Covenant Update for June 10, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR JUNE 9, 2024

We had a banger of a playtest on Sunday! It lasted five hours, longer than most of, if not all, of our other sessions, and we got a lot done.

The only thing we weren’t able to do was try out Sazzy’s ideas for running fights on a map instead of using theatre of the mind. We were going to run this session on Roll20, but real life (like the memorial service for Sean’s father) prevented that this week. We hope to get that done this week, though.

Anyway, this week, the player characters (PC) hit a heavily defended “scrapping site”, where obsolete acoes and political prisoners are ground up into pet food after their cybernetics are removed and refurbished. It is run by the Archimedean Confederation company-state of Rekana Industries. Their CEO, a squirrel-like risu named Rekana, is a real piece of work. The site had heavily armed and armored risu corpsec troops with uniforms deliberately modeled off of Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht, along with bunkers and anti-aircraft emplacements.

Luckily, we had two new PCs. One was a heavy labor model aco with mining and demolitions experience named John Lorde. The other was a heavyworlder human survivalist and hunter named Vergil Duke (yes! our first human!). Their players were new to the system and had trouble with Covenant’s bidding system, but the other players seemed to be able to explain it to them.

All the players made plenty of bids. That included John advancing on a bunker and planting bombs to blow it up while Chanenth the calerre and Vergil covered them. We don’t have any rules for demolition, so Sazzy just assumed that the bunkers were destroyed after John made successful bids.

Things got dicey near the end when Rekana’s elite corpsec troops surrounded the PCs and tossed flashbangs to subdue them. That’s when Vergil’s player surprised Sean and suggested using his demolition experience to disarm the grenades or throw them back. It was surprising because they were completely new to the system. It was also the kind of creative play that we had designed Covenant to accomodate.

Anyway, they made their bid and threw the grenades back, and the Rekana soldiers were surprised enough to allow the PCs to break out of the encirclement. The PCs had been able to destroy enough anti-aircraft emplacements to allow evacuation ships to land and pick up the acoes imprisoned there, and they jumped on the last of the ships and got out without any losses.

All in all, the session went well. Our new players seemed to adapt rapidly to it, and the bidding system continues to take whatever we throw at it. We’ll let you know what Sazzy comes up for our next session next week.