Radio Free Covenant – A Podcast about the Science-Fiction Roleplaying Game "Covenant" and Urban Fantasy Novel "Crossing the Line"

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

No game this week. Sean and Sazzy both had personal business that kept them from playing. So instead of writing up a playtest recap, we’d like to share with you the Covenant’s second contact with humanity.

You can read our previous Covenant history entries here:

• Part 1: Revolution
• Part 2: Consolidation
• Part 3: The War
• Part 4: Stardrives
• Part 5: First Contact with Humanity
• Part 6: First Contact with the Thk’kok

COVENANT – SECOND CONTACT

As we previously mentioned, the Covenant had already made first contact with humanity, and it had gone disastrously. The Covenant then decided to withdraw and watch humanity. Instead of jumping feet first into a “second contact”, they decided that they would learn as much as they could about this strange species and only make themselves known to Earth when the time was right.
This is what they did for over 120,000 long years.
There were a lot of disappointments during this time. Humanity gave the Covenant plenty of chances to make contact, only to ruin them by their subsequent behavior. One of these was the end of World War II, when it seemed that the world had banded together to defeat fascism. However, it became quickly apparent to the Covenant that the Cold War and the subsequent years after it were just a realignment of old imperial structures, with humanity constantly coming up new and exciting ways to oppress themselves.
All during this, humans kept polluting the environment and warming the climate. It got so bad that, by the first quarter of the 21st century, the Covenant despaired of ever making contact before humanity drove themselves to extinction.
Then things started to change on Earth.
After another brief and frightening flirtation with fascism, humans started kicking out the old leaders that had gotten them into their mess and started fixing the myriad problems facing Earth. The empires started to crumble around the edges. People started working together to improve the world and, most importantly, clean up centuries of industrial pollution.
The Covenant scientists watching humanity finally sat up and took notice.
In 2058, during the World Cup – the most televised event on the planet – the Covenant finally revealed themselves to humanity. Again. Their ships appeared above the pitch where the finals match was held, along with over every capital city on Earth.
The Covenant wasn’t offering Earth entry, not yet. Despite recent events, it just wasn’t ready. However, human society had advanced to a point where they would be able to join the Covenant in the near future, if they wanted to. And the Covenant was there to help make that happen.
Almost immediately, Earth split into three factions. There were the old imperial powers. There were nations who, with varying amounts of enthusiasm, adopted the Covenant of Winterhaven. Finally, there were nations who took advantage of the confusion to break away from their imperial masters but who refused to join a bunch of outsiders, choosing instead to go their own way. Much of the second and third factions were made up of nations from Earth’s Global South, but there were joined by neglected cities and provinces within the great powers of Earth, as well.
As you can imagine, reshuffling Earth’s power balance like this led to a lot of conflict and war. However, the new commonwealths on the planet had whole planets of support to draw from, so they were able to defend themselves from relentless onslaughts. The Covenant of Winterhaven slowly spread across the planet, if only because Earth’s commonwealths were able to keep their freedom and help other nations in need.
And that’s how things stood until the next big thing happened. But that’s for later.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR JUNE 9, 2024

We had a banger of a playtest on Sunday! It lasted five hours, longer than most of, if not all, of our other sessions, and we got a lot done.

The only thing we weren’t able to do was try out Sazzy’s ideas for running fights on a map instead of using theatre of the mind. We were going to run this session on Roll20, but real life (like the memorial service for Sean’s father) prevented that this week. We hope to get that done this week, though.

Anyway, this week, the player characters (PC) hit a heavily defended “scrapping site”, where obsolete acoes and political prisoners are ground up into pet food after their cybernetics are removed and refurbished. It is run by the Archimedean Confederation company-state of Rekana Industries. Their CEO, a squirrel-like risu named Rekana, is a real piece of work. The site had heavily armed and armored risu corpsec troops with uniforms deliberately modeled off of Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht, along with bunkers and anti-aircraft emplacements.

Luckily, we had two new PCs. One was a heavy labor model aco with mining and demolitions experience named John Lorde. The other was a heavyworlder human survivalist and hunter named Vergil Duke (yes! our first human!). Their players were new to the system and had trouble with Covenant’s bidding system, but the other players seemed to be able to explain it to them.

All the players made plenty of bids. That included John advancing on a bunker and planting bombs to blow it up while Chanenth the calerre and Vergil covered them. We don’t have any rules for demolition, so Sazzy just assumed that the bunkers were destroyed after John made successful bids.

Things got dicey near the end when Rekana’s elite corpsec troops surrounded the PCs and tossed flashbangs to subdue them. That’s when Vergil’s player surprised Sean and suggested using his demolition experience to disarm the grenades or throw them back. It was surprising because they were completely new to the system. It was also the kind of creative play that we had designed Covenant to accomodate.

Anyway, they made their bid and threw the grenades back, and the Rekana soldiers were surprised enough to allow the PCs to break out of the encirclement. The PCs had been able to destroy enough anti-aircraft emplacements to allow evacuation ships to land and pick up the acoes imprisoned there, and they jumped on the last of the ships and got out without any losses.

All in all, the session went well. Our new players seemed to adapt rapidly to it, and the bidding system continues to take whatever we throw at it. We’ll let you know what Sazzy comes up for our next session next week.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR JUNE 2, 2024

We’re trying to push the game in a new direction – or at least see if pushing it in a new direction is a good idea – and that all started Sunday.

Sazzy has some massive battles planned for this chapter of the game, and our current theatre of the mind rules simply can’t support them. Therefore, Sazzy wants to experiment with using maps instead.

Our playtesters are spread across North America, unfortunately, so that may present a challenge. However, Sazzy was able to turn Discord’s whiteboard feature into a rough-and-ready virtual desktop. They even spent Saturday evening drawing tokens for all the player characters and some of the nonplayer characters. Much of Sunday’s session was getting everyone used to the whiteboard interface.

There wasn’t much action on Sunday, though. We’re bringing in two brand new players, and the time we didn’t spend getting used to Discord’s whiteboard was spent travelling to an aco colony where we met our last new character, a heavy labor model aco and miner named John Lorde. With our first and only human Vergil Duke, a heavyworlder survivalist with a hunting dog, our party is complete!

They’re going to be hitting a Rekana scrapping site soon, hopefully this Sunday. We’ll let you know how it goes next week.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR MAY 19, 2024

We started the first session of our newest (and possibly) last chapter for this Covenant story. This session was all roleplay, so we didn’t use the rules or make any bids.
Tweak the aco got the band back together for one last job: Chanenth the calerre, Sarah the aco, Sazzy the ratel, Carver the valka, and G, who has been turned into a wolf-like Lujen. They were joined by Vergil, who was… a human! Hey our first one!
This chapter is based on a story that Sean started several months ago, with the player characters (PC) joining an Underground Railroad to smuggle acoes out of the Archimedean Confederation (AC). Sazzy has expanded this into a huge arc, with Tweak and Sazzy joining the Underground Railroad and the Underground Railroad starting to take on the AC’s company-states and, in particular, Rekana Industries.
However, taking on Rekana Industries means taking on their CEO, the risu Rekana. Rekana has a time-stop ability that he’s used to kick the PCs’ asses twice. However, Tweak has apparently learned this ability since the last time we saw him, and he’s able to teach it to the other PCs. That should even the odds a bit. We’ll let you know if it does in the coming weeks.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

No playtest this week. Sean and his brother painted the back wall of the house this weekend, and he was in no condition to play or do anything else afterwards. Instead, we’d like to talk about how the Covenant made first contact with the thk’kok this week.

You can read our previous Covenant history entries here:

• Part 1: Revolution
• Part 2: Consolidation
• Part 3: The War
• Part 4: Stardrives
• Part 5: First Contact with Humanity

THE COVENANT – FIRST CONTACT WITH THE THK’KOK

Our sun wasn’t the only star that the Covenant sent survey ships to. They explored every nearby star in the Orion Arm, too. One of these was 51 Pegasi.
The crew of the Spring Sekie knew something was up as soon as they entered the system. The second planet was emitting enormous amounts of thermal and electromagnetic energy, enough to suggest a highly advanced civilization. They didn’t have long to analyze their findings, though. A fleet of strange squid-shaped ships took off from one of the small moons orbiting the planet and attacked them with unidentified and incredibly powerful weapons. The Spring Sekie was heavily damaged and only barely managed to escape. Only one calerre out of a crew of thirty-eight managed to make it back to Cadelle alive.
The Covenant’s initial reaction to the news of this attack was one of terror. They even attempted to build a defensive Dyson sphere around the planet, but their technology just wasn’t up to the task yet. Parts of this Dyson sphere still exist to this day orbitting Zeta 2 Reticuli and are known as the Islands of Steel and Fear.
Eventually, the Covenant decided that they needed to confront whoever or whatever was in the 51 Pegasi system, so they assembled their largest fleet of starships armed with their most advanced weapons and headed back, either to talk from a position of strength or to fight.
The Covenant had spent just over an Earth year since the attack, anticipating an attack every day. However, things had changed drastically in the 51 Pegasi system in that year. The second planet didn’t emit anything beyond natural EM radiation, and nothing rose from the moons or the planet’s surface to greet them.
What’s more, the Spring Sekie had managed to find two continents on the planet before it was forced to retreat. The smaller one had a huge water-filled crater blasted out of its northeast corner, and there was evidence of damage from a massive explosion or impact across the planet.
Despite all this, the planet had a sapient lifeform: an eight-legged carbon-based creature that communicated through tongue clicks. This creature, which the Covenant later learned called itself the thk’kok, lived in the ruins of a spacefaring civilization but used Stone Age technology and lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. They also had species-wide amnesia, either from the trauma they had been through or imposed externally, and couldn’t remember anything of their lives from more than a year before.
This was after first contact with humans, and the Covenant had learned from it. They set up a scientific outpost on the dark side of one of the planet’s moons to observe the thk’kok and to serve as a waypoint for rescued individuals, and that was that for the next 120,000 years or so.
The thk’kok turned out to be full of surprises. They built up industrial civilizations five different times, only to have them destroyed by phenomena that didn’t fit into any scientific model. Certain individuals also had the ability to manifest extranormal abilities, though never off-planet. The Covenant were still trying to figure all this out when the Old Empire came a-knocking. But that’s a story for another time.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST FOR MAY 5, 2024

Chapter 4 of the Covenant ended with a bang this Sunday. The PCs confronted Madura Masham the World Eater in the Grey, or Gaia’s afterlife. What’s more, Rayney – the daughter of Temjin the nozumi, one of the nonplayer characters – was there, too, and she was on Madura’s side.

Luckily, the player characters’ (PC) ship the Infinity managed to chase off the Discordian warship that was menacing them two weeks ago. They also sent down a Louisiana-class fighter – a mass-production version of Sazzy the ratel’s New Orleans, complete with its big GAU-180 Gatling gun – and, piloted by Tweak the aco, the PCs joined the battle.

It was a hell of a fight, with a lot of bids being made. Madura got off a few area-of-attack effects, and we got around needing a battlemap to see who he attacked by just saying he attacked everyone. (He was a god, or close to it, and his attacks were mystical)

It was a hard fight, too. Chanenth the calerre, who bailed out of the Louisiana to snipe at Madura, got knocked out of the fight pretty early. The Louisiana didn’t seem to be doing much damage to Madura, either, until Carver blessed the ship with the power of Wooshu and Drinalis, two of Gaia’s gods. Then its weapons started doing some real damage to him.

In the end, the action economy simply wasn’t on Madura’s side. He was one character facing down a party of PCs in a divine space fighter, and he had to cut and run. Whatever the PCs did to him, it seemed to free Rayney, or at least that’s what Sean thought.

It was a good end to the chapter, and Sazzy already has plans for what we’ll be doing this Sunday. We’ll fill you in here. Talk to you then.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

No playtest this week due to Easter. Both players were on the injured list from headaches. So instead of talking about that, let’s talk about the early history of the Covenant instead.

You can read our previous Covenant history entries here:

• Part 1: Revolution
• Part 2: Consolidation
• Part 3: The War
• Part 4: Stardrives

THE COVENANT – FIRST CONTACT WITH HUMANITY

After the calerre of the Covenant invented stardrive, they started exploring space, as you do. Their starships were primitive compared to the ones they’re using now; it was 120,000 or so years ago, after all.

Eventually, though, a Covenant ship named Pillar of Fire made the 39 light year trip from Cadelle and Zeta Reticuli to the third planet orbiting an unremarkable main sequence yellow dwarf.

The Pillar of Fire was a scientific ship, but they weren’t ready for their first contact with humanity. Humans at this point weren’t much more than small hunter-gatherer bands in southeast Africa, so not only was there a huge cultural and language gap between the humanity and calerre, but a huge technical one, as well. This was the calerre’s first contact with any other sapient species, so her crew had to play everything by ear.

It didn’t go well.

The calerre made contact with a single band of about 20 humans. The humans were scared at first but seemed to warm to the odd strangers. However, things soured later that night, resulting in the deaths of two of the calerre scientists and five humans.

Humans soon forgot the calerre. They had contacted just a single band for a single day and night, so they hadn’t left much of a mark. Clearly, though the Covenant didn’t have enough information to contact humanity properly, so they decided to keep watch on Earth and learn as much as they could.

The Covenant set up observation posts in Earth orbit and, as humanity became more advanced, buried under the surface of the Moon. They occasionally sent down sociologists to get more direct data, first calerre in holographic disguises, then recruited humans.

Covenant scientists were present at many of humanity’s most important moments, though never with Covenant technology. Everything humanity built and accomplished, they did on their own, with the help of only a few calerre anthropologists lending elbow grease and learning humanity’s technology.

So, about those recruited humans.

As humanity’s technology develop, so too did their military technology. Skirmishes between bands of humans turned into wars and genocide between nations. The Covenant didn’t want to sit aside and let innocent people die, but they also didn’t want a repeat of their disastrous first contact. They had to get creative.

The Covenant started rescuing the victims of wars, plagues, and other disasters and bringing them back to Cadelle. To cover their tracks, they left behind bodies constructed from holograms and force fields and, later, biological androids that would die and rot exactly like humans.

A side effect of this was that these human refugees became an important part of the Covenant, in time outnumbering the calerre that had founded it. The calerre treated them like equals, though, and the humans returned the favor. It didn’t hurt that most of the humans were grateful to the calerre for having saved their lives. Soon, they were even accompanying the calerre scientists back to Earth to study their relatives.

That’s about it for now, though. We’ll stream on Twitch on Friday and take another crack at playtesting the game on Sunday. Talk to you next week.

If you like what you read here, please contribute to our Patreon. You can also join us for games on Twitch every Friday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Sorry about the late post this week and the lack of a post last week. Things got a little crazy here, and Sean needed to turtle up for a week or so to deal with it.

We owe you a pair of Covenant playtest recaps, though, don’t we? Here they are.

PLAYTEST FOR APRIL 7, 2024

Sazzy wanted to see if Covenant could be adapted to Star Wars. They had a story idea for the Yuuzhan Vong War, and they also wanted to see if our game systems could accommodate Force powers. Sean was game, so we tried it.

The first game was all roleplaying. We haven’t even done character generation yet. We put together a sufficiently ragtag crew consisting of a lepi, a talz, a droid, and a wookiee, plus a family of human NPCs who took in the taik, and started the game with an ancient XS stock light freigher named the Jackrabbit on the planet of Coachelle.

The vong had already invaded, and Coachelle had a large number of refugees. Communications with the rest of the galaxy were cut off, so the player characters (PC) decided it was a good idea to leave. Their suspicions proved to be correct when a Star Destroyer commandeered by the Peace Brigade (basically vong collaborators) decided to jump into the system and dump a bunch of fighters in front of the Jackrabbit.

A space battle would have been a good test of the Covenant system, but unfortunately we hadn’t generated any characters, so we roleplayed the Jackrabbit escaping the fighters, then dropping a missile at point blank range into the Star Destroyer’s bridge. That pretty much killed any pursuit, figuratively and literally, and the PCs were able to escape.

We’re not sure when the next Star Wars session will be, though. Sean will probably have to shake off the blues and whip up a modified character generation system before we can, but that shouldn’t take too long. We’ll update you when we play that campaign again.

PLAYTEST FOR APRIL 14, 2024

We resumed our brief two-year-or-so playtest campaign the next Sunday. As a reminder, the PCs were trying to find a way to learn the time-stop technique used by Rekana, the owner of Rekana Industries. This is similar to the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Stand of Za Warudo (Sazzy is a huge JoJo fan), and Rekana had already used on the PC twice to devastating effect each time.

They traveled to the planet of Gaia to learn this technique and met with Mizumi, one of the planet’s gods. Mizumi told the PCs that they could learn this technique at one of two places: Elysium, which was more secure, and Deathtoll, which was faster to get to. We learned that the daughter of Temjin, one of the NPCs, had been corrupted by the Discordians, one of the factions on Gaia, and that we might not be able to save her if we wasted time. So we headed to Deathtoll, the faster route.

In hindsight, we probably should have taken the greater security of the Elysium route. Mizumi was able to use their time-control powers to make the trip to Deathtoll faster, but that didn’t stop the Discordians from intercepting them just outside Deathtoll. The Discordians threw several illusions at the PCs to slow them down, but Carver the valka was able to perceive these illusions for what they really were.

The PCs then made their way to Deathtoll’s bell tower, but found it surrounded by a force field. Apparently, the Discordians were inside the bell tower. This was very bad, because the bell tower was supposedly a beacon to guide the planet’s souls to the afterlife.

So, on top of trying to learn Mizumi’s time-control powers and save Temjin’s daughter, and deal with the Discordians, the PCs also stop a theological disaster of Biblical proportions. They’re going to be busy, in other words.

We didn’t make any bids or use the rules this time, but that was only because we ended the session outside the bell tower, right before we tried to breach the force field. The rules are probably going to get a workout next session, though. We’ll keep you updated on it.