Author’s Diary for September 18, 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: NASA/JPL-Caltech

We’ve completed the Socializing chapter of Covenant’s playtest rules! Find out more below the fold.

The Socializing chapter has seven sections. Each section focuses on one way for your character to interact socially with other characters. They are:

• Buying Items: How your character can gain items through money, trade, barter, or throwing your weight around
• Shmoozing with Characters: How your character can learn rumors and gain leads by keeping xir ear to the ground
• Convincing Characters: How your character can convince other characters to join xir side or undermine their beliefs
• Fast-Talking Characters: How your character can bluff xir way past guards, bureaucrats, and police
• Intimidating Characters: How your character can get other characters to do what you want by threatening them
• Taunting Characters: How your character can goad other characters into making mistakes or demoralize them
• Playing Games: How your character can play games or gamble with other characters

We put in chapters like this to give your characters noncombat ways to resolve problems. We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again: Covenant isn’t a pacifist game. There will be times when you’ll have to fight. However, there are also times when you won’t. We want you to be able to resolve situations like that your way, instead of being forced to fight.

Anyway, we have two more chapters left in Covenant’s playtest rules – the Dirty Tricks chapter, which has more rules on both avoiding fights and improving your chances during fights and the Building and Improving Items chapter – as well as four appendices. We hope to finish editing them by the end of October, which will give us four whole months until our Feb. 28, 2021 deadline to rewrite everything.

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