Covenant Update for April 29, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

No playtest this week due to Easter. Both players were on the injured list from headaches. So instead of talking about that, let’s talk about the early history of the Covenant instead.

You can read our previous Covenant history entries here:

• Part 1: Revolution
• Part 2: Consolidation
• Part 3: The War
• Part 4: Stardrives

THE COVENANT – FIRST CONTACT WITH HUMANITY

After the calerre of the Covenant invented stardrive, they started exploring space, as you do. Their starships were primitive compared to the ones they’re using now; it was 120,000 or so years ago, after all.

Eventually, though, a Covenant ship named Pillar of Fire made the 39 light year trip from Cadelle and Zeta Reticuli to the third planet orbiting an unremarkable main sequence yellow dwarf.

The Pillar of Fire was a scientific ship, but they weren’t ready for their first contact with humanity. Humans at this point weren’t much more than small hunter-gatherer bands in southeast Africa, so not only was there a huge cultural and language gap between the humanity and calerre, but a huge technical one, as well. This was the calerre’s first contact with any other sapient species, so her crew had to play everything by ear.

It didn’t go well.

The calerre made contact with a single band of about 20 humans. The humans were scared at first but seemed to warm to the odd strangers. However, things soured later that night, resulting in the deaths of two of the calerre scientists and five humans.

Humans soon forgot the calerre. They had contacted just a single band for a single day and night, so they hadn’t left much of a mark. Clearly, though the Covenant didn’t have enough information to contact humanity properly, so they decided to keep watch on Earth and learn as much as they could.

The Covenant set up observation posts in Earth orbit and, as humanity became more advanced, buried under the surface of the Moon. They occasionally sent down sociologists to get more direct data, first calerre in holographic disguises, then recruited humans.

Covenant scientists were present at many of humanity’s most important moments, though never with Covenant technology. Everything humanity built and accomplished, they did on their own, with the help of only a few calerre anthropologists lending elbow grease and learning humanity’s technology.

So, about those recruited humans.

As humanity’s technology develop, so too did their military technology. Skirmishes between bands of humans turned into wars and genocide between nations. The Covenant didn’t want to sit aside and let innocent people die, but they also didn’t want a repeat of their disastrous first contact. They had to get creative.

The Covenant started rescuing the victims of wars, plagues, and other disasters and bringing them back to Cadelle. To cover their tracks, they left behind bodies constructed from holograms and force fields and, later, biological androids that would die and rot exactly like humans.

A side effect of this was that these human refugees became an important part of the Covenant, in time outnumbering the calerre that had founded it. The calerre treated them like equals, though, and the humans returned the favor. It didn’t hurt that most of the humans were grateful to the calerre for having saved their lives. Soon, they were even accompanying the calerre scientists back to Earth to study their relatives.

That’s about it for now, though. We’ll stream on Twitch on Friday and take another crack at playtesting the game on Sunday. Talk to you next week.