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One Page Dungeon Winners!

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What started as a crazy idea in the last few weeks of Winter has finally come to its conclusion.

Since late May a panel of 6 judges: Chgowiz, Dave: the Game, Sham, Amityville Mike, Alex Schroeder and myself have slogged through 112 entries and we’ve finally arrived with the final results.

If you are curious about our judging process, have a look at Alex’s excellent post on the subject.

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 One Page Dungeon PDF 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, showing high quality and inventive design. 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 30×30 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 D&D 4e Adventures (or equivalent)

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 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

Now here’s the best of the best! This dungeon was highly favored by almost all of the judges, once we lined up our top picks, this entry got unanimous support to be declared the grand winner of the contest…

Best Overall One Page Dungeon: Secrets of the Old City by Simon Bull
Prizes: Patron membership of Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design, Kobold Guide to Game Design, Quarterly membership to Monte Cook’s Dungeon a Day, 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.

Our next step will be to create a swanky PDF with all the entries described in this post.  The PDF will feature a  color cover to be created by the recent winner of the Erol Otus/Fight On!/Otherworld art contest: Mark Allen and will feature a scene from the Secrets of the Old City winning dungeon.  It will  also contain a few One-Page dungeon related posts that Chgowiz and I wrote and will feature a copy of the template itself.  The PDF will be distributed for free by Tabletop Adventures and will be available on most RPG PDF outlets.

We will also create 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 forewarned, it’s a large 68 MB file.

This contest would not haven been possible without the tireless work of Chgowiz and the active support of the other 4 judges. I also want to thank Graham Poole who had initially signed on as a judge but got called away by real life.   I also want to thank you all dear readers and Twitter followers who have been so enthusiastic about the whole thing, making us even more motivated to see this through.

Finally, I wish to extend a big thank you to all Sponsors who have been so generous and have provided so many great prizes:

All right!  This is done!

Now who wants to hear about my “Kill Drittz for Charity contest” idea?

Comments

  5. Are these going to be available to download?

    Sorry I was directed here by somone retweeting your announcement.

  7. @Bob: Thanks for holding the fort while I was dealing with my family’s morning routine 🙂

    Both PDFs will be available for free.

    As for the next version of that contest, I’ll check with my partners in crime in a few months… right now we’ll focus on making the PDF and recover our sanity.

  9. People! Read the freaking post! 🙂

    All entries will be available in a Zip file. Only the winning ones will be packaged in a single PDF.

  10. Thanks for pulling this off, Chatty, Chgowiz, et al! And kudos and congrats to all of the entrants. As I said this morning on my blog, I can’t wait for next year’s 1PD Design Contest. This is the first occurrence of an annual contest, right? 😉
    .-= Christopher B´s last blog ..And the Winners Are… =-.

  11. What was this a contest for again? 😉

    Congrats Chatty and Gang; this was one hell of an endeavour and i will be glad to see (and use) the PDF and zips.

    Any thoughts of having the PDF sold through bricks & mortar stores or is that too much of a process considering how many people were involved?
    .-= HermitDave´s last blog ..pondering the disposible existance =-.

  14. Oh cool! This was an unexpected but pleasant surprise to come here and find this announced! It goes without saying, but is certainly worth reiterating; ChattyDM, Chgowiz, Dave: the Game, Sham, Amityville Mike, Alex Schroeder; thank you for for taking the time and exerting the effort to go through each entry. Thank you also, to the sponsors for their generous donations.

    To have my entry be considered sufficiently ‘Old School’ is prize enough in my book 🙂 Thanks again.
    .-= Andrew Gale´s last blog ..ARTWORK =-.

  17. Congrats to the winners, and thanks for the honorable mention! I suppose this means I should start an RPG blog so that I can explain the background on how my 1-pager came to be.

    (Irrelevant Aside: my anti-spam word today was “d6”.)

  18. Thanks for the kudos everyone.

    Just so we’re clear, we the judges and organizers will need a few months and quite a lot of beer before we even think of making this a regular event.

    @Hermit Dave: We never planned to have a physical product to be sold in store. The whole idea was to have a Creative Commons product freely available on the web. If my old school buddies are interested, we may make it available on Lulu at cost.

    @Andrew: Your entry was a huge favorite and was among those in line for Best of the Best! Thanks for participating and I can tell you that I would DM your dungeon anytime!

    @John Laviolette: My captcha has a special algorithm to detect old schoolers. 🙂

  19. Congratulations to all of the winners. Your badges will be waiting for you at will call! If you need to book a room for the show, use promo code “JIMP09” for an additional 10% discount on already crazy low early bird room rates.

    @ChattyDM & @chgowiz – Awesome work on a great contest!

    Doug Daulton
    Neoncon 2009
    http://www.neoncon.com/register

  20. Any chance of linking the actual pdfs to each of the winners? I know the compiled pdf is coming but it’s a bummer to finally have a list of winners but being unable to see some of these entries as they are not hosted on the compiled entries blog post. Maybe even a zip file containing just the winners? People really want to check out the winners. Sorry to be repetitive.
    .-= kaeosdad´s last blog .."But, it’s not even Dungeons & Dragons anymore…" =-.

  21. @Doug: man I would love to be able to make it to NeonCon. Maybe if my freelance gigs make me enough dough I may be able to afford a Vegas gaming con. Thanks for being a Sponsor.

    @kaos: We’re painfully aware just how bad you guys want to see the entries. Believe me, one of the judges is probably thinking about going rogue and posting them all. But we want to do the Winning PDF thing right and do something nice for the Sponsors. Just give us a few more weeks and we’ll give you a killer PDF for the winners and a nice fat Zip file of all the entries.

  22. Mine was Cry of the Gravegod. I nit-picked this thing to death, so it’s really nice to see that it paid off. If I could buy the judges a round or two, I most certainly would. Thanks, guys!

    At some point, I’d love to see some commentary from the judges on which elements of the various entries really stood out. (later, of course, after you’ve all recuperated)

  23. I submitted the Rathskeller. I’m guessing the “classic” part is the feeling of running a party into a dungeon with oddball monsters, gross traps, arcane devices, and a pile of loot to haul at the end. I’m going to run some of these at a Con in the Fall…
    .-= labsenpai´s last blog ..My One Day Spree at ORIGINS =-.

  26. Thanks to all the judges and the sponsors. This contest was a hoot! My entry was The Clockwork Crypt and it was the first adventure I’ve taken the time to write out in a year at least! Thank you for getting me off of my creative duff. I’ve never been called “elegant” before. I like it! If/when another 1PD contest is announced (or calls for product submissions are made), you can count on me for another dungeon. Best wishes to all!

  27. @Gary: I’m the one who picked your entry as a Judge’s pick. I absolutely loved how you integrated a fountain, a workshop and a crypt all into one. And the puzzle-trap was wonderfull. All in so few rooms. I love such designs. Great work!

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