What Is Signet City? Meet the Fungalpunk RPG Rewriting the Rules
There is no shortage of tabletop roleplaying games on the market today, but every once in a while something surfaces that refuses to fit neatly into any existing category. Signet City, the brainchild of game designer and artist Gareth Damian Martin, is exactly that kind of project. Described with the evocative label of "fungalpunk," this RPG is bold, strange, uncompromising, and deeply political — and it is already generating serious buzz among fans of avant-garde game design.
If you have never heard the term fungalpunk before, you are not alone. While subgenres like cyberpunk, steampunk, and solarpunk have established themselves in mainstream gaming and fiction, fungalpunk carves out its own peculiar niche — one rooted in decay, growth, transformation, and the unsettling beauty of the organic world gone strange. Signet City leans into that aesthetic with full force, and the results are unlike anything else on tabletop shelves right now.
Who Is Gareth Damian Martin?
Gareth Damian Martin is not a newcomer to experimental game design. Best known as the creator of the critically acclaimed video game Citizen Sleeper — a narrative RPG about a fugitive android worker surviving at the edge of a capitalist space station — Martin has consistently shown an appetite for politically charged storytelling and unconventional worldbuilding. His work tends to sit at the intersection of speculative fiction, social commentary, and deeply humanistic character work.
With Signet City, Martin makes his move into tabletop roleplaying, bringing with him the same restless creative energy that made Citizen Sleeper a standout hit. For players who loved that game's emphasis on precarity, community, and systemic oppression told through intimate personal stories, Signet City promises to scratch a very similar itch — albeit through dice, rulebooks, and a table full of friends rather than a screen.
The Inspirations Behind Signet City Are As Weird As the Game Itself
Part of what makes Signet City so compelling is the sheer eclecticism of its source material. Martin has spoken openly about drawing from a genuinely diverse range of influences to build the game's world and tone, and the list is as unexpected as you might hope.
Horror manga sits at one end of the spectrum. Japanese horror comics — particularly the grotesque, body-horror-inflected tradition associated with artists like Junji Ito — have clearly left their mark on the game's aesthetic sensibility. The fungal imagery central to Signet City's identity shares that same fascination with flesh, transformation, and the terror of the uncontrollable organic.
At the other end of the inspiration dial, perhaps more surprisingly, sits a musical by Sting. Martin has referenced the rock star's theatrical stage work as an influence on the project's tone and ambition, suggesting that Signet City aims for something genuinely theatrical — a game that wants to be performed as much as played. This combination of J-horror dread and rock musical bravado gives you some sense of the tonal range Martin is working with.
Additional influences reportedly include political theory, countercultural zines, underground architecture, and the kind of speculative urbanism that imagines cities not as monuments to human progress but as living, rotting, breathing organisms in their own right. Signet City, as a setting, feels like it grew rather than was built.
Politics at the Table: Why Signet City Refuses to Be Neutral
One of the most distinctive and deliberate choices Martin has made with Signet City is its refusal to sanitize its politics. Where many RPGs either avoid political content entirely or gesture vaguely at themes of good versus evil, Signet City appears to engage with ideology directly and without apology.
This is consistent with Martin's broader philosophy as a designer. Citizen Sleeper was openly critical of late-stage capitalism, precarious labor, and corporate ownership of human lives — and it found a wide, enthusiastic audience that responded to that honesty. Signet City continues in that tradition, using its fungalpunk setting to explore questions of power, resistance, community, and what it means to build something sustainable in the ruins of a system that failed everyone.
For players tired of RPGs that ask them to save a kingdom while never questioning who the kingdom actually serves, Signet City offers a genuinely different proposition. The politics here are not window dressing. They are embedded in the mechanics, the setting, and the kinds of stories the game is designed to generate.
What the Fungalpunk Aesthetic Means for Gameplay
Aesthetically, the fungalpunk label does a lot of work in Signet City. Fungi represent something specific in the cultural imagination: they are simultaneously beautiful and repulsive, destructive and generative, ancient and alien. They break down dead matter and return it to the soil. They form vast underground networks — mycorrhizal webs — that connect and sustain entire ecosystems invisibly.
As a metaphor for a city, and for the kinds of communities and resistances that grow within decaying urban systems, fungal imagery is remarkably apt. Signet City appears to use this symbolism thoughtfully, building a setting where the strange and the organic have reclaimed space from whatever more sterile civilization came before.
Why Signet City Could Be One of the Most Important RPGs of 2025
The tabletop RPG space is more crowded and more creative than it has ever been, but Signet City stands out for reasons that go beyond its striking concept. It represents a designer at the height of their powers making a genuine leap into new territory, backed by a coherent artistic vision and a willingness to be genuinely strange and genuinely political in equal measure.
For players seeking something that challenges them intellectually and emotionally — something that feels like it actually has something to say — Signet City looks like a very promising answer. Keep your eyes on Gareth Damian Martin. Whatever the fungus is growing into, it is going to be worth watching.