THE FOURTH ANNUAL SALTY AWARDS

 Planet's on fire again, it's time for the Salties

You

know

the

drill

Jesus Christ it's the fourth one of these.

THE SALTIES

The selection process is simple. I choose things and my choices are correct.

 

 

HOW ABOUT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB

The United States Food and Drug Administration

 

This handy-handy prescription granting me the ability to legally purchase and consume small doses of amphetamine salts for the purposes of making my brain work good doesn't do shit if there's no supply, which there isn't, because these jackanapes won't increase production to meet demand.

I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE THAT BREAK! IS COMING OUT

Break! (Naldo Drinian & Grey Wizard)

 

What will I use for my jokes now? Monster Overhaul and Hull Breach are nearly delivered physically as well so they're also out of repeated gag territory. 

 

BEST GAME

No Award

Nothing's caught my attention in a special positive way in the previous year, not enough to claim this spot. There are good games coming out, but none that fit this slot.

 

BEST ADVENTURE

No Award

As in the previous category, there are definitely good adventures that have come out in the last year, or that i found in the last year. I have not stumbled across one that makes me go "oh yeah, this is special."

 

BEST OSR-ADJACENT MEDIA

Fear and Hunger (Happy Paintings)

I haven't played this. I don't know if I'll ever play it this because this is the sort of game where the content warning comes with its own zip code on top of being extremely difficult. But Super Eyepatch Wolf certainly knows how to sell it and I definitely recommend listening to him about it, and also Worm Girl's story analysis.

Anyway, this game sounds like a horror story about a video game: a great and terrible mystery, the gnawing unknown of something there, lurking past the boundary of the known in that special way that interactive media is capable of achieving. Even now, in the era of (terrible and ad-ridden) fan wikis, secrets remain.

Second place goes to Roadwarden, which is very good but not rabbit-hole good. I can give it an unreserved recommendation though.

 

PRISTINE VIBES

Electrum Archive (Emiel Boven)

Mechanically, EA is nice and slick but the part that really sets it apart is the art. It's raw Caves of Qud meets Morrowind vibes, and that alone is worth the slot. Also Emiel regularly releases CC art and that is always, always good.

 

BEST WORST BOOK

Beasts of Flesh and Steel (Bruce Cordell and Sean Reynolds)

This is a conversion of Numenera into 5e so I knew entirely what I was getting into, and honestly I'm not going to complain. It might be terribly written, generally useless, and symptomatic of a great many deleterious trends in RPGs, but the art is better than it was in normal Numenera and there is at least an attempt to do something novel. I can be very forgiving with that.

 

HOPE AGAINST HOPE, ONLY TO SEE IT DASHED

60 Years in Space (Andrew Doull)

There is a space game out there that does or can do what 60 Years tried to do. It is likely not written yet. Damn my scattershot ADHD brain, I don't think I could make it even with meds. But hope springs eternal.

 

IF YOU NEED AN EMERGENCY BLUNT-FORCE WEAPON

Haunted West (Chris Spivey)

I can't say a thing for the contents of the book (the alternate history elements seemed really cool and interesting, from what I saw on twitter), but I can say that the copies I saw in the store looked like they had eaten several other books and were threatening to eat even more. 

 

THEY WEREN'T EVEN TRYING

Avatar Legends

Setting new standards for phoning it in, Avatar Legends rises above the other churn-and-burn IP cash-grabs just by the sheer scope of the missed opportunity. The PBTA mechanics are utilized in such a barebones manner that you'd be better off just having a single Move and calling it a day. Most of the art is just stills from the show and all the contents are stuck doing circles in its shadow, terrified to do something new.

The one thing it has going for it is not featuring a bending move, electing instead to have players just describe how they use bending to do something - that feels like something of a necessity to avoid getting choked on crunch. But when you remove the mechanics of the central feature of the show, you gotta do something to justify your own existence. This game does not do that.

 

BEST PODCAST THAT HASN'T ALREADY WON THIS AWARD

The Redacted Reports

I am forever a sucker for good Delta Green material and this AP pays off in spades. The players really work well together, it's got great production values, the Handler has a great grip on how to run the game over a long period of time. Some good scares, some good jokes, and overall well worth the time if you're an AP person. I binged over 100 episodes of this in a few months, that should tell you all you need.

BEST RESOURCE

The Classic Explorer Template (Clayton Notestine)

It speaks for itself: a creative-commons template for both versions of Affinity plus indesign, filled with tips and commentary and guides on how to use it. That is above and beyond the call of duty and I can see a whole lot of people getting a whole lot of use out of it: just playing around with it myself has unstuck a couple potential project ideas. Blank pages are intimidating, and this is a great way to conquer them.

 

A NICE, PLEASANT EXPERIENCE

Atlas of the Latter Earth (Kevin Crawford)

 

We do not, as a community or hobby, deserve Kevin's work. The man has gotten this down to a science, so that even this sizable setting gazetteer is an engaging read. Everything, even in the depths of the setting fluff, is oriented around points of interaction. Wars in the distant past shape the current factional conflicts, long-dead civlizations are framed in how you interact with their ruins, and so on. It is a great model to work from, just as Crawford's other games have been.

 

MOST INEXPLICABLE APPEARANCE OF FANTASY IMPERIAL CHINA

Atlas of the Latter Earth (Kevin Crawford)

 

The Fifth Dynastu is just China. Not even weird posthistorical dying earth China, it's just fantasy imperial China. Sticks out like a sore thumb, and that's beyond the handful of other regions that are pretty plain and obvious / have familiar real-world names (hi, Atlantis)

STILL KICKING IMMENSE AMOUNTS OF ASS

The entire Mothership community

Sean McCoy knows what' s up: if you want a game to succeed, encourage people to make stuff for it. The sheer amount of MoSh material out there is testament to the power of its user-friendly third-party license and its creative community. Light a lighthouse in a storm, it is a beacon of hope to the troubled.

 

BEST CAT

Bubs (RIP)

 

 

I miss him :C

THE THIRD ANNUAL SALTY AWARDS

 

COMPLETE STANDSTILL. UNENDING TORMENTS.

The previous year has faded to nothing in my mind. 

Tears in the rain, sand through the fingers. 

The millstone of Moloch grinds down upon us all.

IF HOPE SHALL NOT SUSTAIN ME, MAY SPITE FILL ITS ROLE.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN HELL BUT I CAN MAKE EXCEPTIONS

It is once again time for

THE SALTIES

 

The selection process is simple. I choose things and my choices are correct.

THE SALTIES OF AGES PAST

2020

2021

 

**

AT LAST, A SPARK OF JOY IN MY BLACK AND DEADENED HEART

Solarcrawl (Galen Pejeau)

Now this, this is a game that was created to pander directly to me.  Lightweight Black-Hacky ruleset. Hard-science aesthetic. An actual real gameplay loop. That's the ticket, give me a gameplay loop, give me procedures that I can use consistently and plug in a new planet to explore every couple sessions. Honestly it's the only sci-fi ttrpg I know of that actually feels like it's actually, meaningfully about exploration. There's a resource die for public support of the space program. God I love this thing, and I hate the fact that I haven't had the spoons to run it. I want to run it. I want to make stuff for it.

 

BEST BOOK THAT IS NOT YET IN BOOK FORM

 Monster Overhaul (Skerples)

Third year running. There will be a fourth if necessary.

THE OTHER, DIFFERENT BEST BOOK NOT YET IN BOOK FORM

Hull Breach (Ian Yusem et al)

It is remarkably easy to get me invested in a project: all you really need to do is say "Mothership" and "large book" in proximity to each other. Especially when it's 20 some different authors making modular content for the large book, which means the large book is actually many smaller books, and all of this makes me terribly happy. The awful vanishment of the first half of this year is still awful and bad, but it is also halfway to Hull Breach.

BEST BOOK THAT I WROTE

Unicorn Meat

When you run the award show, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from giving yourself an award!

 

I AM A PATIENT MAN 

BREAK! (Naldo Drinian & Grey Wizard)

The years wash over me as the ocean upon a stone YET I ENDURE.

 

 WE HAVE FALLEN INTO A RUT

RPGs as just kinda a thing, or maybe it's me

Look I won't lie the Salties are going to be low on the awards this year because there hasn't been much to get excited about. I have already covered everything that I am looking forward to and most stuff that's come out just hasn't made any impact on my radar. There's too much to keep track of. A new crisis occurs and there's a new itch bundle and there are so many games and I am so, so tired.

 

HALL OF SHAME

The Tekumel Foundation

They absolutely knew Barker was a white supremacist and covered it up for years.

BEST OSR-ADJACENT MEDIA

Elden Ring (FromSoftware)

Innumerable options for players to solve problems + an open world that rewards exploring it, it's a shoe-in for this category. Y'all knew this one was coming.

 

THE OTHER BEST OSR-ADJACENT MEDIA

Dungeon Meshi (Ryoko Kui)

Look if you haven't read Dungeon Meshi yet it's nearly done and also remains one of the cleverest takes on Generic Vernacular Fantasy out there. It's better at being D&D than D&D is at being D&D. It's comfortable like a favorite pair of pants fresh out of the dryer, but there's also a twenty in the pocket. Also has the best reaction faces in manga. "Western fantasy via Japanese artists" is a good genre and this is a good example of a good genre.

EXCELLENCE IN NARRATIVE COWARDICE

Horizon Forbidden West

I have never, ever, seen a work of media that so consistently runs away screaming at the very implication of something that could be interesting. A setting filled with interesting things is squandered at every moment it is possible to be squandered.

BEST PODCAST THAT HASN'T ALREADY WON THIS AWARD

Pretending to Be People (Zach, Thomas, Luke, Joe)

Back for Season 2, babyyyyyyy! My other favorite AP, being a grotesque-absurdist comedy-horror using Delta Green as its basis. It can be an acquired taste, but it is a taste to my liking and it scratches a horrible itch for me.

BEST PODCAST THAT DOESN'T HAVE REGULARLY UPDATED EPISODES

Go Die In A Hole (Nick Whelan and Arnold Kemp)

Nick Whelan runs Arnold Kemp through old D&D adventures. Possibly the most practical version of actual play out there, where the entire point is replicating at-the-table execution to demonstrate how the module is played. I wish there was more.

THING I WANT THE MOST THAT DOESN'T EXIST AND HAS NO PLANS TO

Abaddon releasing a creative commons art pack

I would pay through the fucking NOSE.

 

BEST OSR RESOURCE

Luka Rejec's trifold pamphlet and half-page book Affinity templates

*Chef's kiss*

CHAINSAW MAN?

Chainsaw Man

CHAIN. SAW. MAN.

**

The Salties have now concluded. I need a nap.

THE SECOND ANNUAL SALTY AWARDS

[REVVING INTENSIFIES]

 

TIME IS A FLAT CIRCLE

THE OCEAN IS ON FUCKING FIRE

OBLIVION GIVES NO AWARDS FOR CRUELTY

SO MIGHT AS WELL BE KIND

 

IT'S TIME FOR 

 

THE SALTIES

The selection process is simple. I choose things and my choices are correct.

Last year's awards may be found here

THE UNBEARABLE MALAISE OF BEING

The Previous Year

God what a shit year.

BEST PODCAST / EXCELLENCE IN NEPOTISM

Admiralty Blues

Am I saying this because my good friend Mon is a cast member? Yes. But am I also saying it because this AP is an absolute delight to listen to? Also yes. It's one of two APs I have actually listened to long-term. Among other things (humor, pacing, cast & characters all great), it is a fantastic example of how to run a Blades in the Dark style game (as it uses the mech hack of BitD, Beam Saber). Also Mon does art for it, which is great.

 

FINALLY SOME GOOD FUCKING FOOD

Dungeon Bitches (Emmy Allen)

I made my thoughts known some months ago, and nothing has changed. It's fucking rad.

THE INTERNET ISN'T HELPING

https://www.twitter.com

Proving repeatedly to all and sundry that no one is immune to bait, rpg twitter is a death-spiral carousel of the offensive and insipid, drowning out anything of value in a tepid wave of subtweets interrupted by entirely too frequent spikes of harassment. Blogger might be a terrible platform, but you can at least develop an idea on it.

 

RESCINDED AWARD

Troika! (Daniel Sell)

Despite being awarded one third of the Trifecta Grande last year, Troika has been struck from the rolls. Through mechanisms unknown to me, it has accumulated a singularly unpleasant online following to the point where my desire to make things with it, run it, or even really mention it at all have evaporated.

 

BEST BOOK THAT IS NOT YET IN BOOK FORM

 Monster Overhaul (Skerples)

Nothing announced since last years awards has me as excited as this, and since I got a preview copy of Dungeon Bitches that book isn't in the running for this award. It will be well worth it when it arrives.

 

I AM A PATIENT MAN 

BREAK! (Naldo Drinian & Grey Wizard)

 p a t i e n c e i s a v i r t u e

 

THIS BOOK HURT MY EYES 

Karanduun Make God Bleed (Joaquin Kyle Saavedra)

One of the games featured in Itch's recent Palestinian Aid Bundle, and an unfortunate victim of "great idea, lots of care put into it, I respect what it's doing, I can't read it without a headache." 

The font used for headings is all caps, narrow, and has next to no kerning. It is often presented as white text on a black box on a white background, and black boxes are used in lieu of bold for emphasis. The central text is squashed by margins expanded to fit large, vertically-aligned chapter names.

It's offputting enough that I went from "this is cool and I am excited" to "this is another game I will never read and never play" more or less instantly. Wish that wasn't the case, but for want of good kerning the war is lost.

WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT LOTFP IS STILL DEAD

Mork Borg (Pelle Nilsson)

I don't even like Mork Borg that much but they A) have a goofy heavy metal aesthetic and B) actually release things C) didn't decide to tie themselves to a sinking ship. So they get an award and we're all better for it.

THIS IS NEAT

2400 (Jason Tocci)

There are plenty of lightweight sci-fi games out there, but 2400 gets an advantage here because Tocci keeps updating it with additional setting / genre splats. Each is 4 pages long (or a single printer sheet, if you are printing out a spread) and follows the same general pattern - character backgrounds, random inspiration tables, some extras keyed to the setting / genre this particular expansion is for - which by itself isn't much but with 12 of them now included with the core rules and a significant following of fan hacks, there's a whole lot of material to play around with.

BEST OSR-ADJACENT MEDIA

Chainsaw Man (Tatsuki Fujimoto)

A grotty, hyperviolent story about broken people in a fucked up world that is significantly more emotionally deep and honest than a story called "Chainsaw Man" would be expected to be. It's a shonen that decided to wake up and choose violence, both literally and in taking the genre conventions and dismissing them utterly. Our main protagonist Denji is an illiterate teen so in debt to the yakuza thanks to his dead father that he's sold body parts and eaten out of dumpsters and he takes on a government devil-hunting job just for three meals, a bed, and the chance to maybe touch some boobs. Except instead of being gross and creepy like you'd expect it's an expression of his desperation for human connection + awkward teenager stuff. Also helps that even weird semi-feral idiot Denji knows you should only boob touch with permission.

Also the art is excellent, the pace is breakneck, the ending is buck fucking wild, and the world is A+.

BEST CAT

Sylvester (RIP)

 

Observe the absolute size of this big cuddly lad. He is missed very much.

MOST DESIRED SUBJECT FOR GAMEPLAY EVOLUTION

The Wretched (Chris Bisette) + Others

Last year, I cited the The Wretched as one of the standout solo games of this new and terrible era, and since then there have been dozens of hacks for it covering a wide variety of interesting topics and scenarios.

And I feel like its spinning its wheels. When I try to play Wretched or one of its descendants, I end up bored by Day 3, because Wretched-based games have a critical issue that I've yet to find dealt with - there's a chronological framework (via the days framework), but prompts themselves are not arranged in any sort of chronology themselves. So you do about ten of them and start getting prompts that, logically for the game you've been playing, you should already have had. Or you get ones that are just repeats of things you've already established. The tension the game aims for evaporates, which is not helped by most common replacement for the Jenga tower - had I not given up on my first run through The Wretched, I would have likely won through raw attrition.

I still like the idea, mind you, but there's room for improvement and no one's cleared the path yet, and that saddens me enough to say something about it.

BEST GAME RESOURCE

Artvee

High quality public domain art, easy to navigate.

**

That's all for this year. Overall, despite the nigh-excessive number of games that have come out since last July, I find myself not particularly drawn to most of them. We sit atop a safe and placid plateau of game design, and I wait vulture-like for the next raw and beating heart to bloom vibrant and vital in the midst of its seas of grass.

THE INAUGURAL SALTY AWARDS

They're arbitrary!

They're weird!

They reject continuity of time!

They reject meaningful distinctions of category!

They're an off-brand bootleg of the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence!

It's time for...

THE SALTIES

The selection process is simple. I choose things and then my choices are correct.

BESTEST OF THE BEST 

The Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, also Dissident Whispers is there.

Thousands of voices singing "fuck the police" in beautiful harmony, to the tune of over 8 million dollars raised. Every game featured within gets this award regardless of my opinions, lack of opinions, or any other qualities it may or may not possess. Because fuck the police.

TRIFECTA GRANDE 

Ultraviolet Grasslands (Luca Rejec), TROIKA! (Daniel Sell), Trilemma Adventures (Michael Prescott)

Also known as "the three books I would save from a fire." Each is magnificent in its own way, and a combination of the three would render one set for life in terms of RPGs. One is the ideal setting book, one is the ideal system book, one is the ideal book of adventures. Together they are unstoppable.

THE VOICE CRYING OUT IN THE WILDERNESS

@pandatheist

Proving that even RPG twitter is capable of sustaining coherent thought, @pandatheist is an island of good critique and spotlight threads in the midst of tepid seas of nonsense. And it's interdisciplinary, too, covering material from the 5e, indie, and OSR spheres.

PRODUCTIVITY POWERHOUSE

Emmy Allen (@dyingstylishly, cavegirlgames.blogspot.com)

How this woman manages to consistently put out so much material is beyond me. Holy shit. Wolfpacks, Enterprises, Ynn, Stygian, that one psy-ops game I never looked into, pretty sure there's an Arthurian miniatures ruleset, and now Dungeon Bitches. Holy shit. How.

ACTUAL GOD DAMN HEROES

Jarrett Crader & Fiona Giest

Go look at some of your favorite books, the real good ones. Odds are good you are going to find these two in the credits for editing or proofreading. This is because they're real fucking good at it, and I speak from personal experience. They gave Unicorn Meat a brilliant polish and turned clunky words into unclunky ones and chef's kiss.

BEST BOOK THAT IS NOT YET IN BOOK FORM

The Monster Overhaul (Skerples)

From art to organization, this is shaping up to be to monster manuals as Tomb of the Serpent Kings is to dungeon adventures - the sort of thing that takes the fundamentals and applies long-needed functionality updates.

I AM A PATIENT MAN

BREAK! (Naldo Drinian and Grey Wizard)

It will be here eventually. I am a patient man. I will wait. I am a patient man. It will be here eventually.  I AM A PATIENT MAN.

QUARANTINE FUN

Solo Games! (Various)

There were a good number of solo games in the Justice Bundle, and I hope that their spread leads to the creation of more. There's an entire field of design here that is just beginning to be explored. Special shout outs go to Ex Novo and the Wretched & Alone games, which are breaking out into more structured solo games than I typically see (and in the latter's case, immensely successful proliferation of hacks)

AN ATTEMPT WAS MADE

Shattered: A Grimdark RPG (It's Never Dark Enough)

There are glimpses of a gonzogrot diamond in the rough buried in this game, but unfortunately Shattered clutches all the sins of mid-aughts design close to its heart. The dread combination of tiny font, minuscule margins, double column text blocks, and uneven topic headers render the book almost unreadable, and this is accompanied by burdensome backstory and worldbuilding, clunkycrunch mechanics, and an insistence that all women have precisely the same body type even when they are of a species where having breasts makes no sense at all.

All this being said, the game's art is striking enough for me to remember it, and it does a decent enough job of establishing its own identity, two steps that man games do not accomplish.

AN ATTEMPT WAS NOT MADE

Wizards of the Coast

From the hypocritical and draconian policies of DMs Guild to their limp-wristed response to criticism of their perpetuation of race essentialism in the ttrpg sphere, WotC has proven to all that there is no bottom to the barrel of their milquetoast corporate cowardice - there is only another barrel. It is an infinite recursive column of barrels, matched only in its terrible depth by my confusion that people are still expecting a different outcome from this company.

SELF-INFLICTED PETARD HOIST ULTRA COMBO

James Edward Raggi IV

It's not even schadenfreude at this point. Just a vague sadness, though any sympathy that might come of it is obliterated by the fact that he released a book painting the very credible accusations of abuse against known malignant narcissist and abuser as mob hysteria, is an open supporter of a man who made his fortune slandering trans people, still refuses to cut ties with aforementioned malignant narcissist and abuser, and practices that most insipid form of cowardice - believing that freedom of speech means freedom from responsibility.

BEST PODCAST

Apocrypals (Chris Sims & Benito Cereno)

Not an RPG podcast, which makes it the best RPG podcast, because it'll actually learn you some stuff. Like biblical apocrypha and how absolutely wild it gets. More gnostic tomfoolery than you can shake a stick at. Dunking on Paul. Interpretive Torah funtimes. All the best Bible fanfiction, all in good humor. Go learn yourself a thing.

JUDGE'S CHOICE

Yokai Hunters Society (Chema Gonzalez)

I have spoken at length my thoughts and praise for YHS - for it's system, for its themes, for its economy of writing, for its flavor, and for how it addresses monster hunting within a different (and often less violent) cultural framework. It's good stuff.

 ***

This has been the inaugural Salty Awards. You may now return to your homes, untroubled.