Covenant concepts
This page lists a number of concepts for Hermetic covenants that can serve as a starting point for designing your original covenant.
Covenant of the Immaculate Tower
by quinchris
This is an urban covenant spread across several regios. I have always pictured this in Southern Italy along the crusader routes, or in Spain or Provencal near a pilgrimage site but any moderately prosperous town were prosperous strangers would not look out of place.
In a fairly ordinary town there is a fairly ordinary square. Surrounded on all four sides by multistorey buildings, various shopfronts occupy the ground floor. Standing in the middle of the square is an unremarkable belltower about fifty feet high. Local legend has one of the base stones as having come from the legendary Tower of Babel. The bells ring out every half hour from dawn to dusk.
The square has long since had a reputation for strange events. On holy days miracles have been known to happen and locals know better than to cross the square during evil nights.
These oddities do not stop a flourish market taking place, with local merchants, craftsmen and famers setting up stalls to cater to the town’s population, visiting nobles and a variety of pilgrims. It is a cheerful and prosperous market. The Magical Aura of 1 makes the colours are brighter, the weather always seems just a little better, the food tastes fresher.
The Covenant runs a tavern in one of the buildings facing the square. Other coven folk and craftsmen are scattered across the town in shops owned by the magi.
Visitors to the covenant know to enter the square by the northern entrance in summer/spring, and by the southern entrance in autumn/winter. They then must circle the edge of the square, just inside the row of surrounding buildings. If they reach the place they started as the bells in the tower are tolling they will find themselves in the next level of the regio.
Perhaps local know to mind their own business, perhaps they are distracted by the bells and the busy market, or perhaps it is a subtle effect of the magical aura, but people vanishing or reappearing in the square do not attract attention. On holy days when the divine aura rises to engulf the magic aura the regio is impassable.
The next Level has a magical aura of 3. The sudden quiet of the next level is a stark contrast to the bustle of the busy marketplace. The stalls and people are gone leaving only the bare flagstones of the square as well as the surrounding buildings. The bell tower is replaced by a white marble tower of seamless stone although the ringing of the bell can still be heard. Visiting magi will have no trouble recognising the Conjuring the Mystic Tower.
Basically it is a tower surrounded by a ring of buildings. Coven folk with supernatural virtues/flaws who do not feel comfortable in the mortal world live in the buildings as well as warriors and specialised craftsmen (glassblowers or illuminators). The Marble Tower contains the Covenant’s Council Chamber, Library and Laboratories of the junior magi.
The magical regio once extended only a few feet beyond the outer edge of the buildings however a number of decades ago a member of the covenant who was an expert in hermetic architecture extended the regio several miles in one direction. Now a grassy field provides grazing for horses and various animals.
Gaining the next higher regio again requires circling the courtyard, this time on the outside of the buildings. Travellers are warned that they must only travel in one direction without stopping, pausing or backtracking. Except for the section facing the field the walls of the buildings are only a few feet from the edge of the regio forcing people to travel in single file.
If the rules are followed, on completion of the circuit the white marble walls of the buildings now tower overhead. Following the edge of the building you come to a set of steps carved out of the marble. It Leads up around the edge of the tower, for that is what you now realise it is, a single massive tower, over two hundred feet wide and hundreds high.
Magical aura of 7. This level is the remains of a incredible conjuration spell. A single massive tower, partially ruined, long since abandoned. Several of the Covenant’s senior magi have their Laboratories here, either inside or on top of the Tower. They use the isolation to investigate the mystery of the Tower or perform their own arcane research.
The magi claim that there is a yet higher regio, one that contains a completed Tower, one so tall that it breaches the Lunar Sphere itself. Anyone with Second Sight or Visions or any other appropriate Virtue will occasionally gain a glimpse of a massive structure stretching up impossibly high. It is unknown if anyone has ever discovered how to cross over. Certainly no one has returned to speak of what they have seen. Once a magi claimed that the way to the highest level of the regio was via the top of the bell tower. He later vanished and was never seen again. No one has managed to repeat his feat. As it involves throwing yourself off the bell tower no one seems particularly keen to experiment.
The highest regio. Magical aura of 9. This is a single wizards attempt to complete one of the Great Hermetic Projects. Stretching many thousands of feet high it is a marvel of engineering, artistic ability and magical skill. As construction progressed it became a battle ground for angels and demons. It is the echoes of these battles that cause the miracles and unholiness in the market place. Except for a few being imprisoned by magical traps the Angel and demons have long since left leaving the pristine building to be infested by a variety of magical beasts.
Disconnected Regiones
by Yair Rezek
This covenant is one of the most ancient in the Order, founded or more accurately found by a follower of Criamon shortly after the Order's foundation. It consists of numerous connected level 8 Magical regios, each in the form of a highly ornate room. Geography means nothing in this place - one navigates from one regio to the other based on enigmatic wisdom and familiarity (Enigmatic Wisdom + Covenant Lore); the roll is Simple and EF 6 for any familiar place. It is possible to peer through regio boundaries using magic or Second Sight, however.
A distinctive feature of the covenant is its Infinite Library. It consists of identical hexagonal rooms, whose walls are covered with books from floor to ceiling. All the books contain jibberish, a random series of letters. In each room, however, or at least in some, a single book also makes sense. Some Criamon magi conjecture that any possible book may be found somewhere in the depths of the library - even books not yet written. The covenant's Librarians (an hereditary covenfolk position) can deposit books in the library and take magi to the rooms they would be found at. Magi may also search for books on their own, but this requires an (Enigmatic Wisdom + Library Lore) roll with EF 6 for a very familiar book (such as one the magus has read before, or written); higher EFs may allow finding unknown books, and an extraordinary success may even allow to find a book that "shouldn't" be in the library at all. A botch indicates finding a corrupted book - a book containing subtle errors, that may result in anything from a loss of Quality to Infernal Corruption. The librarians always roll simple dice (due to their eidetic memory and memorization of all of the library's official content), so they do not risk botches.
It isn't clear where the covenant resides, precisely. Several rooms open to the outside world, but they do so at different geographic locales (perhaps even tribunals). Nor is it clear how many rooms there are - there always appears to be yet-another-room suitable for a laboratory when a magus arrives, and some suspect there may be infinitely many rooms.
One of the regios connecting it to the covenant to the outside is a cave at the side of a mountain, near the Cave of Twisting Shadows. Anyone that sleeps in the cave appears in what is, perhaps, the largest hall of the covenant, used as its Main Hall. One can exit the hall and reach the cave by inflicting some pain (often one pinches himself) at the elaborate stone-facade of an entrance adorning one end of the Main Hall. The person then finds himself awakening on the floor in the cave, as if from a dream. This method of entry has given the covenant the name The City that Is A Dream.
The covenant is in deep Winter, and has few active members. The current Pontifex is suspected to be in deep Twilight, but whenever he is announced to have passed and a new one about to be selected he invariably turns up again - only to never be seen again for decades. Without an official head, the few active members have little authority over the covenant's vast resources. Lately, an ancient Criamon member, that the Criamon maintain is already Tangential [i.e. beyond Twilight], that has more authority under the covenant's elaborate Charter, invited a few young magi from all over the Order to bolster the dwindling ranks of the covenant.
[This covenant can be used to support any power level, from a Weak covenant of young magi that have little access to the covenant's vast resources to a Legendary power level with access to a literally-unlimited library, hundreds of dead-magi labs and magical places with their associated treasures and raw vis sources, and a vast regio network with exists all over Mythic Europe and beyond.]
A Dungeon by a Different Name
by Kid Gloves
Deep in the Carpathians are a vast series of caverns, tunnels and chambers hewn out over the centuries to form the sprawling underground covenant of Castra Cercistum. Almost entirely self-sufficient, it is home to over 20 magi - spread around into enclaves in different sections of the tunnels. You are new magi, given command of the most recent tunnels and one of the few gateways to the surface world. Your task: ensure the covenant is supplied, and protect the senior magi deep within from interruptions.
Unfortunately, the powerful aura of the covenant has twisted the covenfolk who live there - making them small and wiry, with green skin and pointy noses and chins. Tales are told in the nearby villages of the goblins who live in the mountains, ruled by evil wizards. Can you forge links with the outside world? Or will you continue the covenant tradition of raiding and villainy for its continued survival? And can you do this despite the machinations of rival magi in other wings of the same vast covenant?
Suggested resource points: 800 ('medium covenant') for player-accessible resources.
Tower on a Hill by a ... Wait a Minute
by Kid Gloves
This ancient golden tower sits atop the tallest hill in the forest, its makers unknown and its design ornate. Within is a regio, though one would be hard-pressed to recognise it as every door and every window leads into it. From the top of the tower one can see across the trees into the nearby forest, within which stands an ancient tower almost identical to this only in purest white - nestled deep in a secluded valley where the sun only touches the top of the other tower peeking from the trees.
The forest between the towers is fae-enchanted, and very easy to get lost in. Reaching one tower from the other is tricky, though not impossible - though comes with its own perils as the other tower is home to the Faerie Court that controls the forest.
However, this is only true in the winter. At the turning of spring, the inhabitants of the tower awake to find that while the interior of the tower is still their own, they now reside in the white tower - and can see the distant golden tower upon the hill, now inhabited by a different fae court. With the turning of autumn, the towers swap back. Worse, the Fae have come to mimic the inhabitants of the covenant - and are both mecurial and cruel to those who visit their doors.
The covenant itself has fallen into decline, and new blood are being sent by allies of the old magi to help revitalise it. The senior magus has a tendancy to take a personality not unlike that of the current ruling Fae Queen (in the white tower) or King (in the golden tower). If the group can make a home amidst this fae magic and manage to keep their strange landlords appeased they will enjoy a long, albeit strange, life.
Resource points suggestions: 400-800. Suitable for a game with heavy fae involvement.