I’m back from Victoria! While away I had the idea to reflect a little bit on my awards. If I was more organized I would have written my thoughts down on their 10th anniversary. That said, writing this two years late feels on brand.
The first time I made an awards post it was in response to the Ennie’s snubbing Jez Gordon’s art in Death Frost Doom: “that this book wasn’t up for a best art Ennie is why I am even writing this post." You can see all the DNA for the awards right there from the start. I picked three books from the proceeding year. I had a short list of honourable mentions. I act like the awards are a bigger deal than they actually are. I make fun of the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG scene.
I don’t think I had any intention at the time of doing another awards blog post, but people on G+ loved the first one, so my gag became a thing. The second awards post keeps the energy of the first. By this point everything about the awards was in place, including the inconsistent categories and Patrick winning again.
The Ennies have a million categories, with distinctions that often seem dubious. The Diana Jones Award—the awards whose pretentious style I’m trying to ape my awards—has a single winner, picked from a small set of nominees. I prefer this model. I have stuck with my three books only rule because I think making a difficult choice is what makes my acknowledging these books meaningful. Some years I find it quite hard to pick, like this past one, but I force myself to do it all the same. For this reason I think my honourable mentions are actually full of some real juice. So many of these books could have been a winner if not for my mood that day.
It’s funny that early on I already understood the biggest issue with the structure of the awards. Once you are on my radar you typically stay there. The best chance of winning an award is likely having already won one. From the third year running the awards:
Wait—what’s the point of this thing? Patrick’s won something 3 years in a row now. (I actually made an off hand remark about this very situation occurring last year.) We’re half way though 2017 and Veins of the Earth has come and gone, which made picking this years awards tougher. I can see into this award’s future: I can’t imagine not Veins not making my short list next year. That made me second guess my picking Maze of the Blue Medusa for awards this year. There is likely something structurally problematic in how I construct my long list. I’m always going to buy Patrick’s new book: I love what he does. So, he’s always guaranteed a spot in my long list. (Well, until he starts writing dreck.) I pick up all of LotFP’s adventures for the same reason, so they are overrepresented in my long list and have a better chance of making it to my short list. Should I penalize people for making good books, though? As I said last year, every scene needs their Daniel Day Lewis. In 2016 I picked up a lot of games from people i’ve never heard of, for systems I would have never played, so it’s not like i’m knee deep in the same people’s work, but this is still something to keep in mind. At the end of the day this award will always simply be a reflection of what I like. I mean, I named them after myself.
This weakness is also a strength. These awards are idiosyncratic and tied to my tastes. If you like the OSR then these awards will likely speak to you in a way the Ennies never will. They are awards decided by a peer, not randoms with random tastes. And my tastes also aren’t set in stone: they have evolved and changed as the scene I enjoy has changed. Several story games have taken the top spot, and in recent years war games as well. I don’t think my picks are always obvious, which probably keeps things a little interesting for people who are following along at home.
As I note every year, these awards exist in contrast to the Ennies. My awards are aggressively niche. My D&D friends get excited whenever I post my picks, but the people behind Trench Crusade are likely unaware they won such a coveted award this year. The Ennies on the other hand looms large in this scene. Everyone pays attention, even when they don’t care for the awards at all. I was thinking of this while listening to Yochai complain about the Ennies on his podcast about the Ennies. No one made him record this particular show! He brings up my awards as a nice alternative, before jumping back into talking about books him, Brad, and Sam have mostly never heard of. There is likely a vicious cycle here, where the Ennie’s importance encourages people to pay extra attention, and because people pay extra attention they remain important. But if they help people sell more books no harm no foul.
What makes my awards interesting to Yochai—they are from a person he knows whose opinion he is interested to hear—is likely what makes them so incredibly uninteresting for most everyone else: who even is this guy and why do I care what he has to say? Mothership will tell people its won an award from Boing Boing or Polygon because someone reading their website will know who that even is. The size of the audience of those sites provides genuine value. Telling people you’ve won The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Book Award three times on the other hand is a fun in-joke.
Like everything on this blog, the awards exist first and foremost for me. They are nice time capsule of my favourite books. It’s interesting to look back and see what stuff remains a favourite, what stuff I’ve moved on from. I do love the undeserved exuberance people have for them all the same.
I just got back from Ottawa for work. I fly out to Victoria tomorrow to enjoy the sights of the West Coast. The summer is rushing by and I have been quite busy. How is it already GenCon?
I feel particularly disconnected from the Ennies this year. I recognized so few games and people in the list of nominations. Maybe that’s how you felt too, why you are reading this post. I am an old man now: the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry just aren’t for me.
My job remains more than a little bit unrelenting. As in years past, this business and stress translates into rampant consumerism. Who can resist the joy of buying something to make yourself feel good? Certainly not me! The long list for the awards was the longest it’s been since these awards began. Pruning that down to a short list, and then to the books you see below proved to be an agonizing battle. There are books that almost certainly could have earned a top spot had they arrived at a different point in time. That’s often how it goes sometimes.
As always, there is only one rule when it comes to these awards: the books in contention must have arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2025. Let’s fucking go!
Best Grotty British Nonsense: Swyvers by Luke Gearing and David Hoskins
There is something weirdly captivating about Swyvers, Luke Gearing’s game about crap-sack fantasy London. David Hoskins’s illustrations bring this weird world to life. I can’t imagine the book illustrated by anyone else. It’s amazing when you have such a great pairing of words and art. Swyvers is a weird messy game. One day I’ll write more about it. Till then this is me letting you know just how much I enjoyed it.
Best Wargame: Trench Crusade by Mike Franchina, James Sherriff, and Tuomas Pirinen
These awards started their life focused on RPGs, but as the years have passed I spend more and more time playing wargames. In that space, Trench Crusade is a revelation. Mike Franchina’s dark vision of a demon infested First World War is weirdly captivating. His art is incredible. The games rulebook is beautiful. The care and attention that has gone into producing the game is visible for all to see. And most important of all, the game itself is fun! Pirinen has done it again.
The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2025: Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall, illustrated by Alec Sorensen
If you have paying attention no doubt you could have seen this coming. Mythic Bastionland is seemingly everywhere, its success visible for all to see. I have been a fan of Chris’s games for many years now, but this game feels special, the culmination of a decades long journey. I ran several sessions of Mythic Bastionland for my friends and it was such a joy to play. The campaign was only torpedoed by my terrible work schedule. Mythic Bastionland lives up to all its hype. As always, Alec Sorensen’s artwork elevates the whole affair. What a wonderful game.
My friends and I have almost wrapped up our first Blood Bowl league. We began with a round robin tournament, playing six rounds of games between the six players in the league. (I think using the power of math we could have figured out a schedule that went through the round robin portion of the league faster, something to do for next time.) We gave everyone 2-3 weeks to meet and play, which people were mostly able to do. As with RPGs, the hardest part to maintaining a long running campaign is scheduling.
My Blansdowne Aggronauts ended the season with 1 win, no draws, and 5 losses. I’m not that good at Blood Bowl.
We ran our league using the Sevens rules, a smaller version of Blood Bowl. We were using the Sevens rules published by the wargaming club Hulls & Angels as the official version of these rules weren’t out at the time we started playing. Reviewing the document you’ll see how slight the changes are to the game. The game is mostly identical, but you play on a smaller pitch, with 7 players a side, rather than 11. There are some tweaked rules for building your teams. Re-rolls are more expensive and harder to come by once the league starts. The idea behind the format is that it is the amateur version of the game.
Sevens is a fantastic format for playing Blood Bowl. My friends who had played the full game were worried we would be missing out playing Sevens. We had originally talked of using the Sevens league as a way for those of us new to Blood Bowl to learn the game before graduating to full eleven man squads. I think everyone agrees the smaller format doesn’t lose any of the fun, while being faster to play.
I don’t know if I really understood who Blanche was and his impact and influence until I got into the OSR and every other person was obsessed with the grimdark. As a child I would have encountered his artwork in Fighting Fantasy, alongside some of the other greats of British fantasy illustration, but I don’t know if I was cultured enough to dig into what I was seeing beyond thinking it was cool. Getting into Warhammer exposed me to even more of his art and who he was as a creator. He was an incredible artist. There are so many drawings of his I love, but this one of a Sister of Battle is one of my favourites. What a legend. A real loss.
Last summer Games Workshop released the 3rd edition of Horus Heresy. For those keeping score at home, I managed to play three games of 2nd edition before they moved on. I find their urge to constantly churn their rulesets annoying, but that seems to be how it goes with their games. I probably don’t play enough Horus Heresy to justify all the boxes I have bought, but I have bought some boxes. The heart wants what the heart wants: I love those weird looking terminators.
I have managed to play a few games of 3rd edition now with Evan. We discovered that the Honest Wargamer shared some house rules for low point games that are kind of perfect for the amount of models we want to think about. The house rules for this format he has dubbed Squads restricts the game to 750 points, with further restrictions around the sorts of models you can bring, and some small changes to scoring. The house rules pack also includes some sample missions. The tweaks are quite small, but work well to scale the game down.
That said, with Heresy a small game can still feel quite big. My 746 point list was:
Centurion
Tactical Squad (10 models)
Tactical Squad (10 models)
Tactical Support Squad armed with Plasma Guns (10 models)
Contemptor Dreadnought armed with Gravis Chainfist with in‑built Heavy flamer, Gravis Melta Cannon, and a Havoc Launcher.
32 models across 5 units still felt like a lot of minis on the table. Evan’s AdMech included even more models.
We are pretty out of practice playing the game, and unfortunately the rule book doesn’t make the game particularly easy to quickly pick up. The rule book has some of the most dreadful rules writing. So much word soup. Everything feels more complicated than it needs to be. Of course we are playing because there is still a lot to love about the game and how it works. The rules encourage a lot of flavourful situations—once you manage to parse what those rules are trying to say.
It took us a little under 3 hours to get through the game. I can’t imagine how long it’d take us to play a full 3000 points game. A lifetime, presumably. We would probably be better off playing with some experienced players. That’s what made my first experience playing at the tournament work so well.
This is currently the game Evan and I have been focused on playing. There is time for us to figure it all out. I need to name all my guys and figure out the narrative for these games. That’s where the real fun of playing lives.
It is our patriotic duty to buy Canadian Mothership modules. Emergence is a funnel adventure—like you remember playing in DCCRPG. Emergence takes place Henko Acquisitions Correctional Complex. Players play inmates who wake up after some unknown accident has damaged the facilities. They must try and escape to the surface. There is a whole lot more going on, some of which I’ll discuss below, so if you are thinking of playing stop reading now!
The game was written by Carson Brown, with art by the always excellent Brandon Yu. This is one of the books I grabbed at this years Breakout Con, which was honestly mostly me shopping. Brandon’s cover is amazing. You can almost always judge a book by its cover.
The prison complex is quite dynamic. Carson has done a lot to make prison an interesting space to explore. To start, it’s flooding! The rooms in the prison will fill with water as the players explore the space, eventually ending up mostly submerged. Every 30 minutes of game time the players will roll a d10 and increase the flood level of the location by 1. (There are 10 locations that can flood within the subterranean portion of the prison.) The power in the complex is also fluctuating. The adventure begins with the power barely functioning. Certain locations and actions by the player can move the power level up or down, which also impacts what the players can do in various locations.
The prison map is presented abstractly. Because of the flooding and damage, the route the players took to get to the starting location of the module, at the bottom of the facility, isn’t one they can follow back out. To model the confusion and unknown, each path between two locations passes through an additional location, which is determined randomly. Once determined this new location is fixed. Four of the locations in the prison are cell blocks, and a random table is used to determine what are two notable locations with the cell block. You would likely roll up these cell block locations before play, so you can figure out what’s up and which factions control them. The map in the book is nicely put together, with space to track the connection locations, cell blocks, and the the flood levels of the rooms.
The descriptions of the connections and cellblocks are more my speed, a handful of sentences, easy to quickly read. The descriptions of the ‘proper’ locations in the prison are longer: not walls of text, but also not the quickest to parse. Some room descriptions talk about the geometry of the space, where entrances and exists are located, or how one location relates to the others in the physical space of the prison. I personally don’t love this when the maps are all abstract. In this module you don’t even know what new location players will find while travelling between the spaces.
There are 6 factions described in the module, each highlighting one aspect of the prison. They are flavourful, but as presented it’s not often obvious how each would feel about one another, or about the players. To my mind, the descriptions would also be better if they focused on how the factions are reacting to current drama at the prison. Before running I would probably flesh this out more.
The rules for creating simpler funnel characters for Mothership are featured early in the module, after introducing the DM to the events taking place and the nature of the prison. Each of the characters a player creates is a prisoner. You roll 3 sets of d100 to determine their 6 digit serial number. These numbers will be used to help determine stats, and also tell the DM the truth behind a characters crime (eg: they did it, they were framed, they had a sham trial, etc). There is a new “Cohesion” stat specific to these funnel characters that begins at 3 and moves up and down during play. Players won’t know what this stat is actually for initially. The adventure includes your classic 4-up funnel character sheet.
Cohesion is tied to the underlying secret of the module, a fun twist that will help make this funnel feel like a funnel. The players are all clones! They will turn into mindless fungus monsters if they don’t find stabilizer drugs. These drugs are littered throughout the complex here and there, but certainly not enough to keep all the characters alive. The players may end up having to run away from the fungus zombie monster version of themselves. A character that reaches 20 cohesion is free of the curse.
The module ends with some suggestions on what concluding the adventure may look like, and possible future adventures. The back interior cover page is a search the room table. Something the players might do often so it’s handy to have there. The front interior cover page has stats for all the monsters, and sums up what the flooding and power levels mean. The map of the adventure is found dead centre in the module, so it’s also easy to find. Good job team!
I really liked this module. It seems like a great way to get introduced to Mothership: it’s kind of bleak, there are weird monsters, corporations being dirt bags, etc. There will be lots of chances to sacrifice one of your characters to save the rest. Also lots of chances for ignoble deaths. That’s what you want in a funnel adventure.
I find it hilarious that there are two OSR blogging webrings you can join if you are so inclined. The 90s are back, in webring form. Daniel Sell of Troika set one up first, the New Old Gaming Blogring. Shortly after, Elmcat created rootr.ing, which serves the same purpose, but felt easier to customize, so you can its widget at the bottom of this page. If you dislike both of these options, Daniel shared the tutorial he followed to create his blogring, so you can make your own for you and your friends. The world needs more webrings.
Once again the keying of dungeons is the topic of day. Sam Sorensen writes in defence of the humble paragraph. In doing so he pits the paragraph against the bulleted list, a false dichotomy. In his post the examples of bulleted bolded lists are bad because they are word soup, not because they are lists. There is nothing precluding people from writing strong prose while also leaning on structure. Silent Titans and Gradient Descent both do this well.
Sam believes people consume text with more patience and thought when it’s presented in prose: bullet points and styled text encourage the reader to zip around skim. I can see that argument, but it’s almost certainly the case different people consume information effectively in different ways. A while ago I wrote about how Patrick’s approach to writing is a form of usability, which I think relates to this core point Sam is trying to make. Orthopraxy’s Eat the Book remains a great recent read on this topic.
A lot of caveats and comments on a post I’m sharing, but I’m sharing it because I often dislike the same sort of writing Sam does! We can do better, whether you choose to do better with a paragraphs or bullets.
Tephrotic Nightmares is about the sea of ash, a region that was ruined by The Arsonist. Dark Sun had a Sea of Silt, so perhaps I am already biased towards liking this book. The very first thing we learn about this place is water is the currency of note, letting us know what is important and valuable up front. (I was reminded of light in Veins of the Earth.)
The order elements of an adventure are presented in is something I find intriguing. After the introductory page explaining you are exploring a sea of ash, we jump straight to rules for sailing this silt sea in Mork Borg. Luke writes about the various modes of transport available to the players, Mad Max like boats, and the various weapons and defences available to trick them out. The book came with a map and chits so you can play a wargame. Hells yeah!
Factions come next. There are several. Their bases are placed on the hex map of the region. Each faction is described briefly, with a goal, their current challenges, offerings and rituals. These are a sentence or two, and hint at how players may end up interacting them. None are presented in a way that they are explicitly in conflict with one another. The typical units that make up the faction are described, with stats for Mork Borg, along with the vessels each faction uses for travel. Between Luke’s writing and Johan’s art, we get a vivid picture of these groups without too much faffing about.
A bestiary follows. Everything is flavourful, starting with a small and vicious dog, the ash mink. Luke lets you know people are harvesting bodies for water, like Dune. Johan draws some cool witches.
The back half of this book are locations of varying sizes found in the ash sea. There are 22 places in all, starting with the headquarters of 5 of the 6 factions. The region is fairly large, most hexes aren’t described. As this is a sea, that makes sense. Ships move 1-3 hexes per days, so there will be a fair bit of multi-day travel to get from location to location. There are random encounter tables, but I think a GM would want to think about how they want to run the parts of the game that are sailing between locations.
The Bloodhunter Fortress has NPCs who can let the PCs know where to find various monsters. Perhaps the campaign becomes a monster hunter game for a while? The Urniversity will pay PCs to go map a region of the sea. Perhaps the its a game of exploration for a while. The Pyromancers of the Cold Hearth, home of the Burnt Offering faction, will reward players if they find the holy book secreted away within the hidden fortress of the Arsonist, the person who created the ash sea. The Necromancers of the same faction want that book as well. More adventure for the PCs. Locations can feel a bit disconnected from one another, but I found them cool all the same.
The first big dungeon detailed is the faction headquarters of the Cannibal Count. His mount-manse is detailed over 12 pages, with art and maps by Johan. Maps are repeated so you don’t need to flip pages when running, a nice touch. Room descriptions are short and punchy, as I like them. Luke informs the reader that unless the players are hostile encounters should be social, but these people are cannibals: there’s gonna be tension there. These are strange bureaucratic cannibals. Lots of departments and assistants to assistants, working despite their boss seemingly being long gone.
Hex 11 describes a shipwreck, a creature within may take a character hostage and demand the captain of the boat return. But where is the captain? I thought this might be an exercise for the reader. The GM will make something up, maybe some random NPC in one of the faction bases is the captain. Reading ahead, we learn he is a prisoner in Hex 18, The Grinding. So this is still an exercise, just not the one I thought: make note of where they are!
The book concludes with another big dungeon, which takes up 20 pages of the book. The “big boss”, the Arsonist, is found here. As with most everything in this book, there is nothing pushing the players here, though I imagine through the course of play they may find their own reasons.
I was reminded of a False Machine joint based solely on the amount of cannibalism in this book. It feels like every other group you meet eats people.
Tephrotic Nightmares is interesting object: the spine is exposed: you can see the stitched binding and it will lie perfectly flat. The other pages aren’t cut, you need to peel them apart as you read. Your first encounter with the book is a bit of an experience. The hardcover book is genuinely lovely, and if you can afford its price I would recommend it wholeheartedly over a boring PDF. Johan has done an incredible job with the art and graphic design—unsurprisingly.
It was interesting to read this book after reading His Majesty the Worm. In contrast to the exposition and support in HMtW, Tephrotic Nightmares really doesn’t hold your hand. Here are rules for sailing around, here are a bunch of weirdo factions, here are some monsters, here are some places. How you thread it all together is left up to you. Proper OSR nonsense! I really love books like this. A sandbox of stuff. The writing is strong. The art is great. It’s all very atmospheric. But is it too static? If there is criticism to be had, I suspect it will fall here. I think this sort of adventure is perfectly fine. The GM will figure out what’s up, along with the players, through play. From running adventures like this, stuff gets messy when the players get involved.
