Covenant Update for August 12, 2024

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PLAYTEST FOR AUGUST 9, 2024
Sazzy has been running two playtest campaigns simultaneously for Covenant, so Sean is starting his own to give them a break. His new campaign will run alternate Fridays with Sazzy’s all-valka one and will be a continuation of his earlier Underground Railroad campaign.

In the earlier campaign, the player characters (PC) rescued a number of acoes, including Tweak, from a Rekana Industries scrapping site. This new one will have the PCs travelling to another Archimedean Confederation planet to make contact with aco freedom fighters and set up the Railroad’s first station.

Friday’s session was dedicated to chargen. We had three people make characters, including Sazzy. Everyone there had played at least one Covenant campaign, and it went without any hitches. One player even used the item creation rules to make their character’s gear by themselves.

It looks like we’ll be ready to start the game in next week. We’ll let you know how it goes.

PLAYTEST FOR AUGUST 11, 2024

Speaking of the Underground Railroad and Rekana Industries, let’s talk about Sazzy’s Sunday game.
The PCs found themselves on a Rekana world after rescuing a group of acoes from a scrapping site while the Railroad’s new mech, the Araminta, attacking Rekana corporate security. This week’s game started with the truck that the PCs and acoes were in getting cut off by Rekana corpsec vehicles and a pair of concrete barriers. They turned into an alley to escape, but the truck was too wide. It got hopelessly stuck.

They shot out the windshield, piled out, and made a run for their escape ship. The Araminta tried to give them cover, but Rekana chose that moment to reveal their mechs. Two attacked the Araminta, while a third swung its energy sword at the PCs’ rescue ship.

That’s when things got weird.

The sword seemed to be moving slower than normal… or maybe the PCs were moving faster? It was hard to tell. The Covenant universe does have gravity engineering that lets you slow down time like that, but the PCs didn’t have anything like that with them.

Sazzy told the players that it felt familiar. They asked if the PCs wanted to focus on it. They needed every edge that they could get, so they said yes.

Time stood still. The mech froze. It had opened two missile racks, but the missiles it launched hung in midair. Sazzy chose this moment to give the players Rekana’s time stop ability.

Once they understood what was going on, the PCs fired on the mech’s open missile racks and its launched missiles. The time stop effect lasted a single round, but it was long enough to destroy both the missiles and the mech that fired them. With that, they piled on the escape ship and headed back to the Railroad’s headquarters of New Canaan.

It was fun and fast-paced game. There was some combat, but it was pretty loose. The big revelation, of course, was the PCs gaining the time stop ability. It’s similar to the ability that Rekana had used to defeat the PCs twice. Only time will tell if it’ll be enough to let the PCs win in a third matchup.