Gareth Damian Martin Announces Signet City
Gareth Damian Martin, the developer behind the acclaimed RPG Citizen Sleeper, has unveiled their next project: Signet City, a self-described “fungalpunk” role-playing game that puts players inside the body – and agenda – of a fungal parasite navigating a city in terminal decline. The announcement marks Martin’s first major reveal since Citizen Sleeper carved out a devoted following for its bleak, dice-driven storytelling set aboard a crumbling space station.
Signet City is not a sequel.
Where Citizen Sleeper asked players to survive as a human consciousness trapped in a corporate-owned robot body, the new game flips the biological premise entirely – you are not trying to be human, you are something that feeds on the structures humans leave behind. The dying city is not just backdrop; it is, presumably, both host and obstacle, a place rotting at a pace the parasite must learn to read and exploit. Martin has not released a full gameplay breakdown, but the “fungalpunk” label alone suggests a design philosophy that leans into decay, symbiosis, and systems that collapse in slow motion rather than dramatic explosions.
What “Fungalpunk” Actually Signals
The genre tag “fungalpunk” is doing real work here. Punk subgenres in games – cyberpunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk – function as aesthetic and ideological shorthand, telling players what kind of world they are entering and, more importantly, what that world believes about power and survival. Fungalpunk, as a label, borrows from mycology’s growing cultural footprint: the past decade has seen fungi repositioned in popular imagination from passive decomposers to active, networked intelligence – wood wide web discourse, The Last of Us, foraging culture, and a wave of speculative fiction that treats mycelium as a model for decentralized systems. Martin is working in that current, but the parasite framing is darker than most of it.
Most fungi-as-protagonist stories emphasize cooperation and underground networks. A parasitic fungus is different. It does not build; it infiltrates, alters behavior in its host, and spreads. Framing the player as that kind of organism inside a dying city is a pointed design choice – one that raises immediate questions about agency, morality, and what “winning” even looks like in a game where your character’s success might mean accelerating the city’s collapse rather than preventing it.
Martin built Citizen Sleeper around exactly these kinds of uncomfortable structural questions. The game’s dice mechanics were not just a randomness system – they modeled physical deterioration, corporate dependency, and the grinding exhaustion of precarious survival. If Signet City carries that design instinct forward, the fungal parasite conceit is probably not cosmetic. It is likely the mechanical and narrative spine of the entire experience.
Why This Announcement Matters for Indie RPG Fans
Martin’s output is small but carries weight in a specific corner of the RPG market – players who want games that treat systemic collapse and marginal existence as primary subject matter rather than flavor text. Citizen Sleeper earned that audience through rigor: its world felt thought-through at the level of economics and labor, not just lore. A new project from Martin lands differently than a sequel announcement from a large studio, because the audience already trusts the design instincts involved. The question is not whether Signet City will be competently made; the question is how far Martin is willing to push a premise that, on paper, is significantly stranger than anything in Citizen Sleeper.
“Dying city” as a setting is well-trodden ground in games. Detroit, Midgar, Dunwall – urban decline is almost a genre convention at this point, often used to justify aesthetic choices (rust, neon, fog) without interrogating what actually kills a city or who benefits from the process. A fungal parasite protagonist reframes that question structurally. The player character is not a hero trying to save the city, not a detective uncovering what went wrong, and not a survivor clinging to the margins. The player character is something that requires the city to already be dying. That is a genuinely unusual starting position for an RPG.
No release date, platforms, or pricing have been announced for Signet City. What exists publicly, for now, is the name, the genre tag, the creator’s identity, and the core concept: fungal parasite, dying city, RPG. Martin has offered no further details beyond the reveal itself.
For a developer whose previous game spent its entire runtime asking whether survival inside a broken system makes you complicit in that system, the choice to make the player character an organism that literally cannot exist without a host in decline is either the most consistent creative decision Martin has ever made – or the setup for a much harder question about what the parasite eventually does when the city finally stops moving.
