History of The Covenant – Consolidation

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

THE COVENANT – CONSOLIDATION

Real life happened to Sean this week, and we also had a few new players who were interested in the playtest and needed new characters, so we were unable to run a playtest this Sunday. To make up for it, we’ll be talking about the history of the Covenant today.

As we said in our first post on the Covenant’s history, the Covenant was founded on Cadelle, the homeworld of the calerre, in a region called World’s End. It was originally a peasant uprising against the Rethenne Empire, which had invaded World’s End from the neighboring region of the Rethenne Lowlands.

The Covenant threw out the Rethenne Empire from World’s End and gained their freedom. This was a dangerous time for them, though. The native calerre of World’s End were made up of isolated villages and warring clans, and without a common enemy to unify them, the Covenant could have fallen apart or been easily invaded by another neighbor.

They were lucky, though, because World’s End isolated them both geographically and politically. It was protected from invading armies from the north and south by treacherous mountain ranges and from the west by the Qoros region, which at that time was a vast desert. The loss of World’s End also led directly to the collapse of the Rethenne Empire in the east. This gave the Covenant time to consolidate itself.

The Covenant also worked to unify the region through peaceful means whenever possible.

One of these methods was to start a massive road and bridge building program in World’s End. The Rethenne Empire had tried and failed to build a road network there. The natives rightly saw it as a way for the imperials to extract resources and move around soldiers, so they destroyed as many imperial roads as they could.

The roads the Covenant built, though, were made for the benefit of those living in World’s End. They allowed wagonloads laden with food and trade goods to travel between communities. The thought was that it would be harder to hate a rival clan if you were eating food that they had grown, and it turned out to be correct. This logistics program was the direct ancestor of the modern Covenant’s Mutual Aid Civilian Corps.

The Covenant also created an army with soldiers and commanders drawn from all across the region. They trained together and learned a common language together so that they could defend the Covenant together. No one launched any serious attacks on World’s End during its early years due to its natural defenses, of course. However, this regionwide army was formed only partly for defense. The Covenant hoped that people who trained and fought with their rivals would be less likely to hate each and, again, they were right. This was the ancestor of another modern organization in the Covenant, the Mutual Aid Force.

They needed experts to accomplish all of these ambitious programs, though. The natives of the World’s End were smart and clever, and they had some bureaucrats trained by the Rethenne Empire to administer the region, but what they needed were scientists, engineers, and teachers. So they went about recruiting them.

Some of the Covenant’s founders had been political exiles from the Rethenne Empire, and they had contacts across half of Cadelle. They started putting the word out that they needed educated people and that the Covenant was a place that welcomed heretical and heterodox thought.

This was how the Covenant was able to consolidate itself and how the backward, lightly populated region of World’s End became a scientific and industrial powerhouse on Cadelle.

That’s about it for now. Hopefully, things will calm down this weekend, and we’ll be able to update you on another playtesting session. If not, we’ll keep telling you about the Covenant’s early history. Talk to you then.