Covenant Update for January 15, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST

We playtested Covenant on Monday. Not too much happened beyond roleplay between characters, but there was still something to learn from it.

First of all, let’s summarize what happened. Last week, the player characters (PC) hit a “scrapping site” on the Rekanna Industries world of Sujimma. They were there to rescue acoes and political prisoners scheduled for execution. They needed a diversion to do it, so they sent down marines from the Infinity, their ship, to attack Rekanna’s corporate security and draw them away from the scrapping site.

This week, they discovered that Rekanna had pinned down some of these marines and were massacring them. So, after an argument on what to do, they decided to work with the local resistance to rescue the marines. The resistance would take the blame for diplomatic reasons, and the Covenant would in turn supply them with weapons and supplies.

It was the argument, though, that was interesting, at least from the perspective of game design.

One of the cardinal laws of Covenant is that if you don’t need to use the rules, don’t use them – that is, don’t use them if you’re able to resolve conflicts between players or characters through talking or roleplay. This argument almost forced us to break open the rulebook and start making bids.

Jorlim the skalgan, a sapient species from The Nature of Predators (Reddit here, Patreon here, Amazon here) wanted to rescue the marines right away. Sazzy the ratel, though, wanted some kind of cover for the mission first. Her concern was that, if the Covenant openly supported a military strike on one Archimedean Confederation company-state, the others would band together in self-defense and start an interstellar war that would devastate the Orion Arm. They literally butted heads on this.

Covenant’s rules are normally written to resolve conflicts between the Force Majeure running the game and the players. However, if Jorlim and Sazzy’s argument had continued, we might have been forced to make them start making bids against each other, like fighting bids or persuasion bids, to resolve it.

However, the players collectively were able to come up with a solution, and their argument ended without anyone spending discipline or making bids. It was an interesting test of narrativist gameplay, and it seemed to work.

If you’re new here, then get used to posts like this. Our playtesters are committed to their characters, which means they like to do a lot of roleplaying. We’ll often have whole playtesting sessions where not a single rule is tested except that one cardinal rule: don’t use the rules if you don’t have to.

That’s about it for us here, though. We’ll be posting our progress on the Covenant’s domain summary for our patrons on our Patreon this Friday. If you’re interested in that, consider subscribing to our Patreon. Talk to you then.