Announcing ... the winners of the One Page Dungeon Contest

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a ChattyDM approached a skeptical Chgowiz... no wait, that's not it...

Ah, yes, here we go!

Two wild and crazy guys, Chatty and Chgowiz, mustering an army of Chatty-wizzzzessss... no, no, that won't do...

Oh the heck with it, I'll just get on with it!

The judging for the One Page Dungeon Contest has concluded and we have chosen our winners. It was a tough contest to judge - we had 112 entries which far exceeded our expectations. Some of us had a lot of things going on in June, but we managed to get through it and we now have the list of winners in hand.

Before we announce the winners, I'd like to give a big sincere Thank You to our sponsors, who we will rename at the end of this post. Without them, we would not have the fantastic prizes that we're about to hand out. Please be sure to thank them yourselves, and make sure that you consider them all for future purchases.

So ... without further ado, here are the winners of the first ever One Page Dungeon Contest:

Honorable Mentions - these dungeons will not receive a prize, but they are extremely worthy of note and made it into the final Judges Picks before we had to whittle the list down to the last winners. These dungeons will be included in the Winners publication. The category listed was the decision of the judge who selected these honorable mentions.

Best Aquatic Entry: The Barnacle Caves - Sam Kisko

Best Classic: Ruffthroat's Rathskeller - Lee Barber
Best Dungeon Circa 1974: The Crumbling Dungeon - Lord Kilgore
Best Dungeon Crawl: Shrine of the Savage Jungle - John Laviolette

Most Elegant: Clockwork Crypt - Gary S. Watkins
Funniest: The Vareh'gra Depths - Gary McCammon
Best Geometry: Halls of the Mad Mage - Justin Alexander

Best Homage: The Omenous Portent of the Highlands Meteor - Tim Hensley
Best Introductory One-Shot: The Tomb of Durhan Oakenshield - Dyson Logos
Best Non-Dungeon: The Great Cloud Caper - Jonathan Lee
Best Unconventional: Traps-R-Us - Chris Torrence
Best Use of Tables: Mountain Lair of the Misanthropic Magus - Sean Wills

Runner Ups - these dungeons were the top of the Judges Picks, after we had picked the top 3 winners. Each of these represents an outstanding dungeon, certain to appeal to most everyone. These dungeons will be awarded prizes as noted. The category is as the Judge picked it:

Best Hack-n-Slash: The Gray Goblin Warrens - Christopher Brackett
Prize: Random Esoteric Creature Generator

Best Non-Fantasy Entry: The Horror of Leatherbury House - Michael Wolf
Prize: Bundle of Goblinoid Games products

Best Pub: Arendt's Old Peculiar- Antti Hulkkonen
Prize: Tabletop Adventures bundle: Bits of Darkness, Deck O'Names

Best Replayable Entry: The Infinite Tower - James E. Raggi IV
Prize: Otherworld Minatures - Pig Faced Orcs box set

Best Retro Use of 30x30 Space: Megadungeon of the Mad Archmage Gary Stu - Adam Thornton
Prize: Bundle of Knockspell and City Encounter PDFs

Best Silly Dungeon: Maze of NAMCAP - Patrick Riley
Prize: Bundle of Wizards of the Coast 4e Adventure Modules

Wow - those were fantastic dungeons, but the best is yet to come...

These top 3 dungeons represent a lot of hard work, imagination and a very interesting situation from a judging perspective - these 3 were the easiest to agree up on as nearly all of us had them at the top of our lists. So, here are the Best of Old School and Best of New School entries:

Best New School Dungeon: Cry of the Gravegod by Heron Prior
Prizes: Bundle of Necromancer games product, Fantasy Grounds II License, Wizards of the Coast - Dungeon Delve book and Adventurer's Vault book, 6 month membership to Obsidian Portal, AvatarArt free artwork, Quarterly membership to Monte Cook’s DungeonADay.com

Best Old School Dungeon: Valley of the Necromancer Kings by Andrew Gale
Prizes: Bundle of Brave Halfling Production products, Demon Idol Miniature, 6 month membership Obsidian Portal, Fantasy Grounds II License, AvatarArt free artwork, Bundles of Fight On and Knockspell issues

And finally... the best of the best. This dungeon was highly favored by almost all of the judges for various reasons and after much screaming and ranting and throwing of keyboards...er... after reasoned and balanced discussion, we came to the conclusion that this entry was the winner of the One Page Dungeon Contest...

Best Overall One Page Dungeon: Secrets of the Old City by Simon Bull
Prizes: Patron membership of Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design, Kobold's Guide to Game Design by Kobold Quarterly, Quarterly membership to Monte Cook’s DungeonADay.com, A full License for Smitework’s Fantasy Grounds II, 1 year membership to Obsidian Portal, 50$ Gift Certificate from One-Bookshelf, Bundles of Fight On and Knockspell issues

Also, please note that we will also be offering passes for the Las Vegas NeonCon gaming convention to any of the honorary mention, Runner ups and Best of winners, that would like to attend. Vegas, baybee!

Wow! There you have it... the top entries and the prizes! We want to congratulate all the winners for their efforts and their achievement and thank all of YOU for entering, participating, asking questions, being flexible and understanding when we had issues and snafus and for being patient while the judges read and enjoyed each and every entry.

What are we going to do about releasing all of these entries? Chatty and I have batted this around a bit and this is what we've come up with:

The winners and honorable mentions will be placed in a PDF with a color cover to be created by the recent winner of the Erol Otus/Fight On!/Otherworld art contest: Mark Allen! The cover will feature a scene from the Secrets of the Old City winning dungeon. The PDF will also have some reprints of the One Page dungeon posts, the posts Chatty and I did on how to make a one page dungeon key, as well as a copy of the template itself for your use. This PDF will be distributed by Tabletop Adventure on most of the RPG PDF outlets - and it will be FREE.

We are going to make a second PDF which will feature the winners and runner ups, but will not feature the color cover and additional freebies. This PDF will be placed into an archive (ZIP) file which will also have all the entries for you to download. Yes, if you want to see all 112 entries, you will be able to do so. We'll work out where that will be hosted, but be warned, it's a large 68 MB file. The PDF will be for you to use if you wish to see/feature the winners.

I want to thank our hardworking judges -Sham from Sham's Grog n Blog (http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/), Amityville Mike from Society of Torch, Pole and Rope (http://poleandrope.blogspot.com/), Dave from Critical-Hits.com (http://www.critical-hits.com/) and Alex from Alex's Diary/Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/RPG). I'd also like to thank Graham from Critical Ankle Bites (http://criticalanklebites.com/) - Life prevented him from serving as a judge, but we thank him for his input and comments.

So, how did we judge this contest? How did we come up with old school/new school? From day 1, when we started trying to decide how to judge entries, we agreed that the "old school" and "new school" attributes would be strictly subjective to each judge and that we would go by majority votes, otherwise we would have quickly bogged down into the same issues we were trying to avoid. Alex/Kensata has written an awesome summary on how the judging was accomplished once we got OS/NS out of the way, so I'll let him tell the story.

At the end of the day, we felt that this process was subjective, but the ones we picked were usually fairly high in everyone's list, so we had a general consensus. We all felt good about how we went thru the process, and we hope you enjoyed the results. I know I'll discuss the entries and my thoughts later on, and perhaps the other judges will as well.

So... that's it! Congrats again to the winners! I personally am truly humbled by the amount of fun, joy and creativity that went into these things - no matter what game you play, these dungeons represented a place you wanted to take us. Some of them left us laughing, some of them left us wanting to twist our head into strange shapes due to font sizes and creative artistry, but they all were really cool to see.

And before you ask - I need METRIC LITERS of beer before I even think about 1PDC 2010. :)

Our sponsors!
The prizes awarded were generously donated by our sponsors - they were key to getting this thing rolling and we hope you appreciate their support as much as well do. Please be sure to show them your support as well.



Brave Halfling Publishing




Fight On Magazine

Goodman Games


Malhavoc Press/DungeonADay

Mythmere Games
Necromancer Games
Obsidian Portal
Open Designs


Otherworld Miniatures

Smiteworks
Tabletop Adventure