Covenant & Empire

04 Aug, 2025

Preamble

I have been a big fan of TES since the days leading up to Skyrim, when the hype was so powerful that I went and bought Oblivion just to try and survive the overwhelming need to play Skyrim RIGHT THEN. I had never seen anything like these games. I'm pretty sure Oblivion was my first serious RPG ever and it kind of set my expectation for everything from video games to tabletop. I can still remember when I was getting pretty far along in the main quest, not really sure what the hell was going on but loving every minute of it, and I had to try and find the Mythic Dawn. I can't recall if there was a quest marker or not, but I do remember having to actually read a book to figure out how to get to the cult's secret lair. The concept of reading a book in a video game blew my mind. The Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes was a gateway into the wider lore of The Elder Scrolls universe and I remember looking up from that book to see the night sky of Tamriel - the two moons, that I then realized were the dead body of the god Lorkhan, as the music played peacefully in the background. I felt like I was really experiencing something special.

Julian LeFay passed away last month. He was instrumental in the creation of The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall. I played TES2 when DFUnity was announced as feature complete and absolutely loved it. It was a bit primitive in terms of the setting I love so much¹ and somehow more innovative in gameplay than the other games, but what really impressed me was the scale and the way factions interact. It's almost comically huge, but it kind of works, and the fact that you can't join every faction and become the grandmaster in days/weeks is refreshing.

Why make your own game?

To commemorate the passing of LeFay, a fellow OSR gamer going by Socratic-DM wrote this fantastic post which boils down the general idea of character generation in Daggerfall into a generally OSR shaped concept. I was fascinated, and very inspired, as I had already had a few ideas bouncing around in my head about things I would change about WWN if I had enough of an impetus to go and do a huge overhaul. I've already written an extensive, 60 page setting guide and compendium of my homebrew/adaptation of An Echo, Resounding to WWN; I think that blog post was the last little push I needed to get me into thinking about really making my own game from the blocks that Crawford has provided over the years. In my head, a lot of what I've made already should be compatible with what I'm going to make for C&E.

The concepts behind Covenant & Empire

The X Without Number systems are the basic framework of Old School D&D with Traveller skills and Feats² bolted on. I've talked at length about how much I like the system before, and I still really do. When I read Socratic-DM's post I realized that I could take WWN, and my extensive homebrew for it, and just bolt on the RuneQuest style character generation, much like Crawford did with Traveller. I realize that this is not really the same as creating a game from wholecloth, and basically chopping up xWN and putting in some new parts where I want, but I clearly have some ideas that don't align with Kevin's quite as cleanly as I would like. For one, I want to evoke that feeling from Daggerfall, the feeling of walking out of the Fighters' Guild with nothing but a cheap knockoff fireball spell and a longsword in your hands, off to find some godsforsaken crypt buried in the Wrothgarian Mountains. Could I play the Unofficial Elder Scrolls RPG? Sure. Could I play RuneQuest or Mythras or Basic Roleplaying? Sure. But damn it, I have ideas and I have convictions about my setting that I think I can bake into the foundations of an entirely new (to me) game. So that's what I'm going to do.

So, the name - Covenant & Empire. The Empire has become increasingly more important as I've worked on this setting and my campaign, and I knew I had to refer to it somehow as it's the primary setting of my games within the wider world. Empire also has a connotation, and since I want domain play to be an element the Empire will become inescapable as the players climb in level. Covenant just kind of came to me, as religion has also become increasingly important to the setting. Outside of its religious connotations, covenant means a relationship and there should be a give and take between the game world and the PCs.

The first thing I had to do was decide what I really wanted to keep from Worlds Without Number and from my own Player's Guide. Most of Covenant & Empire is derived from WWN's SRD. I have no intention on trying to profit from this, and Crawford has generally been very generous with his IP³, but I would really hate to step on the toes of such a helpful member of the community.

Proposed Features

• A skill list, primarily focused on recreating that of Daggerfall.
• A more dynamic magic system, generally following Crawford's maxim that magic should not replace the abilities of other characters but open new possibilities.
• Nine playable ancestries/heritages. I have already written these, for the most part.
• Birthsigns, ala TES. Again, already written and playtested more or less.
• Bigger focus on procedural play - wilderness/dungeon turns, procedural weather, slightly altered random encounter rules. I use these in my WWN games already, but putting them down in the book would be nice.
• Rework of healing, System Strain, and shock to be more in line with the apparent intentions as opposed to the stated intentions.⁴
• Some kind of roleplaying mechanic, probably akin to Passions from RuneQuest.
• And finally, integrating An Echo, Resounding style domain management/warfare with the Faction minigame and figuring out how exactly I want to make domain management part of the game.

Conclusion

Next time, I think I'll be talking about Skills and Magic. I have it mostly worked out already, but there's some gaps that need to be filled before I'm ready to share. I'm currently working on that, and ancestries - they're already written but with your character's origin not being a Focus that means I have some extra design space to play with. If you have some ideas, or want to tell me to just go play RQ or Mythras, feel free to pierce the veil of Strages and find me on Discord⁵ or comment/DM me on Bluesky. Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies.

Footnotes