Author’s Diary for February 5, 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 rewriting and laying out Covenant’s playtest rules! All we need now is to write a new chapter on player consent. 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

We have started taking notes for a new Player Consent and Trauma chapter for Covenant’s playtest rules.

The rules already have a chapter on player consent, but we decided, while editing them, that it needs to be expanded and updated.

We’ve finished taking notes from that old chapter, because there’s some material from it that we want to salvage. We’ll also be taking notes from some other documents, including:

• Consent in Gaming by Sean K. Reynolds and Shanna Germain
• X-Card: Safety tools for Simulations, Role-Playing, and Games by John Stavropoulos
• Boundaries in Play
• Gaming as Women – Finding My O with the X-Card by Beau Jágr Sheldon

OUR PROGRESS ON COVENANT’S PLAYTEST RULES

We hope to finish taking notes on the new player consent rules by next week. That will give us two weeks before our Feb. 28, 2021 deadline to write it up.

We should point out, though, that the rest of rules are done. That means that, even if we don’t finish the new chapter on time and have to release the playtest rules with a placeholder for the player consent rules, it’s going out at the end of the month.

We don’t want that to happen. We want player consent to be baked into the game as early as possible. However, if we don’t add the player consent chapter in this iteration of the rules, we will add it in a later iteration.

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!