Author’s Diary – Update for the Week of April 22, 2022

We’re getting back to playtesting tomorrow. Until then, we’ve got some Covenant news for you below the fold.

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

• The blog taking off a week while Sean visits Ireland
• The valka Matriarchy
• How to become a playtester

DEVBLOG TAKING A WEEK OFF

Sean is traveling to Ireland with his family next week and will not be able to put out the devblog next week. He will resume on May 6 with tomorrow’s playtesting report. Hope we see you then!

MATRIARCHY

A lot of our work this week focused on gender relations in the Matriarchy, including how valka women basically run everything and the role of larger, mutant women called Battle Matriarchs. There are some biological and anatomical reasons for this. For instance, valka women tend to be larger than valka men. However, the gender politics in hives outside the Matriarchy tends to match those of the domain that they’re in. For instance, valka genders are equal in the Covenant. So there’s something else going on here.

Writing up the Matriarchy was slow, though, so Sean and Sazzy called each other and collaborated more closely on it. It worked, too: we got a hell of a lot of work done, including material on the Matriarchy’s demographics, politics, and justice system. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do it again this weekend at least once.

Remember, we’ll make these domain summaries available to the public when we’re finished with all of them. However, if you’re one of our patrons, we’ll make them available as we finish them (which is another reason you should support us on Patreon).

BECOMING A PLAYTESTER

Have you downloaded Covenant’s playtest rules yet? Did we mention that they’re free? If not, do it now! They’re free! All we ask is that you tell us what you think about them. You can send your feedback in two ways:

• Email us at radiofreecovenant@gmail.com
• Join our Discord server