It’s not even mid-month, and the RPG Publisher Spotlight is ready. This is fitting as we’ll discover that Steve Dee is known as a lightning-quick tabletop game designer.
Thanks to Steve, President at Tin Star Games, for his time and for allowing us to smuggle in a question in his role at the Game Design Masterclass. Steve looks after the Australasia wing, while James Wallis reps the UK and Europe.
We also chat a little about PAX AUS, which, this year, is at the MCEC Melbourne from the 11th of October to the 13th.
Who are Tin Star Games
If you’re a regular reader, then you don’t get a prize for predicting I’ll start at the start. I always do. However, you do win an award for being awesome.
Who are Tin Star Games?
Tin Star Games is an Australian hobby-scale publisher of roleplaying games and storytelling games. Tin Star Games was born back in 2011 or so when I published Daughters of Exile, my first self-published RPG, which was a finalist in Game Chef that year. Now we have three major games in print and I am very ably helped by my second in command, but neither of us draws a salary. We are starting to make more money than we spend though.
What do you think you’re most well known for, and what would you like to be known for?
In the local Australian design scene, I’m known for making RPGs extremely fast. I tend to be a very bare bones designer, although I still tend to make games that have more mechanics than a lot of indie games. Because I think mechanics are interesting. For a long time I was known as the weird Aussie guy who posted way too much on RPG.Net. What I would like to be known for…doing weird, interesting stuff that make people have experiences they’ve never had before, especially those people who are outside or on the edge of the hobby. I think my most recent game, The Score, has the potential to bring so many people into RPGs and see RPGs differently, and if I can just chip away at “RPGs are just like D&D”, that would be great.
You’re a multiple award-winning game designer. Which award are you most proud of and why?
I’m super proud of the Freeplay award I received for The Score. The Freeplay Awards are an Australian award process that focuses on games that really push the envelope artistically, and as such you have to be so much more than just good to win something there! I’m always so excited by the games they showcase.
Getting to know Tin Star Games
DriveThruRPG is currently ranking The Score as Tin Star Games’ most popular under $10 game, but scanning that list reveals a range of genres and games. I could see that Steve had experimented and was curious about where he was going next.
Thankfully, Steve could talk a little about some current projects.
PAX AUS kicks off on the 11th of October. What are your plans?
We are very proud that The Score won a spot in the PAX Rising showcase which this year for the first time is in a combined space with digital games. We also have the biggest team of volunteers ever, which is amazing. I’ve spent so much of my career working alone or helping out others and it’s absolutely amazing to me to have people so keen to help us for free!
You’re working on “The World Well“. What can you tell us about the game and how it might differ from others?
If you’ve played Microscope or Kingdom you have some idea of what The World Well is in that it is a game that uses random prompts to produce a world.
However, what I’ve tried to do with the World Well is to get players to put ideas into the well without “building” anything. You’re just following prompts and adding things that sound interesting. The idea of this is to short-circuit the part of your brain that wants everything to follow logically, because we can actually do that later. Once you’ve built the Well, you then use it to build not countries or cities but factions within the world, and what we call fractures – cracks that have developed across these power-bases that mean everything is about to change.
The reason the game works like this it’s not just building a world but the kind of worlds that make good RPG settings, because they come with built-in factions and crisis points. One of the first people to try the game is already building their own RPG set in the world they built, and that’s the goal! I would love to see more of that…maybe it could be a jam or something.
I’m also currently messing around with a sequel that designs “classes” for an RPG, without knowing anything about the world or anything else, again so as to provide something you could then build an RPG out of. I guess you could call them meta-RPGs…
What about “Five Years After“?
Five Years After is a deeply personal, extremely special game to me. It came together very quickly when I was thinking about grief and loss and also the one thing I’d never seen any RPG do successfully before, which is run in reverse, like you see in films like Memento and Tenet.
You start Five Years After a terrible apocalypse which may have destroyed humanity or maybe just your life, and you work backwards in time to find out what you lost in order to survive. I’ve been through a lot of terrible, traumatic things in my life and this game is a synthesis of that and I hope a way of helping me heal. It’s GM-less and dice-less and simple, but powerful.
Although it’s not political like say Steal Away Jordan or The Price of Coal or something like that, I hope this is a game that gets shared around like that and takes people into places they might never have gone otherwise. Because it is unique. But also, it is very healing as well. It’s a game about tragedy but the sadness is very cathartic. It’s about survival, that’s the thing.
Getting to know Steve Dee
Since Steve is the beating heart of Tin Star Games, perhaps knowing the publishing company is knowing the game designer. Nevertheless, I wanted to ask about a rumour I had heard…
You don’t struggle to make games! Is it true that your local gaming scene has a special Steve Dee exception as a result?
It is true! It was a half-joke but there was an award at a jam last year for the first person to finish after the idea was announced and the organisers said that this did not count me. Like I said, I make RPGs FAST. I guess this is because I’ve been making them since I was 12 or so, which was 36 years ago now, and I finally know exactly what I want them to do and how to make them do that. I suppose this is why I’m now designing more board games – I like to always be challenged. I still have lots of RPGs coming along though – so many! My hard drive has at least three games I’ve finished but haven’t put out yet and lots of ideas coming along…again, always trying to find ways to do the impossible, the never done. That’s my goal. I’ve seen so many RPGs I guess I want to find new ways to do them.
I also run an event where we make them in an hour as a group, so anyone can learn this skill!
What’s the best question you’ve had at a Game Design Masterclass?
That is a very good question. I’m not sure I can think of one! I think the question I like to hear most is “can you come and run this again for (other group)?”. Mostly I like to hear people say they’ve taken their games home and showed them to other people, which isn’t a question!
What do RPG publishers need to do to be successful?
I think it’s important for every RPG publisher, and designer to answer that for themselves, because we can get very caught up on what we think success must be, and it might not be what is actually meaningful for us. Everybody wants to be popular but some of that is outside of your control. Everybody wants to make a lot of money but boy I don’t know how to do that the way others seem to know! I guess if I could say one thing is take your time. It’s very easy to get burned out in this industry; we all work too hard and we make very little money and if you burn out (or run out of cash) you might never be around long enough to build up a fanbase. People take a while to get to know a company and their output. They respond to seeing not just one good product but several good products, good product support, and so on. Customers can get free RPGs easily, so something they value is a strong customer support experience.
Change and the future of Tin Star Games
As I like to start with the start, I also like to wrap up with some cheeky probing questions.
How has the tabletop RPG scene changed over the years?
In a lot of ways it hasn’t at all? Ghostbusters came out in 1985 and nothing has really improved on it. Buffy came out in I think 1999 and nothing has improved on it. We have very poor memories about design principles and people tend to come in through D&D which isn’t great (and which I built The Score to try to stop). I think though the big surge of new D&D players that came in over the last seven years or so are starting to look beyond D&D, which is great. I think.
People are always hungry to tell and create stories and they just use D&D because it’s this lingua franca and every cycle around we have to unlearn that. But on the other hand, what the Actual Play movement has done is get people to realise that this can be improv, not just numbers and combat. I also think paying for GMs is leading to hopefully the idea that being a GM isn’t always a lot of fun and it deserves compensation!
What next for Tin Star Games?
With shipping prices still four or five times what they were before COVID we’re not sure when our next print game is coming out. Five Years After will hopefully be a co-production. But we have more digital stuff – The World Well next year, a few more expansions for Relics, our yearly Halloween games…and then, who knows?
We try not to have too much of a fixed idea of what we need to do, but we do try to stay around and keep doing things. Maybe we might have a break after so many games in a row…but we’ll not be gone forever. Slow and steady wins the race!
Thanks, Steve!
Tin Star Games
- Tin Star Games’ website.
- Tin Star Games on DriveThruRPG.
- Tin Star Games on Mastodon.
- Tin Star Games on Facebook.
- Tin Star Games on X.
- Tin Star Games on YouTube.
- Tin Star Games on Patreon.
- Tin Star Games on Ko-fi.
- Join Tin Star Games on Discord.
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