Our Story

It was a hobbyist’s nightmare that turned into a pipe dream.

The first one was pine, bartop resin and an old Mac Mini. It was rough and it was very cool, and that was the problem: once it worked, there was no going back. Everything you could buy was either nice furniture with laptops piled on top, or a screen crammed into a box that looked like a man cave made a booty call.

The Team

Who builds it

Prime Material Planes is three co-founders. Matt designs and builds, Charlotte turned the idea into a brand and a business, and Nathan engineers the hardware. Every decision on this website survived an argument between the three of us.

01
Founder & CEO
Matt Gasbarre
Playing since a 4th Edition game in 2008. Matt designed and built the 2023 prototype this company grew out of, and still owns product vision, design direction, and the worldbuilding behind the Astral Plane.
02
Brand & Operations
Charlotte Lewis
Charlotte saw the second table design and recognized a market before anyone else did. She runs brand and operations, and owns the words and the systems behind them.
03
Hardware Engineering
Nathan Rauch
A friend from Matt’s longest-running campaign, now the engineer behind the build. Nathan wants the table to work so smoothly you forget it’s there. If this site says a feature works, he has tested it.

The Origin

From a 4th Edition game in 2008 to a shop in Bozeman

Told by Matt Gasbarre, founder and creative director.

01 / 01

2008

A door opens.

Someone handed me D&D 4th Edition and that was that. What hooked me was the room: friends building a world together. Some of my favorite memories still live in those sessions.

2020

The line in the sand.

Friends moved. Calendars filled. The gaps between sessions stretched from weeks into months, and then distance stopped being a choice. Remote play could almost hold the feeling of everyone in one room. Almost was not good enough.

2023

The pine table.

The straightest cheap lumber I could find, an OLED panel under a window of bartop resin, fold out player and DM stations, and an old Mac Mini running all of it. A remote player in my campaign could finally sit among the group. When it was finished it was glorious, and 3.5 million people on TikTok seemed to agree.

2024

Everything wrong with it.

The Mac Mini couldn’t keep up. Chasing the biggest screen I could fit made the table too big for its room, so getting into a seat was a chore. The station lights were too bright and the DM space was too small. Running a stack of separate programs turned every session into a juggling act. I finished my longest-ever campaign on that table anyway, and then took the whole design back to the drawing board.

Early 2025

It was not just me.

I was showing the new plans to my friend Charlotte when she said the thing I had not considered: I would not be the only person who wanted this. Two weeks of market research later, every night after work, I knew she was right.

April 2025

Prime Material Planes.

My vision, Nathan’s engineering, Charlotte’s eye for the business. We took a shop space and started building it properly. Where everyone else makes a boxy table with a removable lid and a sunken pit, we went solid: displays flush under tempered glass, a trestle base so seating works at any party size, and a shape meant to look like nothing else in the room. Every design pass turned up something else the table could do.

Now

No longer my project.

The prototype is mostly finished. Nathan has taken the build somewhere I could never have reached on my own, and Charlotte turned a workshop obsession into an actual company with a plan behind it. The table is still the thing I dreamed up in an apartment, and it is better than that dream because two other people got hold of it. A Kickstarter is next, and we will talk about this table with anyone who will listen.

Our Philosophy

The wood outlives the electronics. We built around that, on purpose.

Screens age out and ports disappear. Hardwood lasts. So the furniture is the permanent part and the tech is a tenant, and any tenant can be swapped out without touching the wood you chose.

Your dice stay yours. Nothing in the table watches or tracks your roll. It’s between you and gravity, the way it’s been since somebody carved the first die out of bone, and we intend to leave that alone.

We’d rather ship less and tell you plainly. Everything on this site either works today or is marked as in development. ArchmageOS is in development, and we’ll keep you posted on where it stands, including the weeks where the honest update is “not much, still grinding.”

The table is yours. It runs in your home without asking the internet for permission first.

What We Won’t Compromise On

You can fix it.

This table is meant to see a lot of life, and things will happen to it. The wood, glass, screens, lights, speakers and PC all come apart with normal tools and go back together with parts you can buy anywhere.

Bring your own hardware.

The touch layer and glass are independent of the displays underneath. If a panel dies eight years from now, drop in any screen that fits the opening. We don’t want to be the only place you can buy one.

Standard parts, always.

It’s built around standard consumer PC hardware. If you want more memory or a better GPU, buy the same parts everyone else does, from whoever you like.

Your table, your software.

ArchmageOS is our software, and you’re free to replace it. Wipe it and run Windows, or whichever Linux you’d rather spend a weekend fighting with.

Local and private.

There’s no server of ours in the middle of your game. Your characters, maps and twelve years of increasingly deranged world notes live on your machine, in your house. We collect the crash and usage data we need to fix our own bugs, and nothing else.

AI strictly on your terms.

Soundscapes, maps, notes and campaign management all work without AI, and always will. Where AI saves you a tedious hour, it’s optional, and anything we ship runs locally on your table. Your data stays in the room.

We build out in the open, which mostly means you’re going to hear about the screwups too.

One email the day the Kickstarter goes live.