Covenant Update for November 6, 2023

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

We promised you that we’d playtest the game’s spaceship combat rules on Sunday. Our players, though, had other plans.

As a recap, the player characters (PC) Pyro the four-armed thk’kok and the acoes Tweak and Cozen were trying to escape from the Rekana Industries planet of Sujimma when four armored cars showed up and started shooting at them. They were scrambling to find another ride out and using guerrilla tactics to wipe out the first wave of soldiers sent against them when a new ship showed up unexpectedly: the New Orleans, flown by the massive badger-like ratel Sazzy and the aco Collision.

Sazzy and Collision had fun shooting at the guards and flinging the remaining armored cars into each other with the New Orleans’ cargo grapples. (Sazzy’s player was inspired to add those grapples from the arcade game Zero Wing, which had a space fighter with a tractor beam) They threw one of the armored cars into a massive squirrel-like risu named Kem, who was one of the cruelest guards at the lab where Tweak and Cozen had been held. However, he had plot armor – no, really, he literally has an ability called “Plot Armor” – so he just got pinned underneath it.

Meanwhile, Tweak, Cozen, and Pyro found an empty spaceship, the Funny Business. As they got ready to take off, they heard that fighters were being sent to deal with them. Kem had also pushed the armored car off of himself and was swinging a massive minigun towards the New Orleans. This was the Force Majeure (FM) telling the PCs to get the hell out of Dodge, and luckily, they did.

A Hammerhead orbital cutter and three Tulwar fighters blocked their path as they climbed into orbit. Cozen didn’t have much to do during this session – he’s more of a face than a fighter – so the FM had him get on the commo in the Funny Business to talk to the cutter.

Big mistake.

The FM Forgot that Cozen had an ability called Liar, which you can chapter-tap – that is, use once per game chapter – to succeed automatically at a deception bid. Cozen chose to use it to convince the cutter that they were innocent spaceships fleeing from the fighting at the spaceport. It was a whopper, but he managed to convince the cutter.

He didn’t convince them entirely, though. The cutter told the Funny Business and New Orleans to dock at a nearby orbital elevator while they sorted out what was going on. That’s where we ended the session. We could still end up with a spaceship fight, or at least chase, if the Pcs try to run next session. Only time will tell.

The FM is seriously considering rewriting the Liar ability and other abilities that give automatic successes after that session. The players, on the other hand, think it should stay the way it is because it was a cool use of the ability. It was. However, the important questions are whether the ability is overpowered and if it’ll break the game to keep it unchanged.

Anyway, that’s it for now. We may be switching to another playtest campaign on Sunday (we have several running at the same time). We’ll let you know next Monday. Talk to you then.