Covenant Update for July 30, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s playtest report for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR MONDAY, JULY 29, 2024

All right, we finally have time to write up yesterday’s playtest!

Sazzy, our Force Majeure, retconned the game back to the New Orleans. The player characters (PC) still made their way into the ship and still encountered the corrupted fungal infection from last Sunday, but from here on, the game deviated.

The fungal infection had spread throughout the ship, but Carver the lujen used his esoteric powers to keep the spores from infecting the PCs. Something came screeching at them from out of the dark, but it didn’t do anything to them. That’s just as good, too, because it shrugged off a shotgun blast from Chanenth the calerre.

The PCs eventually came across an armory filled with charged photon weapons. It also had Rekana, the current BBEG. He was different, though, younger and sad. He then walked through the bulkhead, which is definitely a trick Rekana hadn’t learned yet.

Soike the risu, who seemed to understand what was going on, said that Rekana lost his body long ago during the 1999 Algol incident. That meant the Rekana the PCs had been fighting was something else.

The worldship was still hurtling towards New Canaan, the aco Underground Railroad’s headquarters, so the PCs made their way to its center to find a way to divert or destroy it.

The core of the worldship was a massive, non-Euclidean mass of struts and microsuns and photovoltaic arrays, an engineering feat that the valka had long forgotten how to build. The chamber it was in was larger than some countries in diameter.

It was also filled with the corrupted fungal biomass, too large to fight with anything less than starship weapons. The chamber was filled with the minds of all the people the mass had consumed over millions of years, minds that were only half-sane.

Chanenth took a reading of it on his recorder. It was definitely the 1999 Algol entity.

The PCs’ weapons were capable of punching through the entity’s fungal shell, but it was just too large. So they formed a plan: one half of the party would attack it to distract it, while another would find a way to sabotage the chamber and kill the thing outright.

The metal of the chamber was cracked and rotten from millions of years and lack of maintenance, so the sabotage team found a shard of metal and shoved it into one of the cracks. They hit it enough, and the chamber started to collapse on the entity.

The entity lashed the decoy team with both physical and mental attacks, trying to make them harm themselves and twist their perception. However, the chamber collapsing on it ripped open a hole in its shell, and the decoy team gathered around the gash, firing all their weapons into its innards. It was weirdly cathartic, maybe because the PCs were finally facing their true enemy.

Soike burst out of the debris, the spirits of the dead drawn to him. He drew his photon blade, drove it down into the entity’s head, then broke it. The photon crystal left inside exploded.

A portal opened, with Rekana inside. Sarah, the aco sniper, instantly aimed and fired at him, and Rekana disappeared.

Everything after that was wrap-up. The Infinity had transformed into its humanoid configuration and was holding the worldship up just a few miles from New Canaan’s surface. When the worldship’s core started collapsing, the rest of the worldship did, too, and the Infinity’s head burst into the chamber, allowing the PCs to escape.

The worldship appeared to be Rekana Industries’ best shot at wiping out New Canaan. With that gone, their fleets ran away, with ships from from the valka Matriarchy and the Covenant’s Mutual Aid Force chasing them away.

And that’s it. The first part of the campaign’s fifth and last act is in the bag. It was a great game, with everyone present and on point. Even the technical difficulties decided to behave. It also proved that the Covenant system could handle situations besides direct combat, which is heartening.

Anyway, it’s late, so we’re going to wrap this up. But we’ll be back here next Monday with more playtest updates.