Tin Star Spotlight: Partners in Play!

Hello stargazers! R. Chaucey Gummere again with the Tin Star Spotlight! Last month I left you off with some characters created for Partners, and this month I thought I would give you a breakdown of an episode with these characters. So, let’s just dive into the actual play of In-Between Cases. 

The Crime
Using a deck of cards, we drew our first card to figure out the profession and gender of our corpse. We drew an Ace of Spades, which meant our corpse was a fellow female Cop! The individual is also either successful or wealthy in their given field, which was determined by the suit the card belonged to, and in this case, a spade.
Our next card determines the apparent form of death, we drew a 3 which means they were stabbed. The killer got up close and personal, was it an intimate killing, or a brutal one? The final step was to generate a couple words to incorporate to the scene; we got sentiment and beautiful. So, we decided this meant that the death appears on the intimate side.
The next step of setting up the episode was determining four suspects. We drew 2, Jack, 6, and 7; respectively, these represented a lover, a fellow detective that was connected to our leads, a long-time friend to the victim, or the victim’s boss. This was already getting interesting! For their motives we drew in order of suspects the cards of conspiracy, desire, jealousy, and protection. Among all of these it appeared that the only one that looked negative on first inspection was our fellow detective. 
Now all that remained was to start running through the scenes, I decided to write up snippets of our little episode in short story format for you all to enjoy. In what follows you’ll note the randomly generated words via their bolded text and the drawn evidence by italics. 

Episode 1: The Star-Crossed Case
Detective Zabaniyyaa Mahdavi arrives on scene, a detective from another precinct found dead in her own home. She was stabbed three times, once in the chest and twice to the abdomen. It looks like over dinner, the detective looked beautiful in her black dress, rose pedals strewn about the room. Lailah Valenzuela was brought onto the case as a non-biased third party to the investigation, as the precincts were under a lot of heat lately and couldn’t risk cops looking for justice for their own getting out of hand. Mahdavi didn’t like it, but she was good at following orders… Once the routine investigations got done with and forensic took over, the two hit the streets, deciding to start out by investigating the victim’s precinct and find out what they could about the lady. 
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Lailah would not stop going on about her personal life as Mahdavi dug through the vic’s desk. She kept yammering on and on about how this was why she was a private detective and couldn’t imagine working in an office like this one, how glad she was to work alone. This struck a chord with Mahdavi as she came across a record; it had Benjamin Doon’s name on it, that was Mahdavi’s old partner, he had moved districts and apparently their victim was his partner or at least she used to be until she put in a request for a change in partners. For some reason it appears Detective Sheila Grace didn’t want to be working with Doon anymore. This didn’t bode well as old friends. Mahdavi must get his side of this and clear him from any suspicion… 

As the episode goes on, the job is starting to look like an inside job! Grace’s boss was implicated when a contact of Lailah’s informed them that he is spending more than he had at their casino. It appeared he had some dirty laundry, and their victim had been investigating him. Maybe he did it to silence her? But the death had seemed so personal, surely, she wouldn’t have met with her boss in that respect?...
Halfway through the case and Lailah has the duo off track, she gets a call from a client from the agency. His son is a pledge at Berkley and has gotten himself into a little trouble during a hazing ceremony. Mahdavi is dragged off course to take care of this, but it is not all for not as the team runs into Professor Henderson, a lifelong friend of Ms. Grace whose alibi was: he was out of town. He had been dodging their calls, and now Mahdavi had a chance to find out why…

…In the end they discovered a nasty tangled mess of a love affair, Detective Grace and her boyfriend were on the rocks, he had plenty of motive through jealousy, as it was found out she was getting back together with her ex, and longtime friend, Professor Henderson! And while there was plenty of reasons for her boss to kill her, the form of the murder and the fact that he had been trying to mend his ways cleared him. Detective Doon seemed like he was in the clear, their partnership had ended months ago and according to him he didn’t know why.

Well, that was until his silk shirt was found covered in her blood in the trunk of his car. 

After a shootout and eventual capture of Doon, he confessed that he had fallen for Grace and after admitting his feelings she requested the change and did all she could to distance herself from him. He began stalking her, and after finding out about the affair she was having he couldn’t take it any longer. He killed her before Henderson arrived for their date, he was spooked and created an alibi that he was out of town. 
The partners had solved their first case together, but it was bitter one. Not only was it one of their own that was dead, but it was one of their own who had done it, a personal of friend of Mahdavi no less. 

To rub salt in the wound, their precinct decided that this was all the proof they needed that Lailah was necessary to keep them nonbiased in the public’s eye. It looks like this partnership was going to be permanent.

Wrap Up!
Oh boy! That was a lot of fun to play and write; hopefully in this little short story you got a taste of just how much fun and randomness can occur in a game of Partners. I would love to hear your own stories and episodes, so go ahead and jump on over to twitter @tinstargames1 or talk to me directly in the discord! Finally, to keep up to date with everything happening at Tin Star join the newsletter. Until next time!