Publisher: Lightspress

A core setting guide for mythpunk fantasy roleplaying, written for narrative-first play and compatible with the Principia: The Simple Approach framework, with easy adaptation to other rulesets.

Mythpunk fantasy is set inside living myths that govern daily life. Power moves through gods, oaths, customs, and inherited victories that still sort protection from exposure. Law, labor, and violence carry mythic force because they were shaped long before the characters arrived. Play begins with the assumption that these structures persist, watch for disruption, and respond when crossed. Characters act within systems that expect continuity and react when that continuity is strained.

The defining pressure comes from systems that hold memory. Authority responds to interference through obligation, reputation, and reprisal. Social order tightens access, assigns debt, and redirects blame. Ritual fixes outcomes into place and makes reversal costly. Violence rearranges status and protection rather than settling disputes. Each choice reshapes future conditions, because the world records disturbance and adjusts behavior around it.

This book exists to keep that pressure present and legible at the table. Its use produces sessions where actions carry forward and attention compounds. Interference establishes standing and draws response. Power answers through altered relationships, lost shelter, enforced duty, and narrowing options. Supporting characters remain subject to consequence rather than absorbing it for others. Authority responds through people and institutions. Rebellion becomes sustained effort that consumes time, safety, and trust while binding characters more tightly to the world they’re altering.

Preparation focuses on forces that retain memory and resist collapse. Between sessions, it helps restore stakes when play settles into routine. At the table, it aligns expectations about escalation, fallout, and follow through. Responsibility for consequence circulates across participants, shaping conduct alongside fiction.

The book assumes collaboration built on shared risk. Harm lingers. Victories complicate what follows. Violence reshapes social position and obligation. Myth acts through custom, institution, and enforcement as much as through story. Attention before play begins matters here because this mode of play depends on continuity. What changes remains changed, and everyone at the table accepts the weight of carrying those marks forward once the story is in motion.