Covenant Update for May 13, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

No playtest this week. Sean and his brother painted the back wall of the house this weekend, and he was in no condition to play or do anything else afterwards. Instead, we’d like to talk about how the Covenant made first contact with the thk’kok this week.

You can read our previous Covenant history entries here:

• Part 1: Revolution
• Part 2: Consolidation
• Part 3: The War
• Part 4: Stardrives
• Part 5: First Contact with Humanity

THE COVENANT – FIRST CONTACT WITH THE THK’KOK

Our sun wasn’t the only star that the Covenant sent survey ships to. They explored every nearby star in the Orion Arm, too. One of these was 51 Pegasi.
The crew of the Spring Sekie knew something was up as soon as they entered the system. The second planet was emitting enormous amounts of thermal and electromagnetic energy, enough to suggest a highly advanced civilization. They didn’t have long to analyze their findings, though. A fleet of strange squid-shaped ships took off from one of the small moons orbiting the planet and attacked them with unidentified and incredibly powerful weapons. The Spring Sekie was heavily damaged and only barely managed to escape. Only one calerre out of a crew of thirty-eight managed to make it back to Cadelle alive.
The Covenant’s initial reaction to the news of this attack was one of terror. They even attempted to build a defensive Dyson sphere around the planet, but their technology just wasn’t up to the task yet. Parts of this Dyson sphere still exist to this day orbitting Zeta 2 Reticuli and are known as the Islands of Steel and Fear.
Eventually, the Covenant decided that they needed to confront whoever or whatever was in the 51 Pegasi system, so they assembled their largest fleet of starships armed with their most advanced weapons and headed back, either to talk from a position of strength or to fight.
The Covenant had spent just over an Earth year since the attack, anticipating an attack every day. However, things had changed drastically in the 51 Pegasi system in that year. The second planet didn’t emit anything beyond natural EM radiation, and nothing rose from the moons or the planet’s surface to greet them.
What’s more, the Spring Sekie had managed to find two continents on the planet before it was forced to retreat. The smaller one had a huge water-filled crater blasted out of its northeast corner, and there was evidence of damage from a massive explosion or impact across the planet.
Despite all this, the planet had a sapient lifeform: an eight-legged carbon-based creature that communicated through tongue clicks. This creature, which the Covenant later learned called itself the thk’kok, lived in the ruins of a spacefaring civilization but used Stone Age technology and lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. They also had species-wide amnesia, either from the trauma they had been through or imposed externally, and couldn’t remember anything of their lives from more than a year before.
This was after first contact with humans, and the Covenant had learned from it. They set up a scientific outpost on the dark side of one of the planet’s moons to observe the thk’kok and to serve as a waypoint for rescued individuals, and that was that for the next 120,000 years or so.
The thk’kok turned out to be full of surprises. They built up industrial civilizations five different times, only to have them destroyed by phenomena that didn’t fit into any scientific model. Certain individuals also had the ability to manifest extranormal abilities, though never off-planet. The Covenant were still trying to figure all this out when the Old Empire came a-knocking. But that’s a story for another time.