About

Kali and I released High Magic Lowlives, the first game under our shared Gem Room Games imprint, in August of 2019. Despite having not much idea what we were doing, I spent a lot of time concerned with how to describe it. I know exactly what to call a story about a wizard living in modern day New York, but I had no idea how to describe a partnered streamer exploring the bowels of the Lich-King’s ziggurat-keep.

In the end I went with Science Fantasy because Troika! had done that and it was the least-worst thing I could come up with. But I couldn’t quite let it go, and remained green with envy that Massif Press had landed on “mud and lasers modular mech game” for Lancer before they went to print. I needn’t have worried, we wouldn’t be done with High Magic Lowlives for quite some time. We still aren’t.

Since then Kali and I have been lucky to get to know a lot of big brain geniuses in the tabletop RPG space, and we discovered that we, Kegan, and Brandon were all working on different projects with a similar energy. This was exciting for a lot of reasons, not least of which it was a new audience for my complaints about the lack of a good genre for fantasy settings with information era concerns and sensibilities.

Eventually Post-Dungeon Fantasy popped up and it stuck.

This document is intended to be a set of principles of what a Post-Dungeon Fantasy game ought to be. If you might be writing a game that’s a PDF let us know at gemroomgames [at] gmail dot com. I’d like to start highlighting them.

Thanks,

Dan