Hal Duncan

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: 2Ages: 14+Playing Time: 20-40 minutesContents: 41 cards, 10 plastic cubes, 9 plastic discs

NOMINEE - KENNERSPIEL DES JAHRES 2022You’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. Number of players: 3-5Ages: 10+Time: 30-50 minutesComponents: 5 player booklets, 6 board pieces, 60 cards, tokens & counters

The Land of Somewhere Safe: where things go when you think, "I must put this somewhere safe," and then can never find them again. The Scruffians: irreverent foul-mouthed street urchins, older than their years, waifs who have been Fixed by the Stamp, frozen so that they are immortal, providing perpetual slave labour. But now the waifs have nicked the Stamp and burned down the Institute that housed it, preventing any more of their number being Fixed and exploited. Peter and Lilly: two school kids orphaned by Nazi bombs, who find themselves thrown together by circumstance and evacuated from London during the Blitz. Sent far further north than intended, all the way to the Isle of Skye, they are taken in by Clan Chief Lady Morag MacGuffin of Dunstravaigin Castle. With them are the four Bastable children - a jolly queer bunch - who prove to be far more than they seem. The Reverend Blackstone: no real reverend at all, but an occultish Nazi spy determined to get his hands on the priceless Stamp, even if he has to raise hisself a demon to do so...

Fixed imperishable by the Stamp, sold as slaves, escaped to run wild, fight dirty and plot revenge, Scruffians might look no more'n filthy guttersnipes, but it's a daft groanhuff who crosses em. From the Children's Crusades to the chimney sweeps of Ripper Vicky's London, from Jack Scallywag to the Beast of Buskerville, Scruffians have learnt the hard way to carry a shiv and mind yer mate's back. We'll learn you too, scamp, with these fabbles of Liberatings and Come-Uppances, carnival carnage and Christmas feasts. So cosy in and grab some grub. It's stew tonight, and if yer finds a finger... that's good luck Praise for A Scruffian Survival Guide: OThe post- post- modern Victorian fables that comprise Hal DuncanOs A Scruffian Survival Guide inhabit a unique dark fantasy world a feral dream. The language is mad genius. O N Jeffrey Ford

Meet the Scruffians, workhouse tykes and street arabs scrobbled by the Waiftaker General, dragged to the Institute and put to the Stamp, Fixed ageless, imperishable... the perfect child labour. Meet the scruffs escaped to live free & fight back: Flashjack and Puckerscruff; Squirlet Nicely and Vermintrude Toerag; Yapper, the Scruffian what speaks Dog; Whelp, the dog Fixed as a scruff; and Rake Jake Scallion, not a scruff, but the finest friend a scruff ever had. Park yer arse, stray, and we'll learn yer the ABCs of being a scruff. We'll learn yer how us Scruffians STAMP. Praise for A Scruffian Survival Guide: OThe post- post- modern Victorian fables that comprise Hal DuncanOs A Scruffian Survival Guide inhabit a unique dark fantasy world a feral dream. The language is mad genius. O -- Jeffrey Ford ""Hal Duncan's cheeky and charming Scruffian stories hide a steely shiv of inspection..."" -- Neil Williamson

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

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

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."

Neljä syntistä - palkkamurhaaja, prostituoitu, kulkuri ja homoseksuaali - heräävät synkeällä lautalla Manhattanin siluetti taustallaan. He ovat kuolleet ja matkalla Helvettiin, joka on sadististen poliisijoukkojen hallitsema New Yorkin kieroutunut kuvajainen. Kärsittyään sanoinkuvaamattomia tuskia syntiset tapaavat uudelleen, ja he päättävät paeta kiirastulien kaupungista. He saavat tietää, että arkkienkeli Gabriel, alamaailman herra, pitää valontuoja Luciferia vankinaan Helvetin alimmassa kerroksessa. Luciferin avulla syntiset voisivat toteuttaa pakoaikeensa, mutta arkkienkeli valjastaa kirottujen armeijan tuhoamaan syntiset, ja Helvetti pääsee totisesti valloilleen.