Covenant Update for August 7, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s playtest report for Covenant! Sorry for the late post. Sean is in the middle of a move.

PLAYTEST FOR AUGUST 2, 2024

We had our first party wipe in Covenant history. This campaign is hardcore, though, so that’s going to happen a lot.

The valka Ceku, Raaga, and Meri were still in the inn with Karu and the risu Rekana. Meri stayed in the tavern with Ceku, who didn’t seem comfortable with social interactions, started repairing the plumbing behind the bar unbidden and wound up getting paid for his work. Raaga started haggling with another valka named Garan for supplies, that turned into some NSFW roleplay in the basement.

Suddenly, the basement started filling up with a black, tarry goo. Or maybe the fool was turning into goo, it wasn’t entirely clear. Garan was the first to touch it. It was burned his skin like acid. But it wasn’t just corrosive. Garan started screaming, his mind filled with voices, and the goo started drawing him down into it. Meri tried to pull him out of it, but by the time she did, they were surrounded by the goo and, just to make things worse, the ceiling started sprouting teeth.

The goo started oozing up through ground on the above floor after presumably devouring Garan and Meri. Rekana had been keeping Karu’s “trophy bag” and snatched it up, getting ready to escape.

Karu’s severed head stared up at him from the bag. The “Karu” they’d been travelling with was Karu’s ancient enemy Tykatra.

Turns out the bartender was a Third Hand member, or a disciple of Tykatra. There was a short fight that ended when Ceku threw a lighted piece of paper at the gas lines behind the bar. This blew up the bar, the bartender, and hopefully Tykatra. Meri and Ceku escaped but lost track of Rekana when he was blown out of the window.

The goo devoured the entire town, leaving Meri and Ceku as the sole survivors. Meri was reduced to 0 discipline and Ceku to 50, which meant that neither of them was ready for another scene.

Unfortunately, one found them when they ran into a nearby forest. Creatures like the barnacles from Half-Life dropped long sticky tongues from the branches and tried to catch them. They managed to dodge the first few, with Ceku sharing his discipline with Meri, but eventually they ran out of discipline and were caught and eaten.

Luckily, the valka have a hivemind that can store all kinds of things on it, including personalities, so there’s a chance that all three characters will be returning in different bodies. Sazzy has also instituted a house rule that gives players either 50 extra discipline or a trait whenever they lose a character, a rule that we’ll probably keep in the final game.

The players didn’t seem to mind the increased difficulty or the loss of their characters. They’ll have another crack at the campaign when we roll up new characters and start again next Friday.

Also, the one player who had difficulty with the system last time didn’t seem to have any during this session. Sazzy worked with them in DMs during the week and at the start of the game, so we’ll have to figure out what they did that made them finally understand it.

PLAYTEST FOR AUGUST 4, 2024

This session was pretty straightforward. Tweak the aco brought the player characters (PC) back together several months after the Battle of New Canaan, which devastated the planet but also destroyed Rekana Industries’ biggest asset, an ancient valka worldship and the metabiological horror that lay within it.

The PCs headed into Rekana space disguised as workers. John the humanoid aco was stopped and the UV tattoos in their feet scanned (aco manufacturers deliberately put the tattoos on their foot soles because it inconveniences them), but he had some equipment that spoofed the scanners.

They were on their way to their mission when they saw Rekana soldiers shoving an aco family into a van, the kind that they used at scrapping sites. As soon as they saw that, the PCs abandoned their mission and attacked.

Two unexpected things happened:

1. A group of humanoid rabbits leaped out of nowhere and, talking like the Insulting Frenchman from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, attacked the guards. These were the Kry’lik, a new playable alien species from a client state of the Federation of Earth Colonies. More on them to come in the coming weeks.
2. Just as it looked like the Rekana troops were about to cut off the PCs, a huge shadow appeared and strafed their vehicles before stepping on them with a huge robotic foot. This was the NCVG-01/02 ARAMINTA, named after Harriet Tubman’s birth name and based on the mechs from the Gundam series (Sazzy’s a big Gundam fan). The Underground Railroad on New Canaan had built the Araminta. They had been operating in secret long enough. It was time to give the people suffering under Rekana’s heel some hope.

We made a lot of bids, almost all of them combat-based, and the action was pretty nonstop without being too confusing. We think that the game system held up to another playtest session.