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Welcome to this week’s playtest report for Covenant!
PLAYTEST FOR JULY 21, 2024
We had a pretty dramatic game on Sunday that ended on a cliffhanger. We can’t wait to see how it wraps up next Sunday.
The game started with the player characters (PC) in orbit around New Canaan, the base of the aco Underground Railroad, in their ship the Infinity. A massive portal opened near the ship, revealing a moon-sized valka worldship, flanked by a fleet of corpsec ships and barreling towards New Canaan.
The PCs took off from the Infinity in Sazzy’s ship the New Orleans. They were accompanied by mass-production Louisiana ships based on the New Orleans’ design. The plan was to have Sazzy try to deflect the worldship away from New Canaan and, if that didn’t work (of course it wouldn’t), have the PCs board the worldship and take control of it. Somehow.
The fighting on the way there was intense and deadly. Tweak the aco jacked into the *New Orleans’* systems and managed to avoid most of the fire, but unfortunately not all of it. A missile got through the ship’s armor and breached the fusion reactor, and the PCs had barely enough time to crash onto the worldship’s surface and evacuate inside before she exploded. It was an emotional moment. The New Orleans had been with us since Chapter 1, when we started at least a year ago. She’ll be missed.
Strangely enough, though, the worldship appeared to be completely empty. Worldships need thousands, even millions of crew to pilot, so this was a bit unusual. It wasn’t until they PCs made it to the control room that they found anything living.
To understand this next scene, you have to understand a little bit about risu spaceship manufacture. People think that they fly wooden ships, but their ships are actually made up of a dense fungal mass that resembles wood. The mycellium network allows the risu to interact directly with their ships using their electrokinetic powers.
However, if the fungus goes bad, then it has to be burned immediately. That’s because the spores they give off and drive a person crazy.
That’s what the PCs found in the control room: a mass of rotten ship fungus. What was worse, they were getting sensor readings matching the entity that they fought way back in Episode 1 on Bitter Springs, an entity related to the one that destroyed the valka homeworld of Algol back in 1999 CE.
While the PCs were trying to process all this, one of them opened a door onto space and saw the Infinity. It had transformed into its humanoid form and was even lowering a manipulator to allow them to get back to the bridge.
It was only until they started climbing onto the manipulator that anyone asked, “Hey, we’re standing unprotected in space. Why aren’t we dead?”
That was when Sazzy the FM told the players to make a collective willpower save, which was basically a bid that everyone contributed to. The PCs made it, which allowed them to pierce the illusion being created the rotten fungus in the control room.
What did they see once the resisted the illusion? No idea, because that’s where the game ended. But we’ll let you know what it was and if we survived next week!
Radio Free Covenant - A Podcast about the Science-Fiction Roleplaying Game "Covenant" and Urban Fantasy Novel "Crossing the Line" 