(Crossposted to Storygames)

Covenant, by Matt Machell, is one of those games that I have demoed at a few cons, read, been enthused by, played all to rarely, but never actually run a full game of. I felt this to be remiss, not just because I feel that Covenant is an under-appreciated piece of work, appearing at the same time in 2006 as the more famous and lauded Contenders and Best Friends (both also excellent games in their own right). One of my aims during my time in New Zealand was to run Covenant at least once and during this Christmas holiday season, I had the ideal chance at Post Box Con, organised by Steve Hickey. An informal event of gaming and chat just after Christmas, it proved to provide two excellent (but radically different) game experiences. One was 'The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries', and the other was the subject of this AP, Covenant.

The concept behind the game can be a bit of a hard sell at times. The idea of a global conspiracy that got it wrong, mistimed it's imagined apocalypse and is now being torn apart by recrimination, factional struggles and self-interest is engaging for me, but strangely difficult to get across exactly why it is so good. Nonetheless, Morgan Davie, Steven Hickey, Blair Rhodes and Paul Wilson, were all keen to play after my initial pitch.

Perhaps the most challenging part of the initial preparation process was the creation of Conventions for the cell and, rather interestingly, the original purpose of the cell. Working out what the original purpose was had to be set aside and returned to after working out other things, and even then it proved relatively challenging. There is a fine line in the game that you have to be carefully about: many of the suggestions for the purpose were far to task specific in a very defined, narrow way. We eventually got round the problem and the cell looked like this:

Name: The Guild of the Signal
Location: Wellington, New Zealand

Conventions
Always refer to the sacred texts
No society member will reveal the conspiracy
There are invisible entities
Every member must be married
Strict hierarchy

Motifs
Charts written in blood
Conversations on high ground
Isolated living spaces
Winding hillside roads
Deep waters

Former Purpose
To guide the invisible entities into contact

Important People
The helicopter pilot - moves the cell swiftly about the region
The guildmaster - head of the conspiracy in Wellington
The librarian - keeps of the texts and archives of knowledge

As we had decided to make the location the city we were actually in, it made creating the motifs extremely easy. Most of them were easily identifiable characteristics of Wellington (the deep water of the harbour, the high ground of Mount Victoria, Mount Cook and the other hills, the winding roads that snake through the city). The familiarity of location also made setting the place of scenes really easy: no lengthy descriptions that took up time, everyone knew what the places were like and the familiarity, juxtaposed with the strangeness gave a pleasing air.

The characters were then created and people seemed to find this a fairly intuitive process once the initial ideas were thrashed out. It was certainly commented on that the way the characters are created sets up a huge number of story elements right there and then. Everything on the sheet can be brought into the game somehow to give added spice, conflict and drama. Did we know when we were creating character that the game would end up being all about dysfunctional relationships and the idea of marriage? Certainly that was touched on tangentially by one of the conventions, but it was until the game actually started and got rolling that these things came front and centre, becoming really powerful driving forces in the fiction.

In brief, the characters were:

Thomas Mowbray, an introverted astronomer, a man who really believed in the conspiracy but who also dedicated his life to science.

Baker, the taciturn fixer, an ex-army man with a decidedly skewed view of morality and with no eye towards the long view.

Nolan Kincaid, an arrogant chief executive, who has an immense belief in himself and a dim view of others and their susceptibility to money.

Ben Lyall, a sympathetic tramper (hillwalker) who works for the Department of Conservation and who has a strange belief that the invisible entities are actually real.

We took a break for food after creating the characters, which was very handy as it gave me time to detail a few NPCs who had grown out of the cell and character creation process. I initially sketched out The Guildmaster, Titus the librarian, the helicopter pilot (whom it turned out was the wife of Ben Lyall) and Linda, the deceitful wife of Thomas Mowbray. Looking at the character sheets, it became stunningly obvious that this game wasn't going to be about the conspiracy at all, in any meaningful sense, but totally about how these people related, the power struggles, the relationships and the corrosive nature of what was happening between them.

Taking a cue from all of this stuff, the first scene took place on a windy Mount Victoria lookout at 3am. Kincaid and Baker (who had relationships established through the crucibel on the character sheets) were taking photographs of Linda Mowbray having sex in a car with her latest boyfriend (both Kincaid and Baker had a joint order of having to end all the mariages within the cell, contrary to the established convention). This was the first use of the resolution mechanics in the game, so provided a learning platform from everyone else round the table, letting them see how the various elements on the character sheet allowed them to manipulate the outcomes of the resolution.

There followed the Guildmaster attempting to get rid of the cell members by violent means aboard his yacht, Lyall flying to an isolated lighthouse in an attempt to find the Librarian and being bested in a conflict by Russell, the newest member of the cell and an surprisingly mean NPC (who, through a glance through the door of the lighthouse as he and Lyall fought, showed that Lyall's wife, the pilot, had taken him briefly as a lover). Mowbray, shot in the gut because of the assassination attempt and being manipulated by his wife (he was still unaware of her infidelity) into trying to kill Titus the librarian. Bleeding from his gut wound, Mowbray stumbled through Wellington Airport, attempting to catch the fleeing, semi-crippled old librarian. He failed at the last and collapsed to the floor unconscious and bleeding everywhere. Paul had to leave at the this point, so it represented the ideal scene in which his character could bow out of the action.

It was only about half way through that the game kicked in to high gear and went from being satisfying to being outstanding. The scenes cranked up, the conflicts became really meaty and meaningful and everyone round the table was leaning in when they were going on, listening to the words being said and craning their necks to see what the dice would throw up. Kincaid was established as the true villain of the piece, a despicable man manipulating and using all those around him, especially Lyall and Baker.

Kincaid visited the home of the librarian in order to speak to his elderly wife, Laverne. The scene went from a nuanced, but innocuous conversation, to utmost horror, as Kincaid suspects his tea is poisoned and attempt to force Laverne to drink from his cup. Was he victimising and innocent old lady or was there genuinely something more conspiratorial at work here? It turns out that there was and Kincaid, although not justified in his treatment of Laverne, was somehow vindicated. This just added more to the feeling that Kincaid was a the epitome of evil in the fiction.

In a particularly traumatic but horrifyingly effective scene, Baker returned (on Kincaid's orders) to a small cabin in the Rimutaka Mountains that we had visited in an earlier scene. This time, he brought his wife with him, for Kincaid had ordered him to end his marriage. He did this in a particularly brutal fashion, but stabbing her in the back of the head. Was this a conflict? No, we all agreed this should happen. But there was a conflict, between the dead wife an Baker, each new die revealing something else about their relationship and what would happen to Baker as a result of his crime. I only created 3 edges during play for Shirley, but they worked really well: She always really loved you (cue anguished knuckle biting round the table), her family will never forget (visions of posters and TV appeals for months after) and our unborn child (the heart rending discovery of a used home pregnancy test, positive, in her coat). It was a pretty harsh conflict, but one that everyone agreed worked exceptionally well.

We then saw Lyall, having been tortured for days (off camera) due to losing the fight in the lighthouse and doped to the eyeballs with psychoactive drugs, confronting Kincaid in the the grimy, dismal car park under the motorway. The conflict that played out was another tense, engaging affair where everyone was really invested in what was going on. Lyall was having serious mental issues and was on the verge of breakdown, Kincaid was his usual confident self, even with a gun in his face. Lyall lost so badly that he couldn't go through with his killing of Kincaid and ended up with the story level consequence of 'Hallucinatory, batshit insane'. Lyall was now under the control of Kincaid, as was Baker. In a final scene, we see a hotel room where the helicopter pilot and a young man are having sex. The camera pans up and we see Lyall, a dribble of spittle coming from his mouth, holding the gun he used to threaten Kincaid. "Don't worry" he says, "Everything is going to be all right" and the scene fades to black.

It's actually quite difficult to get across how fundamentally good this game was and how much the way Covenant sets up the game and character contributed to it. The establishment of the power relationship that Kincaid had over Baker and Lyall flowed very naturally, creating villains out of every member of the group. The descent into madness of Lyall, the easy step into murder for Baker and the ascension to even greater power for Kincaid just all came together in a very satisfying, horrifying and brilliant way.

I hope that Morgan, Steve, Paul and Blair take the chance to chip in with their thoughts on how the game went and perhaps add things that I might have missed from my telling of the various scenes.

Cheers
Malc