There's something hiding among us: an elusive cryptid is prowling our city streets. The evidence is clear but, without definitive proof, the scientific community will never believe you. There's nothing else to be done - you must track down this cryptid yourself! Play as a determined Scientist manipulating heat, movement, and sonic sensors to scan the city, identify your quarry's true location, and capture them. Or take the role of a Cryptid, snaking your way through the shadows and back alleys of the metropolis that surrounds you, eliminating all evidence of your existence as you go, desperately avoiding capture. Emerging victorious in this high stakes cat-and-mouse chase, played out across a sprawling urban landscape, will require all your ingenuity and foresight. Cryptid: Urban Legends is a tense asymmetric game of competitive deductive reasoning for two players from the creators of Cryptid. Players: 2 Ages: 14+ Playing Time: 20-40 minutes Contents: 41 cards, 10 plastic cubes, 9 plastic discs

NOMINEE - KENNERSPIEL DES JAHRES 2022 Number of players: 3-5 Ages: 10+ Time: 30-50 minutes Components: 5 player booklets, 6 board pieces, 60 cards, tokens & counters You've studied the footage, connected the dots, and gathered what meagre evidence you could. You're close - soon the whole world will know the truth behind the Cryptid. A group of like-minded cryptozoologists have come together to finally uncover the elusive creature, but the glory of discovery is too rich to share. Without giving away some of what you know you will never succeed in locating the beast, but reveal too much and your name will be long forgotten! Cryptid is a unique deduction game of honest misdirection in which players must try to uncover information about their opponent's clues while throwing them off the scent of their own. Each player holds one piece of evidence to help them find the creature, and on their turn they can try to gain more information from their opponents. Be warned - give too much away and your opponents might beat you to the mysterious animal and claim the glory for themselves! The game includes a modular board, five clue books, and a deck of setup cards with hundreds of possible setups across two difficulty levels. It is also supported by an entirely optional digital companion, allowing for faster game setup and a near-infinite range of puzzles.

Glaikit, mockit, droukit, drouthy, couthy, scunner, thrawn - the Scots language is rich with words too gallus not to glory in, dialect terms that deserve better than to be boxed away as precious oddities. Here we've collected some of the strangest writers of Scottish descent to bring these terms to life - that's Scottish by heritage or residence, adoption or initiation...

Glaikit, mockit, droukit, drouthy, couthy, scunner, thrawn - the Scots language is rich with words too gallus not to glory in, dialect terms that deserve better than to be boxed away as precious oddities. Here we've collected some of the strangest writers of Scottish descent to bring these terms to life - that's Scottish by heritage or residence, adoption or initiation...

Are you prepared to enter acclaimed author Hal Duncan's world of scruffians and scamps and sodomites? Beware, for it is filled with the gay pirate gods of Love and Death, immortal scoundrels, and young men who find themselves forced to become villains. But who amongst us does not adore a gamin antihero? These fantastical tales from the fringes of an imaginative realm of supernatural fairies and human fey will captivate the reader. Light a smoke, raise a cup of whiskey, and seek a careful spot to cruise the Scruffians

Are you prepared to enter acclaimed author Hal Duncan's world of scruffians and scamps and sodomites? Beware, for it is filled with the gay pirate gods of Love and Death, immortal scoundrels, and young men who find themselves forced to become villains. But who amongst us does not adore a gamin antihero? These fantastical tales from the fringes of an imaginative realm of supernatural fairies and human fey will captivate the reader. Light a smoke, raise a cup of whiskey, and seek a careful spot to cruise the Scruffians This deluxe edition of Scruffians contains one never-before-published short story and over forty full-color photographs that compliment the fantastical and homoerotic elements of Duncan's imaginative tales.

Acclaimed author and critic Hal Duncan turns his analytic eye towards the development and current state of speculatuve fiction in American and English writing in the pages of Rhapsody. Duncan's trademark wry humor and suffer-no-fools approach to critiquing the genre will make this book more than a resource for students of the field--anyone who enjoys reading tales of the fantastical and strange can find Duncan's insight worthwhile to read agan and again.

Meet the Scruffians, workhouse tykes and street arabs scrobbled by the Waiftaker General, dragged to the Institute and put to the Stamp that writes your very soul into your skin. Meet the waifs of Ripper Vicky's Empire, Fixed forever as they are, never ageing, never starving, ever bouncing back to exactly how they were Fixed...the perfect child labour. Now escaped from their chimney sweep and mill owner masters, hiding out in their rookery cribs, surviving as thieves and beggars...and fighting back. Meet Flashjack the hellion and Puckerscruff the urchin; Squirlet Nicely and Vermintrude Toerag; Yapper, the Scruffian who learned to speak Dog; Whelp, the dog Fixed as a Scruffian; and Rake Jake Scallion, not a Scruffian, but the finest friend any scruff ever had. Meet Gobfabbler, the fabbler of this here crib, with his fabbles of Christmas spirit, canine spifflication, and why, only the most important fabble of em all...the fabble of how the Scruffians took the Stamp!

Meet the Scruffians, workhouse tykes and street arabs scrobbled by the Waiftaker General, dragged to the Institute and put to the Stamp that writes your very soul into your skin. Meet the waifs of Ripper Vicky's Empire, Fixed forever as they are, never ageing, never starving, ever bouncing back to exactly how they were Fixed...the perfect child labour. Now escaped from their chimney sweep and mill owner masters, hiding out in their rookery cribs, surviving as thieves and beggars...and fighting back. Meet Flashjack the hellion and Puckerscruff the urchin; Squirlet Nicely and Vermintrude Toerag; Yapper, the Scruffian who learned to speak Dog; Whelp, the dog Fixed as a Scruffian; and Rake Jake Scallion, not a Scruffian, but the finest friend any scruff ever had. Meet Gobfabbler, the fabbler of this here crib, with his fabbles of Christmas spirit, canine spifflication, and why, only the most important fabble of em all...the fabble of how the Scruffians took the Stamp! SPESHUL EDITION

Fantastique Unfettered #4 Ralewing marks the one year anniversary of this new, genre-bending magazine, an issue filled to the brim with unique prose, poetry, and non-fiction. Herein, there are fears to face, and things unknown, things unthought. Herein, there is Death unmasked. We dare you to turn these pages and read... Featuring new fiction and poetry by Hal Duncan, Mike Allen, Jacqueline West, Alma Alexander and more. Table of contents: Fiction: Azif by Lynne Jamneck The Bachorum Principle by Brenda Stokes Barron The Butterfly Collection of Miss Letitia Willoughby Forbes by Alma Alexander Mr. White Umbrella by Georgina Bruce Sons of the Law by Hal Duncan Stolen Souls by Mike Allen (Reprint) Three Tales of the Devil's Wife by Carmen Lau Verite by D. Harlan Wilson Poetry: Mike Allen (special feature) Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky Binary Sisyphus Crawls Self-portrait by Shweta Narayan 'cubus by Dan Campbell At the Crossroads of the West by J. C. Runolfson Life Decisions by Kaolin Fire Black Sheep by Jacqueline West Clones evaporate faster by Kristine Ong Muslim Nonfiction: Alexa Chats with... Hal Duncan & Brent Weeks The Night Circus Reviewed by Alexandra Seidel Life is Suffering: The Writer's Point of View, Being a Discussion with Hal Duncan & Mike Allen, Conducted by Alexandra Seidel This Inscrutable Light: A Response to Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Editorial by Brandon H. Bell "The stories are fantastical in the best sense of the word: strange and marvelous, full of the inexplicable... This magazine is worth seeking out." --Terry Weyna, Fantasy Literature "By and large the sensibility is 'literary, ' and the quality is high (the two, of course, not always the same thing), virtually all the stories assembled here working, though to different degrees and in different ways.... That combination of quality and variety means that Fantastique Unfettered #1 offers something for many different tastes... " --Nader Elhefnawy, The Future Fire "There is a poignance in these poems: an ache and a loss, a love and a surrender, a luscious melange of sorrow and love." --Dan Campbell, Poetry Editor of Bull Spec (in his review of the poetry and interview)

Collecting for the first time, and revising for this edition, all four stories in the ERRATA sequence-"The City of Rotted Names," "The Prince of End Times," "The Whenever at the City's Heart," & "The Tower of Morning's Bones"-this chapbook is a cubist collage of wordplay and worldblazing, a mosaic narrative of the battle for the city of the soul. Here, fans of VELLUM & INK can delve deeper into the mythos of The Book of All Hours, while new readers will find a stand-alone story, a wild ride into the world of a work described as "the Guernica of genre fiction."

It's 2017 and the End Days are coming, beings that were once human gathering to fight in one last great war for control of the Vellum - the vast realm of eternity on which our world is just a scratch. But to a draft-dodging Irish angel and a trailer-trash tomboy called Phreedom, it's about to become brutally clear that there's no great divine or diabolic plan at play here, just a vicious battle between the hawks of Heaven and Hell, with humanity stuck in the middle, and where the easy rhetoric of Good and Evil, Order versus Chaos just doesn't apply. Here there are no heroes, no darlings of destiny struggling to save the day, and there are no villains, no dark lords of evil out to destroy the world. Or at least if there are, it's not quite clear which is which. Here, the most ancient gods and the most modern humans are equally fate's fools, victims of their own hubris, struggling to save their own skins, their own souls, but sometimes . . . just sometimes . . . sacrificing everything in the name of humanity. "Vellum is a mind-blowing read that's genuinely like nothing you've ever read before. . . The imaginary worlds that he dreams up are stunning. . . Vellum has expanded fantasy's limits like nothing published in years." SFX