So You Want to Be Game Master has been nominated for the 2024 ENnie Award for Best RPG Related!
The Alexandrian as a whole has been nominated for the 2024 ENnie Award for Best Online Content!
Although the nomination process for the ENnies is juried, the actual selection is based on a popular vote by fans like you. You can vote until July 21st, 11 PM EST.
If you enjoyed the book, the website, the Youtube videos, the Twitch streams, the Discord, or the amazing community that makes everything at the Alexandrian possible, please join in by VOTING for the book and the site!
If you want to vote for the Alexandrian:
1. Go to this website.
2. Go down to “RPG Related.”
3. Under “So You Want to Be a Game Master,” select Rank 1 (the best rank!).
4. Now go down to “Best Online Content”.
5. Under the title “The Alexandrian,” select Rank 1 (the best rank!).
6. Click the “Vote!” button at the bottom.
7. While you’re there, look through the other categories and vote for anything else you’re familiar with that you think deserves a reward. There’s a lot of great stuff nominated this year!
Thank you!
So, maybe I’m just betraying my ignorance here, but… is anybody still publishing long form adventures in any genre other than horror?
Because if so, maybe they need to reach out to the ENnies selection people.
As far as I can tell this is the first year to have an explicit category for “long form” adventures, after two years straight when the top slot was won by anthology books. Last year, for example, it went to Seasons of Mystery for… Vaesen. A horror game.
Two years isn’t so terribly long, I know. In 2021, neither the gold nor the silver went to anthologies – instead, they went, respectively, to Halls of the Blood King (“a fantasy horror adventure” for Old-School Essentials) and Destroyer of Worlds (for the Alien RPG).
I think the last time a non-horror, non-anthology title won the gold was in 2018. I’m not totally sure, since I don’t know much about The Dark Of Hot Springs Island, and a quick search mostly just finds people raving about how developed and sandboxy it is (which is, admittedly, a big draw). Otherwise, you’d have to go back over a decade to Rise of the Runelords in 2013. Hey, at least in that time, 5E got the top slot once… with Curse of Strahd.
I don’t doubt that all of these are really incredible pieces of work which deserve recognition. I don’t read many adventures these days, so no, I don’t have a list of books I’d like to see win instead. But when I can find more reprints of 30-year-old Cthulhu scenarios than all non-horror standalone content combined, that’s a little odd, right?
It seems like either we’ve reached the same biases as other narrative criticism (dark and/or tragic works are inherently more artistic), or that RPG writers are just really struggling to find substance in anything besides horror for whatever reason.
And it’s not controversial to think that both of those scenarios would count as problems… right?