Descent

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

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