I was never really able to take the ENnie Awards seriously after they nominated the truly god-awful Pit of Loch-Durnan as Best Adventure in 2001: This early D20 product featured truly gorgeous cover art, but everything else about it — the interior art, the layout, the cartography, the NPCs, the “plot” — was atrocious. Imagine the opinion you’d have of a new film award that nominated Gigli for Best Picture in its first year of existence and you’d have a pretty accurate gauge for my opinion of the ENnies.

Recently, however, I’ve found myself thinking that the ENnies have probably refurbished their reputation in my eyes. It took the better part of a decade, but the stink had definitely worn off.

(You can see where this is going, right?)

The 2010 ENnie Nominees were named a couple days ago. And I’m sorry but this:

Does not deserve to be shortlisted as Best Cartography of the Year. Not even as an honorable mention. To do so is to, once again, turn the ENnies into a joke.

Allow me to be crystal clear on the nature of my complaint: There’s nothing inherently wrong with these maps. They’re clean, clear, and functional. (Quibble: The fact that the direction of north switches between the first and second maps is unnecessarily confusing and will almost certainly result in GMs having the PCs enter through the wrong door.) They aren’t bad maps. I mean, if I thought they were bad maps I’d have to look at my own maps from The Complex of Zombies and take myself out back for a good horse-whipping:

There’s nothing wrong with functional, workman-like cartography. But there’s a reason that “workman-like” and “award-winning” aren’t synonymous.

On a more positive note, the adventure this cartography is taken from — Death Frost Doom — is very good. It’s a little rough around the edges, but provides the raw material for an incredibly evocative and haunting experience. If it had been nominated as Best Adventure it wouldn’t have even made my eyebrows waggle. It probably would have even gotten a nod of satisfied approval. I recommend that everybody reading this check it out.

I think the most charitable interpretation of what happened here is that the judges for the ENnies recognized Death Frost Doom‘s general quality as an adventure and ended up looking around for a category to stick it into so that it would be “properly” acknowledged. This is slightly better than being swayed by a pretty cover wrapped around dreck, but is still pretty questionable behavior for any awards program that wants to be taken seriously. It tarnishes the credibility of the awarding body’s judgment, calling into question the value of the awards lists in judging quality, and thus obviating the entire point of an award in the first place.

Buy this. It’s good.

Thought of the Day: A World Without Heroes Remixing Hoard of the Dragon Queen Thought of the Day – Mind Flayer Symbology