Signet City Turns Fungal Parasites Into RPG Design
Signet City Turns Fungal Parasites Into RPG Design
Signet City sounds like Gareth Damian Martin refusing to simply make Citizen Sleeper again, and that is the most promising thing about it.
Rock Paper Shotgun’s feature describes the game as a first-person fungalpunk RPG from the creator of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper. The setup is immediately strange: the player is not just a wandering hero in a new city. You are a fungal parasite waking inside a human host, sensing emotions, memories, and social pressure from within.
A City Built Around Hosts, Not Quest Boards
The city itself draws on the industrial North of Britain, with smoking factory stacks, brutalist buildings, concrete underpasses, and a fungal mass called the Canker sitting at the center of the setting’s technology. The article describes “fungal computing,” a signet device that lets people access a fungal network, and a society shaped by that biology-meets-industry premise.
That gives Signet City a clear design problem to solve: how do you make an RPG where the player is powerful, but not socially visible? Damian Martin’s answer, according to the feature, is to make hosts matter. Each host has relationships, memories, obligations, and emotional triggers. The parasite feeds on emotions and turns them into a resource for action.
The Interesting Moral Hook
For Christian players, the premise raises a useful question before the game is even out: are you helping your hosts, using them, or doing both while pretending otherwise? The feature quotes Damian Martin discussing the line between symbiosis and parasitism, and that distinction could give the game more bite than a standard “choose good or evil” morality meter.
The comparison point is not just Citizen Sleeper. Rock Paper Shotgun notes influences and echoes ranging from Disco Elysium-style interiority to tabletop RPG The Veil. The common thread is interior life: emotions, memories, and identity are not flavor text. They are the machinery of play.
Signet City is still in development and more than a year away from release, according to the feature. That makes this less of a buying recommendation and more of a watchlist flag. But for readers who care about narrative RPGs with unusual moral texture, it is worth tracking now.
If Citizen Sleeper asked what a person is worth inside a corporate machine, Signet City looks ready to ask what influence costs when your survival depends on someone else’s inner life. That is uncomfortable territory, which is exactly why it could be interesting.
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