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 Welcome Tin Star Fans! Time once again for our monthly company update! And the biggest news of all has to do with images like the one to the left there. You might have seen images like that popping up on our social media over the last few weeks. We've started counting down...but down to what?
The answer is TREASURES ON EARTH our new deluxe supplement, coming to Kickstarter in early October. Over the coming month we will be revealing more and more about this book, but as you may imagine it will focus on new relics and their powers. The kickstarter will also be a chance for new backers to pick up the core rulebook and we have other surprises in store! And Speaking of Kickstarters, Tin Star is very proud to be contributing to the Tiny Library a collection of 50 games, each small enough to fit on a single card. The kickstarter is already 700% funded after just two days which will allow for a truly gorgeous collection and all the profits will be shared with all contributors! And we haven't forgotten Partners! The hardcopies are on their way to Australia now and then it should be just a few weeks to get them out to your waiting hands! With any luck we'll be fulfilling the final part of the Partners kickstarter as the Relics one rolls out! The final stretch goal, our seventh, is the Tea Time Files, focusing on the more genteel murders and the ladies of a certain age who pursue them. It's been a joy to see what we can put the Partners engine to, and we'd love to see what ideas you have! If we get sufficient interest we'll set up a license so you can produce and publish your own Files! Till Next Month!
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 Welcome to a new series of Tin Star Blogs. Each month, our resident Tin Star expert R. Chauncey Gunmere takes a look at parts of our games in new and interesting lights. This week, the star is Supernatural. Let's Play Supernatural! Using The Relics System.
There is a good chance that if you clicked this article you are either a fan of Supernatural or of the Relics TTRPG--heck maybe both!--on the off chance you have no idea what I am talking about, you can learn more here. While you enjoy that read, pop open your favorite streaming service and start binging Supernatural. It won’t take long for the urge to grab your friends and start kicking demon ass to take over. Once you’ve done that and got the bug to play as a bad mother angel taking on impossible threats, or perhaps the all too familiar desire to recreate your favorite moments from the show, meet me back here, and I’ll be here to show you how to do just that! This should be obvious, but SPOILERS may exist beyond this point for the above content! Creating Iconic Characters For this piece, I will be helping you build the Relics’ version of three iconic characters from the show, Dean and Sam Winchester, and of course Castiel. In Relics every persona is a fallen angel, so we will be making angel versions of the brothers; Castiel already is an angel so he gets to stay relatively the same. For this campaign we will be going from somewhere around Season 9 of the show- a very Relics time frame with lots of angels and demons fighting each other along with a perfect relic to give to Dean. Without further ado, we will begin by designing Dean Winchester, the rough tough bad boy with a boyish sense of humor. Heads up! I will only be covering steps 1, 2, 3, and part of 5/6 of character creations in Relics for each character and giving a small reason why for each choice. Dean Winchester: I went with the Signifier of Death, this one is completely based on my own feeling, but I feel like it represents him well as someone who has lost so much and made many sacrifices. His Aspect was easy, Aryeh; Dean is a man of action and never shies away from a fight—plus we’re going to reflavor the sword of majesty miracle to play into their Relic, more on that later. The Herald was another clean choice, we obviously went with Michael as he was made to be Michael’s perfect vessel. On top of that, his need to always protect his brother plays into the gifts of the herald very well. Finally, his Relic is The First Blade, it gives him the power to pretty much kill anything from ancient demons to archangels, and everything in between! This as his relic is a great way to encompass the sword of majesty miracle; instead of fire, it’s a bone that kills whoever it’s used on. Sam Winchester: The Magician seemed fitting for Signifier, he’s always dabbled in the arcane from early on and he is one smart cookie. Choosing his Aspect was another clear choice, I went with Behema because enduring great suffering and resisting terrible pains is a staple of Sam. This Herald was tougher as I couldn’t go the same route as Dean and just take it from the text. So, to fit some of his psychic powers, we’re going with Raguel. A Relic for him was a bit more difficult as well, but I decided to go with something we see him using all throughout the series, a laptop! He’s always got one nearby for doing his monster research, so it makes all the sense that its where his superpowers are coming from for our game of Relics! Castiel: The true angel of the show practically writes these answers himself. His signifier is Hierophant, a messenger and a by the rules guy for a lot of the show. His aspect is Nesher, with his wings and ability to move about being a calling card of his. Cas’s assigned Herald is his big brother Gabriel, plus the communion dominion will be important for his power to hear the calls of Dean and Sam no matter where he may be at the time! For him, the Relic has to be that classic trench coat of his! A Shared Mission I am only going to briefly touch on step 5, but I thought it would be remiss to leave out the very suitable missions this band of Angels could have holding their trio together. There is a very good argument that could be made for the Sword of Wrath, “here to a win a war” against demons and all. Very action packed and true to the story we would be trying to tell. Personally, I really fell in love with the Armor of Righteousness, “we are here to stand beside them,” speaks so much louder to the shows over all theme of a close-knit family uniting together to stand against all odds. They don’t have a bunch of allies, but the few that they do are willing to aid them in their cause always, and likewise the trio is only ever just a call away when their allies need aid. Playing Supernatural! You were probably expecting more steps, weren’t you? Sorry to disappoint, but this game is so fluid, and narrative driven that there really isn’t anything crunchier to wrap your head around. Seriously, with a quick read of the mechanics you are ready to grab a tarot deck (or regular playing cards, or d6s) and go! Relics is refreshingly simple to pick up and play, and the genre is perfectly gritty and full of the right kind of angsty hardship to make you feel like you are struggling to make meaningful change in the world, which feels so much like the plights of the characters in Supernatural. The degrees of success play well into the theme we’re trying to accomplish, a Grudging Success, has been seen a thousand times on the show—that narrow escape from a monster, that beating a demon just before it kills them, defeating Lucifer only to be imprisoned in hell, talk about drawing the Devil card at the most pivotal point of the scene! If I had more time, I would love to explain how you can recreate the same types of reveals Supernatural loves to do through the memory system—I can cover this more in a future blog, anyone else here want part two next month? We played, so Let’s Talk! If you enjoyed this new format from Tin Star Games, don’t forget to join the newsletter to keep in the know of all things Relic and more! Would you like something more in-depth on this Let’s Play? Or maybe you have a totally different topic or game you want to see discussed! Head over to the Discord channel and let us know the burning topic you want covered. You can also find them at their official social media pages like Facebook. Now that you know how to get ahold of us, Let’s Play some Relics!  Monthly Updates Now Coming to this Blog! We now have so much news coming out we're going to make it much easier for you to keep track of by posting updates about all our products at the start of every month! We'll also be posting more stuff here about tips and tricks to get the most out of our games, which we'll be called Tin Stargazing. Look out for those! You can sign up to get an alert whenever the blog updates (see nearby box) AND you can also sign up to our mailing list, which will also be sending out the same content! Choose the method you prefer to get all your Tin Star news! Relics ReturnsWe can confirm that in October we'll be launching a kickstarter for the next big Relics supplement. Over the next few months we'll be leaking hints and tidbits about the supplement and all the other goodies we'll be adding to the campaign. We want there to be tons of options for extra stuff so that even the dedicated Relics collector has new toys while also providing a place for the new fan to get started. Partners In PrintPartners books are now in our warehouse. We are currently doing the last bit of calculations into postage costs and once that's done we'll be sending out postage bills to all backers. Then we start mailing them out! We should have them to Australian backers by September, a little later for international folk. In the meantime remember we have FOUR supplements already out for the game and available through our store on itch.io Meet the BibliomancerColin Kloecker of Terribly Beautiful has built a terribly beautiful machine: a simple program that takes as its input any body of text and spits out the most common words within it. With whole novels uploaded thanks to Project Gutenberg, this gives you an enormous amount of cool options to develop your own random word lists and "oracle" mechanics, perfect for games of Partners! We liked it so much we installed the bot into our Discord. Instructions are in the pinned post and we also have Tin Star staff mooching around the Discord at all hours if you need any help - or have any other questions about any of our Tin Star Games!
 As promised, Partners is now available since backers have been sent their copies! You can grab it here, or pledge for the hardcopy instead! Now get out there and find the killer!
The case is afoot!Check out the pre-launch page!
You know how it goes. One's a real straight shooter. The other's a total wildcard. But on the case they are always...Partners.
Partners is a unique new storytelling game for two players from award-winning designer Steve Dee. A love-letter to the police procedural and mystery of the week television genre, players take the roles of detectives hot on a murder case each session of play. Instead of players trying to discover a plot created by a GM or freeform a solution, random card draws slowly reveal which suspects are in play and what kind of clues they provide. Only when the final card is drawn in the final scene will the detectives - and the players - know who did it. Designed to suit anyone from experienced roleplayers to crime fiction writers to novices who just love the genre, Partners is the perfect game for anyone who cannot get enough of solving mysteries, and being an irascible duo along the way. Published as a beautiful softback book and only needing a single deck of cards it can be played anywhere by anyone who has ever seen a cop show, and you can even expand it out for more than two if you wish. It also plays well online making it a great gift in these isolation times. Partners will be kickstarted in May.  Relics is now available on Roll20. This mod gives you access to the Quickstart Rules and lets you run the game on a beautiful backdrop complete with fillable character sheets and the beautiful Relics tarot cards. To celebrate this we are looking for someone to be paid to run Relics online! If you stream your RPGs or would like to and want to run Relics through Roll20, get in touch with us right away and find out how you can earn money playing RPGs!
If you'd like to join a game you'll find us at Arcanacon Online on the 23rd and 24th of January. One of the Relics writers, Jake Nelson, will be GMing and seats are still available as of this post! Looking further afield, Tin Star Games will also be appearing at Session Zero Con, a digital convention in the Phillipines on the 30th and 31st. The RPG scene in South East Asia is among the most exciting on the planet and we are very proud to connect with our neighbours! Finally, if you love solo RPGs (like our game The Tin Star) you can find our other solo RPG Two Faces in this astounding bundle of solo RPGs: 87 games for just $10, and all to raise money for mental health care! And this is just the beginning. 2020 sucked; 2021 is going to be a banner year for you, for us, for Relics! Love the art of Relics?Now you can get it on a t-shirt. Or a phone cover, or a throw cushion or a postcard or a shopping bag. Shop till you drop and ascend to heaven at Redbubble!   As always, we love to talk about Relics, and Steve Dee did recently on Kickstarter Journeys, a fantastic podcast for those taking their early steps into the world of crowd funding!
We also had an amazing humbling review from our Italian friends at No Dice Unrolled. Check it out! If you have a podcast, actual play or review games anywhere on the net, or if you want to run Relics games at your local store or con, then we want to send you free stuff, so get in touch! No advertising is better than word of mouth - so let your words flow forth!  The bad news of 2020 is that all the gaming conventions moved online.
The good news of 2020 is that all the gaming conventions moved online. And that means we can get to the ones overseas! So Tin Star Games will be at Metatopia this weekend, and we'll be running demo events of There's Been a Murder and Relics every night at 7 and 9pm respectively (that's US EST time, GMT-5, so 11am and 1pm here). If you're coming to Metatopia you can sign up to There's Been a Murder here: https://www.envoygateway.com/calendar/event/738-theres-been-a-murder-playtest/ And to Relics here: https://www.envoygateway.com/calendar/event/739-relics-a-game-of-angels-rpg-event/ |
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