Star Chapters
A downloadable game
The world you can see isn't all that's out there. In the world, there are a lot of fascinating things that no living soul has ever seen.
- Fujitaka Kinomoto, Cardcaptor Sakura
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Star Chapters is a tabletop roleplaying game about an ordinary girl with special, magical powers. Inspired by anime like Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon, Star Chapters is designed to tell lighthearted stories about magic and friendship. It takes an hour or two to play.
To play, you'll need any deck of cards. 🃏 These could be standard playing cards or something stranger: Tarot cards, Pokémon cards, Dixit cards. Maybe you even have a set of Clow cards lying around! As long as each card has a unique name or image, it'll work with this game.
Star Chapters can be played alone or with up to six friends.
The download for this game contains a 3-page PDF with the game rules and a reference sheet for playing with a normal deck of 52 cards. There are two versions: colour, and easy-print black and white.
If you like this game, consider checking out the rest of our work.
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A note on pricing:
This game is free in the same way that a song from a busker is free. You're welcome to engage with it and enjoy it however you like. That said, if you loved it and have some spare change, it would be kind to drop some in the hat.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Invitation to hack + Bare bones font versionFeb 03, 2024
Comments
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Star Chapters is a tabletop rpg about a magical girl life using any kind of deck of cards.
The action resolution needs us to draw a card from the deck and interpret the drawing or the general feel of the card as how the action is resolved. So it is better if you play using cards with evocative images such as trading card games or tarot decks. I am planning to play it more using Magic The Gathering cards.
I was playing solo the first time but i believe even in group, everyone on the table still control one magical girl so it is best that everyone understand the boundary of the theme and feel and vibes of the story.
I found out Star Chapters first through one of its hacks, Koriko The Magical Year actually. It's great to see the first inspiration in Star Chapters.
Star Chapters is one of my favorite TTRPG about magical girls. Great work, Kurt and A Smouldering Lighthouse team.
Lovely game, A Smouldering Lighthouse team.
Thank you zeodan! I can't help but notice that you're a frequent commenter on itch -- that's awesome. Designers get surprisingly little feedback on their works, and hearing that you hit the mark with someone is always a good feeling. Anyway; glad you liked the game.
-Kurt
Why thank you Kurt. Usually i just give a little remark about how i feel after reading and trying the game a bit. Let me give a more thorough feedback for Star Chapters then.
I will try playing it more deeply using MTG cards next time.
So simple yet so fun. Cannot wait to play this with some black mana MtG cards and make a cute magical girl with terrifying friends.
IT'S LIKE YOU WERE THERE FOR PLAYTESTING. (He was not, folks.)
To claim that this can be played with Magic cards, I needed to try it out. I reached out to my brother-in-law and was like, hey, do you have any Magic: the Gathering cards we can playtest this with? And he was like, sure friend.
I have never played Magic. When he came over with a "black mana deck," I didn't know what it meant until every card was named "flesh eater" or "rotting corpse".
Of course our magical girl ended up being at a school for young necromancers. It actually ruled. So go live out your gnarly necromantic magical girl dreams.
I had the privilege of playing this game before release, and it might be my favourite tabletop gaming experience of the year. If you take the time to imagine the story, to engage and explore the characters, I guarantee you’ll find yourself thinking about them well after the game is done.