This is the second year I’ve decided to post Novies, but rather than struggle to create novelty categories every year, I’m going to keep it simple. From 2024 (or so), I’m going to pick my favourite things, judging for innovation and how influential it was to me. However many runners up I want, because spread the love. Let’s go!
Best Single-location Module: Goblin Mail by Sofia Ramos and Evelyn Moreau
Goblin Mail is unique. Unlike anything else released this year, immaculate in its vibes, and trying to do something that even other Troika! modules aren’t trying to do. It’s absolutely fantastic and I can’t recommend it enough. Nothing else like it.
Runners Up:
Resonant by Amanda P is the best Mothership module to come out this year. My first draft of these awards said “absolutely the best”, however we had two late-year surprises that I’ll talk about in a moment. The art by Tony Tran is transcendent, the layout is immaculate, and the writing nails the capitalistic horror that Mothership is best at.
Both Dead Weight and When In Rome were late year surprises that almost upended the competition. Both of them do a single-location, are wildly interactive, and feature some very clever game design decisions but fall down in their execution.
Tomb of the Primate Priest by Joseph R Lewis by contrast, is absolutely tiny, but by being judicious with its choices absolutely nails the idea of a small module. It’s a neat crawl, and the kind of thing we need more of to fill in our hex crawls. Clever stuff, which is really inspiring. I think that small modules are a tough nut to crack, and in many ways Tomb of the Primate Priest is a good exploration of how to crack it. However, that leaves 3 of the top 5 single-location modules being designed for Mothership: Fantasy module writers, you need to start bringing it in 2025!
Best Multi-location Module: Tiny Fables by Josiah
I wrote the review for this donkey’s years ago, but it’s still yet to be released beyond backers. This is the best, straight up, Mausritter module, and I’m really excited for everyone to get it in their hands. It’s a cute, interesting, beautiful and easy to run fairytale of a module which bucks Mausritter design trends. Expect a review as soon as it’s publicly released, and keep it on your radar; I can’t give you a link to it at this stage.
Runners Up:
Atop the Wailing Dunes by Sofhino absolutely blew me away with its methods of designing a hexcrawl that feels organic and like actually travelling through wilderness. I didn’t understand Pariah until I read this. It’s far from perfect, but I want to see others attempt similar things.
Crown of Salt by Tania Herrero was a late-year surprise, and revealed Tania as someone to look out for, combining art, layout and writing in creative and exciting ways, just like luminaries such as Luka Rejec. The grim fairytale vibe is a great twist on Mörk Borg, and this is well worth pre-ordering.
Best Game: Dawn of the Blood Orcs
Dawn of the Orcs was a late year entry with Critique Navidad, and absolutely blew me away with its rigid structure and parlour larp approach to wizardly bickering.
Runner Up:
His Majesty the Worm is the game I’d run if I were to choose one game to run for the rest of my life. It’s all here. You can play from this book for eternity and it’s a beautiful book. The problem is, it doesn’t suit my style of play, which is module-heavy; that’s the main reason it didn’t win best game of the year for me. But if you’re playing a weekly game with the same crew and have for years, this is the game for your table.
Gonan the Barbarian really surprised me with a unique and fun cartoon structure that I feel needs to be hacked and iterated on. Just a really fun surprise.
Eco Mofos was a game that released early and I discovered late, and has reawakened my desire to run Cairn-like games again. It just has a pile of neat innovations, a lot of cool flavourful cues for play, and it made me excited to bring to the table. I hope it managed to build an ecosystem enough that it thrives, rather than disappears as many unsupported TTRPG games do, however you could manage well on the procedural generators that feature here.
Best Blog Post: On people-centred adventure design by Amanda P
Amanda P — a friend of mine I should note — is just very much on the same wavelength as me regarding what they’re attempting to do with their modules. But this and Social Contracts Must Be Splintered are really influential pieces of writing on how to make the people in your modules interesting and living people in their own right, and how to make your elfgame not just a video game.
Runners Up:
Environmental Horror Design by Sean McCoy takes about how to design creepy environments.
Design the Dungeon with Numbers by Clayton Noteskine talks about the mechanics and psychology of decision making.
Lifestyle, an under-utilised mechanic by Syd Icarus is about making mechanics conspicuous.
Zedeck Siew blogged an entire module for Halloween, A Perfect Wife. It’s creepy and excellent.
Clayton Noteskine wrote a whole series on graphic design and other creative tips including marketing copy, covers, titles and voice.
Best Episode of a Podcast: Prestige Classes on Dice Exploder by Sam Dunnewold with Sam Roberts
Making me pick Best Episode is so challenging, and I’m glad I set this restriction. I’m a big fan of Dice Exploder, and I’ve been a guest on the show previously, but there were some strong other contenders this year, with stellar episodes of Bastionland, RTFM, and Yes Indie’d (and of course a special call out to my feature in Stop Hack & Roll) in 2024. But for me, as someone who’s primarily into DIY elf games, this episode of Dice Exploder featuring my friend Sam Roberts was just brimming with the special sauce that makes Dice Exploder great and enthusiasm for the flawed mechanic it discussed and the game as a whole. It was really inspiring for me, and I began designing two games in partial response to it (only one which will come to any fruition, I think). It’s a part of a series on D&D on Dice Exploder, and for me this was the only stand out episode. The difficulty I think is that so many of the mechanics in D&D are either subjects of derision (the Adventuring Day, THAC0), or incredibly basic to everyone’s understanding of the hobby (the d20 roll!), that for me, the guests on these episodes couldn’t help but feel a little less enthused than the usual guests, although Sam Dunnewold is as always a ray of sunshine. I just hope that this series on historical D&D doesn’t preclude other episodes on elfgame mechanics, like mine on Rumour tables, because there is still just so much exciting and interesting stuff out there that merits talking about.
Best Videogame: The Lost Crown
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Every time I play a new metroidvania, I feel like we should persevere with attempts to translate the level design to our megadungeon design, in the same way that Ave Nox attempted to. This game was an absolute pleasure.
Runners Up:
Chants of Senaar, which is filled with interesting linguistic puzzles, of the kind that I wish I could wrap my head around how to write, as I think that this particular type of linguistic puzzle is so obviously a perfect kind of puzzle structure for building worlds in modules and settings. I really should (or someone should) write about building linguistic puzzles like these.
Elden Ring, which I never finished, but the world building and structure is really fascinating and I wrote a number of posts about it including Elden Ring and Overworlds.
Best Book: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi was juggled being fascinating study of motherhood and middle age, a mildy spicy ill-advised romance, a swashbuckling pirate adventure, and an epic fantasy, in a way that I didn’t see coming after reading and enjoying Shannon Chakraborty’s previous books. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I can’t get enough of Chakraborty’s medieval Islamic historical fantasies (Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark was also a consideration for my favourites of the year).
The Theft of Swords by Michael J Sullivan I only finished the other week, but was a very solid and enjoyable fantasy, which builds up a world, politic and characters subtly and enjoyably. This is focused primarily on fantasy heists, and it’s the first in a series (of collected novellas is my impression), and I suspect it may deteriorate into a more epic fantasy over time, but these first two novellas in one volume both bring exceptional lessons for world-building and faction politics.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan, is a huge contrast to the other two: This is a Chinese mythological fantasy, featuring a significant romance plotline, which is absolutely epic in scale and breadth. I couldn’t get enough of this first part of the duology (although I don’t feel so strongly about the sequel, which to be honest doesn’t need to be read as the first finished perfectly well). Strong recommendation if you’re interested in non-western fantasies.
Other Recommended Pleasures
I played a lot of Micro Macro Crime City this year; this is an exceptional “board” game to fit around work and parenting, bite-sized in play time, and left pinned as a poster to your wall. In it, you solve crimes by looking for clues on a massive Where’s Wally style poster. We coloured ours in as we went, as well.
Cavern Shuffle: Maze of the Minotaur is a new solo card game that I only got in the last few weeks, and I’ve been playing it when left alone over the break. I’ve never gotten into solo games before, but it’s an absolute pleasure of a solitaire-like, and it feels like you’re crawling through a dungeon despite the familiarity of the mechanics. Oh, and I just really enjoy the art by Bodie H.
This is the year we started building Lego, which we discovered through building with our kids that are of that age. We’ve been slowly building up our Animal Crossing village (the set that persuaded us to invest in it for ourselves and not just for the kids), and are pretty excited for the new releases next year.
Drawing in spare moments was my hobby this year. I didn’t nail it consistently, but I bought notebooks and pens to leaves everywhere I could, and got to sketching dungeon maps and trees and hills and little folk after the style of Ed Emberley (who, sadly, I can’t find many books of
My year in brief
Every Oscars or Grammies has a montage of what happened that year. I’m not all over everything in this hobby, but here’s my milestones for this year:
- Released two games — Advanced Fantasy Dungeons and SLIMDNGN!
- Ran a Kickstarter campaign for the Curse of Mizzling Grove which is now available in print and digital.
- Aired 50 episodes of Dungeon Regular
- Recorded this episode of Dice Exploder with Sam Dunnewold
- Published 52 Bathtub Reviews
- Published 17 I Read Reviews
- Published 24 reviews for Critique Navidad, my Advent Calendar style review bonanza
- Published over 200 000 words here on Playful Void: More, in fact, than Tolstoy’s War & Peace!
- My top five non-review posts were
Things to look forward to next year: I’ll be releasing Sharky, an underwater dungeon module for Zinequest in February, Lightfingers, a small mansion heist module in the second half of the year. Sharky has been written, playtested and the art is rolling in, and Lightfingers is for playtesting early next year. I’m excited by both of them.
Idle Cartulary
Playful Void 
Leave a comment