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Remember that setting I made the ape amazons for? Remember my very first post, where I advise patience for those joining a new group. The campaign is now mine for the patience I showed, or sort of impatience actually.

Our first GM had to bail, Mike picked up the slack but the strain was showing in the game: bad rules calls, overly lethal encounters, depleted description in narration. From work, his three other campaigns, the price of gas and his long travel time, and maybe even the retrograde motion of mars; the toll has been on the poor guy. With assurances that Steve and myself would take turns running the game to lighten the burden on him, Jupiter has become my province to run.

The genre is planetary romance. Exploration, weird science, and exotic locales in pulp fashion with modern-like human protagonists in fish-out-of-water scenario: this defines our theme. The Iron Lords of Jupiter setting from Polyhedron magazine was the original inspiration, but I’m taking a slight different tack.

Jovian Chronicles: an original world of my own design with new species and wild settings. Iron Lords was essentially Iron-age Jupiter with some ray guns thrown in. I’m planning to advance things a bit to a Renaissance level of technology, a mix of old and advanced. The group digs fantasy, and though magic isn’t an asset of the genre hyper-advanced tech can appear that way. The medieval times transitioning into the Enlightenment from real history gives us this feels.

Hold your horses, though. Nature precedes and shapes civilization. First come the physical setting components. I’m keeping the sky glow, a luminescent cloud layer that substitutes for the sun, which is invisible beneath the ultra dense cloud cover and merely a bright speck even on the surface. This is sufficient to promote life, but not awesome. My idea is to have coruscating colors and variable brightness intensity in the phenomena. Think of it as an incredibly intense firestorm burning every element, called the Corusea - Core-uh-See-ah. Morning starts out blue; noon is yellow, with evening creating red that fades to magenta in an ultraviolet “night”. A full color cycle, Ryzma - from prism, takes 30 hours or a Jovian day. Patterns within the Corusea — like perceived shapes in clouds — are given spiritual significance akin to the constellations: The Vermillion Maiden of Regret, Golden Firebird of Victory, Azure Eye of Dawn‘s witness. Freaky yet familiar makes exotic.

The original setting features a solid landmass like earth with oceans and seas, different mainly only in coloration. Yet again, this seems kind of boring. A new player Dan told me about real life theories of ultra pure mercury compounds on the giant planet that would make valuable super-duper-superconductors. I like that idea, and it gives us the basis for a truly alien landscape. No oceans!

Continents and islands slowly float over an electrical maelstrom marking Jupiter’s inner atmosphere — the dark, lightning strobed Elemir (el-ah-MEAR), from electric mare or sea. Each range is composed of and sitting atop massive plates of Argen, a local name for the silvery red anti-grav mineral. Occasionally, these ranges collide to form larger landmasses with topography similar to that on earth with mountain ranges and valleys complete with fresh water from rain forming rivers and lakes - OH MY. Variable amounts of Argen in the landmasses affect the altitude of ranges. This gives us varied climates, with high fliers closer to the Corusea being equatorial equivalents - hot sticky jungles or blasted deserts - and low Elemir skimmers being frigid tundra and sub-artic plains. Earth in three dimensions.

With each range being it’s on isolated ecosystem this allows us have a ridiculous amount of biodiversity and a variety of civilization. Jovian sentient life abounds, with varying levels of civilization. Processed and energized Argen plates give lift, allowing ships to navigate the huge expanses between ranges like the sailing ships of old but with the handling of a helicopter.

I’ve got several concepts for species the Earthlings will encounter, but don’t want to give away too much as players visit the blog. You can count them being fleshed out here as the setting develops through game play, as the Jovian Chronicles are written into the history of this strange, fantastic world.

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