Congratulations to the 2020 ENnies Winners!

In an online ceremony hosted by Robin D. Laws, Misha Bushyager, Kenneth Hite, Chris Spivey, and Mike Pondsmith, the RPG awards for 2020 were announced last night, with the gold award for Product of the Year going to MÖRK BORG by Free League Publishing (who also took home the gold for Best Game with their Alien RG).

Best Family Game / Product
Silver – Kids on Bikes: Strange Adventures Volume 2 (Renegade Games)
Gold – Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (River Horse)

Best Aid or Accessory
Silver – The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats (Loke Battlemats)
Gold – Deck of Many Animated Spells (Hit Point Press)

Best Online Content
Silver – RPG Writers Workshop (Scribemind)
Gold – The Monsters Know What They’re Doing (Saga Press)

Best Podcast
Silver – Red Moon Roleplaying
Gold – Asians Represent!

Best Monster/Adversary
Silver – Big Bad Booklet 1-6 (Hit Point Press
Gold – Mordenkainen’s Fiendish Folio, Volume 1: Monsters Malevolent and Benign (Wizards of the Coast)

Best Cover Art
Silver – The Ultraviolet Grasslands (Exalted Funeral Press)
Gold – Call of Cthulhu – Berlin the Wicked City (Chaosium)

Best Interior Art
Silver – Strata (Rowan, Rook and Decard)
Gold – The Ultraviolet Grasslands (Exalted Funeral Press)

Best Organized Play
Silver – Where Can She Be? (Robbie Pleasant)
Gold – Stygia Untamed (Greasy Snitches and Paul Gabat)

Best Free Game/Product
Silver – Tunnel Goons (Highland Paranormal Society)
Gold – TTRPG Safety Toolkit (Smooching Knife)

Best RPG Related Product
Silver – Session Zero (John C. Byram)
Gold – Absinthe in Carcosa (Pelgrane Press)

Best Electronic Book
Silver – Uncaged Volume III (Scribemind)
Gold – New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley 2nd Ed (Stygian Fox)

Best Layout and Design
Silver – A Pound of Flesh (Tuesday Knight Games)
Gold – MÖRK BORG (Free League Publishing)

Best Cartography
Silver – Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (River Horse)
Gold – Trilemma Adventures Compendium Vol 1 (Trilemma Adventures)

Best Rules
Silver – Zombie World (Magpie Games)
Gold – Thousand Year Old Vampire (Petit Guignol)

Best Writing
Silver – The Monsters Know What They Are Doing (Saga Press)
Gold – MÖRK BORG (Free League Publishing)

Best Adventure
Silver – Trilemma Adventures Compendium Vol 1 (Trilemma Adventures)
Gold – A Pound of Flesh (Tuesday Knight Games)

Best Setting
Silver – Arkadia – The Greek Setting for 5e (Arcana Games)
Gold – Call of Cthulhu: Berlin the Wicked City (Chaosium)

Best Supplement
Silver – Ironsworn Delve (Shawn Tomkin)
Gold – Delta Green: The Labyrinth (Arc Dream Publishing)

Best Production Values
Silver – Humblewood Box Set (Hit Point Press)
Gold – Thousand Year Old Vampire (Petit Guignol)

Fans’ Choice for Best Publisher
Gold – Free League Publishing

Best Game
Silver – MÖRK BORG (Free League Publishing)
Gold – ALIEN the Roleplaying Game (Free League Publishing)

Product of the Year
Silver – Thousand Year Old Vampire (Petit Guignol)
Gold – MÖRK BORG (Free League Publishing)

Judges’ Spotlight Awards
Sleepaway (Jay Dragon)
Glitter Hearts (Greg Leatherman)
Refractions in Glasston (Taylor University PWR Press, Sam Guinsatao, Carson Jacobs, T.R. Knight, Joy Lemont, Elijah Oates, Rayce Patterson, Emily Pawlowski, J. Tucker White)
Knarls Candy Compendium (Makenzie De Armas, Levi Phipps)
Hit the Streets, Defend the Block (Rich Rogers)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So essentially, the Ennies are the independent small-press RPG awards. Any reason they don't just call them that?

Because they're open to everyone.

What if, let's pretend, only left-handed people submitted entries to the Ennies. Would you like them to relabel their awards in response?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It would be like if the only movies nominated for Academy Awards were independent films that only had limited release on 100 or fewer screens, or the Pulitzers were only open to books that sold fewer than 10k copies.

I guess industry leaders feel giving publicity to small publishers is more worthwhile than recognizing excellence in the field. But even if that's the case, the boost is probably negligible, along the lines of selling 700 copies of a product instead of 400. It all seems like inside baseball at that point, and nothing really to do with average gamers at all. And no, people who read this forum daily and buy multiple indie RPG books a year are not average gamers.

You've got some strange ideas on book sales numbers. (Also, are most people focused on the Pulitzers for books?) The game titles that were finalists and winners for Ennies all sold more than 700 copies before this point. And even established novelists have a hard time selling more than 10k copies.

Again, folks, please stop extrapolating your personal experiences and tastes to somehow being representative of the industry. You aren't a bad person for not giving a crap about stuff you don't give a crap about, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to have the same tastes.

If you, for whatever reason, aren't interested in games that aren't made by Paizo or Wizards of the Coast anyway, do you really need awards to recognize them? Just go buy some gold stickers and put them on the covers of your copies.

 

[MGibster]

The Ennies are s pretty good representation of the gaming landscape. There are just so many games available to choose from these days. You might not find them at your FLGS, but you can buy them online.

 

[Haffrung]

Again, folks, please stop extrapolating your personal experiences and tastes to somehow being representative of the industry. You aren't a bad person for not giving a crap about stuff you don't give a crap about, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to have the same tastes.

As someone who spends a lot of time on RPG forums and has heard of several of the nominated games, I'm well aware my experience is not representative of the wider RPG public. Everyone on this forum, heck pretty much everyone who has even heard of the Ennies, makes up a tiny and unrepresentative sample of the RPG player and buyer base, which is estimated to number in the millions.

I'm not making a value statement. Popularity and awareness have little correlation to quality (assuming we can even agree on what quality means). I don't see why it's necessary or dispute comments pointing out how few people play the games nominated. The local indie bands in my city struggle to get more than 50 or 60 people out to a live show. Doesn't mean they aren't great bands. It does mean they aren't popular if 95 per cent even of live music fans have never heard of them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For the record, comparing these products to local indie bands is a real disservice to the RPG creators involved.

There are thousands of people playing Mork Borg, for instance. (500-999 PDF sales in English at DriveThruRPG, plus 1,152 folks from the Kickstarter, plus all the folks who've bought it through retail outlets, which are numbers that only Free League will know, at the end of the day.)

Uncaged III is a Platinum seller at DriveThruRPG, which means it has sold between one to two thousand copies (comparable to WotC's lone entry on the list, interestingly).

Most indie bands would be pretty happy with either of those numbers. I know musicians who still can't unload all the cassettes they all had optimistically made back in the day.

If the only stuff that should be considered for major awards is stuff that sells in the millions, there's only a handful of products that are eligible ever in the RPG space. WotC has said that most people buy the core books and then just make up in their own content, so the multi-million seller list is likely very, very small. I don't think the Ennies should just keep giving the 5E PHB an award every year.

 

[dragoner]

I still haven't seen any products put forth by the complainers that they think should have won.