Descent
A downloadable game
In 2015, a man on a popular social media site talked about an exciting new TTRPG he had created. It was called Jovian Sleighride, a new game where you play as the crew of a broken-down jalopy of a whaling ship, earning its keep by diving into Jupiter's atmosphere and battling the native megafauna to render into FTL fuel. It had gameplay focused around selling your FTL fuel to the various factions (both legal and otherwise) that had cropped up in the Jovian system, including Europa, run by a protectionist Earth government, Ganymede, run by hypercapitalist Martians, and Callisto, controlled by ruthless pirates. It was billed as "a game of desperately trying to claw your way out of poverty the way the Yankee whalers did - by climbing into a rickety ship and trusting that it can stand up to nature and all of her monsters, even the ones on two legs."
Yet, despite its interesting premise, nobody had ever seen a copy floating around on the Internet.
And so it was for seven years. Jovian Sleighride remained a "white whale" for some on the Internet; a project that seemed enticing and interesting, and yet forever out of their grasp. In 2022, I made a burner account on the site and messaged the game's creator, asking to see if he still had the files for his game, and if he would be willing to share them. To my surprise, he still had all of the original files and sent them over. At first I was elated; after years of searching, I was the person to finally find this game where so many others had failed.
When I opened the zip file, my excitement vanished. The game's core rules were less than a hundred words in total, with some flavor text scattered among a dozen or so folders (almost all empty) and a few threadbare text files. What was promised as a game was little more than a half-formed list of ideas that might one day be cool to put in a game. Less than dead, it never was.
When I shared this, reactions were mixed. Most were disappointed, but at the same time it provided some sense of closure to the project. The white whale they hunted never truly existed.
On February 15th 2023, Notepad Anon (https://notepad-anon.itch.io/) decided that Jovian Sleighride was too good of an idea to lay untapped and unfinished, and so held a game jam. Participants were given one month to create a sci-fi whaling simulator, as detailed or rules-lite as they wished, with a few other simple requirements to make it more interesting. I decided that I would make a game that truly captured the spirit of whaling.
This is the result.
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Holy fucking shit I was one of the people that "made" the original Jovian Sleighride! I'm not the person who posted on Reddit and made the notes, such as they were. Rather, I was the other person on a short lived-podcast where we got together every few weeks, got a bit drunk, and sketched out a setting from a few prompts. One of them was "whales" and "space" and the setting just kind of tumbled out of that, name and all.
The game came from the other person. We had a section after we made the setting where we talked about what we might run it in. I don't remember who thought of Dread, the game where every move is made by pulling a block from a Jenga tower and if the tower collapses your character dies, but it was a good fit. Other person decided to run a game of it, which I sadly couldn't attend. IIRC the system was FATE Core, but every action also involved a pull from the Jenga tower, and if the tower fell something important on the ship broke (death was chosen to be too nasty in a game that would have a lot of rolls). A good time was reportedly had by all.
The notes that you got from the Redditor must have been the original notes from that game. Part of the reason they were so sparse is that the game was just a mashup of two existing systems that worked for the premise, and part of it was that the setting already existed in the podcast, so there was no need to write it down just to run a quick game for friends.
The original podcast doesn't appear to exist on the internet any more and might not exist anywhere, which is a shame because I remember it being the best episode. Then again, it was made in 2013, a full decade ago, so maybe it's better that it lives in my memories.
I'm so happy to find out that someone did something with the idea! It is, as you said, too good of an idea lay unused. It's going to take me a while, but I'm going to try and read all of the game jam submission. I can't find the actual game jam, though I found the Youtube rundown by NotepadAnon which has enough to find anything published.
(This above is my recollection of it - other person probably remembers a bit better but the above is the broad strokes. Amazingly, I found this page because a mutual friend, who I believe was in the playtest, found this by chance when trolling for interesting looking games).Hell yeah dude, that's awesome. It's a shame that the podcast doesn't exist anymore, but as you said, a lot of things are better left as memories. It's a very cool concept for a setting.
If you're looking for the games themselves, you can find them in the #jovian-sleighride channel at discord.gg/mMKVPM5VeF
I have questions:
So … “success” in tests is the bad result, because the stats are all negative, and a success is the bad stat winning? Is that correct?
“22-Card Tarot Deck” I assume this just means the Major Arcana?
When do you run “The End”? Is it after capturing a whale successfully, or when the ship blows up, or at some other time?
Success is indeed bad. I liked the concept of succeeding in a miserable situation that you can't escape to be inherently maladaptive. It's intended that you use the Major Arcana.
Each card is meant to represent one month, so you would run The End after twelve months. Obviously if your ship blows up then that's the end of your story, but the whales don't stand much of a chance.