I've finished my initial redline pass on the regional conspiracies, which puts me at the halfway point in terms of the number of conspiracies (20 of 40), but quite a bit less than that if you're looking at word counts (50,000 words vs. 128,000 words).
This is primarily a first impressions pass. I might catch a typo or a bit of formatting wonkiness here and there, but I'm primarily interested in identifying anything that doesn't seem to be working, as well as developing a baseline for what a conspiracy at a local/regional/global/otherworldly Standing should feel like - so that I can redline them again with that target in mind.
This is one of those things that wasn't so much as alluded to in the core, and even The Devoted Companion was more interested in rendering conspiracy behaviors (actions, Icons, Privileges, and Projects) mechanically than in discussing when it makes sense to have multiple Hierarchical Nodes and when it doesn't, how many Icons should grant minor mechanical boosts vs. ones that do something freaky and weird (or totally gonzo), and so forth. Conspiracies being Storyteller-facing, and Deviant being a brand new game, we had some sense of how the conspiracy mechanics would work in play, but there were a lot of unknowns. As people have taken the rules out for a spin and built their own conspiracies, it's become easier for me to recognize patterns. And ten new conspiracies of each tier has given me further insight into what can be done with them.
This is good, because I plan to spend a few tens of thousands of words talking about those topics. But I knew I couldn't do that (not even a first draft of that) until I had those conspiracies in hand. So, at the end of the first impression pass of each tier, I've been jotting down some observations about the traits of a local vs. regional vs. global vs. otherworldly conspiracy. For example, I've found that a high Standing conspiracy's Icons are considerably more potent than those of low Standing, but that's not always true of all their Icons. As with my advice to take a Persistent Scar or two and then round out a character with Controlled/Involuntary ones to avoid a high Standing Deviant just having too many Scars to adequately play up, though, I'm finding it usually works best to have a mix of weird Nodes and relatively ordinary ones even in an Otherworldly conspiracy to prevent a game-breakingly frustrating situation where every conspiracy agent has multiple Mag 5 Variations.
The scale of Nodes is another interesting area. Quite often, a local Node can be confined to a single building. But you wouldn't expect an interdimensional conspiracy to suffer a major setback because the Renegades burned down one police precinct building; otherworldly Nodes are of an entirely different scale.
It has been an interesting exercise in game development, for sure.
Once I've completed the first impression pass, it'll be time for a deeper dive (har har) into the fiddly stuff like character sheet formatting.