Author’s Diary for November 27, 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 three whole chapters in Covenant’s playtest rules since last week! Find out more below the fold.

Here’s what we want to talk about this week:

• The chapters that we finished this week
• Our progress on Covenant’s playtest rules
• How to become a playtester

WHAT WE DID THIS WEEK

Here are the three chapters that we finished this week:

• Chases: How your character can chase down and evade other characters
• Character Movement: How your character can move between areas during areas and use specialized forms of movement – like climbing, jumping, and swimming – as well as the effects of terrain and your character’s stances on movement
• Hazards: How hazards like falling, strangulation, and exhaustion can damage your character, along with your character’s food and water requirements and what happens when you don’t have them

We also started the Fighting chapter yesterday. So far, this chapter has rules for:

• Making attacks against other characters and defending against attacks
• Gaining an edge over other characters with tactics
• Special maneuvers that your character can use to get into a superior tactical position

The rest of this chapter will have rules for controlling other characters’ movement by restraining, pushing, and blocking them, as well as rules that allow smaller characters to swarm over larger characters.

OUR PROGRESS ON COVENANT’S PLAYTEST RULES

We had hoped that finishing the Basics of Play chapter would speed up our production, and it has. We had finished a total of 68 pages last week, and now we’re up to 95 pages.

We’re hoping than we’ll need only three days tops to finish each chapter, which means that we might finish the playtest rules before the end of the year. The sooner we finish them, the more time we’ll have to edit and polish them before our Feb. 28, 2021 deadline.

BECOMING A PLAYTESTER

Do you want to become a playtester? Just drop us a line at radiofreecovenant@gmail.com, and we’ll put you on the list when the rules are finished at the end of February.

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