Psychic trash animals race to solve a mystery before the city’s trash is collected at dawn. A diceless TTRPG played with trash.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
New trashy content!
4 months ago
– Sun, May 12, 2024 at 10:20:56 AM
Meet the Psychic Trash Detectives Contributing Poets
We are excited to share our latest exclusive Psychic Trash Detectives content with you!
Psychic Trash Detectives contributing writers Tonee Mae Moll, Tristan B Willis, Tyler Vile, and jason b. crawford joined Scryptid Games Co-Founder Nat Mesnard to read poems, talk about meaningful gaming experiences, and generally geek out about the fun intersection of TTRPGs, poetry, and imaginative fiction.
We had so much fun collaborating with these brilliant writers to create Junked Histories, the anthology of poetry and fiction that accompanies the Psychic Trash Detectives game book.
It’s been a few months since we closed our latest Kickstarter campaign and got to work producing Against the Gloom, and we are pleased to share that the game is now available for pre-order on Backerkit.
What if our heroes exchanged their battle axes for Stratocasters? And what if lyrics and harmony were actual magic? Against the Gloom is a dice-based, role-playlist-building game about the joy and power of music, chosen family, and building community in the face of the void. Players take on the roles of punk pirate troubadours sailing across a vast and dangerous void—the Gloom—aboard a ramshackle ship propelled by the power of song. Use your character's sonic powers to build your story one gig at a time!
The designer of Psychic Trash Detectives, Brigitte Winter, collaborated with Against the Gloom's lead designer, Dustin Patrick Winter, on this game.So if you enjoyed the style and feel of Psychic Trash Detectives’ emphasis on compelling story, delightful weirdness, and creative and harmonious game mechanics, we think you’ll love Against the Gloom. You'll even get to build and play a collaborative playlist as a central game mechanic, earning and spending songs to maintain your band's harmony.
Be a rockstar and pre-order your copy of the game book before it drops this fall, and then add a pack of oversized custom Gloom dice and an Against the Gloom concert tee to your order while you’re at it.
In case you missed it…
Brigitte recently appeared on the Epic Levels Mad Dungeon podcast. 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.
New Scryptid Games Website
We’ve made some Scryptid upgrades! We have a new Shopify website, which will make it a ton easier to manage our digital storefront.
Check out the new site and browse our growing collection of TTRPGs and story games.
TTRPG book club, Scryptid Discord, and the next Scryptid Games Kickstarter Campaign, oh my!
We are about to launch some cool new projects.
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.
Until next time, stay trashy, friends!
Roll dice. Build your playlist. Shred the Gloom. Against the Gloom just launched on Kickstarter!
7 months ago
– Fri, Feb 16, 2024 at 12:41:53 PM
Greetings, trashy friends and detectives!
In case you missed it, on Valentine’s Day we launched our next project as Scryptid Games: Against the Gloom!
What if our heroes exchanged their battle axes for Stratocasters? And what if lyrics and harmony were actual magic? Against the Gloom is a dice-based, role-playlist-building game about the joy and power of music, chosen family, and building community in the face of the void. Players take on the roles of punk pirate troubadours sailing across a vast and dangerous void—the Gloom—aboard a ramshackle ship propelled by the power of song. Use your character's sonic powers to build your story one gig at a time!
The designer of Psychic Trash Detectives, our own Brigitte Winter, is collaborating with the lead designer, Dustin Patrick Winter (yup, they’re married), on Against the Gloom. So if you enjoyed the style and feel of Psychic Trash Detectives’ emphasis on compelling story, delightful weirdness, and creative and harmonious game mechanics, we think you’ll love Against the Gloom. You'll even get to build and play a collaborative playlist as a central game mechanic, earning and spending songs to maintain your band's harmony.
Gloom funded in less than two hours and is already climbing quickly toward its stretch goals. And some of the rewards include cool and unique stuff we’ve never offered before!
A “tour” t-shirt, featuring our backers’ hometowns (or maybe their own fictional worlds?) as tour stops!
Custom dice depicting the creepy Gloom swirl and fun musical elements!
Incredible art by Jupiter V, Gigi Wilder, and hopefully more!
And could there be actual music on the horizon? Only one way to find out! Rumor has it, one of our secret stretch goals may be a mixtape of original music inspired by the game...
We hope you’ll support this game with the same love and generosity with which you supported Psychic Trash Detectives.
So grab a line, swing on over to our Kickstarter, and climb aboard for the wild ride, you sonic scalawags! Against the Gloom is funding until March 15.
Answering the calls across the void…
As our campaign for Against the Gloom progresses, we’d really love your help with spreading the word about it. Scryptid Games is very new as an entity, kind of a scrappy underdog even in the indie space, and we don’t always have the power to get word out about our projects.
If you back Gloom, please spread the word about it! Be sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and BlueSky, and share why you think it’s cool! Brag about your largesse! Gloat about how you’re best friends with us! But truly, word of mouth goes a long way.
Is she secretly an octopus?
As if she wasn’t doing enough, Brigitte is also working on her other next big project: the juggernaut that is New Year, New You, an anthology of speculative fiction stories about the joys and costs of reinvention. Forged in the furnaces of the Viable Paradise workshop, and featuring work by the 2023 workshop attendees and author-instructors, New Year, New You will feature one of Brigitte’s most incendiary stories, never before published.
Brigitte has been helping to make the anthology a reality on the publishing side of the project as well, and everything is going great there too! So check that Kickstarter. We’re not quite sure how she does it all!
Brigitte is a finalist! Vote for us for Dicebreaker’s People’s Choice Award!
10 months ago
– Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 07:46:25 PM
Greetings, my trashy, fabulous wild ones!
Our beloved Brigitte Winter, creator of Psychic Trash Detectives, is a finalist for Designer of the Year in Dicebreaker’s 2023 Tabletop Awards! Wow wow holy cow!
I'm sure you'll all agree that Brigitte is a powerhouse visionary creator who very much deserves to win this! The awards for these categories are actually determined by a panel of esteemed judges from all over the industry, so we can't really help her claim that crown, HOWEVER…
You can vote in Dicebreaker's People’s Choice Awards! If you liked Psychic Trash Detectives and think it’s super cool and you think wow, those folks deserve a trophy, then please vote for us! You can find the submission form by following this link: https://www.dicebreaker.com/tabletopawards
The winners of the Tabletop Awards will be revealed on-stage in December at the PAX Unplugged convention in Philadelphia. We’ll be there again this year---all five of us Scryptids---and we hope you’ll come find us and say hi!
Cheers,
Dustin
It's a PDF party! Celebrating fulfillment—and Dustin
10 months ago
– Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 11:12:51 AM
Finishing Fulfillment, For REAL
Hey, everyone! Nat here, grabbing the mic to talk you through the endgame miscellany of our fulfillment for Psychic Trash Detectives. Thank you, once again, for being along for the ride on this first-ever Scryptid Games project. It's been such a delight to bring this game to life, and I, for one, have learned a lot about publishing books—and successfully getting them to people—along the way. 😉
Thanks to collaboration from all of the Scryptids, I think I can now say that outside of specific, one-off cases (e.g. a package got lost in the mail) we are done fulfilling every little bit of this Kickstarter. Details below on some new PDFs that may find their way to your inbox. And, as a reminder, if your physical mailing is still missing, don't hesitate to let us know. We want you to have your stuff.
Scryptid Games Facilitator's Guide
During the original ZineQuest campaign for Psychic Trash Detectives, one of the stretch goals we promised was a Game Facilitator's Guide that contains anti-oppressive practices and structures for running inclusive, equitable TTRPG tables.
This guide is now done. And it's gorgeous! With glorious typesetting designed by Tiffany and myself, a cool cover design created in collaboration with Brigitte, and five unique essays on ethical facilitation by each of the five Scryptids, this project has been worth the wait.
Anyone who backed the original campaign will now have access to a PDF download of the Scryptid Games Facilitator's Guide. From sparking creativity and group bonding, to creating shared ownership of characters, scenes, and the system, this guide benefits from our 100 combined years of playing tabletop games, and contains some remarkable insights on the state of leading games in 2023.
PDF Library
For those who backed at the Takeout Carton level and above, we owe you some PDFs! You now have access to Ball of the Wild, and the full Creature Feature bundle. We hope you enjoy this collection of weird, wild, wonderfully creative games. Let us know what happens when you play them!
The Gloom is Coming
We're hard at work on our next release, Against the Gloom, which will fund during ZineQuest in 2024. Designed by our very own Scryptid Dustin Patrick Winter, this TTRPG brings you pirate troubadours battling back enormous, existential horrors with the power of JAMS! 🎶 That's right, in Against the Gloom you'll roll dice to play songs together, explore half-lost cities clinging to hope, and build community on the weirdest ship that ever did sail the ever-encroaching, starless sea.
Myself, Patrick, and Tiffany are headed to Metatopia this weekend to playtest Against the Gloom, as well as some new games that may be coming your way in the more distant Scryptid Games future. We're also preparing for a Scryptid Games retreat, where we'll be celebrating Dustin's birthday. He's turns 42 today, and in celebration I'd love to get 42 new follows on BackerKit for Against the Gloom. Help me recognize Dustin's general awesomeness and the brilliance and promise of his game design work!
Stay trashy...and get gloomy!? We'll see you soon. Oh, and if you're a game designer who'll be attending Metatopia, definitely come say hi. I'd love to talk to you at the bar!
—Nat
We have liftoff!
12 months ago
– Fri, Sep 22, 2023 at 06:39:34 AM
Our launch weekend was a big success!
We had an awesome release weekend. Nat and Pat came in from New York and Tiffany made the trek from Maine so we could all be together. And not only that, but they brought some incredible friends and volunteers with them. We all sat in our tiny living room, packed boxes and printed labels, made plans for the future, and drank boba tea. Not too shabby. Despite a few hiccups here and there, Nat and Pat commanded our book-packaging army like veteran logisticians.
The graininess of the photo really brings out the hard work, eh?
At this point, all of the physical pre-orders and Kickstarter books are on their way to you! If you don't receive yours by the end of September, reach out to let us know. You can also contact us about any problems with your order. This is our first Kickstarter, so we want to get this right, and we want you to be super happy at the end of fulfillment.
Logistics WIZARDS, I tell ya.
Trashy, digital, and now in technicolor!
The PDF versions of the books and the coloring pages have also been sent out. Backers who use screen readers, please send us your feedback on the PDF.
"Dude, who has the dark red? Stop hogging it!"
By the end of September, we will also be creating a digital, neurodivergent-friendly version of PTD.
Reading and mingling...
Oh, did I forget to mention how many people showed up for the events? We had an incredible crowd for both events.
What a crowd! And we didn't even have to promise there would be cake!
I have to say that every single one of the writers who joined us for the reading was ON FIRE that night. Hearing someone read their work in their own voice and on stage is a level above, for real. Afterwards, we descended on the local food market and put multiple tables end-to-end to make what I can only describe as Franken-table---Franken-table's Monster, maybe?
Tonee Moll is such a doll!
...and gaming, oh my!
And then at dawn... WE GAMED! Okay, maybe it was at dusk. Whatever.
Pat really is fantastic at running games and demos.
The folks at No Land Beyond were super kind and helpful and, well, I'll be honest here, I don't really know HALF of what people did that night because I was too busy having fun facilitating a game of Psychic Trash Detectives for a great group of players.
Why am I clapping? Anyway, here's Psychic Trash Detectives...
Sure, the trash animals of Wurstburg figured out why their source of delicious clove cigarette butts disappeared, but what about Colin? Will he ever recover from his heartbreak? Will the TikTok witches ever break through to make it big? Will the sordid events at the bleu cheese factory continue undetected?
Everyone had a great time and we are super stoked to do events like this again. More pictures of the events can be found on our Instagram!
Facilitator's Guide is coming soon!
I know what they say about offering advice, but you did literally ask for this... We are wrapping up work on our Facilitator's Guide, the collection on anti-oppressive practices and structures for running inclusive, equitable TTRPG tables that we promised you in one of our campaign stretch goals. I can't wait to tell you more about this! Stay tuned!
The mockup for our Facilitator's Guide, coming soon!
And the Gloom draws a little closer...
Development on Against the Gloom continues! Right now I'm working on the dice-rolling mechanics with Pat and building out the lore and world of The Gloom. I'm very excited to bring y'all this game. This is a much more than a game to me: it's a love letter.
Follow the prelaunch page for more details and a chance to receive an exclusive Against the Gloom sticker:
