Covenant Update for January 29, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST

Before we started, though, the players running species from The Nature of Predators (Reddit here, Patreon here, Amazon here) decided that they wanted to convert their characters to acoes instead. We had already proven that the game was able to accommodate material from other franchises, so we allowed it. The conversion process was relatively painless, too, and the players were able to do it with minimal help from Sean and Sazzy.

Then we got back to the game. If you recall, Rekana (the risu CEO of Rekana Industries) had appeared on the Infinity’s bridge and took a bit out of Sazzy the ratel’s neck, incapacitating her. We did some more roleplay during the week, where Rekana ships chased the Infinity across several star systems and with Carver the valka doing his best to evade them.

The Rekana ships finally cornered us, only to be destroyed by several valka ships. Turns out we’d stumbled into the Matriarchy. The valka assembled to form what could only be called a giant magnifying lens, which used the light of the local star to cook the Rekana crews and their reactors alive.

The valka can be kind of intense.

Once things calmed down this week, though, the player characters (PC) had a chance to review the damage Rekana had caused. Turns out, it was a lot. He’d managed to damage systems all over the ship.

However, we did figure out a few things. Chanenth, a calerre scientist from the Covenant’s Mutual Aid Force, discovered that Rekana had either been traveling impossibly fast or compressing time. There’s technology that allows you to do that in the Covenant universe, but Rekana didn’t appear to be wearing or using anything like that.

We also discovered someone onboard who was able to fight off Rekana, a nozumi from Gaia named Temjin. Better still, Temjin was able to use a technique similar to Rekana, though it seemed to exhaust him. The PCs raced off the Infinity’s bridge to protect their one weapon against Rekana.

They were almost too late, though. The player who played Jorlim the skalgan from The Nature of Predators had made a big lionlike aco named 3131 to assassinate Temjin. He didn’t seem like a willing volunteer, as he had some kind of torture device that forced him to fight and a suicide bomb that would go off if he failed.

(Incidentally, we really need to find out why people want to play acoes. Maybe it’s because the Gen-1s have so many options, they have a built-in rebellious slave background, or we’re just attracting a lot of furries to the playtest)

3131 had a rough time landing a blow on Temjin, who used a combination of superspeed (he called the ability Sidestep, in honor of Sean’s comic book that kicked off the whole Covenant universe) and bomb knives to wear him down.

He finally figured out how to get past Temjin’s Sidestep and managed to land a massive blow on him, slicing him across the ribs and doing 400 discipline in damage. That’s a huge loss, enough to put a beginning character out of the game.

Temjin wasn’t a beginning character. He was essentially a boss, and he still had enough discipline left to defeat 3131.

That’s where the PCs showed up, and that’s where we’re going to end this week’s post. We’ll catch you next week with another update on the playtest, or you can get another Covenant post this week if you subscribe to our Patreon. Talk to you then.