The ancient world.
Fantasy worlds, always, but worlds that look backwards. Every place we write gathers up what is beautiful in human history: the wonders of the Mediterranean, the sacredness of nature, time measured out by the moon and the seasons.
About us
Anthemon Fellowship
Manifesto
A game night can be a beautiful thing. Carefully written, well paced, elegant in its rules, and able to move you.
Storytelling with weight.
What matters most to us is the moment a player stops looking at the character sheet. A description that makes people lower their voices, an NPC you grow attached to, a choice that truly costs something. A story that tries, quietly and without pretension, to change not only the character but the player as well.
Lean systems.
We believe in mechanics that add tension without adding weight: limited resources, decisions with a cost, rules a GM can handle while narrating. We test, we cut, we trim. Our material is not here to overturn the game you already play at your table: it widens it, and disappears when it is not needed.
Design is storytelling.
The choice of a typeface, the breathing room of a margin, the way a page looks under a lamp while four people wait: these are narrative decisions as much as any description. That is why we treat layout and illustration with the same care we give the text.
Roleplaying matters.
Around a table you spend a few hours living as someone you are not, and you come back a millimeter changed. It is an exercise in imagination, in language, in empathy — as true for a twelve-year-old as for a group of adults who have met every Thursday for thirty years. We publish knowing this: what we write becomes a real experience between real people.
The people
We work in Brescia, in northern Italy, where the plain ends and the hills begin: scorching summers, freezing winters, and enough woods around us to feel the seasons go by.
Anthemon Fellowship began as an idea of Francesco Viganò, founder and lead designer. Every project takes shape with Tommaso Boglioni on mechanics, Marco Bertocchi on illustration, and a number of other skilled collaborators.
All of it comes to life at the tables of our own gaming groups.
The game table
Before the printed books and the website there are the game nights: dice, snacks, arguments about the rules and jokes that never stop. That is where every Anthemon book gets tested, and that is where all of this started.
How we work
Our worlds, the adventures, the mechanics, the graphic design and the layout are written and built by the people above.
The illustrations in our first books were made with artificial intelligence tools. With Epteka we are starting to illustrate by hand, with the goal of reaching books drawn entirely by people.
Our original text and rules are released under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
Pull up a chair.
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