The ENnie Awards is proud to announce the 2019 Nominations!

Aldarc · Jul 3, 2019

Looking through the list, you can tell that it has been a busy year for Monte Cook Games.

imagineGod · Jul 3, 2019

"Mothership" is quoted as still being in alpha development, not even beta, so is not a properly published complete game, that is if we consider the alpha, beta, release candidate nomenclature.

dalisprime · Jul 3, 2019

Aldarc said:
Looking through the list, you can tell that it has been a busy year for Monte Cook Games.

A lot of it is to do with the heavy slip up they experienced with invisible sun. They essentially ended up in a situation where they were releasing two systems in parallel.

Aldarc · Jul 3, 2019

dalisprime said:
A lot of it is to do with the heavy slip up they experienced with invisible sun. They essentially ended up in a situation where they were releasing two systems in parallel.

True. Having my own copy of the final product of the Invisible Sun Black Cube, I can safely say that it was worth the wait. The production value and sheer content provided is INSANE!

hawkeyefan · Jul 3, 2019

Congrats to all the nominees! I have to look into a few of these games.

Aldarc said:
True. Having my own copy of the final product of the Invisible Sun Black Cube, I can safely say that it was worth the wait. The production value and sheer content provided is INSANE!

How is the game, Aldarc? I've seen a lot of the art and physical materials which are all impressive, and looked at a bit of actual play online, but I'm curious for someone's take on the game.

Celebrim · Jul 3, 2019

I remember when the EnNies were young thinking to myself that they had a bias toward the familiar big names. Now, looking at this list I'm wondering if the bias has gone completely the other way.

Oh well.

Big call out though to the nomination of Seth Sorkowsky who has absolutely been killing it on Youtube for the last two years or so. If you haven't watched his podcasts and you have an interest in running CoC games, then you are missing some of the best laid out GM advice I've ever seen, done with extremely high production values.

Aldarc · Jul 3, 2019

hawkeyefan said:
How is the game, Aldarc? I've seen a lot of the art and physical materials which are all impressive, and looked at a bit of actual play online, but I'm curious for someone's take on the game.

I've had the game awhile, but I have not had an opportunity yet to play it nor have I sat down to familiarize myself fluently with the rules. It's almost intimidating the amount of materials that you receive: books, cards, props, and other tools. With some irony, I actually only looked through everything that was in the box a few days ago. I was probably not as rushed to do so, because I also had the pdfs to read through. But in retrospect, I do think that this product is easier to process as a physical product than a digital one.

IMHO, the biggest initial hurdle, again as someone who casually flipped through the materials so far, is that the writing feels almost needlessly byzantine. There is a LOT of new terminology, in-character perspective writing, and such. I get that it's meant to reinforce the tone and timbre of the setting, but it can also come across as an unnecessary hurdle that impairs the clarity of the rules as someone who periodically keeps asking myself while reading it, "Yeah, but how does it play?"

A number of the underlying elements of the Cypher System are there. Ephemera = Cyphers. The players roll everything, and the GM sets the TN (0-10 in the CS, but 0-17 in IN). Characters are built by essentially creating a sentence of various building blocks.

Your Order is your "Type," but instead it's which magical order you belong to, which determines how you do magic. Your Forte is your "Focus," but renamed for some reason. Your Heart is like your "Descriptor," but instead built more like a mix of the four Keirsey Temperaments and Harry Potter houses, with each associated with an element, an animal, an object, etc. It provides your starting stats and can be affected by the Sorte cards that the GM will draw. The Foundation is a new addition that basically describes your living situation and connections.

This is not necessarily a negative impression of the game. It's just an incomplete one where I personally find navigating the entirety of this project a personally daunting task. There are a lot of moving parts and it's somewhat difficult for me to grasp quite yet how it all interacts with the core mechanics. I have been behind on so many RPGs, but I have wanted to sit down and properly learn the game for some time now. And what motivated me to look through everything in the Black Cube was a desire to do so, which I hope to do (relatively) within the next month or so.

JeffB · Jul 3, 2019

Glad to see The Book of Ages get some love. A phenomenal resource/book of inspiration/toolkit for DMs of any edition or setting.

Olaf the Stout · Jul 3, 2019

There is a heap of stuff I haven’t even heard of in here. However, having clicked on a few links, a lot of it looks really, really interesting. I can see a few new purchases in my future!