = Gundam. I've never seen Gunbuster so I'm guessing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2015 09:37
|
|