Covenant Update for April 1, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

No playtest this week due to Easter, so let’s talk about the early history of the Covenant instead. This one’s going to be a short entry, but it’s important because of its consequences.

You can read our previous Covenant history entries here:

• Part 1: Revolution
• Part 2: Consolidation
• Part 3: The War

THE COVENANT – STARDRIVES

After The War, the calerre more or less settled into two blocs on Cadelle, with the Covenant and their allies on one side and a loose coalition of capitalist and authoritarian nations on the other. There was intrigue, there were wars, but Cadelle maintained this equilibrium as its technology became more advanced.

And with more advanced technology came more pollution.

Now, the Covenant has something called the “downstream principle”: what can you do if you live downstream of someone who’s polluting your water, like someone who owns a tannery or chemical refinery? This principle says that you can do something about it, even if that person isn’t making direct threats against you, because it affects you and your quality of life. It’s how anarchists like the Covenant can still act responsibly to others. They were able to control pollution and greenhouse gasses in their territories

The Covenant’s rivals didn’t have anything like that, though. They had environmental laws, but the agencies responsible for enforcing these laws these were mostly captured by the very companies and institutions they were supposed to police. Pollution and greenhouse gasses were out of control in these countries and, despite the Covenant’s best efforts, deteriorated Cadelle’s biosphere. The whole planet teetered on the brink of complete environmental collapse.

That’s when the Covenant made a discovery that would save the calerre: stardrives, or spaceship drives that could send a crew to other star systems. The Covenant didn’t want to abandon Cadelle, but they did know how their rivals thought, so the Covenant slipped their research into their rivals’ scientific programs and fooled them into thinking that they had discovered stardrives themselves.

The people leading the Covenant’s rivals knew that Cadelle was facing an environmental catastrophe, but they either thought that they couldn’t do anything about it or that dealing with it would be too expensive. That’s why they used “their” stardrives to build a fleet of starships and abandoned the dying planet to the Covenant.

That left the Covenant as the sole superpower on Cadelle, and they immediately go to work cleaning up the planet. It was touch and go for a while, but they eventually averted an environmental collapse and turn the planet into the paradise that it is today.

The Covenant’s plan did have a downside, although no one at the time would have thought of it: the descendants of the calerre who escaped Cadelle went on to found the Old Empire, the Covenant’s oldest foe.

That’s about it for now, though. If you liked what you read here, make sure to subscribe to our Patreon and tune in to our Twitch stream this Friday.