Covenant Update for August 19, 2024

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PLAYTEST FOR AUGUST 16, 2024

Well, we had our first party wipe last time. How is the campaign going to recover from this disaster?

Well, when all of the player characters (PC) are valka, and the valka have a hivemind…

The PCs woke up in a fishing village near the north pole of Algol. A meteorite had struck the planet eons ago and knocked it on its side, with the north pole permanently pointed toward the sun. The fishing village was just on the edge of this arid and inhospitable region.

Ceku, Raaga, and Meri found themselves in cages, with another valka tying red or blue cloths. Red meant that they would live, while blue meant that they would be chopped up and fed to the village when the fishing catch got low. The PCs needed to do some fast talking to convince their captor that it would be worth his while to save them.

Their captor took their cages into another room, then left. Ceku was able to throw together a makeshift lockpick out of the red cloth on his cage and a long bone on the ground, and he managed to free everyone else.

The PCs then went to confront their captor, who turned out to be Karu, another valka. They thought they were traveling with Karu during the previous session, but it turned out that the BBEG Tykatra had killed and beheaded him.

When he died, Karu woke up in the body of a hunter who caught valka for the fishing village. Same with all of the other PCs: they woke up in the bodies of other valka with all of their skills and memories intact (well, except for the moment of their death) and one or two extra skills that their hosts knew.

Kind of horrifying, right? But it does solve one of the problems of a high-lethality game like this: just jump the dead PCs into someone else’s body. We’ll have to wait until next week to see where this goes.

PLAYTEST FOR AUGUST 18, 2024

Our playtest last Sunday had the PCs rescuing a group of acoes from a Rekana-held world. This week’s session, however, started far grimmer: Rekana had nuked the planet that the PCs had been on and killed everyone on it, then blamed the PCs.

This session didn’t have a lot of action. Instead, it was taken up by the PCs trying to figure out what to do against Rekana’s latest move. Every port was closed to them, and there was now an army of bounty hunters after them with orders to kill them.

The answer came from one of the Underground Railroad’s leaders – Pussycat, a pleasure model aco introduced all the way back in Chapter 2. She said that the Underground Railroad would start raids all across Rekana Industries space in order to distract its corporate security. This will give the PCs a chance to confront Rekana once and for in his headquarters on the planet Garas Ejen.

So how’d that go? You’ll have to find out next week.