Gareth Damian Martin, the developer behind Citizen Sleeper, has announced a new RPG called Signet City, in which players inhabit a fungal parasite moving through a dying city.
Martin revealed the project this week with a brief premise: Signet City is a "fungalpunk" RPG set in a failing urban environment, and players are the parasite itself, not a human navigating its effects. No release window, platforms, or gameplay footage have been shared. The announcement is a name, a genre tag, and a central concept.
Citizen Sleeper earned its reputation by making alienation mechanical. You played a digital mind leased into a body it did not own, and the dice tracked how fast you were deteriorating. The pattern here is legible: Martin keeps returning to protagonists that exist outside normal human experience and builds games around what that actually costs. A parasitic organism consuming a dying city is a logical, if grimmer, extension of that project.
"Fungalpunk" will either crystallize into a real genre tag or remain a one-developer coinage. Martin may be the only person positioned to decide which.