Covenant Update for January 29, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Massive Smash-up at Vega (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

PLAYTEST

Before we started, though, the players running species from The Nature of Predators (Reddit here, Patreon here, Amazon here) decided that they wanted to convert their characters to acoes instead. We had already proven that the game was able to accommodate material from other franchises, so we allowed it. The conversion process was relatively painless, too, and the players were able to do it with minimal help from Sean and Sazzy.

Then we got back to the game. If you recall, Rekana (the risu CEO of Rekana Industries) had appeared on the Infinity’s bridge and took a bit out of Sazzy the ratel’s neck, incapacitating her. We did some more roleplay during the week, where Rekana ships chased the Infinity across several star systems and with Carver the valka doing his best to evade them.

The Rekana ships finally cornered us, only to be destroyed by several valka ships. Turns out we’d stumbled into the Matriarchy. The valka assembled to form what could only be called a giant magnifying lens, which used the light of the local star to cook the Rekana crews and their reactors alive.

The valka can be kind of intense.

Once things calmed down this week, though, the player characters (PC) had a chance to review the damage Rekana had caused. Turns out, it was a lot. He’d managed to damage systems all over the ship.

However, we did figure out a few things. Chanenth, a calerre scientist from the Covenant’s Mutual Aid Force, discovered that Rekana had either been traveling impossibly fast or compressing time. There’s technology that allows you to do that in the Covenant universe, but Rekana didn’t appear to be wearing or using anything like that.

We also discovered someone onboard who was able to fight off Rekana, a nozumi from Gaia named Temjin. Better still, Temjin was able to use a technique similar to Rekana, though it seemed to exhaust him. The PCs raced off the Infinity’s bridge to protect their one weapon against Rekana.

They were almost too late, though. The player who played Jorlim the skalgan from The Nature of Predators had made a big lionlike aco named 3131 to assassinate Temjin. He didn’t seem like a willing volunteer, as he had some kind of torture device that forced him to fight and a suicide bomb that would go off if he failed.

(Incidentally, we really need to find out why people want to play acoes. Maybe it’s because the Gen-1s have so many options, they have a built-in rebellious slave background, or we’re just attracting a lot of furries to the playtest)

3131 had a rough time landing a blow on Temjin, who used a combination of superspeed (he called the ability Sidestep, in honor of Sean’s comic book that kicked off the whole Covenant universe) and bomb knives to wear him down.

He finally figured out how to get past Temjin’s Sidestep and managed to land a massive blow on him, slicing him across the ribs and doing 400 discipline in damage. That’s a huge loss, enough to put a beginning character out of the game.

Temjin wasn’t a beginning character. He was essentially a boss, and he still had enough discipline left to defeat 3131.

That’s where the PCs showed up, and that’s where we’re going to end this week’s post. We’ll catch you next week with another update on the playtest, or you can get another Covenant post this week if you subscribe to our Patreon. Talk to you then.

Covenant Update for January 22, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

At the Heart of Blobs (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

THE COVENANT

Life got in the way of the playtest this week. So, instead of updating you on the playtest this week, this post will be about the titular Covenant in Covenant. This is going to be a multipart post because the Covenant’s backstory is pretty extensive, as are those of the other “domains” or factions.

The Covenant was founded during a peasant revolt on the calerre homeworld of Cadelle about 120,000 years ago. Cadelle orbits Zeta 2 Reticuli, which is about 39 light years from Earth. Zeta 2 Reticuli is relatively poor in elements heavier than hydrogen, so Cadelle doesn’t have a lot of easily accessible metal deposits. Many of these deposits were in a region known as World’s End.

World’s End (now Star’s End) was an isolated region bordered by the towering Shoulders of the World mountain range in the north, south, and east and by the deserts of the Qoros region. Cadelle’s weather patterns have changed in 120,000 years, so Qoros is now lush farmland, the planet’s breadbasket. Back then, though, World’s End was geographically isolated from the rest of Cadelle.

It wasn’t isolated enough, however, for the Rethenne Empire in the neighboring Rethenne Lowlands to conquer it in order to control its precious deposits of iron and other metals. This is because World’s End was controlled by warring clans. Empires are good at playing divide-and-conquer, and that’s exactly what the Rethenne Empire.

Keeping control of World’s End was a full-time job for the Rethenne Empire, as the clans and various religous fanatics constantly tried to throw them out. None of these ever succeeded, however, because the region was still made of hostile factions. Everyone with any kind of power there was either suspicious of each other or on the Rethenne Empire’s payroll, often both.

THE COVENANT OF WINTERHAVEN

The Covenant was different, though. It was made of up peasant, religious and political radicals (lots of people were both), and bandits from across World’s End, along with political exiles from the Rethenne Empire. This group spent a hard winter in the World’s End village of Winterhaven, where they hashed out the Covenant of Winterhaven.

The Covenant of Winterhaven is the Covenant’s founding document, which lays out the rights and responsibilities that all sapient creatures must have to have a just society. Ideally, a Covenant community, known as a commonwealth, would be anarchistic and have no central government. However, the Covenant of Winterhaven does allow individuals to set up their own forms of organization, which often takes the form of some kind of government.

An important feature of the Covenant of Winterhaven is that commonwealths would be allowed to adapt to local political and defense conditions. In this way, it’s more like the U. S. Declaration of Independence than the Constitution. It doesn’t say how you’re supposed to organize public life but rather what you need to do to be considered part of the Covenant.

From Winterhaven, the Covenant’s founders spread across World’s End to spread the Covenant of Winterhaven. Many were imprisoned or killed, but enough survived to create a movement that would force the Rethenne Empire out of the region.

The Covenant succeeded where others failed because it was founded and run by the dregs of society: peasants, bandits, criminals, prostitutes, and beggars. They were able to create a cohesive force that superceded clan loyalties. In fact, the Covenant is why the calerre call themselve calerre. “Calerre”, a term used in the Covenant of Winterhaven, meant “being with a soul”, so everyone in the Covenant was a calerre.

It didn’t matter what clan, gang, or nation you came from. In the Covenant, you were a being with a soul, like everyone else, and that was most important distinction you had.

THE BATTLE OF LASHARRE PASS

The Rethenne Empire tried one last time to retake World’s End. The Covenant met their army at Lasharre Pass just outside the Shoulders of the World.

Calerre are winged and can fly over the lower peaks of the Shoulders of the World if they dropped everything they’re carrying. However, if you’re an armed and armored soldier who wants to go from the Rethenne Lowlands to World’s End, you need to use one of the mountain range’s few mountain passes. And if you want to get a column of soldiers, along with all their baggage, into World’s End, there was only a single pass large enough to do it: Lasharre Pass.

The Battle of Lasharre Pass has been described as a “reverse Thermopylae”, with a large force of peasant soliders defending against a smaller army of professional soldiers at a choke point. The imperial generals were confident that they would easily defeat an army of poorly trained peasants.

However, they underestimated the Covenant. The imperial army had a long march to Lasharre Pass, and the Covenant was able to evacuate any towns and farms along their path so that they couldn’t resupply, then harassed them, destroyed their baggage trains, and cut them off from resupply and reinforcements. The imperial army, starving and weakened, still almost managed to defeat the Covenant at Lasharre Pass – they were professionals, after all – but were ultimated routed.

The imperial army’s defeat in World’s End created a political crisis that led to the downfall of the Rethenne Empire. This gave the Covenant the time they needed to shore up their defenses and eventually become a major power on Cadelle. We’ll talk about that next time.

Covenant Update for January 15, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Alien Sunset (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Ariz.)
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Ariz.

PLAYTEST

We playtested Covenant on Monday. Not too much happened beyond roleplay between characters, but there was still something to learn from it.

First of all, let’s summarize what happened. Last week, the player characters (PC) hit a “scrapping site” on the Rekanna Industries world of Sujimma. They were there to rescue acoes and political prisoners scheduled for execution. They needed a diversion to do it, so they sent down marines from the Infinity, their ship, to attack Rekanna’s corporate security and draw them away from the scrapping site.

This week, they discovered that Rekanna had pinned down some of these marines and were massacring them. So, after an argument on what to do, they decided to work with the local resistance to rescue the marines. The resistance would take the blame for diplomatic reasons, and the Covenant would in turn supply them with weapons and supplies.

It was the argument, though, that was interesting, at least from the perspective of game design.

One of the cardinal laws of Covenant is that if you don’t need to use the rules, don’t use them – that is, don’t use them if you’re able to resolve conflicts between players or characters through talking or roleplay. This argument almost forced us to break open the rulebook and start making bids.

Jorlim the skalgan, a sapient species from The Nature of Predators (Reddit here, Patreon here, Amazon here) wanted to rescue the marines right away. Sazzy the ratel, though, wanted some kind of cover for the mission first. Her concern was that, if the Covenant openly supported a military strike on one Archimedean Confederation company-state, the others would band together in self-defense and start an interstellar war that would devastate the Orion Arm. They literally butted heads on this.

Covenant’s rules are normally written to resolve conflicts between the Force Majeure running the game and the players. However, if Jorlim and Sazzy’s argument had continued, we might have been forced to make them start making bids against each other, like fighting bids or persuasion bids, to resolve it.

However, the players collectively were able to come up with a solution, and their argument ended without anyone spending discipline or making bids. It was an interesting test of narrativist gameplay, and it seemed to work.

If you’re new here, then get used to posts like this. Our playtesters are committed to their characters, which means they like to do a lot of roleplaying. We’ll often have whole playtesting sessions where not a single rule is tested except that one cardinal rule: don’t use the rules if you don’t have to.

That’s about it for us here, though. We’ll be posting our progress on the Covenant’s domain summary for our patrons on our Patreon this Friday. If you’re interested in that, consider subscribing to our Patreon. Talk to you then.

Covenant Update for January 8, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Evidence for Strange Stellar Family (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

PLAYTEST

We had a long break from playtesting Covenant over the holiday, but we were back at on Sunday.

The player characters (PC) began their assault on the aco scrapping site on Sujimma. The scrapping site, if you don’t remember, is where Rekana Industries grind up obsolete acoes into pet food. Sazzy, who was the Force Majeure (FM) for this session, made sure to emphasize the gore, just to drive the point home.

The PCs didn’t have much trouble slipping in. Their base of operations, the spaceship Infinity, had enough crew to send down a diversion. They started freeing the acoes trapped on the conveyor belt leading to the grinder when Kem showed up.

Kem was an NPC from Sean’s Underground Railroad campaign last year. He’s a massive eight-foot-tall risu with a Gatling gun, and he was on duty when Tweak escaped from Sujimma the first time, so these two have a history.

Kem and Tweak had a huge fight that we ran entirely in roleplay without any bids. Tweak started emitting a golden glow during the fight, which appeared to protect him when Kem picked him up and threw him against the wall. The fight ended with the two of them falling through the floor.

Kem had the fight beaten out of him, but instead of finishing him off, Tweak said that he could join the PCs. He didn’t have much choice – Rekanna’s rough on employees who fail the company – so he joined the PCs as they evacuated the scrapping site and set off a nuclear bomb in it.

The game ended with everyone back on the Infinity and with Tweak proposing to another aco named Sarah… and throwing up from nerves halfway through it. (You can read more about Tweak and Sarah’s adventures on the Radio Free Covenant subreddit).

All in all, it was a satisfying game. Not a whole lot of rules got tested, but we did tie up a number of lose ends in Tweak and Sarah’s backstory. And we’ll be continuing the game next Sunday, too. Talk to you about that next week!

Crossing The Line by Sean Daily – Chapter 1

Crossing the Line by Sean Daily - Front Cover

What happens when the only person who can stop a war between humans and fay is an ex-felon changeling who can’t even carry a gun? Find out in Crossing the Line, Sean Daily’s first published novel! It’s available for download on Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

Read the first chapter for free below the fold.

Read more: Crossing The Line by Sean Daily – Chapter 1

People are idiots. I hate idiots, which is funny, because I keep running into them, and in the middle of the Mohave, no less, which has many excellent and suitably painful ways to cull them from the herd.

Ah, but therein lies the irony, right? That I’ve pledged to keep the pizdi alive and the gene pool stupid with my life, my honor, and my continued freedom from incarceration.

Anyway, I was up on Mount Charleston making my rounds when the computer in my truck went off, the one linked to the fence sensors. Could have been a rabbit crossing the line, but the peach fuzz on my ears said no.

My damn fuzzy ears. If I didn’t have them, I wouldn’t be a national asset, and I’d still be happily rotting in prison.

I flipped a bitch on Kyle Canyon Road and cut rooster tails down the mountain, hoping that I wasn’t too late. I mean, that’s just what the talking heads want—some “incident” to whip up their flocks and distract from how badly we’re screwing up in the four or five other wars that we’re already fighting.

I stopped just outside the old campgrounds—less than nine miles from the 95, two thousand or so feet up Mount Charleston and one or two worlds away from Las Vegas. It lay in one of the few places that hadn’t gotten defoliant dumped on it during the war—just a wide spot in the shoulder with a dry riverbed between it and the fence. Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir surrounded the road on all sides. The mercury hovered around eighty, and somewhere behind the folds of the earth’s dress, the Vegas valley lit up as the sun went down. It was exactly the kind of out-of-the-way place that morons go to get drunk.

I counted about ten of the little zhopy with as many Styrofoam coolers. They sat around a merry and highly illegal campfire that pushed back the growing gloom. None of them could have been over twenty-five, and I smelled the booze on them as soon as I stepped out of my truck and slung my bag of tricks over my shoulder.

They’d parked their vehicle nearby, one of those monster RVs for people whose idea of roughing it is not putting up the satellite dish. I usually hate seeing those rolling ecological disasters anywhere near the reserve, but there are times, like when you’re about to Enter Into Tense Negotiations with the natives, when they are the sweetest sight on earth.

My main concern wasn’t the ones around the campfire, though. My main concern was this brain donor in a Tapout muscle shirt, cargo shorts, and flip flops, his arms and back covered in tribal tattoos and dragons. You know the type: thinks he’s a cage fighter, stinks of entitlement. He held the tiniest chainsaw I’d ever seen, with a wimpy little powerhead and no more than a 12-inch bar.

Need I even mention that he was inside the reserve—on the other side of the line, where the dark and the mist get thick—and that a pair of bolt cutters lay next to a hole in the fence that you could have driven the RV through?

A Chicana with camo tights and a muffin top waist pointed at me from the campfire and said, “Oh oh! The po-po!” They laughed, a few right off their chairs, which wasn’t hard in their condition. I ignored them. My real problem was the brewing diplomatic incident on the other side of the fence.

The chainsaw revved. I glanced up in time to see its chewing teeth swinging toward a skinny laurel, a broadleaf tourist in a coniferous world, and the kid swinging it about to sign his own death warrant.

“Stop!” I yelled. He jumped, stumbled, and unfortunately didn’t lop off something near and precious. “What the hell are you doing!” I said after my heart restarted. “Turn that damn thing off and get back on this side!”

He blinked soggy, unfocused eyes at me. I thought at first that maybe he’d been in the reserve for too long and that the delirium had sunk its teeth into him.

But no, he was just snockered.

“Oh, hey, Misser Ranger!” he slurred cheerfully as he switched off the saw.

Blessed silence fell on the forest for exactly one second. Then the Chicana got inspired and yelled, “Ranger Rick!” at me. The rest of our “hope for the future” fell off their chairs. Again.

“Hadda get some firewood!” the guy with the chainsaw said. “For the fire! You fergot to leave firewood! What’m I payin’ tazzes for, no firewood—”

“Of course there’s no firewood!” I shouted back, eyes scanning the unnatural dark of the forest behind him. “This isn’t a campsite! Now get over here before something spots you!”

He blinked again, looked around, then waved the saw at me.

“So what?”

I actually didn’t know how to respond to that. I mean, so what? Where had this guy been the last ten years? How about the war? The Treaty of Bismarck? The creation of the reserves? How about what happens to humans when they wander onto the reserves and break just one of their many arcane and unwritten laws? How could he not know? Didn’t he know?

No. Of course not. Because he was drunk.

Hold on, though. It gets better.

“I mean, I ain’t afraid of no fairies!” he said. “I got a black belt in… black belt in… uh… well, anyways, I got a black belt! And anyone crawls outta their hole an’ tries to start something, I’ll…”

I stopped listening around “fairies”. The fuzz on my ears started to burn. Less than a second later, the wind shifted, and I caught this under-the-rocks smell: mushrooms and mold and something else that made the ape part of my brain want to leap out my skull to run and hide.

“Shut up, damn it,” I said. “Shut up, shut up! God damn it, shut up get back over here before—oh hell—”

One second it wasn’t there, and the next it was. Ten feet tall with mottled green skin like granite stretched tight over baseball bat ribs. Matted black hair, gorilla arms, tree trunk legs. Tree root feet and silent as death.

In other words, your typical troll.

The little huyesos didn’t notice, of course. He didn’t notice the cicada chatter suddenly rise to a roar all around him, excited and expectant, as the reserve awoke for whatever the troll left behind. He was too busy OD’ing on his own testosterone to notice.

Luckily, he had friends.

“Oh my god!” the Chicana screamed. “Behind you!”

The next few moments almost made this job worth it.

The kid stopped dead with a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. The troll stood almost belly-to-bum with him, its tennis ball-sized midnight eyes staring down through the top of his skull.

It whuffed, just once.

The kid pissed his pants.

What can I say? I’m a man of simple pleasures.

The little oyobuk screamed and flailed out a no-look swipe behind him with the chainsaw. What’s a chainsaw chain made of? That’s right, iron—carbide-tipped steel, to be exact—which also happens to be the only thing that’ll kill a troll.

I had my second bad moment of the night. I saw every step in my masochistic little mind: the guy gutting the troll, the entire rez rolling down the mountain in retribution, a living carpet on the desert floor, a tidal wave of lethal weirdness that Vegas just isn’t ready for…

He missed, though. The troll displayed an agility that something half its size shouldn’t have had. The chain barely missed its belly.

Then it snaked out a long arm and scooped the kid up by the ankle with a manhole cover-sized hand. Next thing I knew, his head dangled three feet off the ground and his right foot about nine, and he let everyone in earshot know how he felt about it. The troll lifted him even higher to get nose-to-pointy-nose with him.

It whuffed again. He screamed.

“Do something!” the Chicana yelled at me. I bit off my reply as I crossed the line into the rez.

The troll forgot about the human yelling up a fine storm in its grip the instant I stepped through the fence. It locked those big black eyes on me like a stalking wolf. I had a sudden urge to hightail it back to my truck and commend the kid’s fate to Saint Darwin, but that’s the last thing you do with a troll.

After all, only prey runs.

Instead, I ignored the visceral sense of my place in the food chain and threw its stink eye right back at it as I reached for my belt. My arsenal consisted of a stick of pepper spray, but I wasn’t quite ready for that. I cast a quick look back to the line and hoped that we were close enough to the land of the humans for my higher-tech toys to work. Then I pried one of those toys off my belt and, just as the troll reared back to strike, stuck that something in its face.

A terrific, soundless flash of light momentarily banished the gloaming in the rez and lit up the encroaching fog. The troll grunted, dropped the little dolbo yob, and stumbled backward, hands to its eyes. The “fearless troll killer” regained his feet with admirable dispatch, then tried to make a break for the fence. I collared him and reeled him back in by the scruff of his neck. No way I was letting him just waltz away from this.

“Wh-what did you do?” the “fearless troll killer” squealed.

“Got a picture,” I said, showing him the screen of my cell phone. “Priceless.”

“A picture?” Little ingrate had the nerve to sound offended. “Don’t you have a gun or—”

“No. I don’t. I’m trying to smooth over a diplomatic incident with the fay, not cause one.” Besides, ex-cons can’t carry guns, even if they’re with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Diplomacy Unit. I didn’t tell him that, of course. He had enough to think about.

“The fay?” That took a while to sink into his well-armored brain. “That’s a fairy?”

“One kind, yeah.” He obviously didn’t watch the Discovery Channel. I know, big surprise.

“Well, can we go now?” he whined. “Please?”

“That’s actually a very good question…”

The troll started to recover, blinking half-blind eyes and obviously wanting to end the earthly existence of something.

It spotted us.

“Oh my God,” moaned the “fearless troll killer,” sinking lower behind me. “What do we do now?”

“You?” I said, not taking my eyes off the troll. “You stay here. Don’t move, don’t make a sound, don’t breathe if you can manage it. I’m gonna try to talk our way out of this.”

“You—you can talk to that?”

“Why yes, you candidate for a retroactive abortion,” is what I wanted to say. “I’m a changeling. Mommy was a human, daddy was a monster. Hell, this troll might even be my lost long father, and we might be on the verge of a Very Special Moment.”

I didn’t say that, of course, because that wouldn’t have been diplomatic.

I walked up to the troll real slow, hands open and level with my shoulders. It narrowed its eyes and whuffed at me, and I came damn near to pulling a Lovecraft—running until I fell into a swoon and knew no more. But I grabbed my brain by its stem and waited for the monkey panic to subside. Then I squared my shoulders and, with iron in my voice and steel in my heart, said:

“Hey, Thornapple.”

The troll got in my grill, head a beachball-sized wad of ugly. It curled its lip and favored me with a good look at its sharp black snaggleteeth. Hot, moist carrion breath stirred my hair. I had to marshal all my self-control to keep from gagging.

“Would you like to tell me what, by the gnashing teeth of Our Mother, is going on here, halfbreed?” he said. “Why did you do that to me? I’m still having trouble seeing.”

I glanced behind me. “I hate to tell you this,” I said to our Fearless Troll Killer, “but he just told me that he has to tear our your heart and eat it to appease his gods.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Thornapple.

“Oh God, no…” the Fearless Troll Killer moaned, flight in his eyes.

“Don’t move!” I ordered. “Only prey runs.”

“True,” said Thornapple.

“Wh-what?” the Fearless Troll Killer stammered.

“I mean, do you want him to think that you’re a meal on the hoof?” I said. “The answer is no, by the way.”

Thornapple had gotten down into a crouch during this exchange, long fingers curled into hooks, claws dark and shiny from a recent meal.

“You were telling me why you had to stick that thing in my face and blind me, halfbreed,” he growled, voice silky with danger.

“Come on, Thornapple. I had to get a shot of you scaring the stupid out of that guy. That’s one of the best I’ve ever taken of you.” I thought a bit. “Not as good as that one of you treeing those Boy Scouts, but close.”

“What’s going on!” the Fearless Troll Killer shouted, a desperate, whining edge creeping into his voice.

“Well, you’ve angered him,” I said. “He says that you’ve tread on sacred ground. His ancestors cry out.” Dramatic pause, very important. “For vengeance.”

“What!” Thornapple said, coming half-up out of his crouch. “Where are you getting this! I never —”

“Shut up and play along,” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth. To the Fearless Troll Killer, I said, “I’m making progress, though. He says he’ll let you go, but only if he can keep your arms.”

“Mommy…”

“Great,” Thornapple said, shaking his head. “Now he thinks I’m some sort of savage. Just great.”

“Hate to break it to you, Thornapple, but he already does.”

Thornapple reared back at that. There was the clear implication that I’d just cast aspersions upon his heritage. All the better.

“Me? I’m the savage! Did you see that human just did!” He pointed a scythe-like claw. I heard a moan of terror behind me. “He cut down the little sister! He killed—”

“Calm down, Thornapple. He didn’t kill anyone. Look.” I did some pointing of my own, but at the still-standing laurel. The fog wrapped protective tendrils around its trunk. “She’s fine.”

Thornapple’s eyes followed my finger. “Oh.” He hesitated. “He was about to! I saw him!” Some welcome uncertainty had crept into his voice.

“I stopped him. So why don’t we just let this one go, okay?”

“Let him go?” The confusion left his voice to run and hide. “So he can come back and try again? Like they always do? No! We make an example of the human now!”

Well, it was worth a try, but now hi s blood was up. Logic wouldn’t work.

Maybe fear would.

“The humans don’t think so.”

“Blast the humans! Hang them!” Thornapple shouted in a hand-waving fury. The Fearless Troll Killer whimpered.

“Okay, okay,” I said, bringing my hands up again. “But while you’re blasting and hanging humans, consider this. They’re looking for any excuse to start the war again. You killing this chucklehead might just become that excuse.” Sweat suddenly stung my eyes. I didn’t dare wipe it away. “You want that, Thornapple? You want another war with the humans? Only this time with nuclear weapons, napalm, and genetically engineered diseases?”

That got him, and in mid-handfling, too. Nobody wants the war again, or least nobody sane. Thornapple wasn’t insane.

Murderously pissed off, maybe, but not insane.

His hands dropped to his sides. He ground his shovel-like jaw. Then he slammed a fist into the ground and howled with impotent fury. No sound from the Fearless Troll Killer. I smiled, then snuck a peek, half-hoping that Thornapple’s performance had given the little zhopa a heart attack.

It hadn’t, but his color had changed to that of a good Gouda, nice and pallid. His blank eyes and gibbering mouth told me that he’d decided to hunker down in his Happy Place until this all blew over.

I turned back to Thornapple, who was doing the troll version off a slow burn. Two more fist-shaped craters had appeared at his feet, and he had thrown his head back in a long bay of despair.

Always leave the other guy an out. I cleared my throat, crossed my fingers, and made my play.

“Look, what can I do to make this good?” I thrust a thumb behind me. “Or rather, what can Sunshine here do to make this good?”

I took exactly one step to the right, to give Thornapple an unobstructed view of the RV when he looked back down. This he did. I saw the gears grind in his head.

Then he pointed at the RV.

“That,” he said, with disgust. “That… machine they travel in. Big. Noisy. Vomits smoke and foul liquids. If you won’t let me kill the human, halfbreed, give me that.”

Inside, I sighed with relief. Normally, I share Thornapple’s opinion of RVs, but there are times when I love them. They’re the best substitute victims you can get. The motor home dealers in the valley love me.

“Let me see what he thinks,” I said sweetly, as I turned to the Fearless Troll Killer. “Hey, Leatherface. Yeah, you. He’ll let you go, but he wants the RV.”

That woke him up. “No way! That’s my dad’s!” Little ingrate even had the nerve to sound offended.

“May I remind you of the alternative?”

“You’re my negotiator! Negotiate!”

More afraid of Daddy than disembowelment, figures. I sucked my teeth, turned to Thornapple, and said, “I need you to roar at me.”

“Excuse me?” Thornapple said, rearing up again.

“Thornapple, listen very closely,” I said, through a smile of clenched teeth. “If that human had managed to cut down that laurel, I’d give you the damn machine, and with that little svoloch nailed to the grill to boot. He didn’t, though, so we have to, well, convince him. So if you want the machine, if you want to avoid another war, you will roar at me like I just insulted your mama.” I got as close to nose-to-nose with him as I could. “I will, if I have to.”

Thornapple sighed a long-suffering sigh, then took a deep breath and let loose with the most feral, bloodthirsty roar I’d heard in, oh, maybe three days. It echoed through the forest, thundered off the mountains, and brought him down in a half-crouch, arms splayed, claws crooked and ropes of hot spittle flying from his teeth. He always was a bit of a ham.

“Well, I negotiated with him,” I said brightly, after Thornapple ran out of steam. I glanced behind me to catch my audience’s reaction. It was better than I’d expected.

The Fearless Troll Killer had fainted.

Thornapple straightened and wiped his mouth. “There. I’ve completely demeaned myself. Happy?”

“Very,” I replied. The guy’s friends hadn’t fainted, but they looked like they wanted to. “You guys can cross the line and collect your buddy. I think he’s had his fun for the night.”

Then to Thornapple, with a grand gesture like a game show host showing off A Brand New Car: “The machine, she is yours.”

You should have seen it. Thornapple’s head was almost level with the roof of the RV: big honkin’ pile of metal, probably got five gallons to the mile, Daddy’s pride and joy, right? Well, Thornapple raised those big fists of his, and suddenly the roof was below his head, or part of it, anyway.

The Fearless Troll Killer’s buddies didn’t even try to wake him up. They just dragged him back down Kyle Canyon Road with them, a sight that would lift even the weariest heart.

Thornapple needed a while to get it out of his system. He reduced the mobile home to a rough cube of distressed metal in the process, the steel frame folded and refolded over itself under a thick shell of aluminum and plastic. I fetched the chainsaw and wire cutters, and he folded the potmetal of the RV around them.

Then he turned and walked back into the woods. He emitted exactly one sound: a grunt of pain as he ducked down through the hole in the fence. I blinked, and he was gone like a train. The reserve’s hungry cicada chatter disappeared with him, sounding a little disappointed.

“Thank you,” a woman’s voice whispered to me on the wind. It floated on a light Greek lilt from the general vicinity of the laurel.

Then I was alone on the mountain.

That’s the life of a changeling in these trying times. The pay sucks, the hours are terrible, and you run a pretty good chance of dying every single day. Your only rewards are the sound of the wind in the trees and the knowledge that you’ve postponed the war for another day.

Better than sex, really. I even lit a cigarette and blew some smoke to the emerging stars to celebrate.

My high lasted exactly ten seconds. My leash—I mean, my radio killed it. The Bureau of Fay Affairs wanted to know what was going on, so I lied like a four-star general before Congress. Then I plugged the hole in the fence with one of the lucky horseshoes in my bag, hooked through the fence where the hole’s keystone might have been. It was the best I could do until a crew got up there to fix it.

I left behind the mountain cool for the valley, still suffocating in the desert heat, then knocked off for the night after filing my report. Doña Maria down on Cheyenne and Tenaya has some good tamales in red sauce, and the lighting’s low enough for me to take off my hat and give my fuzzy ears some air.

Then I picked up my water ration. The bachelor set’s down to a gallon of potable a day here in Las Vegas. That’s about enough if you sit on your ass all day and do nothing. Needless to say, I don’t.

Speaking of which, did you hear why the Air Force dumped all that poison in Lake Mead during the war? Mermaids. No, really. The Review-Journal’s Freedom of Information Act request finally got through. Someone thought they saw mermaids in Lake Mead, which is prima facie absurd. Nothing but quagga mussels and beggar carp up there—well, before the war, at least.

Besides, everyone knows the that the mermaids are up in Lake Tahoe. Or they do now.

I wish I could show you my precious memories of Thornapple, but the rez must’ve gotten to my phone while I was convincing him not to kill me. Wiped it clean. The reserves have a tendency to do that to anything more sophisticated than a two-stroke engine or gas-operated gun action, I’ve found.

So that was that. I headed home, where I caught up on the latest disaster out of Operation: Iranian Freedom and tried not to think about the rez tearing itself apart while the only changeling on the federal payroll in southern Nevada isn’t there.

Covenant Update for January 1, 2024

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

A Black Hole Destroys a Star (Illustration) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

PLAYTEST

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot to report today. Our normal playtest day fell on New Year’s Eve, which mean that a lot of our players weren’t available for the game. However, the holiday season is finally over, so things should calm down enough for us to start playtesting Covenant on a regular basis again.

We also want to start getting the game ready for publication this year. It probably won’t happen this year, but we want to get far enough down the road so that we’ll be able to publish in 2025. We have enough material for Covenant. We just need to pull it all together into a single book, start writing, and get it out the door.

Anyway, that’s it for now. We should have more news about Sazzy’s campaign next Monday and a more detailed update about the game for our patrons on Friday. 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!

Sorry about the lack of a post on Friday. The holidays and Sean catching a lingering cold kept us from making any progress on the game or performing a playtest this week. We are going to be taking off this Friday so that we can concentrate on the game.

Hope you had a merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Covenant Update for December 18, 2023

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Double the Rubble (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Double the Rubble (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Not a whole lot happened at this week’s playtest, but one of the players did do something that pointed out an ongoing problem we’re having with the rules.

We introduced some new characters from the Nature of Predators (NOP) universe (Reddit here, Patreon here) last week, and they brought with them the recorded memories of about a hundred survivors of a war in the NOP universe. The player characters (PC) decided to replay these memories, and it took them about half the session to recover from the experience and talk about what it meant to them.

After that, the PCs started planning for the raid on the Rekana Industries scrapping site, where obsolete acoes were murdered and turned into pet food. The PCs ship the Infinity was orbiting over the Rekana planet of Sujimma, where one of the scrapping sites was located.

That’s when one of the PCs – Jorlim, a skalgan from the NOP universe – threw us that curveball we mentioned earlier. Jorlim had 600 discipline and, after his player asked us how characters regain spent discipline – spent 599 of it on a bid to analyze a set of the scrapping site’s plans. He also tapped his Tactics trait, and since this gave him more advantages than disadvantages on that bid, doubled his bid to 1198.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t matter how much your character beats a bid’s difficulty or an opposing character’s bid by. You get the same results whether your character beats it by one or 1,000. Despite this, we’ve had players spend hundreds of discipline on their bids, and Jorlim’s bid is just the latest in this trend. Sean and Sazzy have talked about this, and we’ve decided to add a paragraph or two to the rules to make sure players understand that they don’t get extra effects for massively exceeding a bid’s difficulty.

That’s about it, though. Our players may be seeing some action next time, but only time will tell. We’ll let you know how it goes in our next Monday post. Talk to you then!

Covenant Update for December 11, 2023

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST

Black Hole Grabs Starry Snack (Artist Concept) (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

We had another playtest on Sunday. Not too much happened. We introduced some new player characters and didn’t make any bids or use any of the rules. All the action was behind the camera.

Sazzy is a fan of a science fiction universe called The Nature of Predators (*NOP*) by Space Paladin (Reddit here, Patreon here) and has made a lot of friends on the NOP Discord server. They had the idea of creating characters from the NOP universe in the *Covenant* universe, which isn’t a bad idea. It gets some of our new friends involved in the game but, from a playtest perspective, it will also prove if material from other intellectual properties can be used in Covenant.

We need to note right now, though, that this isn’t an official expansion to the game, nor is it being done with Space Paladin’s permission. We also don’t intend to sell any NOP-based material without the permission and input of Space Paladin. This is just for our playtest.

As Sazzy pointed out during this week’s Twitch stream, one of the reasons why Dungeons & Dragons is so popular is because you strip out the setting (which is minimal at best) and use it to play games from other intellectual properties or even make up your own. If Covenant is able to do the same thing, then it will help make the case for the game’s commercial viability.

It looks like it’s going well, too. Sean wrote a quick backstory questionnaire, the kind used to make other Covenant characters, for a skalgan, one of the species in NOP. They look like tall, muscular sheep with reinforced skulls for headbutting. Not only did the player create their own character on their own, they were also able to make their character’s equipment with the rules in the Covenant rulebook. They even made their character’s headbutt natural attack. This bodes well for the game’s overall viability, too, since the game’s creators won’t have to hold the players’ hands when they make their characters. Now if we can just get more people to make their characters on their own…

That’s it for tonight, though. We’ll be back next Monday with more Covenant news. Talk to you then.

Covenant Update for December 4, 2023

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

PLAYTEST

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

We held another playtest in Sazzy’s Beyond Infinity campaign. We had a lot of exposition and roleplay this session, along with a few plot grenades, but no bids or gameplay. Looks like that’s coming next session.

The player characters (PC) met on the bridge of the Infinity, a giant spaceship that made its debut way back in Chapter 2 (we’re up to Chapter 4 now). Their efforts to take the planet below them from loyalists to Baran, the old Khan of the ratel Khanate, had been successful, and the Covenant were going to use it as a beachhead for their operations in the Sagittarius Arm.

The PCs were then introduced to a number of new species who, like the chiroptim, were from another timeline and had stumbled into the Covenant universe. They brought with them a number of advanced technologies, including a superluminal drive that didn’t need fixed facilities opening wormholes in space. The Infinity was going to need it for its operations against Rekana Industries, including their plans to evacuate the “Scrapping Sites” for outdated acoes and, eventually, to destroy the company itself.

Rekana seemed to be aware of the PCs’ plans, too. They were replacing people with doppelganger acoes loaded with the memories of the people they were designed to replace, then using them to carry out infiltrations and assassinations. One of them had already killed the Matriarchy’s Omnimatriarch. The Infinity had developed a test to spot these doubles, but it’s definitely something that the PCs will have to look out for in the future.

The Infinity made its first jump across thousands of parsecs back to Gaia in the void between the Orion and Sagittarius Arms. That’s when our co-writer Typh decided to throw in a plot twist: someone somewhere activated a Penrose sphere, killing billions. The Infinity was barely able to survive it, and Tweak the aco fell to the bridge deck, suffering from some kind of seizure and repeating the name “Madura Masham” in an ancient risu dialect.

We have no idea who or what Madura Masham is. However, judging by Sazzy and Typh’s evil snickering, we should probably be worried.

PLAYABLE SPECIES

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sean has written four of the five playable species that he has for Covenant. Last week, he finished the calerre, or the founders of the titular Covenant (you can get the character creation rules for Covenant if you’re a patron). This week, he’s going to work on the last of his species, the chiroptim.

The chiroptim are from another universe (actually, another roleplaying game that Sean abandoned) where anthropomorphic vampire bats evolved alongside humans. They came to the Covenant universe during an event called the Crossing and are unable to return to their universe, which they call the Old World.

Their main feature is that they’re predators and blood drinkers. They’re also one of the few playable species who can fly under their own power. Their hollow bones make them more fragile than other species, so they’ve compensated by developing a strong gun culture and traditions of hit-and-run fighting and guerilla warfare.

Sean has been taking about two weeks to finish the character creation rules for each species. The chiroptim are going to be one of the more complicated ones to write, because they’re split up into two major ethnicities: the Ya’os from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; and the Tiükmad from Southeast Asia. Each one will have similar but different ability trees reflecting their cultural differences.

That’s about it for now, though. We’ll let you know how the playtest and the chiroptim are coming next Monday. Talk to you then!