A book of games and writing that flips the lens on conventional cryptid lore. In this zine, cryptids are beings with vivid lives, goals, and stories of their own to share. Don’t solve the mystery. Be the mystery.
Designers and writers, now that we've funded Tales from the Cryptids, this anthology project is officially open for submissions! We are seeking games, fiction, poetry, and uncanny ephemera for publication in this collection of gloriously liminal work.
Submissions will be open March 1 - May 15, 2026 or until we hit our submission cap of 100 real non-AI submissions in each category. We will endeavor to send responses by June 15, 2026.
If you have any additional questions about submissions to Tales from the Cryptids, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].
From Scryptid Games, this book of games, fiction, poetry, and other ephemera flips the lens on conventional cryptid lore. In this book, cryptids are beings with vivid lives, goals, and stories of their own to share.
Tales from the Cryptids is for:
TABLETOP GAMERS who love collections of short games like 9th Level Games' Level 1 Anthology
READERS of speculative anthologies like GennaRose Nethercott's 50 Beasts to Break Your Heart
GAME DESIGNERS (and writers) who want to send in work when we open for submissions in spring 2026!
Once we reach our goal, we’ll publish a gorgeous perfect-bound softcover book that contains:
Original game systems and mechanics: games that could be poems and poems that could be games, immersive experiences and thoughtful explorations. We will fill this book with games that make you say, “Wow, is that game actually a cryptid?
Stories about monsters with agency and depth, and we will feature cryptid fiction and poetry that prioritizes the self-determination of liminal beings, places, and experiences.
Uncanny ephemera—cryptid scribbles, doodles, haikus, photographs, and other 2D marginalia—to literally occupy the book’s margins.
For the purpose of this anthology, cryptids are beings of real or imagined folklore who “could be real” and exist on the fringes of our world. Could a cryptid be a song, a memory, an entire town?
The more funds we raise for this project, the more content we'll be able to include when we open to submissions this spring.
Our current TTRPG contributors include:
Avery Alderis a game designer, educator, and facilitator creating games about community, relationships, doubt, queerness, and the collapse of civilization. She is interested in learning how to build healthy communities, repair relationships, liberate the imagination, and escape the clutches of capitalism. Her work blends facilitation, design, and play – bringing keen curiosity and visionary imagination to how we create together. In collaboration with Benjamin Rosenbaum, Avery created the Belonging Outside Belonging game system, which revolutionized possibilities for collaborative play.
Sharang Biswas has won two IGDN awards, four Ennie Awards, an IndieCade award, and a Golden Cobra award for roleplaying games, as well as the Brave New Weird Award for fiction. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Augur, Strange Horizons, and more. He is the co-editor of Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games (Pelgrane Press) and the author of The Iron Below Remembers (Neon Hemlock Press).
Shing Yin Khor is a multidisciplinary artist exploring mythic Americana and the American Dream, in conversation with queer immigrant identity, new diasporic traditions, and rituals of labor. Their award-winning experience and game design work is rooted in their work as a builder and artist - keepsake games centered on the bridge between physical making and traditional tabletop RPGs, kind and awkward emotional connections, and new traditions and rituals.
Our current fiction and poetry contributors include:
Jason B. Crawford is a writer born in Washington, DC and raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut full-length poetry collection Year of the Unicorn Kidz is available from Sundress Publications, and their second collection YEET! was the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize. They are a 2023 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow. They are the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, the winner of the Rhino’s Founders Prize, and a finalist for the Frontier’s Open prize. They were a finalist for the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid 2021 and 2022 Poetry Contest. They hold an MFA in poetry from The New School.
A.E. Osworthis a novelist whose debut, We Are Watching Eliza Bright (Grand Central Publishing 2021) was long listed for The Center For Fiction First Novel Prize, The Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and The Tournament of Books; it was a finalist for The Oregon Book Award. Their second novel, Awakened, about a coven of transgender witches fighting artificial intelligence with magic, was published by Grand Central Publishing in March 2025.
Shen Tao immigrated to Canada at an early age and grew up inspired by both Chinese and Western stories. An engineer with roots in Nanchang and Toronto, she later moved to Seattle to be closer to the mountains and the ocean, where she currently resides with her partner, her piano, and her menagerie of stuffed critters. Shen is a finalist for the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for science fiction, a two-time finalist for the PNWA unpublished novel contest, and a graduate of several speculative fiction workshops including Taos Toolbox, Viable Paradise, and Odyssey. Her debut novel, The Poet Empress, debuted in January 2026.
Tales from the Cryptids is edited by award-winning game designer and author Brigitte Winter.
Brigitte writes stories about monsters, magic, and messy relationships. She is an author, photographer, narrative game designer, and co-founder of Scryptid Games. Brigitte was a 2023 Dicebreaker Tabletop Awards Finalist for Designer of the Year, and her TTRPG, Psychic Trash Detectives, won the 2024 CRIT Award for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art.
Brigitte is a 2023 alumna of Viable Paradise, and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and the Horror Writers Association. Her short fiction is featured in PodCastle, New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention, and City of Weird. Her debut novel, The Normal Monster Club, will be published by Generous Press in 2027.
The capacity of storytelling to connect, inspire, and incite is central to Brigitte’s art and her activism, and she creates and consumes stories that are queer, feminist, intimate, and deliciously weird. She grew up on monster-of-the-week narratives, but she’s always been on the side of the monsters.
Calling all cryptids, creepy-crawlers, and precious monsters! Do you have cryptid content to share?
We are crowdfunding this anthology to bring it into being, and we will open to submissions March 1st – May 31st, 2026. We will post detailed submission instructions on the Scryptid Games website once this campaign closes, but here is a preview to get you started.
Up to 1,000 words, 10 cents a word for originals, 5 cents per word for reprints
For games, we are especially keen to acquire TTRPGs and other narrative games that embody a sense of the liminal. We love unusual original game systems and mechanics. Send us games that could be poems and poems that could be games. Send us immersive experiences and thoughtful explorations. If we read your game and say, “Wow, is that game actually a cryptid?” you’re probably in.
For fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, we want cryptid content that prioritizes the agency of liminal beings, places, and experiences. Your work does not need to feature a cryptid protagonist or an optimistic point-of-view, but your monsters must have agency and depth.
Micro-Submissions (2D Marginalia)
$25 per accepted submission
We are also interested in micro-submissions of uncanny ephemera to literally occupy the margins of this book. Send us cryptid scribbles, doodles, haikus, photographs, and other 2D marginalia. Even we don’t quite know what we want in this category. Surprise us.
We are excited to crowdfund this project for Zinetopia!
Our Zinetopia partner is Goosepoop Games, an indie studio publishing scrappy, silly, accessible TTRPGs and board games that spread positivity and introduce the world of games to new players.
If you back both Tales from the Cryptids and Goosepoop Games’ Food and Evil, a card-based TTRPG about demons running a food truck, you’ll receive a digital copy of Hogs, an exclusive TTRPG created by Goosepoop founder Jordan Dube and Scryptd Games co-founder Dustin Patrick Winter.
Travel cross-country as a motorcycle gang of "ferocious" warthogs. Fight with your feelings, explore meaning in running away and life on the road. Use your actual keys to play.
In Hogs, you’ll play as warthogs, hedgehogs, and different kinds of pigs in a haphazard road trip across Pangea to find community with your fellow motorcyclists. This is a fast and friendly one-shot game perfect for new players and Game Masters. Only one six-sided die is needed.
Go on a road trip to remember.
Our special Creature's Cache reward tier is offered in collaboration with Creature Publishing, a rad small press specializing in feminist, queer, and trans horror, dark speculative fiction, women-driven thrillers, and spooky fantastical and literary fiction. Here's a little bit more about them:
Creature Publishing was founded in 2019, and publishes stories with an inclusive, transgressive, and intersectional understanding of what horror is and who can make it. From the beginning, we’ve embraced cathartic, subversive, socially conscious, and innovative writing that widens readers’ understanding of the world. Our books have won or been finalists for the Bram Stoker Award, the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award, and the Foreword Indies; most recently, THE SCALD-CROW and MY LIPS, HER VOICE were named to the 2025 Stoker preliminary ballot, and ROOT ROT was #5 on the NYPL's Best Horror of 2025.
With this discounted bundle, you’ll not only receive Tales from the Cryptids and three Scryptid Games releases featuring weird punk creatures and ecosystems, you’ll also receive Mine: An Anthology of Bodily Autonomy Horror from Creature Publishing, which includes 16 original horror stories exploring the ownership and control—or lack thereof—that we have over our bodies.
We’re getting real weird with this one. If this project funds, we will collaborate with the entire city of Baltimore to solicit true accounts of Maryland cryptid sightings to be featured in an exclusive zine called The Real Cryptids of Baltimore!
We are offering this zine at the Bigfoot’s Bundle and Old Briney’s Bounty reward tiers for this campaign, and you can also include it with your order as an add-on.
If you live in or around Baltimore, keep an eye out this spring for our story solicitation flyer! We want to hear all of your true tales of Maryland’s uncanny critters.
In this Zoom workshop held on March 29, 2026 from 3-5PM EST, we'll take inspiration from short TTRPGs written for anthologies, legendary one-pagers, and even business cards to playstorm game concepts and mechanics for new short games.
Writing a 1000-word (or less) TTRPG is the perfect challenge for a new tabletop game designer. For experienced designers, it’s an invitation to create something fresh. Together, we’ll investigate three short games, revealing mechanics, systems, and narrative tools aligned with elegance and brevity.
Then participants will be invited to hack or otherwise play with elements of the game(s) we've discussed—developing a promising concept for a new short TTRPG. By the end of this session, you’ll be well on your way to designing a submission for a future TTRPG anthology project.
This add-on is for writers and game designers who want personalized feedback on their game, story, or poem before they submit to our anthology open call this spring! You will receive extensive written feedback from anthology editor Brigitte Winter or game design instructor Nat Mesnard, oriented on fully realizing your idea and preparing it for submission.
An exclusive bonus zine featuring true tales of encounters with uncanny creatures that will be sourced from Baltimore residents through an anonymous report line.
A 2" x 2.5" woven embroidered patch with iron on backing featuring everyone's favorite cryptid, the Squonk. Wear your cryptid feelings loud and proud. Image is a MOCKUP of the final patch.
Bodily transformation. Possession of the body. Forced disembodiment. A baby consumes its mother in utero. Unrealistic postpartum expectations turn deadly. A witch avenges the voiceless. These 16 original horror stories explore the ownership and control—or lack thereof—that we have over our bodies. Edited by Roxie Voorhees and Nico Bell.
Together, become a weird ecology. When the world shatters, how will we survive?Assemblage is a card-based eco-fantasy storytelling game for 2-6 players where each player portrays an entire species—and collaborates in crafting an interdependent ecosystem on the verge of collapse. You'll begin by collectively choosing a strange and mysterious habitat. Then you will draw prompt cards and take turns describing the assemblage of species living there: history, relationships, adaptations, and myths. Then you'll encounter an epic environmental disaster—and explore what it means to survive.
Live fast. Eat trash. Solve mysteries. Psychic Trash Detectives is a collaborative, shared-GM TTRPG for 3-5 players, about psychic trash animals solving the mysteries no one cares about. Players use actual trash to generate elements of the game world, resolve questions, and push the story forward. They create the setting of the game together too, mapping out on a hand-drawn map the weird places where their characters find their favorite trash. And when it comes to the psychic trash visions, they play weird, surrealist mini-games–like writing erasure poetry on trash, sketching with their eyes closed, and listening to playlists for musical inspiration–to determine the supernatural messages and memories. This game won 2024 Crit Awards for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art.
Roll dice. Build your playlist. Fight 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 fantasy TTRPG for 3-5 players about the joy and power of music, chosen family, and building community in the face of the void. Play as pirate rockstars touring across a vast and dangerous void—the Gloom—aboard a ramshackle ship propelled by the power of song. Use your favorite songs to create your world, then protect it from the Gloom, one rockin’ gig at a time. With an easy-to-learn d6 system inspired by Yahtzee, you'll harmonize dice values to succeed, earn and spend songs on a collaborative music playlist, and truly unite your band.
The Goodest Girls is a zany stand-alone TTRPG set in the Psychic Trash Detectives universe. Inspired by the sitcom The Golden Girls, this is a replayable, single-session, shared-GM TTRPG for 2-6 players about a tight-knit group of senior shelter animals living their best lives together at the local shelter, Shady Pines. Collaborate to build the sitcom world of Shady Pines and the paw-inspiring characters who live there. Earn real treats for goofy antics as you step into a flashback episode where you reminisce about the times you and your fellow fuzzballs shared.
🔒 $4,500: Initial funding goal. Basic Buy-In: Covers book production and author fees for a 120-page perfect bound book.
🔒$10,000: Stretch goal one. At this level, we’ll increase the page count to 140! That means we’ll be able to say yes to more game designers, fiction writers, and poets when we open to submissions this spring.
🔒$14,000: Stretch goal two. At this level, we’ll transform the anthology into a glorious hardcover book!
🔒$18,000 Stretch goal three. At this level, the hardcover anthology increases to 160 pages and the word count limit for submissions increases from 1,000 words to 1,500 words!
🔒$25,000 Stretch goal four. Wow! You did it! At this level, the glorious, hardcover, 160-page book evolves into its final form, complete with a fancy ribbon to help you mark your place as you read.
Should we reach our funding goal, you will be charged for shipping after the crowdfunding campaign for Tales from the Cryptids concludes, via a survey sent by our BackerKit Pledge Manager. For this project, we will be shipping to US, UK & EU, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
While we would like to send to customers worldwide, we are not offering global shipping for this campaign because the cost of shipping to many countries could easily meet or exceed the cost of the book itself. If you live outside of the regions where we're shipping, we'd like to invite you to back at the Dover Demon’s Digital Delight tier to receive a PDF of the anthology.
We estimate fulfillment will take place by November 2026.
At Scryptid Games, we make story games for cryptids.
We love strange, liminal, punk, and outsider stories—and players who find meaning and community beyond the mainstream.
From trash animals who celebrate each other's "grossest trait" to aging shelter animals to magical punk musicians to alien ecologies, our games invite you to play with quirky and queer perspectives, exploring delight, survival, and purpose through easy to learn TTRPGs designed for one-shot play.
Our first crowdfunding campaign, for Brigitte Winter's Psychic Trash Detectives, blew past all expectations, arriving on the market with a trashy bang. The book went on to win a 2024 CRIT Award for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art, and led us to a thriving publishing practice that encompasses additional titles including Ball of the Wild, Against the Gloom, The Goodest Girls, Assemblage, and new titles forthcoming in 2026 and beyond.
Dustin Blottenberger Dustin (he/him) is a writer, editor, artist, and game designer living in the woodsy ‘burbs near Baltimore, MD. He created his first role-playing game at 8 years old: X-Men, the RPG (unpublished). It was a real hot mess. These days, he is interested in creating games and stories about found family, polyamory, and casting rad spells. He can be found on social media @NeverSayDustin.
Nat Mesnard Nat (they/them) is a writer and game designer based in NYC. A published writer of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, Nat has taught interactive fiction and game design for the last 10 years. They also make video games, and aspire to perform. Connect @natmesnard on BlueSky & Instagram.
Brigitte Winter Brigitte (she/they) is a writer, photographer, and game designer based in Maryland. She is also the Executive Director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, a DC-based company that inspires young people to realize the power of their voices through storytelling. The capacity of storytelling to connect, inspire, and incite is central to Brigitte’s art and her activism. They consume and create stories and games that are queer, feminist, intimate, and deliciously weird. You can connect with them on Instagram @bwinterose and play their games on itch.io.
Patrick Watson Patrick (he/him) is a writer, teacher, and game designer living in the East Village of NYC. He’s been playing and making games for nearly 20 years and his favorites are good and weird. Like, wizards with crummy corporate jobs and radioactive dogs weird. Find him @patrickdkwatson.
💥 Zinetopia 2026
This project is participating in Zinetopia! A Small-format TTRPG event celebrating Zine Month running February 2–27, 2026.
📖 What is Zine Month? Zine Month is a month-long online celebration observed every February by the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) community where creators share and launch new DIY zines.
🔥 Unlock the Limited Zinetopia Freebie! Receive the limited edition Zinetopia 2026 Group Zine when you back 5+ projects featuring 60+ pages from participating creators full of mini-games, sketches, activity pages, and more!
