Covenant Update for July 8, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR JULY 5, 2024

We’re starting a new playtest on Fridays! Like we said last week, it’s an all-valka game that takes place in the Matriarchy on or around 1999 CE.

Apparently, the Matriarchy was a lot more unstable back then (about 800 years before the main game), and there were constant fights between valka hives. Sazzy dropped the PCs into the middle of one of these to start off the campaign.

This campaign is a lethal one. Sazzy has made it very clear that we might lose our characters numerous times during it. It looked like we might have a TPK the very session, too, with hordes of valka soldiers sweeping through a hive’s surface buildings and massacring everyone they could find.

The players had two things going for them, though. One was a risu who was able to use their electrokinetic abilities to hold off the first wave of soldiers. The second was our sense of self-preservation, we ran for it.

We ended the session in the swamps outside of our hive on Algol with two notable NPCs in our party: Karu, a valka who makes repeated appearances throughout history, and Rekana, the risu who blasted the soldiers with lightning.

Rekana seems nice.

PLAYTEST FOR JULY 7, 2024

Sunday’s game took place about 800 years later, in the game’s “present day”. The PCs were still recovering from their attack on the Rekana Industries scrapping site, with their ship Infinity docked to the aco station of ReHome.

Suddenly, something shook the Infinity. Something had latched onto ReHome and was slowly destroying it. The PCs helped evacuate everyone off of Rehome while the Infinity fired on the thing destroying ReHome.

The evacuation was a lot more successful than the Infinity’s attack. In fact, after the thing was done with ReHome, it grabbed onto the Infinity’s central axis. It looked like the ship was going to share the same fate as the ReHome.

That’s when Tweak the aco came up with a desperate plan. The ship’s central axis held the cables leading from the ship’s power plants. The plan was to expose those cables and drive all that electrical power into the monster attacking the ship, then use the FTL drive to get the hell out of there.

Our newest PCs John the aco and Vergil the human volunteered to expose the cables while everyone else covered them. They finally pulled it off as waves of things poured off the monster.

The Infinity activated its FTL drive, and the PCs saw, in the final seconds before they buggered out, Rekana outside the ship, unprotected in the vacuum of space, with the monster.

Rekka the risu, who is with the risu Nameless Order, explained what was going on. Rekana was involved in the Algol incident back in 1999. She didn’t go into details, but something or someone woke up a “larval god” that threatened to destroy the planet. Rekana was able to stop it, but at the cost of absorbing it into himself. That Rekana doesn’t exist anymore. Now Rekana and the larval god are one.

The incident did enormous damage to the Orion Arm. The risu forgot much of their electrokinetic abilities, and the valka forgot how to manufacture much of their technology, including the photon weapons that the PCs were using.

It looks like Rekana in the Friday playtest has a bad fate awaiting him.

ANALYSIS

Both sessions had the players making lots of bids. The system still seems solid, and Friday’s game in particular gave us a glimpse of what the game would look like if the lethality was cranked up. All we have to do now is figure out some way to translate the system we’re using into a printed set of rules, and we’ll be all set.