Jovian Chronicles
After Ianus decided to split into two ventures in 1995 — Protoculture, which would publish Protoculture Addicts magazine; and Dream Pod 9, which would design and market miniatures and gaming books,[1]: 271–272 Jovian Chronicles was re-published as a full-fledged game line in 1997 by Dream Pod 9, this time using their own in-house rule system.
[7] During this time, Beta Playtest Rules for a new edition, called Jovian Wars, were released for free on DrivethruRPG as a PDF.
[8] The game world shows one possible future, a time in which Mankind has expanded and settled the Solar System, going as far as terraforming Venus and Mars.
[9] Exo-armors are one of the main hooks of the series, these one-crew mecha consist of big armored space suits talling 15 metres or more with weapons capable of devastating even small warships.
The series art and mechanical designs were created by John Moscato and Ghislain Barbe, the latter who was also responsible for the artistic style which characterized all of the Dream Pod 9's lines including Heavy Gear and Tribe 8.
The concept has its origins on a campaign played by the authors Mark A. Vezina and Etienne Gagnon since 1987, using R. Talsorian's Mekton system.
It is also of note that at this stage, Exos tend to be more balanced with little differences among them, while on later editions, grunt exos are intentionally inferior to hero machines, for example, a CEGA Syreen and a JC Pathfinder are equally balanced in power, armor and weapons, and similar in capabilities to larger machines.
Miniatures were in 1/325 scale due to the fictional size of the exo-armors and presented one of the finest and most dynamic mecha sculptings of the era.
Combat is handled by the same system, with characters taking penalty-inflicting wounds rather than depleting a set number of health points.
This change in scale intends to represent more realistically the magnitude of the conflicts depicted, making combat units smaller and warships larger.
It features a new turning template for ship maneuvers which is promoted as the major innovation in the system and due to the scale of the exo-armors, they now operate in squadrons of 3 miniatures each.
The project was funded, however it is uncertain if besides backers, other potential or new players will accept the scale change which has turned the exo-armors, an emblematic symbol of the series and marketing hook (first edition depicted a full page illustration of a Jovian Exo-armor on cover which was also used on the RAFM blister's card) into a sort of battle counter (size matters... sometime), rather focusing on ship to ship maneuvers.
But he criticized the combat rules, which he called "more work than fun", and he found little to be excited about in the setting, saying, "There's nothing terribly interesting going on here, and the game's ambitions seem awfully modest compared to the wide screen spectacle of Trinity."
Given the setting's emphasis on robot combat, Swan believed that "Jovian Chronicles aims at players more interested in hardware than human beings."
4 — a supplement describing six Venusian ships of the Jovian Chronicles line — that appeared in the August 11, 2000 issue of Pyramid found the supplement had failed in the small details that other works by Dream Pod 9 had possessed, saying "Being truly excellent is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, of course, you're excellent -- and that comes with a lot of perks.
