A Land Once Magic is the Fantasy I've Been Looking For - Review

10 Sep, 2026

I love fantasy like a childhood friend.

That’s precisely why it’s so disheartening to grow up, come home for the holidays, run into fantasy again at the grocery store, and realize it’s been playing on the same playground this whole damn time.

Think back to your first experience with Lord of the Rings. What staggers me every time I return to that world is how, even decades later, it still feels magical. Compare that to a lot of modern titles, and even among the Good Fantasy™, it can feel like the genre’s magic is…missing. So many fantasy worlds are so similar, their tropes so codified, their iconography and assumptions so interchangeable. And when some of the most popular and well-regarded fantasy stories to come out recently¹ are all riffing on, subverting, or otherwise working with those same old tropes? It can feel like the genre is eating itself alive, the way Marvel and Star Wars films have turned into unwieldy networks of references to their own lore. What a backwards way to go for a genre where the very premise is that it can be anything you can imagine.

Viditya Voleti, designer of the fantasy worldbuilding RPG A Land Once Magic,² has a solution: a subgenre termed “post-fantasy,” present in the game’s tagline, and elaborated on in its foreword and afterword. On a surface level, the idea of post-fantasy is as simple as asking: “what if we could recapture the magic of fantasy by making unique settings again?” But under the surface, it’s also about updating fantasy themes for the modern era. A Land Once Magic is purpose-built for the task, and succeeds beautifully.

The Palette and Touchstones immediately prod you towards uniqueness

A Land Once Magic’s opening steps are crucial: the players decide on a series of descriptive words—appropriately called “paints,” arranged together into a “palette”—and a series of touchstones to serve as guidelines for the upcoming brainstorming.

Right at step one, the palette’s focus on specific aesthetics, themes, and moods challenges players create fantasy that’s noticeably distinct from the usual template, even at a glance. The example paints help players do this by providing example words not typically used to describe fantasy: “acrid,” “heavy,” “gentle,” et cetera. Like real paints, how much your group uses them is up to you; each one could fill the entire canvas, speckle it almost invisibly, or anything in between, so there’s no fear of getting locked into something before you know if it works. Instead, the paints simply provide a sense of direction, and something for players to reach for to inspire or justify their contributions.

Next, there’s the touchstones, where you pull specific ideas and/or vibes from pieces of media, an obvious instinct when pitching fiction to your friends. But here’s the kicker: NO FANTASY MEDIA ALLOWED.

That’s right, bucko. We are not in the business of coming up with a take on the same old Tolkien-esque rigamarole. We’re in the business of making something NEW.

The examples in the book are broad enough—from “Legally Blonde’s fierce determination in the face of prejudice” to “Borderlands’ funky guns”—that anyone should be able to think of something that interests them. Combining these touchstones with the palette will immediately get everyone’s brains whirring. Usually, players begin pitching the general shape of the world at this point, before that process is even supposed to begin. I see that as a selling point rather than a flaw; with two simple steps, this game will make your imagination run so wild, you won’t be able to hold it back.

The tables and prompts are just specific enough

From there, players take turns drawing from a deck of playing cards, reading the associated prompt, and then opening up the discussion, with the player who drew the card getting the final say. The usual pitfall with these sorts of prompt tables is failing to strike a balance, either making them too broad to foster creativity or too specific to feel like the game is your own. Luckily, A Land Once Magic springs over said pitfall,³ providing a structured experience where you still have all the creative freedom you could need.

It’s here where the specifics of what Voleti means by “post-fantasy” make themselves known. As a guest on an episode of the excellent Yes Indie’d Podcast, he makes a great point about classic fantasy: it is often colonial by its very nature. Not in the sense of being colonialist propaganda (though some of it obviously is), but in the sense of dealing with colonial themes: the strangeness of outsiders and the world away from home, whether these things pose a threat, conquering other cultures or being conquered by them, et cetera. This hearkens back to an age where these themes were of greater concern to a less interconnected humanity, which, in the modern era, is interesting, but maybe not as inventive or illuminating as it could be.⁴ Through its prompts, A Land Once Magic homes in on things that are infinitely more modern—environmental change, what new developments mean for the future, who benefits from the status quo and why, what a better society might look like—while still feeling like fantasy, with evolving magic, legends, heroes, villains, journeys, beasts, traditions, omens, and more. Voleti proposes “speculative fantasy” as a potentially better name than post-fantasy, and after playing the game, it’s easy to understand why: A Land Once Magic wants you to create fantasy that’s about tomorrow instead of yesterday.

As you follow these prompts and build your world, the game zooms in, gradually increasing the amount of detail, and before you even know it, you won’t just have a world, but a narrative. Then, it ends, leaving off right when you most want to know what happens next. The game suggests picking an RPG system beforehand, letting its limitations shape the world you create, and then using it to play in the setting you made. Nothing has made me want to do that more than having to move on from these worlds that me and my friends have created. The process of creating them is rewarding in and of itself, but it aches to leave them behind. They feel too good not do something with.

Flaws? Heheh, as if! ...(There is one, actually)

I'm glad A Land Once Magic is so slim; light rules create approachability that can help draw apprehensive players in, and it's far and away preferable to a bloated book hiding a few good needles inside a haystack of mediocrity. However, its small size does mean that it has a relatively short lifespan. Replay it too much, particularly if you do so with the same people, and you may find yourselves traveling down familiar worldbuilding paths, or deciding to ignore the results of drawn cards, spiraling off into unstructured brainstorming.

The otherwise excellent prompt tables are primarily at fault for this; there just aren’t that many results. For two or three plays, they're a cornucopia, but they fall short of the infinite potential plays provided by the insane quantity of table options in Ex Novo, for example.⁵ Even on your second playthrough, you may draw into a prompt that you’ve already used in a previous game and experience something like the white bear phenomenon, trying to think of a new interpretation as your mind unhelpfully floods with your previous one.

Granted, this a minor complaint. Any game becomes stale if played too much. But A Land Once Magic has such a straightforward, compelling structure that I’m sad I won’t be able to keep playing it forever. Whatever form a follow-up, supplement, or hack might take, I'd be there, day one.

Learning to love collaborative world-building

Trying solo RPGs taught me that interacting with other people is what I get out of this hobby.

It’s not just that I like playing games with my friends, though. Playing solo made me realize that I can’t get the same results when it's just me. The other players bring ideas to a shared game that I never could have brought myself, and vice versa. The alchemy that comes from this meeting of the minds is what makes the stories we tell through play feel so damn special.

I realize now that I am basically using my friends as dice. Sure, I’ll double down on that. Other people are the best dice imaginable. They already bring ideas to the game when they roleplay and invent backstories; why not let them bring even more?

Many, when confronted with the idea of collaborative worldbuilding, feel the control freak instinct seizing them. This is incredibly understandable. Worldbuilding solo is a ton of fun, and also maybe a better route towards coherence.⁶ But A Land Once Magic is designed for 2+ players; following the prompts all by your lonesome might be neat, but it won’t get you anywhere that feels all that unique to you. The other people are the X-factor in this game, breaking you out of your worldbuilding rut by spinning your ideas in ways you would have never thought to. Not to mention, you get the satisfaction of doing the same for them. At the end of the game, you’ll have a setting that none of you had authoritarian control over, but in which you’re all way more invested than you would be if you were merely learning about someone else’s setting. You will feel like geniuses, a group of great minds thinking alike.

There are, of course, other games you can go to for that kind of collaborative worldbuilding: The Quiet Year, Microscope, and Ex Novo are just a few of many great options. But if you want to watch the magic return to fantasy...A Land Once Magic is the best place to start.