#171: The Awards 2023
I. Dear Reader
The Awards are a frustratingly-named but wonderfully pleasant , grassroots attempt at celebrating unique indie RPGs. Their tagline is “Make Weird Shit. Make Shit Weird.” Every year, a whole new roster of judges spend months picking what they think of innovative games worth celebrating. This year’s winners were announced over video stream here and it’s quite an interesting list.
There doesn’t seem to be a list of games that won apart from this twitter thread but it seems like a really interesting list. Definitely worth checking out, submitting your game next year, or even nominating yourself to become a judge. Seems like a good initiative worth engaging in.
The 20 winners:
The Wildsea: An original system and setting where you play the crew of a ship sailing on an endless sea made of the dense canopy of trees.
This Machine Has Meat In It: A rules light, tongue-in-cheek cosmic horror RPG about a nightmarish workplace that deserves to die.
i remember you: A game of stacking rocks, sharing memories, and figuring out who you are.
Kosmosaurs: You play a space dinosaur saving the galaxy, based on Lasers and Feelings as well as other games.
Fedora Noir: A game about a detective and their hat. One of you plays the hat.
FIST: A game of paranormal mercenaries doing jobs, half PbtA, half OSR.
Meanwhile in the subway: A giant whimsical subway map with both character creation, surreal setting and original rules.
Flabbergasted: Light comedy, genteel 1920s era adventures for those who like Wodehouse and social clubs.
The Cross Stitch: A Mork Borg adventure about a being from outside reality and other weirdness.
Beam Saber: Forged in the Dark game of pilots and their mechs, as seen on Friends at the Table.
MIRU: A solo-first hexcrawl about killing god in a solarpunk future.
Outliers: A solo journaling game about a research assistant in an eldritch lab.
A Collection of Improving Exercises: A game? I think? From the designer of Ten Thousand Year Vampire.
Downtime in Zyan: A supplement for downtime activities in the OSR space, system agnostic but flavoured with bits of an original dreamlike setting.
One Breath Left: A scifi horror, solo journaling game where you investigate a destroyed space ship.
Moonlight on Roseville Beach: Pulp horror, queer romance, all woven together with a Psi-run inspired system.
The Electrum Archive: A quirky, science fantasy setting for OSR-adjacent games.
Bibliocalypse: Rogue linguists explore the Forbidden library in this improvised dungeon crawl that uses words to do everything.
Saltfish & Almanacs: Merchant sell goods and explore new places in this short, card-based RPG-in-a-box.
CBR+PNK Augmented: The box version of the one shot, cyberpunk heist game based on Blades in the Dark.
Yours celebratively,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
On Yes Indie’d, I talk to game master, game designer, and game studies academic Evan Torner about the academic study of games, game design as media analysis, and other interesting subjects.
Just going to mention an entire podcast: The World of RPGs. It’s by someone in Germany who spends an episode talking to people from different places around the world (mostly Europe) about their local RPG scenes. They have a two part episode on Poland, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
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If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up. This is the last week before I do the roundup for October and November next week.
III. Links of the Week
On the Indie Game Reading Club, a fun post about GM personas. Do you look like a stern judge but are actually a friendly collaborator?
On Rolling Boxcars, a review of the Mothership anthology, Hull Breach
Magpie Games have a nice post about their pirate game, Rapscallion, which I believe is out only in free quickstart form.
On Gnomestew, a nice post about why ‘short campaigns’ (i.e. games meant to last less than six months) are a fun way to play.
Alex Rinehart has a post about the XCOM videogames and how they inspired his game, Cyberrats. It’s tricky to translate video games into tabletop games and Alex shows how you can make a dozen different games inspired by the same mechanics from
Burn After Running blog has a gushing review of Justin Alexander’s upcoming book about being a game master. It has a good preview of the contents of the book including the fact that it starts out with a 150 pages about running dungeons.
Also, in other award news, Dicebreaker announce their nominees for their 2023 Tabletop Awards
IV. Small Ads
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A wondrous worldmaking game with tension, traitors, and a living chimera you call home — The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri by momatoes. All proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders.
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There’s a bundle of Mongoose’s fantasy game, Ultimate d20
Also, two Torg bundles. The essentials bundle with the core rules and a new bundle with two new settings.
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
Tx, Thomas! Great newsletter as always and fun playing This Ship is No Mother two Fridays ago. -Cliff