Via Kickstarter:
Game in a haunting, dark, cyberpunk city, full of aliens, robots, and mutants. Welcome to Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown. Watch your back!
“Skyscrapers with sides so smooth and featureless (with vidscreens on the interior, instead of windows) that one might think they were solid granite monuments in a graveyard for dead gods. Other buildings that looked like they’d been pieced together from thousands of odd-matched parts salvaged from stripped factory machines, steam curling out of grids and grates in their complex flanks. Buildings with snake skins of multicolored mosaics. Buildings wearing an armor of riveted metal plates, like retired warships looming vertically with their sterns jammed into the street. Flat roofs upon which perched smaller buildings, symbiotically. Other structures tapering to needle points that seemed to etch the clouds upon the blue glass of the sky. Stacked apartments. Stacked businesses. On street level: shop fronts, and gang kids squatting on tenement steps, glaring insolently at the slow sludge of traffic...Ah, Punktown.”
--Jeffrey Thomas, Deadstock
The Setting:
Picture Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Minority Report, Total Recall and the rest of the dark, not-too-distant-future genre. Now add aliens, mutants, and robots. Welcome to Punktown...now gimme your wallet.
Punktown is a city created by author Jeffrey Thomas who has written numerous books set there, both novels and short story collections. The stories depict a crazy world where anything and everything goes, but menace lurks in the shadows.
The Book:
Punktown: An RPG Setting for Call of Cthulhu® and BRP is a book that will allow players of Chaosium's famous award-winning system to explore a dark, futuristic world fraught with untold perils. If you're a cyberpunk fan, if you're a horror fan, or if you're both, you'll want to explore the pages of this book.The book will be written for the famous BRP system, compatible with Call of Cthulhu and Chaosium's many other game settings, so if you're looking to expand your world, and add options, look no further than Punktown!
The book will explore the city itself, the alien races, the weaponry, the creatures, mutations, cybernetics, drugs, sanity (and the inevitable loss thereof), and the option of adding the Cthulhu Mythos into the mix. As written in Jeffrey Thomas' work, the mythos is already there, threatening life as Punktowners know it, but whether or not to use that element is left to the individual gaming groups, and their preference.
The Authors:
Teaming up to bring you this book is the creator of Punktown itself, Jeffrey Thomas, fiction/nonfiction/gaming author Mike Tresca, Call of Cthulhu Great Brian M. Sammons, and the President of Miskatonic River Press, Tom Lynch.
Jeffrey Thomas is a prolific writer of science fiction and horror, best known for his stories set in the nightmarish future city called Punktown, such as the novel Deadstock (Solaris Books) and the collection Punktown (Ministry of Whimsy Press), from which a story was reprinted in St. Martin's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #14. His fiction has also been reprinted in Daw's The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII, The Year's Best Fantastic Fiction and Quick Chills II: The Best Horror Fiction from the Specialty Press. He has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (Best First Novel) for Monstrocity, and a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Deadstock. Other books by Thomas include the novels Letters from Hades (Bedlam Press) and Monstrocity (Prime Books), and the novella Godhead Dying Downwards (Earthling Publications). The German edition of Punktown has cover art by H. R. Giger. For more info see http://punktalk.punktowner.com.
We got a great suggestion from one of our backers: why not post some fiction of Jeff's to build more interest? Why not indeed? Jeff provided links to two short stories available for free on the web. Read up and dive in, my friends:
Michael "Talien" Tresca is the National RPG and Sci-Fi Movie Examiner and recently published three books, the non-fiction history of gaming, The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games from McFarland Publishing, his fantasy fiction debut, The Well of Stars, from Three Ravens Books, and the young adult fantasy Awfully Familiar from Dark Quest Books. Michael has authored numerous supplements and adventures for publishers of Open Game License and D20-compatible games, including AEG, MonkeyGod Enterprises, Goodman Games, Otherworld Creations, Privateer Press, RPGObjects and Ronin Arts. A top 1,000 reviewer for Amazon, his articles and reviews have appeared in Allgame.com, D20 Filtered, Dragon Magazine, Gamers.com, Pyramid, RPG.net, and Sharktopus. He has participated in panels about electronic and tabletop role-playing games at ConnectiCon, Dragon*Con, and I-Con. For more info see http://michael.tresca.net.
Brian M. Sammons has been writing reviews on all things horror for more years than he’d care to admit. Wanting to give other critics the chance to ravage his work for a change, he has penned a few short stories that have appeared in such anthologies as Arkham Tales, Horrors Beyond, Monstrous, Dead but Dreaming 2, Horror for the Holidays, Hellfire Club 3, Twisted Legends, Letters from the Dead, Over the Mountains of Madness, and Once Upon an Apocalypses. He has edited the shot story anthologies; Cthulhu Unbound 3, Undead & Unbound, Eldritch Chrome, Edge of Sundown, and Steampunk Cthulhu. For Call of Cthulhu he wrote the book Secrets, has contributed to both Keeper’s Companions, wrote a companion scenario for the Keeper’s Screen, and has had scenarios in the books Terrors From Beyond, The San Francisco Guidebook, Houses of R’lyeh, Strange Aeons 2, Atomic Age Cthulhu, and Doors to Darkness. His first novella, The R’lyeh Singularity, co-written with David Conyers, just came out and he is currently far too busy for any sane man. For more about this guy that neighbors describe as "such a nice, quiet man" you can check out his very infrequently updated webpage here: http://brian_sammons.webs.com/.
In addition to running Miskatonic River Press, Tom Lynch has written scenarios for New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, More Adventures in Arkham Country, and such forthcoming books as Tales of the Sleepless City and Chaosium's Doors to Darkness and Atomic Age Cthulhu. Tom has also pried his way into the fiction market and has short fiction in Horror for the Holidays from MRP, and will be appearing in Undead and Unbound, Eldritch Chrome, and another soon-to-be-announced appearance (all three books from Chaosium) as well as such magazines as Tales of the Talisman and the Lovecraft eZine.Tom has been an avid Punktown and Jeffrey Thomas fan for some time now, and is ecstatic to be a part of a project that will bring gamers into this new, dark, twisted world. For more of the story on Tom, check out http://www.miskatonicriverpress.com/about/bio_tom.shtml.
So like I said before...welcome to Punktown! Now gimme your wallet.
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