Come, traveler, take a seat by our fire and listen to a tale of the times before. Ours is an ancient world and its legends are many. Doubtless you have heard some of them. Drink with us. Sing a song with us. For this night we are your friends and you are our family.
This is the story of The Covenant a realm of magic and myth where the very rocks and trees burst with life, magical creatures dwell in every corner of the realm, and history is written as much by the everyday deeds of individuals as the edicts of kings.
I began creating The Covenant in early 2020, based loosely on previous attempts at creating an original campaign setting for tabletop role playing games and fantasy novels. The Covenant began to fully take shape in my mind while playing a text roleplaying game with Allison Martin over Discord. As our characters interacted and explored the world, it became clear that we were not playing in any of the fantasy worlds with which we were familiar from computer or tabletop games. We were building something new.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit America and we both found themselves in a complete creative rut, which was compounded by smaller scale disasters in our families.
As we begin to emerge from that time of disaster, I am again feeling the need to create. This will start with documenting the world and exploring it through short stories. Allison and I will likely revise and complete our novel and, perhaps, others will join us in creating a richly documented fantasy world.
Three thousand years ago nobody much cared about cannon vs. legend in storytelling. If the storyteller claimed that Zeus could transform himself into a swan, Noah could fit two of every creature on a boat, or Gilgamesh could slay a chimeral beast, then by Odin’s eye they could do those things!
Then humanity invented a little thing called literacy and everything went down hill after that.
My point is that I’m writing this document as a “behind the scenes” encyclopedia of how I imagine everything in this world actually happened. Since I’m the creator, what’s written here is real.
But that’s not how myths are born. Myths are messy, and legends and folk tales doubly so. Any document about The Covenant which is tagged as #The Covenant/Meta# contains information which the average person living in this world probably wouldn't know about or, at the least, would have an incomplete understanding. Likewise, any page tagged as #The Covenant/Fiction# is not bound to accurately represent the information contained in the metafictional pages. I may, at times, directly contradict the meta in my fiction, because the Woshaka don't care that Urdan attack them only because of the influence of a corrupt Shryk, they just know their fishing boats got destroyed by a bunch of jerks from the grasslands.
You may find some links which fail to work or attempt to launch the Bear app if you have it installed on your device. Sorry about that. I use Bear for writing my blog posts and building this world, but only export items with the #The Covenant/Published# tag to my website. Some pages which are complete enough to share include links to pages that are not ready for sharing yet.
Index | Timeline of The Covenant | Map of The Covenant | Tales of The Covenant | Covenant Bestiary | Notable Persons of The Covenant | Gods of The Covenant
The Covenant © 2022 by Andrew Linke is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Contact me to discuss commercial licensing.
#The Covenant#
#The Covenant/Published#
#The Covenant/Meta#