Round Up and Reflections for Ennie Award for Best Adventure

When the 2025 ENNIE shortlists were released a couple of weeks ago, I decided to purchase, read, and (where possible) run every single adventure to have been nominated for the Best Adventure – Short form award. I also did this in 2024 culminating in a post where I shared my thoughts not only on which adventures deserved to win, but also on the ENNIEs themselves as an institution.

Here are this year’s reviews:

• Tides of Rot for Frontier Scum
• The Dream Shrine for Old School Essentials
• Nevermore for Grimwild
• The Mall – Remastered for Liminal Horror
• Sweet Revenge* *for Perils & Princesses

You’re welcome to explore the reviews above, but this post is really about bringing the project to a close… sharing some thoughts on what this year’s shortlist says about the state of the hobby, and presenting my favourite of the five adventures.

On The ENNIEs

The ENNIEs were built for a world that no longer exists. They launched in 2001, under the wing of EN World, whose forums were then preoccupied with third edition D&D and the tide of D20 products that followed in its wake. It was a time when the distances between corners of the hobby felt narrower and more easily traversed… or at least easier to ignore.

Back then, it was assumed not only that everyone would be passingly familiar with D&D, but also that there was a steady flow of people leaving D&D and heading out into the broader hobby. This vision of trickle-down attention economics underpinned an assumption that while not every game was for every player, most games would be (at the very least) legible to every type of player.

When the ENNIEs were founded, the idea of a unified hobby, with shared language, shared concepts, and a common culture of play, was already under strain. Indie designers gathered around Ron Edwards’ Forge forums were not just challenging those assumptions, they were moving past them. For decades, RPG design had circled around ideas first traced by Dave Arneson in the 1970s. Innovation tended to arrive as elaboration, as footnote. One session might find you playing an elf in a friend’s campaign setting, the next would find you playing a bounty-hunter in the Star Wars universe but certain roles and rituals remained above question. The Forge disrupted that rhythm and unsettled the idea that there had ever been true consensus to begin with.

While some aesthetically-conservative gamers took great umbrage at the tone struck by posters on The Forge… and have never quite forgiven storygames for the affront of being born, The Forge taking a hammer to existing conceptual frameworks seemed to give every corner of the hobby permission to become unapologetically itself. Long-standing preferences and disagreements came to form the basis for the hobby dividing itself into what some people now refer to as silos—but which are perhaps more generously described as distinct cultures of play.

In theory, the existence of different cultures of play should not have resulted in the siloisation of the hobby but even after fifty years and thousands of systems, it is still harder to learn a new game by reading a rulebook than it is to sit down and actually play. The fact that all of the silos require some degree of socialisation and person-to-person explanation means that, while we could all play all games, we tend to have preferences that shape who we talk to, who we listen to, who we buy from, and – increasingly – who we can understand.

The hobby’s silo-based structure was particularly evident in this year’s Best Adventure – Short form category as every single adventure to be shortlisted was either the work of an established OSR designer or an attempt to borrow (aesthetically or mechanically) from the OSR. It felt less like a representative sampling, and more like a single current sweeping the rest aside. Last year’s shortlist featured a much broader range of adventures from a far broader cross-section of the hobby and this year’s act of enclosure has left me grieving for what must have been missed.

I don’t identify with any specific corner of the hobby but I am aware that some parts are more visible and more legible to me than others. That myopia is why I decided to undertake this reviewing project and I am saddened by the fact that this year’s shortlisted decided to draw my attention to a corner of the field with which I was already very familiar. I wanted to be surprised, I wanted to be outraged, I wanted to be baffled, but instead all I got was a sense of overwhelming familiarity.

The perceived narrowness of this year’s shortlist is only heightened by the presence of familiar names… so familiar, in fact, that one appears to have been nominated for what amounts to a minor update of an adventure first released in 2021. I have nothing but sympathy for the judges, who will have been buried under an unrelenting tide of dungeons, investigations, and hex-crawls. I understand that the hobby’s broader attention economy inevitably shapes what rises to the surface. But even so, the outcome feels like a missed opportunity.

Those of us who pay attention to the hobby are already subject to its sorting mechanisms… we are already hemmed in by its silos and their quiet hierarchies, which is why institutions like the ENNIEs still matter: They offer, at least in theory, a chance to look beyond the familiar… to remember that there’s more to gaming than the narrow confines of our taste, and the small online worlds we build around it.

So… Who Should Win?

Over in SFF-land, public discussion of award shortlists tends to use a rather cute conceit: Imagine that you are taking a ride in a hot air balloon and the balloon suddenly starts to lose altitude. Desperate to regain altitude, you start throwing things overboad until all you have left are the works on the award shortlist. Rather than throw them all out at once, you start by chucking out the works that you like least and continue down the list of nominees until you are left with the one work with which you are most reluctant to part.

Fifth Place (First to be Dumped): Tides of Rot for Frontier Scum, written by Brian Yaksha.

Packaged in the form of an LP, Tides of Rot seems designed more to catch the eye than to support play. It is graced with evocative artwork and some gorgeous line-by-line writing, but that surface brilliance feels curiously detached from the work’s function as a playable module. Beyond the visual flair, what remains feels rudimentary… stylised, but sparse, and emotionally hollow.

Fourth Place (Second to be Dumped): Nevermore for Grimwild, written by Luke Saunders.

Positioned as an off-ramp for people looking to leave 5th edition, this well laid-out but curiously flavourless dungeon module also aims to serve as an on-ramp to the fantasy-themed storygame Grimwild. But it falls awkwardly between those two goals… neither imaginative enough to satisfy as a dungeon-crawl, nor didactic enough to usher new players into storygame culture. Nevermore feels conflicted, and under-developed.

Third Place (Third to be Dumped): The Mall – Remastered for Liminal Horror, written by Goblin Archives.

A module that left me torn. On the one hand, it’s a well-realised horror scenario for a system that I play regularly. On the other, it’s a minor update of a widely-celebrated module first released in 2021. Even setting aside questions of eligibility… was adding a few maps to a four-year-old release really enough to make it stand above every OSR adventure released in 2024? Was it enough to eclipse all of the non-OSR work too?

Second Place (Silver Medal): The Dream Shrine for Old School Essentials, written by Brad Kerr.

Surreal, whimsical… and carried by a distinctively humorous voice, The Dream Shrine is a quietly radical piece of design that encourages groups to focus their attention on aspects of play which, despite their centrality to the RPG experience, seldom receive much attention. Beautifully focused and unapologetically singular, The Dream Shrine is an adventure that is full of care and imagination.

First Place (Gold Medal): Sweet Revenge for Perils & Princesses, written by Destiny Howell

Overflowing with gorgeous artwork and laid out with impeccable clarity, Sweet Revenge is a beautiful-looking adventure. But its visual appeal pales beside the care, intelligence, and subtlety of its writing. Pitched at parents hoping to bring their daughters into the hobby, it’s a superb introduction to RPGs, a better one to OSR play, and one of the most charming and assured modules I’ve ever encountered. The aesthetics may not be to my taste… but the form and execution are breathtaking.

In Closing

I didn’t set out to pick winners, I set out to pay attention. That’s all this project ever really was… a small act of witnessing. A way of reaching across the borders that divide our hobby and asking what lies just beyond the edge of my understanding.

That question still feels urgent.

There’s nothing wrong with taste. But when awards settle into predictability, when surprise becomes rare, when risk is invisible… something is lost. Not prestige. Not relevance. Just possibility.

If the ENNIEs are to mean anything, they must remain open to that possibility. To strangeness. To difference. To work that hasn’t yet been sorted, tagged, and softened by familiarity.

Otherwise, we are not so much recognising excellence as rehearsing it.