It’s cool that Dungeons & Dragons is popular again, and that it’s helped raise the profile of other tabletop role-playing games with it, but sometimes you need something a little bit more than that preteen high fantasy stuff. Sometimes you need to roll into teenage fantasies instead, and which one of those has been more meaningful and evergreen than punk? Okay, probably a ton of ‘em, but bored and restless kids are always going to get into punk, whatever that means for their generation, and that’s something to be celebrated, encouraged, and leveraged across all manner of art and culture, including role-playing games. And that’s where the underground RPG Mystic Punks comes in.
Set in a world that’s similar to ours but home to magical punks fighting off terrible monsters, Mystic Punks has been bringing punk and dice-based storytelling together for years, starting with self-published solo adventures created by Anthony Meloro just under a decade ago. Longtime collaborator Jay Domingo helped Meloro create a multiplayer tabletop RPG around the game’s concepts and aesthetic, and the result is now the focus of a Kickstarter campaign being run by the two and the publisher Exalted Funeral Press. If you’re wondering what role-playing has to do with punk, well, punk’s always been more of a mindset than a musical style—a personally-defined set of ethics and beliefs about creating art without bending to commercial or corporate influence. And even a cursory glance at Mystic Punks makes it clear that Meloro and Domingo are operating on their own unique wavelength, one that never strays into the airspace of any of the big names in the TTRPG scene.
With just over two weeks to go before its April 20 deadline, the Mystic Punks campaign is on pace to hit its funding goals, but that can always be tricky to predict. It’s currently sitting at just over $30000 out of its $45000 goal, and for fans of the Mystic Punks world and weird, unusual games as a whole, hopefully it’ll cross that line. The lowest donation tier of $25 will net you digital versions of everything on offer, whereas the minimum pledge to snag a physical book is $36. And it’s a nice-looking book, at that: 250 pages with new rules and loot, dozens of spells and beasts, as well as “new weed strains to smoke out your dank Punk.” It also has one heck of a cover by Marra, the creator of the Fantagraphics comic Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War on Terror). At higher tiers you can also get a patch and the source book Mystic Punks: Weird Wanderings Vol. 1, with adventures written by Levi Combs, Steve Albertson, and John “Hambone” McGuire, and a cover by Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt. Stretch goals include new adventures, a Mystic Punks comic by Ben Marra, new classes (including Psi Punk and Daemon Punk), and more.
I’m not going to lie: I haven’t earnestly tried to play a TTRPG in over 30 years. (The kid whose house I was at was excited to play the Tom Cochrane tape with “Life Is a Highway” on it. His little brothers later became a very minor TV curiosity because one of them could flip M&M’s into the other’s mouth with his earlobe.) But with its cool artwork, original theme, and connection to a music and art scene that’s kind of been my main thing since high school, Mystic Punks really speaks to me. It mixes fantasy and horror with musical and artistic subcultures that might not be the most famous but have large, passionate fan bases, and then sets you lose to tell your own story. If that’s not worth Kickstarting, what is?
The Mystic Punks Kickstarter campaign runs until April 20.