It's not too late! Preorder Against the Gloom, a dice-based role-playlist-building game about music’s furious resistance to despair. Plus, order Kickstarter exclusive add-ons!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Scryptid Games is on Discord!
21 days ago
– Sat, Jul 06, 2024 at 08:31:35 AM
Scryptid Games has a Discord server!
Want to be the first to know the latest news as we finalize Against the Gloom and send it off to print? Interested in connecting with Against the Gloom designer Dustin Patrick Winter, and playing, creating, and talking about games with other folks who love indie TTRPGs as much as you do?
Join the Scryptid Games Extended Universe and be the first to hear about upcoming Scryptid Games publications, game jams, events, and other fun opportunities for community, creativity, and connection.
CRIT Awards Voting Closes July 7
Voting for the CRIT Awards closes July 7th, so today is the last full day to vote for Scryptid Games’s Psychic Trash Detectives for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art!
The Creator Recognition in TTRPG (CRIT) Awards celebrate and recognize the contributions and achievements of the TTRPG community by shining a light on the talent, creativity, and hard work of our community members.
Being selected as a Finalist is already an amazing honor for Scryptid Games, Psychic Trash Detectives designer Brigitte Winter, cover illustrator Ava Eerie, and the growing community of weirdos who love this game.
Are you tired of owning indie TTRPGs that you never play? Do you want to connect with other gamers? Do you need one more reason to hang out at No Land Beyond in Baltimore? Well, come on out to Indie TTRPG Book Club! You can join the group on Facebook here.
Indie TTRPG Community Book Club is a public gaming group that meets on a monthly basis to play and discuss indie tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). At each of our meetings, we will play a short session of a different indie TTRPG and then reconvene as a group to share our thoughts, both on the RPG as a book and game, and on how the session went. This is a great way to get to know other gamers, play new games, or explore what TTRPGs are and what potential they hold for storytelling.
In between meetings, you’ll have time to get your hands on the next month’s game, read or play as much of it as you like, and then come to the next meeting ready to discuss. If you’ve ever been part of a normal book club, this is a lot like that.
Viva la QueerBar is a slice-of-life story game about a queer bar (or queer café) and the team who runs it. It's a game about the pleasures and struggles of being part of a queer community.
Whether as a fantasy medieval tavern, a cyberpunk underground club, a real-world gay bar in a historical setting, an intergalactic queer bar on a spaceship, or anything else you can think of – the QueerBar lives wherever you want it to.
To play, you’ll need a PDF or print copy of Viva La Queer Bar, a regular deck of 52 playing cards, and 1-5 people to play with you. No preparation necessary – just start playing!
Viva la QueerBar welcomes players of all genders, orientations, and skill levels who are willing to take on the perspective of a queer character for the duration of the game. Since this is a story game more than a role-playing game, however, you will spend more time describing your character's thoughts, feelings, and actions than you will acting as your character.
In 2023, the German version of Viva la QueerBar won a Crystal Stephan Award for Best Role-Playing Game in the "Goldener Stephan" (Public Choice Award for Escapism, Nerd Culture, and Fantasy).
Please note: the Plotbunny website defaults to German language. If you are using Google Chrome, the browser should automatically translate for you, but if it doesn’t, you can right-click anywhere on the site and select Translate to English from the menu.
See you there!
Art preview and big CRIT Awards news...
about 1 month ago
– Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 06:19:18 AM
Art preview!!
Production is going great for Against the Gloom. The book is currently in layout, and illustrator Gigi Wilder is hard at work completing four beautiful half-page illustrations for each of the flash fiction pieces that Dustin Patrick Winter wrote to demonstrate the world of the game.
Here’s a sneak peek at Gigi’s illustration for Dustin’s Heart to Heart, along with a short excerpt from the accompanying story.
"Roderica stormed out of her cabin, a letter freshly crumpled in her hand. She crossed the hold and stomped upstairs, then crossed the deck, the wind in her hair, ready to throw the cursed missive as far from the ship as she could manage. When she got to the rail, though, she found Heart leaning on it, pondering the Gloom…"
There’s still time to upgrade e-book purchases of Against the Gloom to physical books on BackerKit, and to snag additional copies.
We can’t wait to hold this book in our hands, and to share it with all of you. It’s going to be gorgeous.
Scryptid Games is a Finalist for TWO CRIT Awards!
Big news! We just learned that Psychic Trash Detectives, Scryptid Games’ trashy little game that could, is a finalist for TWO CRIT Awards!
The Creator Recognition in TTRPG (CRIT) Awards celebrate and recognize the contributions and achievements of the TTRPG community by shining a light on the talent, creativity, and hard work of community members.
Psychic Trash Detectives is a CRIT Awards Finalist for both Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art!
What an incredible honor for Scryptid Games, Psychic Trash Detectives designer Brigitte Winter, cover illustrator Ava Eerie, and the growing community of weirdos who love this game.
These awards are community-nominated, so if you’re a Scryptid fan, we hope you’ll take a moment to vote for Psychic Trash Detectives for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art and to then spread the word about the awards within your communities. Voting closes July 7th, and the winners will be announced at GenCon the first weekend in August.
And if you haven't played Psychic Trash Detectives yet, you can get a copy on the Scryptid Games website. It's a collaborative, diceless TTRPG played with actual garbage, and it's about psychic animals solving the mysteries that no one else cares about.
At its heart, the game is about a chosen family building community together and finding value in the beings and objects that others have discarded. It’s about the power that comes from accepting your weird self and the other weirdos all around you.
Scryptid Games is a collective of 100% queer creators, and it feels incredibly meaningful for a game like this to be nominated for a popular award.
For all of you who connect with that statement, this award nomination is for you!
A Missive from the Gloom
3 months ago
– Wed, May 01, 2024 at 06:33:45 AM
It has been a little over a month since we closed our Kickstarter campaign and got to work producing Against the Gloom for you, and we are pleased to report that our publishing and distribution timeline is on schedule. After a few more playtests, Against the Gloom writer Dustin Patrick Winter collaborated closely with Editor Nat Mesnard and Developmental Designer Brigitte Winter to complete a full draft of the game. He also wrote four short fiction pieces set in the world of the Gloom, and he’s been meeting with backers at the We Built This City! reward level to listen to tunes and dream up new anchora for the book.
This month, we will be passing the game draft to Scryptid Co-Founder Tiffany Salter for copy-editing, and then meeting with Andrew Sargus Klein, our Gloom layout artist, to map out the gorgeous book we are creating for you. We will also reconnect with our Gloom artists to plan for additional illustrations for the book’s interior. We can’t wait to show you previews of the art and layout as this project comes together over the next few months.
Meanwhile, Nat is designing and ordering hundreds of oversized Gloom dice, and Brigitte is designing the Against the Gloom concert t-shirt and collaborating with the musicians contributing to the Against the Gloom mixtape.
In short, we are VERY BUSY, but we are on track to deliver Against the Gloom and all of your rewards by the fall.
In the meantime, please keep an eye out for an email from Backerkit this week. You’ll need to complete a survey and update your mailing address to get your rewards, so be sure the email isn’t lost in spam if you don’t see it in the next week or so.
We have a rocking new website!
We’ve made some Scryptid upgrades since the Against the Gloom campaign ended! Nat transitioned our website to a new Shopify platform, which will make it a ton easier to manage our digital storefront.
The new site is really pretty and we’re proud of it, so check it out and browse our growing collection of TTRPGs and story games.
TTRPG Book Club, Scryptid Discord, and the next Scryptid Games Kickstarter campaign, oh my!
Are you tired of owning TTRPGs that you never play? Do you want to connect with other gamers? Come out to Indie TTRPG Community Book Club!
Dustin is talking with No Land Beyond in Baltimore about starting a monthly gathering to play and discuss indie games. We’ll update you as soon as we schedule our first meeting. Once we get our Baltimore group going, we’ll be exploring a New York City TTRPG book club and a virtual club that meets on Discord.
Speaking of Discord…
Tiffany is creating a Discord community for our Extended Scryptid Universe (i.e. all of you!) Join us when it launches to talk about games, play games, make games, and generally nerd out with other great folks who love the things you do.
By joining our Discord, you’ll also be the first to know about our upcoming game projects, including a new game we’re Kickstarting later this summer…
Stay tuned for more details as these projects develop.
In case you missed it…
Brigitte appeared on the Epic Levels Mad Dungeon podcast last month. Check out the episode to listen to a fun conversation about games, music, Against the Gloom, and the contents of podcast hosts Dragon Warrior and Tiger Wizard's trash cans.
Until next time, Gloomfarers!
You did it! 🎸🥳
4 months ago
– Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 08:37:56 AM
You shredded the Gloom!
Congratulations on a successful Kickstarter! Thanks to you, this humble campaign to make Against the Gloom not only fully funded, but blasted through multiple stretch goals. We are so incredibly grateful!
Against the Gloom will be a glossy, perfect-bound book full of gorgeous art and fiction, alongside everything you need to play this rocking game about shredding despair with the power of music.
We didn’t quite hit our final stretch goal, but f***k it, WE ARE MAKING A DIGITAL MIXTAPE FOR YOU ANYWAY (because that’s what our punk Gloomfarers would do)!
If you missed out on snagging extra copies of the game, you want more dice, or you’d like to grab an Against the Gloom tour t-shirt, check out our pre-order store on Backerkit for late pledges. We’ll keep the store open until we print the game and fulfill this project in October.
We’ll have fun news soon on what’s next for this project and for Scryptid Games. The Scryptids are busy playtesting at Unpub in Maryland this weekend, so stay tuned for a more in-depth update when we’re home!
In the meantime, enjoy this playlist Dustin created to celebrate the final ten days of the campaign. He shared a daily microblog on his Instagram @neverysaydustin about each song on the list, along with insights into his game design process for Against the Gloom. The final song he shared was Go! by Public Service Broadcasting, the perfect closing message for this epic Kickstarter journey.
Last chance to shred the Gloom!
5 months ago
– Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 08:41:09 AM
This is it, friends. Only one more day to back Against the Gloom on Kickstarter.
Time is running short on this rockin' campaign, and we're narrowing in on our biggest stretch goal yet: a full mixed genre digital mixtape of songs composed exclusively for Against the Gloom.
This is beyond exciting, because it means we can fulfill our dream with this project: to design and publish a TTRPG project that celebrates music...with actual music by indie artists who love the same nerdy stuff we do.
If you’ve been considering increasing your pledge to grab extra rewards, or meaning to recommend this game to a friend, now is the moment to make your move.
Every dollar pledged in the next day will help us bring on additional musical artists to contribute to our mixtape. We’ve already heard from several incredible musicians who are interested in creating songs for this project, so please help spread the word about the campaign so we can say yes to them and produce more cool stuff for you.
Exclusive music by Bard City…
Early work is already coming together on the two songs our previous stretch goal enabled us to commission! We're giving our community an exclusive listen to the first song, Blast Off, over on the Against the Gloom Kickstarter page prior to its full release.
Composed by Baltimore-based folk TTRPG/LARP band Bard City, Blast Off is an infectious bop that features character and band cameos from the Gen Con TV Sarah's Table game. Give it a listen — just head over to the campaign and scroll down to News!
Then check out the game sessions that inspired this song. The videos are linked under Events on the Against the Gloom Kickstarter page.
GameFace Con rocked! See you at Unpub!
Scryptid Co-Founders Dustin Patrick Patrick Winter, Brigitte Winter, and Nat Mesnard spent the past weekend at GameFace Con in Baltimore, Maryland. This first-year con took place at Peabody Heights Brewery, and featured more than 30 indie companies selling and running games, plus a delicious food truck and a custom beer brewed in honor of special guest Zeb Cook!
Dustin ran two games of Against the Gloom for full tables, and dozens of players got their grubby hands on Psychic Trash Detectives, Ball of the Wild, and our Scryptid Games Facilitator’s Guide.
We’ll be continuing the Maryland fun next weekend at Unpub, and Dustin will be playtesting another game of Against the Gloom at 8pm on Saturday, 3/16. Come say hi if you’re there!
