Author’s Diary for September 11, 2020

(Don’t forget to contribute to our Patreon campaign or join us on the Radio Free Covenant Discord server! Don’t forget to tune in to the Radio Free Covenant podcast every Saturday at 4 p.m. Eastern (1 p.m. Pacific) on our Twitch page and get a summary of the game rules!)

Featured Image Credit: Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)

We’ve finished the Finding Information chapter in Covenant’s playtest rules! This chapter has rules that let your character find out information about the game world and other characters. Find out more below the fold.

The Finding Information chapter has five sections:

Handling Essentials: How the FM should handle essential information and not “gate” it behind bids that the PCs can fail

Using Perception: How your character can spot ambushes and hidden characters and items, including items hidden on characters

Investigating: How your character can gain information on characters and items, in case you want to play a reporter or scientist

Tracking Characters: How your character can track down characters that want to remain hidden, in case you want to play a bounty hunter or detective

Reading Characters: How your character can “read” another character’s behavior to find out a character’s intentions or counter a feint

Most of the rules in this section boil down to your character making some kind of perception bid against another character’s stealth bid. We hope that this points the way to us compressing the rules in this chapter and cutting away the fat.

Moving on from that, we started the Socializing chapter today, which will give your character rules for interacting with other characters, including buying items and intimidating, taunting, and otherwise influencing other characters. We hope this chapter is at least as useful as the Fighting chapter and gives players more options to resolve problems.

There’s only two chapters after this, as well as four appendices, so we hope to be done with editing the playtest rules by the end of October. After that, we should have plenty of time to retype everything, so we should have the playtest rules done and ready for publication by Feb. 28, 2021.

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That’s about it for now. Talk to you next week!