[Covenant]Theme and Mood and being specific

[Matt Machell]

Covenant (link) was one of my "hey what a cool idea" games. Neat ideas left to stagnate. A few months ago I went back to it and realised it was way too vague. It handwaved a whole bunch of things that were actually core to the ideas behind the game. I wanted to revise it, make it a more solid game, hopefully for a commercial version sometime this year...

For those who haven't seen it before, Covenant is a modern conspiracy game about members of a secret society dealing with the fallout of their secret prophesies failing.

I set out to de-handwave the things in question. I'd like some feedback on those bits, and ideally some playtesters to see how those things pan out in actual play.

1st handwavy thing: participants agreeing on mood and setting.

I've addressed this by getting all participants , before play, to contribute a convention ("the society controlled the templars") and motif ("flocks of ravens"), these are added to the Cell creation process and you can invoke these to modify conflict rolls. So if you've got a motif of "astrological symbols", and you narrate a conflict modification as "I grab his shirt and and throw him to the ground, revealing the tatoo of a star constellation", you get rewarded with a bonus to your roll for bringing an agreed motif into play.

2nd Handwavy thing: participants getting rewarded for addressing themes
This was originally very vague: "Get a drama point if you resolve a conflict in a way that addresses the themes of the game". I've taken a leaf from Burning Wheel for solving it. Each character defines themselves by three truisms, beliefs they hold to be true, in the style of those utterances from conspiracy dramas ("Good men die badly" and so on). Resolving the questions thrown up by these is tied to the players ability to frame scenes. When two are resolved you're hitting endgame for that character.

3rd handwavy thing: drama points and deadly conflicts

I pulled the drama points and specifying a conflict as deadly before you entered it by spending drama. Drama points didn't really do anything else except reward you for having your negative consequences invoked in conflicts, and what was mentioned above. So I pulled them and instead opted for allowing participants in a conflict to decide how long they want to be commited to it, and thereby decide if they're willing to risk the possibility of a story-level write-out consequence (death, or similar).

So, that's the main changes and my reasons for them. I'd appreciate any feedback on the wording of these changes (Are they vague? What's ambiguous?). I'd also really appreciate any playtesting people could do to see how play with the revision pans out.

-Matt