Author’s Diary for December 4, 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 finished three chapters for Covenant’s playtest rules and started a third! 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:

• Fighting: All the ways your character can fight other characters during scenes, including tactics, blocking your opponents’ movement, and restraining them with grappling and wrestling
• Finding Information: All the ways your character can find information on items and characters, either by spotting hidden hazards and things that are “off” in the game world, investigating, or “reading” a character’s behavior and speech to reveal their true intentions
• Socializing: All the ways your character can interact with other characters outside of fights, which currently includes buying items and gathering rumors and leads

We also started the Dirty Tricks chapter today. So far, this chapter has rules for:

• Hiding your character, other characters, or items from other characters
• Disguising your character or other characters
• How to make counterfeit items

OUR PROGRESS ON COVENANT’S PLAYTEST RULES

When we last talked to you, we’d finished 95 pages. Tonight, we got that up to 120.

Unfortunately, the current chapter that we’re on, the Dirty Tricks chapter, is going to be a monster one. That makes sense, because your characters are going to need a lot of dirty tricks in Covenant if they want to survive and succeed.

Luckily, it’s also one of the last ones. There’s just one more chapter after this – the Building and Fixing Items chapter – and then five more appendices, four of which are just long lists and should go quickly.

Long story short, if we can keep up this pace, we might be able to to finish the playtest rules by the end of the year. That’ll give us two whole months to edit and polish before its Feb. 28, 2021 deadline. Then it’s off to the playtesters!

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!