The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming 2016

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 26, 2016

Ennies voting has come and gone. What are these books even? As is often the case I find their picks lacking—in other words I don’t recognize them. The Ennies are the Teen Choice awards of the RPG scene.

It feels strange writing about books from a year ago in the summer of 2016, but here we are. The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming need to follow some rules, otherwise what’s the point?

What follows are my favourite books of 2015. To qualify for contention your book must have been purchased by myself in 2015 (and ideally published in that year as well, but I honestly don’t give that many fucks about that). Winners were chosen all by myself, based on my feelings about gaming at this moment in time.¹ As you read on you might say to yourself, “Ram: these categories are totally different than last years!” Yeah, they are. If you want consistent award categories the Ennies have you covered.

Best Setting Book: David McGrogan for Yoon-Suin: The Purple Lands

yoon-suin

Yoon-Suin: The Purple Lands takes Vornheim’s approach to world building—copious random tables—to an extreme. Rather than describe Yoon-Suin David McGrogan shows the reader how to create their own version of his world. The setting itself is comprised of several regions, each interesting and unique in their own right. Yoon-Suin could have been 4 or 5 books, but instead it is a single epic tome. The scope and vision of the book is incredible, and is as unique as the world it describes.

(I would be remiss if I didn’t call out Matthew Adams and the wonderful art he has provided for the book. One of the few complaints I have with the work is that there isn’t more art from Adams.)

Best Not D&D: Jason Lutes for The Perilous Wilds

Perilous Wilds

The Perilous Wilds is Dungeon World crossed with all sorts of OSR inspiration. I love hex crawls and wilderness exploration in my D&D. This book is a nice focused look at the subject, coming at the topic from a completely different direction than i’m used to.

There is a fair bit of Basic / Expert D&D in the tone and feel of the book, and also in how the book has been laid out. B/X was very smart when it comes to presenting information, and was seemingly ignored as a design to copy. Well, people copy the trade dress while missing what actually makes it compelling. Perilous Journey’s isn’t so foolish. Almost everything in the book is a tidy spread. It’s a pleasure to flip through and use. A lot of thought has clearly gone into making it useful in a fast improvisational game.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Book of 2015: Scrap Princess and Patrick Stuart for Fire on the Velvet Horizon

Scrap tells you to shut up about stats.

Fire on the Velvet Horizon is unlike any other D&D book I’ve read or seen. It is a monster book without stats, a coffee table book you can use in your D&D game, some sort of new-wave fiction. Stuart’s writing is captivating and thoroughly weird. Each of the pages in the book, produced by hand by Scrap, is a piece of art. There are some stand out examples of her “she’s just scribbling god damn it!” style. Seeing so much of her art in one place, and stuff in colour, it really nice. As I’ve said before, there is nothing else like her artwork.

This book is such a great example of two people following their own artistic vision without letting anyone else get in their way. Fire on the Velvet Horizon has the airs of something art-house, but once you dig in it is clear it was written with an eye to towards the gaming table. The book is thoroughly uncompromising in every way.²

Honourable Mentions

The Chthonic Codex, In the Woods, The Hell House Beckons, The Warren, and Ryuutama are excellent books I enjoyed. A Pernicious Pamphlet is particularly excellent, and had a ‘best zine’ award in several drafts of this blog post.³

Till next year. Booyaka! Booyaka!

This blog post has been a draft for months now. I knew fairly early on what books I wanted to call out, but it has been agonizing trying to pick one book over another for the big award. That said, in my heart I probably knew who the winners were the moment I read their book. One of the biggest reasons this was a hard choice was that Patrick won an award last year and I was worried these awards were just going to be “Ramanan’s annual blog post where he tells Patrick he’s awesome.” And now the mother fucker wrote Maze of the Blue Medusa so I am already stressed for 2017—pressure is on everyone else. Still, you should win if you are doing good work. Every scene needs their Daniel Day-Lewis. ↩
Including how small they were willing to typeset the text. ↩
I want to limit myself to calling out three books a year. Maybe that’s dumb, but I think focus is good. I hope people don’t think my Honourable Mentions are also rans. These are all really stand out books in my mind. ↩

Review: The Perilous Wilds

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on October 24, 2015

Tagged: dungeonworld osr indie

The Perilous Wilds and Friends

The Perilous Wilds by Jason Lutes is a supplement for Dungeon World that expands upon that games rules for wilderness travel. This is the part of D&D I enjoy the most—it’s the bulk of my Carcosa game—so the book was of interest despite the fact I don’t play Dungeon World. The best RPG books are those that are useful beyond the games they are intended for.

The book borrows from what I would call the Vornheim aesthetic. There are random tables galore. The writing is terse, but evocative. The layout is smart: spreads are assembled with care and thought as to what rules, writing, and images appear together on each set of pages. This sort of attention to detail is rare in RPG books.

The art work is all black and white line art by cartoonist Keny Widjaja. The art is very retro, reminiscent of the sort of art one finds in old Basic D&D and early AD&D modules and rule books. There are lots of small illustrations throughout the book.

The book introduces new rules and mechanics to Dungeon World games for travel, making camp, scouting, etc. These could be moved whole hog into a game of D&D. My plan is to do just that in my Carcosa game. The mechanics of Dungeon World are quite simple: roll a 2d6 and you either succeed, succeed with a complication, or fail and face a tough complication. You could model all reaction rolls in D&D on this formula, I suppose. The rules taken together add a structure to wilderness travel that feels lacking in vanilla D&D, and is apparently glossed over in Dungeon World.

There are rules for using retainers that are interesting, with lots of random tables for helping you quickly roll some up. I am also thinking of using these rules in my D&D games to differentiate PCs from their hired help. Often times retainers in my game end up being extra attacks for the PCs and someone to suck up damage from monsters. The rules here would turn interacting with your retainers into a little bit of a mini-game, I suppose, in the same way wilderness travel becomes its own mini-game.

There are pages upon pages of tables in the book to help you come up with a wilderness encounter. Their are tables for generating settlements, monsters, dungeons, discoveries, etc. I plan to use them in a game I am sharing DM duties with here in Toronto. (In my Carcosa game the results for many of the tables don’t make as much sense.)

An additional supplement produced as part of the Kickstarter that resulted in this book, Freebooters on the Frontier, may get me playing Dungeon World. It looks and feels like OD&D Dungeon World—the characters are more fragile, your choices for classes pared down to the core four, and the goal of the game is straight up looting treasure. It seems like a pretty straightforward game to play: my favourite.

Also pictured in the photograph above is A Book of Beasts, which uses the monster generation rules in The Perilous Wilds to produce a small bestiary. The monsters are neat, but it’s probably more useful as an example of how to best use the tables from The Perilous Wilds.