If Cyberpunk is a genre that explores modern trends and concerns about technology, society, and big business using settings with cyborgs, hackers, and megacorps, then "Dungeonpunk" and the various RPGs within this genre is about transplanting those very same trends and concerns into the classic western fantasy world seen in works like Dungeons & Dragons. If raiding dungeons for treasure becomes a business, will adventurers form a labor union? If magic is a scholarly discipline, why can't it be used to empower technology? The following Tabletop RPGs explore questions like these with novel mechanics, vivid settings, and varying ratios of optimism and cynicism.
Dungeonpunk, compared to Cyberpunk, Steampunk, exploring D&D-style dungeons, looting treasure, and fighting monsters with the non-conformist, anti-authoritarian themes of classic punk sub-culture, forcing fantasy heroes to grapple with modern concerns like powerful corporations, industrial technology, the ethics of exterminating kobolds and slimes, etc.
The following Tabletop RPGs all explore different aspects of the "Dungeonpunk" genre – some immerse players in worlds where technology and magic are the same, others portray adventurers as wage slaves or rebels in a dungeon-delving industry, while others portray fantasy adventuring as a recreational activity on par with cross-country hiking or extreme sports. The common element among all these games is the use of modern tech and culture to make the classic fantasy setting more familiar, plus a willingness to explore the logical implications of a world where fighting monsters and raiding tombs for treasure is a viable career path.
Dungeonpunk Tabletop Game: Sword And Backpack
More light-hearted than other Dungeonpunk RPGs on the market, the freeform rules of Sword And Backpack are designed to be printed out, cut, and pasted into a Moleskin notebook. In this book, players will jot down story notes, catalog different spell chants (which they must recite from memory to cast), draw maps, record the contents of their PC's backpack, and draw sketches.
This self-made, custom "Rulebook" is a prop version of the "Sword & Backpack: The Young Adventurer’s Almanac, 5th Edition," an in-game survival manual for aspiring fantasy adventurers. The Dungeonpunk Manifesto written up by the creators of Sword And Backpack describes their game's protagonists as a mix of classic fantasy explorers, rock stars on a road trip, and wilderness backpackers, strongly emphasizing the importance of fantasy adventure and journey over murder, intolerance, or rigid adherence to rules.
Dungeonpunk Tabletop Games - Spire: The City Must Fall & Heart: The City Beneath
Grim and bloody, the two signature RPGs of the Rowan, Rook and Decard game studio deconstruct and re-imagine two classic staples of D&D-style fantasy - fantasy races like elves and the exploration of of deep, labyrinthine dungeons. In Spire: The City Must Fall, players are oppressed dark elves in the towering city of Spire, crushed under their heels of their cybernetically augmented high elf ruling class. In most campaigns, said player will a revolutionary faction called the Ministry, mastering forbidden magics and committing violent deeds in the hopes of one day restoring the freedom and heritage of the Drow people.
Heart: The City Beneath, in contrast, takes place many miles beneath the city of Spire, where desperate, flawed adventurers called Delvers embark on expeditions into living, fleshy dungeon called the Heart, risking mutation, death, and fates far worse in pursuit of their dreams. Discounting their dark themes of body horror and oppression, the Spire and Heart RPGs also put spins on classic fantasy character classes, letting players roleplay as sorcerers infested by colonies of bees or holy knights who worship municipal subway systems.
Dungeonpunk Tabletop Game: Electric Bastionland
Electric Bastionland, designed by Chris McDowall, is an Old School Revival inspired RPG set in Bastion, a colorful, sprawling, yet vaguely defined Art Deco metropolis filled with strange sub-cultures, feuding political factions and reality-breaking devices and secrets called "Oddities." Each player character, generated through rolling dice and the consulting of intricate backstory charts, is a Treasure Hunter trying to work off massive debts gained in the wake of a 100 possible failed careers.
While adventuring to pay off their debts, both players and the Game Referee give shape to the mysterious, undefined city of Bastion using Spark Tables, dice charts that generate new characters, locales, perils, and mysteries to interact with.
Dungeonpunk Tabletop Game - Dungeons & Dragons: Eberron
The brainchild of game designer and novelist Keith Baker, Eberron is a Dungeons & Dragons setting drastically different from the pre-modern medieval worlds of most D&D settings.
On the continent of Khorvaire, the cunning of magical artificers has birthed societies where wands are as common as handguns, railroad networks and airships are propelled by conjured lightning, and the great nations of the world are recovering from a devastating Last War where magitech robots called Warforged were constructed to be thinking weapons of war.
The player characters in an Eberron campaign are generally discharged veterans of the Last War, putting their hard-earned skills to use working as mercenaries, bodyguards, sleuths, explorers, and heroes, embroiling themselves in the conspiracies of the Dragonmarked Houses, foiling the sinister schemes of Khyber cultists, and generally engaging in thrilling adventurers inspired by pulp fiction of the 1920s and 1930s.
