Classic Explorer Workshop Winners

The results are finally here. (And the winners probably won't surprise you!)

---

Summary of Contents:

😞 About the Delay (Why did it take so long?)
🌱 Rising Explorer Award Winner
👑 Gold Explorer Award Winner
🗡️ Perilous Explorer Award Winner

---

It’s been a while.

The Classic Explorer Workshop started in the Summer of 2023 and ended in November (after being extended). Well, it’s officially 2024, and I’m announcing the winners. I apologize to anyone who was waiting.

The reason is simple: I’m 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).

Don’t do these things if you want to keep a schedule.

Classic Explorer Workshop

“A time-slaying, grid-taming, torch-waving layout template for classic fantasy roleplaying games.” That was the pitch back in early 2023. The goal was to create a tool that streamlined the design process—and taught it with hands-on experience.

Here’s the very short post-mortem: it accomplished that goal. Almost a year later, I catch complaints about it homogenizing the landscape—the template is everywhere, from Snow’s Songbirds to half of Cairn’s 3rd party zines. That’s great! People don’t complain about templates unless they’re useful enough to be widely adopted.

If you’re curious what that template looks like (or want to design something with it), you can find the template on the Explorers’ itch page.

We also have great counter-evidence to suggest that the “Classic Explorer look” isn’t as uniform as expected. That’s partly due to the Classic Explorer Template Workshop—the game jam on Itch whose winners you’re about to see now.

Rising Explorer Award

The Rising Explorer Award recognizes someone new and growing in the RPG industry. We have many contenders—some of them were disqualified for a good reason: they outgrew their “beginner” label immediately after submitting (looking at you, Hugh Lashbrook—you’re a household name now).

Broken Circle by Eternal Torch

Winner: Broken Circle by Eternal Torch

I didn't realize it would be difficult to bestow the Rising Explorer Award—it 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 approachable—a 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 they’re 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 triumphant—and from an upward angle—reinforcing 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. It’s simple and clean but rough around the edges, the way third-party RPGs used to be—back when I’d print them on the sly using my school printer.

There’s 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 couldn’t kill—just good ole’ 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. 

Haiku by Sam Seer

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 colors—everything 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. It’s 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 experiment—a very polished experiment—into “classic” 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. 

Howl by Odin's Beard RPG

Winner: Howl by Odin’s 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 skip—you 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 innovations—without 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 don’t finish this zine, don’t you DARE show your face in Maine. (You’re 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, what’s 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 something—something 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.