Author’s Diary for the Week of January 15, 2021

(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 the main section of Covenant’s playtest rules and started editing the appendices! Find out more below the fold.

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

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

WHAT WE DID THIS WEEK

Here’s what we edited this week:

• Chapter 7, Hazards: Rules for all the hazards that your character might encounter during a game, including falling, drowning and strangulation, being exposed to the elements, and running out of food and water
• Chapter 8, Fighting: Rules for any kind of fighting, including using tactics and controlling your opponents’ movements by blocking, pushing, ramming, and restraining them
• Chapter 9, Finding Information: Rules for finding information in the game world, including using your character’s perception to spot hidden things; investigating people, items, and phenomena; and reading other characters’ behavior to gain clues to their intentions
• Chapter 10, Socializing: Rules for social interactions with other characters, including buying items, convincing other characters to join your side, negotiating with opponents, and gambling
• Chapter 9, Finding Information: Rules for finding information in the game world, including using your character’s perception to spot hidden things; investigating people, items, and phenomena; and reading other characters’ behavior to gain clues to their intentions
• Chapter 10, Socializing: Rules for social interactions with other characters, including buying items, convincing other characters to join your side, negotiating with opponents, and gambling
• Chapter 11, Dirty Tricks: Rules for deceiving other characters (hiding, disguising, counterfeiting, fast-talking, and feinting), undermining opponents (intimidating and taunting), and damaging and degrading items (sabotaging; setting bombs, traps, and alarms; disarming bombs, traps, and alarms and picking locks; and hacking computers)
• Chapter 12, Building and Fixing Items: Rules for building, repairing, and getting the flaws and negative conditions out of items
• Chapter 13, Using Medicine: Rules for healing characters and diagnosing and treating conditions
• Appendix A, Designing Items: The rules for designing custom items. We finished the rules for designing weapons and will continue with the rules for armor and miscellaneous “gear” this weekend.

OUR PROGRESS ON COVENANT’S PLAYTEST RULES

The last time we talked to you, we’d edited a total of 157 pages. We more than doubled that this week, with a total of 326 out of 503 pages edited.

If we can keep up a rate of 25 pages a day, then we should finish editing the entire book by the end of next week. To be on the safe side, though, we’re going to shoot for finishing it in two weeks, and definitely before the end of the month.

This will give us more than a month until the playtest rules’ Feb. 28, 2021 deadline. That will give us time to do everything else that we need to do, including:

• Rewrite the rules
• Write a new Player Consent and Trauma chapter
• Lay out everything

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 it for now. Talk to you next Friday!