Gen Con 2019 is over and the Ennie Award winners have been announced!

My first thought while going through the list is that the venerable Masks of Nyarlathotep has still got it. The new edition grabbed the Best Adventure award, probably thanks to Chaosium not only further expanding the text but also adding high quality art and fixing some of the most egregious problems with the gender and ethnicity of NPCs. Plus, the HPLHS got 2 Masks-related awards, one for their prop set (which, sadly, I got only after my group ended the campaign…) and one for their radio show, which is a lot of fun to listen to.

Call of Cthulhu in general was well represented with a bunch of other awards for the new Terror Australis edition, the excellent Starter Set, and the new Cthulhu Invictus guide.

Some “Call of Cthulhu-adjacent” things also won a few spots, with The Fall of DELTA GREEN nicely grabbing the Best Setting award, and other awards going to the Miskatonic University Restricted Collection board game, Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos for 5E, Seth Skorkowsky’s YouTube channel (I only started recently but I like it so far), and the ever entertaining and informative Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast.

Finally, Chaosium grabbed a few other non-Cthulhu-related wins with the gorgeous RuneQuest slipcase winning Best Interior Art and, again, overall Best Publisher award (this time gold!).

So yeah, Chaosium and Call of Cthulhu did quite well this year… Eric Tenkar was asking over in his tavern why that is, but if you look at the past two years of Ennie awards, they had also been doing quite well back then too. That said, I think there’s a few factors at play:

1. The fairly recent 7th edition line is chugging along nicely, and is very well done overall. On a personal level, it’s actually the first time I’m genuinely interested in running CoC with the vanilla rules, instead of using something else like GURPS.
2. The rise of podcasts and actual plays came with a fairly high portion dedicated (or adjacent) to horror roleplaying in general and CoC in particular, including past Ennie nominees and winners.
3. With Pathfinder and D&D 5e being smashing successes, the explosion of actual play podcasts and videos, and pop culture pushing RPGs back in the zeitgest, it seems like the hobby grew a lot in the past decade… and surely, by now, a good chunk of these new gamers must be looking for new/different stuff to play. CoC is a frequently recommended thing to try to anybody asking if there’s anything else after D&D.

There were a few surprises for me:

• The Invisible Sun Black Box not winning the Best Production Values award. I mean, have you seen this thing? It’s the most fucking impressive thing on my bookshelves, but I guess very few people own it given the high price point, hence the lack of votes, maybe.
• The RuneQuest slipcase not being even nominated for Best Cover Art, and The Fall of DELTA GREEN not being nominated for Best Layout and Design. Such a shame.

The point of the Ennies is also partly about discovering some new cool stuff:

• Mothership: I hadn’t heard about this one before but hey, if “sci-fi horror RPG” wasn’t enough, you got me at “dangerous derelict spacecrafts”.
• Forbidden Lands: I had been wondering about getting that one since it’s bound to be as gorgeous as the Tales from the Loop books, and I like dark fantasy. I guess it’s next on my shopping list!
• Kids on Bikes: I already had the PDF but hadn’t read much of it. It’s now next on the reading list.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and KULT: Divinity Lost: I hadn’t thought or heard of Warhammer or KULT for a long time, so I was surprised to see them coming back with new editions. Nice!

That’s it! Now if only I could some day make it to Gen Con…

Here’s some interesting interview over at Buzzfeed with the Twitter dev who implemented the retweet, and who regrets it. Manton Reece mentioned that Micro.blog doesn’t have this feature, for the same reasons detailed in the article. Good to know.

Over at the ENWorld forums there’s a thread based on a tweet by TheDiceMechanic about an 80’s reader poll from White Dwarf, a very popular UK gaming magazine from back in the days. I totally love how the Judge Dredd RPG shows up in the top 5 most played games… so 80’s British! Also notable is that the Toon RPG is in the top 20… which is probably about right since I haven’t played that since high-school. Oh the good ol’ days…

According to my wife, I have “too many t-shirts” (as if that was a thing). Turns out that’s far from accurate since I don’t even have a hundred t-shirt: I barely have 80 of them.

And I know that because I counted them when I made the important decision to switch from them all being folded on shelves to them being all on hangers.

While sorting through my t-shirts, I found a couple, ahem, “collector’s items” that I haven’t worn in decades… like one I got for 3dsmax 4’s release in 2000 back when Discreet was the publisher (remember when Autodesk didn’t own everything?), or the one I got with Wing Commander 3’s “premier” edition (which came in a replica of a 35mm film case, with a “Behind the Scenes” VHS tape!).

Anyway, along the way, I started collecting a few stats about my t-shirt collection and, well, this is my blog, so if I want to post completely useless graphs about the type of t-shirts I own, this is definitely the only place where I can do so without having to justify anything!

Without further ado, here it is:

The chart is organized by theme, so some t-shirts are sometimes counted multiple times – there’s no point adding the numbers together. A funny t-shirt about Cthulhu would be counted in “Funny” and “H.P. Lovecraft”.

Some more notes:

• “Company/corporate” are generally t-shirts I got for free through work or some convention.
• “Convention”, however, are some t-shirts that I bought at a convention and are about that convention (both t-shirts here are actually for VanCAF).
• “School” are t-shirts I got at school (high-school or university). In most cases, I actually helped design those t-shirts!
• The rest should be pretty self-explanatory.

Of course, these stats are going to get out of date pretty quickly since, now that I know I don’t have a hundred t-shirts yet, I might go a shopping spree. Don’t tell my wife…