Classic Explorer Workshop Winners
The results are finally here. (And the winners probably won't surprise you!)
Summary of Contents:
đ About the Delay (Why did it take so long?)
đą Rising Explorer Award Winner
đ Gold Explorer Award Winner
đĄď¸ Perilous Explorer Award Winner
Itâs been a while.
The Classic Explorer Workshop started in the Summer of 2023 and ended in November (after being extended). Well, itâs officially 2024, and Iâm announcing the winners. I apologize to anyone who was waiting.
The reason is simple: Iâm terrible at time management, and the more I thought about writing this article, the more I dreaded it. A month after the jam started, I got engaged, planned a wedding, started a new job, bought a house, and moved from Tennessee (boo) to Maine (yay).
Donât do these things if you want to keep a schedule.
Classic Explorer Workshop
âA time-slaying, grid-taming, torch-waving layout template for classic fantasy roleplaying games.â That was the pitch back in early 2023. The goal was to create a tool that streamlined the design processâand taught it with hands-on experience.
Hereâs the very short post-mortem: it accomplished that goal. Almost a year later, I catch complaints about it homogenizing the landscapeâthe template is everywhere, from Snowâs Songbirds to half of Cairnâs 3rd party zines. Thatâs great! People donât complain about templates unless theyâre useful enough to be widely adopted.
If youâre curious what that template looks like (or want to design something with it), you can find the template on the Explorersâ itch page.
We also have great counter-evidence to suggest that the âClassic Explorer lookâ isnât as uniform as expected. Thatâs partly due to the Classic Explorer Template Workshopâthe game jam on Itch whose winners youâre about to see now.
Rising Explorer Award
The Rising Explorer Award recognizes someone new and growing in the RPG industry. We have many contendersâsome of them were disqualified for a good reason: they outgrew their âbeginnerâ label immediately after submitting (looking at you, Hugh Lashbrookâyouâre a household name now).
Winner: Broken Circle by Eternal Torch
I didn't realize it would be difficult to bestow the Rising Explorer Awardâit turns out it's next to impossible. In the future, I'll make a jam exclusively for new designers. Until then, I'm looking up every creator and hoping I don't make a mistake.
Broken Circle by Eternal Touch is one of those difficult cases. Is the designer new? You wouldn't know from the work. Broken Circle is so good that it nearly earned an honorable mention for the Gold Explorer.
The work is immaculate. The details are buffed to a mirror-like shine and well-considered, from the balanced spreads to the typesetting. The real kicker is that the designer put a lot of their own passion and cultural experience into the project. The manuscript combines cultural motifs and visuals that suggest great research and lived-in experience. The result is a fantasy adventure that's deep but approachableâa rare combo.
Honorable: Tears of the Salamancer by Riles
It's a fantastic little adventure with some good visuals to go along with it. This submission was an immediate shortlist.
This is semi-unrelated, but a big knock against "classic fantasy" is that it routinely falls into a compositional funk. Crack open most trad fantasy, and you'll find monsters posing like theyâre getting their high school photos taken. They're all too stiff.
Not in Tears of the Salamancer. At least not in the star photo. That Salamancer is suitably triumphantâand from an upward angleâreinforcing their importance and power in the adventure. Good stuff. It displays solid instincts and good tastes. You can see other sharp decisions throughout.
Honorable: Picaroon Prawn-Riders of the Dead Plateau by Melfy
When I first made the template, I had a specific aesthetic in mind. This submission embodies that feeling perfectly. Itâs simple and clean but rough around the edges, the way third-party RPGs used to beâback when Iâd print them on the sly using my school printer.
Thereâs a lot of self-imposed rules and intentionality behind the work. Stuff other designers still struggle to hold back. For example, the sidebars are used for only the tersest, most reference-y material in the scenario. No essays or optional content the the author couldnât killâjust good oleâ usable details and guidance.
Gold Explorer Award
Everything is subjective, but some games merit special attention. The winner of this category exhibited incredible attention to craft. This category winner shows a firm grasp of space, information design, hierarchy, typography, etc.Â
Winner: Haiku by Sam Seer
I struggle to think of anything besides an exhaustive list of positive adjectives. Everything it does is almost perfect. The art placement, the typesetting, the colorsâeverything blends beautifully.
What I love about Haiku is how different it feels from everything else in the workshop despite using the template almost exactly as it was presented. Good layout is often decided by its contents, like writing, art, and rules. But what makes the layout great is how it preserves the power of the pieces while making them work together.
If I were to describe the feeling of this work, it would be like a warm spring breeze, the rustle of fall leaves, or a delicate rain. Itâs quiet and contemplative. Haiku is about undergoing a journey. The visual design reinforces that journey by suggesting a gentle one. This work has many beautiful little details, from the warm but poetic messages in the sidebar to the famous, undeniable art of Hasui Kawase.
If I had this game in print, I'd probably display it on my coffee table so guests could see how decadent my alone time is.
Honorable: Foul Play by Hendrik Ten Napel
Just like Haiku, this submission excels by taking what the template offers and putting every piece to work. In addition to being tonally succinct, it's also usable. The sidebars and overall structure make the game so simple to read that you might be tempted to say, "Is that it?"
In my mind, that's how you know you've dialed in your design and writing just right.
Honorable: The Way RPG by CoolWayInk
The Way is an experimentâa very polished experimentâinto âclassicâ fantasy archetypes, their advancement, and how their quests can tie those two together. The results, regardless of gameplay, are incredibly well made. What I love most about The Way is its concision. Nothing feels crammed into these spreads. The chibi-like illustrations get to hog the spotlight just as nature intended.
Perilous Explorer Award
Sometimes the best among us are the weirdest, boldest, and most unexpected. This award will go to the project that pushes the template to its limits, breaks the grid, or spawns rules dependent on the layout and visual design itself.Â
Winner: Howl by Odinâs Beard RPG
Every candidate for the Perilous Explorer had at least one piece of tech, but only *Howl* by Odin's Beard RPG had them all. Does it work? Not always. Using the sidebars for headers *and* supplementary information is a delicate balance. On some spreads, I had to recalibrate, double back, and start over.
The triumph of Howl is that even when its patterns stumble or skipâyou can still see the intentionality behind every decision. I love how they use pages and spreads to delineate rooms and encounters. The mini-maps are easy to understand despite their abstraction. And the listed exits should be industry standard.
The Perilous Explorer award goes to whoever can take the template's core conceit and push it through innovation. In this case, Odin's Beard packs it to the gills with little innovationsâwithout making it feel overstuffed.
Honorable: Palace of the Silver Princess by David Blandy
The biggest knock against Palace of the Silver Princess is that it's half-finished. The finished half is great, though. I would consume any rebooted D&D module by David Blandy and Richard Marfert. David, if you donât finish this zine, donât you DARE show your face in Maine. (Youâre always welcome. Our coastline is unmatched.)
Often, when someone remixes one of the classics, they change the content. What Blandy did with this template was show how transformational restructuring can be on its own. There are plenty of content changes, but the clarity of the composition makes that content shine.
Honorable: Crown of St. Ormus by Personable
Crown of St. Ormus uses the template as prescribed, except in one instance. In the meat of the zine, where the rooms are exposed, Markus tops the pages with a zoomed-in, wide-format picture of the specific room. The look is aesthetically striking and something I want to see explored and polished more.
The concept of a mini-map isn't new, but something about stylizing it creates a sense of drama I like. The awkward crop diminishes its utility, but it may justify the loss by setting a mood.
So, whatâs next?
I have to get back into the analog game world. Most days are booked with work and family, except for a couple of hours here and there. That means when I do make or write somethingâsomething else went wrong.
It appears my future in rpgs is becoming increasingly more restrained. The last time I wrote something every week, I was in my twenties, alone, and working at a miserable desk in advertising.
Until the next template or project, never stop exploring.
Clayton, what an honor. I learned a ton of enduring layout tips from you and your template. Thank you for building this design-centric corner of the indie RPG world!
Being bestowed the "no award because you're not a beginner anymore" award is a great honour :D Thanks Clayton! It's been great looking through these designs and seeing the things people have been able to do with your excellent template.