Covenant Update for April 16, 2024

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Sorry about the late post this week and the lack of a post last week. Things got a little crazy here, and Sean needed to turtle up for a week or so to deal with it.

We owe you a pair of Covenant playtest recaps, though, don’t we? Here they are.

PLAYTEST FOR APRIL 7, 2024

Sazzy wanted to see if Covenant could be adapted to Star Wars. They had a story idea for the Yuuzhan Vong War, and they also wanted to see if our game systems could accommodate Force powers. Sean was game, so we tried it.

The first game was all roleplaying. We haven’t even done character generation yet. We put together a sufficiently ragtag crew consisting of a lepi, a talz, a droid, and a wookiee, plus a family of human NPCs who took in the taik, and started the game with an ancient XS stock light freigher named the Jackrabbit on the planet of Coachelle.

The vong had already invaded, and Coachelle had a large number of refugees. Communications with the rest of the galaxy were cut off, so the player characters (PC) decided it was a good idea to leave. Their suspicions proved to be correct when a Star Destroyer commandeered by the Peace Brigade (basically vong collaborators) decided to jump into the system and dump a bunch of fighters in front of the Jackrabbit.

A space battle would have been a good test of the Covenant system, but unfortunately we hadn’t generated any characters, so we roleplayed the Jackrabbit escaping the fighters, then dropping a missile at point blank range into the Star Destroyer’s bridge. That pretty much killed any pursuit, figuratively and literally, and the PCs were able to escape.

We’re not sure when the next Star Wars session will be, though. Sean will probably have to shake off the blues and whip up a modified character generation system before we can, but that shouldn’t take too long. We’ll update you when we play that campaign again.

PLAYTEST FOR APRIL 14, 2024

We resumed our brief two-year-or-so playtest campaign the next Sunday. As a reminder, the PCs were trying to find a way to learn the time-stop technique used by Rekana, the owner of Rekana Industries. This is similar to the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Stand of Za Warudo (Sazzy is a huge JoJo fan), and Rekana had already used on the PC twice to devastating effect each time.

They traveled to the planet of Gaia to learn this technique and met with Mizumi, one of the planet’s gods. Mizumi told the PCs that they could learn this technique at one of two places: Elysium, which was more secure, and Deathtoll, which was faster to get to. We learned that the daughter of Temjin, one of the NPCs, had been corrupted by the Discordians, one of the factions on Gaia, and that we might not be able to save her if we wasted time. So we headed to Deathtoll, the faster route.

In hindsight, we probably should have taken the greater security of the Elysium route. Mizumi was able to use their time-control powers to make the trip to Deathtoll faster, but that didn’t stop the Discordians from intercepting them just outside Deathtoll. The Discordians threw several illusions at the PCs to slow them down, but Carver the valka was able to perceive these illusions for what they really were.

The PCs then made their way to Deathtoll’s bell tower, but found it surrounded by a force field. Apparently, the Discordians were inside the bell tower. This was very bad, because the bell tower was supposedly a beacon to guide the planet’s souls to the afterlife.

So, on top of trying to learn Mizumi’s time-control powers and save Temjin’s daughter, and deal with the Discordians, the PCs also stop a theological disaster of Biblical proportions. They’re going to be busy, in other words.

We didn’t make any bids or use the rules this time, but that was only because we ended the session outside the bell tower, right before we tried to breach the force field. The rules are probably going to get a workout next session, though. We’ll keep you updated on it.