20 hours to go and I'm feeling optimistic about that AP stretch goal! But that's not what we're here to talk about today. Instead, I'm going to talk about the members of your revolution that you don't get to play – your contacts and your covenants with them.

If you've played previous versions of Voidheart Symphony, you'll know that only a part of your abilities come from the playbook your rebel is using – the rest come from your relationships with other people, and specifically the relationships you've invested with occult significance and turned into covenants. Your crew covenant is your most reliable of these; you're already holding up your side of the bargain by committing to a new target, and so your crew covenant starts each investigation intense and ready to use. This revolution won't go far if it's only limited to your crew, however. That's where contacts come in.

What are contacts? Simply put, they're NPCs – characters controlled by the Architect or the group, instead of any individual rebel player. But it's more than that: every contact is someone your rebel has met, someone who might be interested in and useful to your revolution. They might be someone you meet while fighting the vassal in the city, a recovering victim or repentant minion of a vassal, or a chance connection your rebel makes when you Let Your Hair Down or Connect with someone. Contacts don't offer you powers just yet, though: first you'll need to perform the ritual to form a Minor Covenant.

This ritual is key to breaking your contact out of the mindset the castle wants to force on them, and convince them to put their faith in the new world you're building. It's pretty simple to do: you hang out and get comfortable with them, and then just ask them what they most need right now. The magic is that they'll tell you truthfully and honestly, asking you for something that – in the castle's paradigm – would be way too big or risky or weird to ever ask for. They've done their part, and now it's your turn. You put in the work to get them what they need, even as their internalized castle-mindset subconsciously warps reality to make it harder than you might have expected. Break through that barrier, meet their needs, and you've broken their chains and showed them that a better world is possible. That's when the real magic happens.

As a side note, this ritual is pretty much completely new to Voidheart Revised. I've never been completely comfortable with the idea that you can draw power from a contact without them having an inkling of what you were using the power for. In this new version of the game, every contact you have a major covenant with is aware of your shadow revolution, and has invested their hopes and dreams into your bond.

Major covenants are potent sources of power, each giving a unique kind of strength. To group these bonds, the book uses the major arcana of the tarot: a Wheel of Fortune bond lets you navigate life's ups and downs, a Chariot bond helps you get places fast, a Moon bond taps into the power of nightmares. Still, I'd encourage you to tweak them at the table so that your Sun covenant is distinct from another player's, even if that's just tweaking how the powers look in the story.

Your access to this power is contingent on the contact having faith and trust in you – you can't take these people's support for granted. That's why each major covenant starts the investigation faded. This isn't because they suddenly hate you, but because maintaining that level of investment in a relationship is hard. It's on you to Check In with the contacts whose covenants you want to access and intensify the relationship by spending time with them. That comes with benefits, as every major covenant also comes with a Hangout Move that triggers when you spend time with them: the Sun offers you answers to your questions, the Magician teaches you new skills, the Oracle shows you your city's hidden beauty.

Another side note: this also helps players keep their options at a manageable level instead of starting each investigation with half a dozen or more powers to juggle. You can pick which covenants you want to 'activate' in the early days of the investigation, letting you decide on a build that's useful for this particular vassal.

Once a covenant's intense, you can call on its powers during this investigation. At the base level, its City Move and Castle Move give you powers you can call on for as long as it's charged up. For example, the Gardener lets you nurture and heal your allies in the city, while in the castle it lets you consult the accumulated wisdom of everyone who has ever cared for you. Beyond that, intense covenants are also a useful safety net – if a roll goes badly, you can fade any of your intense covenants to re-roll the dice, though you open the contact up to danger if you do so. Similarly, a charged-up crew covenant lets you lend you dice to other rebels when you act in concert, vastly boosting your chance of success. Particularly important relationships can become committed, letting you exhaust them twice before they're fully faded.

Finally, it's not just your intentional actions that can affect covenants. As you end a session, you look over each covenant's 'nurture' and 'betray' triggers, seeing if anything you did might have affected your relationship. Even if the contact was never on-screen, your perseverance against great odds might have intensified your Strength covenant – or your willingness to spurn tradition might have robbed your Sage covenant of power.

While the tarot typology of covenants is default setup, there are many other ways to conceive of your bonds with others. The book has guidance on building new arcana, or even constructing whole new systems to use at your table – maybe you want to give characters power based on star signs and planets, comic book heroes, favorite animals, whatever you desire. There's even a worked example of an alchemy-inspired system where different locations are the mystic tools you use to transmute your contacts up and down the ladder of reagents towards your magnum opus.

Whether you're using the core covenant system or making your own, the key truth remains – your rebels will need the support of their community to win, and by the time you've played a full Voidheart Symphony campaign you'll have built a vast, thriving, interconnected web of people you can rely on. And that's my cue to thank you all for your support on this campaign, thank you for reading this far, and celebrate the final day of this campaign!