Four Settings Enter…and Politely Shake Hands in The Crit Awards.
Here Are The Coolest Worlds To Die In.
Let’s talk about The CRIT Awards™ and the settings up for a cool award (including us!)
The giant death laser of infernal heat hangs above us in the sky, threatening all of us nerds who enjoy the cradle of air conditioning. With the threat of deadly sky lasers comes gaming events, and with those events come awards! Awards that to 99.9% of cryptids — are never heard of. But to those of us foolish enough to build a career around shiny math rocks, game awards present opportunities to scream into the internet void, and congratulate one another on jobs well done. Or at least done!
So let’s do that. Let us embrace the cold, digital, void of electrons and celebrate the first round of awards: The Crit Awards, which aren’t focused on any particular event, unlike the ENNIEs (Gencon) or the Origins Awards (Origins Game Fair). These wild and woolly awards cast a wary eye on a mix of creativity in the industry, like…well, just keep reading.
Nay, the Crit Awards are focused on content creators and creations across a mix of categories, including Best Solo Game, Best Indie Game, Best NPC in an Actual Play, and the one we actually remembered to respond to — Best Setting Description. (Author's Note: The Black Ballad also had the potential for best musical score for TTRPGs, but wrathful little internet spiders devoured that particular email, and so alas, it is only Best Setting this time.)
Those would-be judges at the Crit Awards (that’s you btw, it’s a community thingy), pontificate over these four chosen Settings for the best based on their creativity, detail, and imagery.
Storytellers Forge gladly accepts such scrutiny, along with all the required etiquette. Bravo.
(ARE YOU KIDDING! WE ARE PSYCHED!) As a new studio, just getting started, OF COURSE, we are going to be flipping tables and running circles around the office like Kermit the Frog on a bender over a nomination for the Crit Award.
We are, however, also nerds who enjoy other systems. So rather than talk about ourselves (and let’s be real, if you’re on this website, you already know all about it), let’s channel that giant death laser of infernal heat over to these other settings and see what makes these other glorious wrinkle-brained creatives so magnificent:
CalazCon Setting Lore from "CalazCon: The Beam Saber Mega Game"
Beam Saber - it’s big stompy mechs coupled with sci-fi space opera’y drama - what’s not to love? And in the CalazCon setting, it gets a little…shall we say…bonkers? The players are dealing with the weirdest war of all, a battle between intergalactic convention-goers, space hucksters, overcaffeinated panelists, and more as they land their convention smack dab in the middle of a massive multi-faction war. It’s now been a month since the convention and its participants made planetfall, and the previously warring factions have already had enough of their sh*t, forming a temporary truce to figure out how to get rid of these con-goers, and get back to warrin’ with one another.
Cerberon’s Gate from "Amber Ascenscion" by Jenel (@bossjellybean)
What do you get when you mix Okayest DM’s SAGAS system with GM Jenel’s Amber Ascension setting? You get this cool neon-tastic world full of big, bad, planet-controlling, drug-dealing corpos and the people rising up to take back the world and control of the Spice…er, Amber.
Boston from "The Storyteller Squad: Expanded Universe" by The Storyteller Squad
(Say it in your best Homer Simpson voice): “Mmmmmm Monsters!” Or more specifically, Monster of the Week, the episodic modern monster-hunting RPG, which is the backbone of The Storyteller Squad’s episode, “Night Falls on Boston.” Now switch from Homer to your best Bostonian accent, and watch as the hunters scour the city in a harrowing quest to find missing persons in the middle of a major blackout.
And it’s never as “easy” as that, right? Nah, because the crew has detected the otherworldly presence of not one (it’s never just one!) but two powerful spirits in the area. Time to dispatch the A team, also known as Team Rook.
"The Black Ballad" by Storytellers Forge Studios
Can you believe these guys? It’s their blog, and they are talking up their nomination? Oh, wait, is the mic on?
So, yeah, anyway, at least we were cool enough to include ourselves at the end of this post, rather than right at the top. So don’t harp on us about it, or we’ll have our content manager (What up, Dave? Beers later?) bump us back up to the top, add three more paragraphs, and “accidentally” forget to re-add everyone else. Don’t make us do it!
So, threats now out of the way, let’s talk about The Black Ballad, our D&D 5E campaign setting, that will work with 5.5e/2024/whatever they are calling it these days, and that can also easily be adapted to other D20 systems. The Black Ballad tosses you into the land of the dead and into the sinister city of Nox Valar, where you encounter its major players and politics….anddddd…then a catastrophe strikes. Some major shift has occurred, and it’s threatening the entire realm of the dead! Can you and your group right things, all while dealing with the fact that you’re in the afterlife?
Now that you know more about the category, maybe head over to the Crit Awards’ website to cast your vote on this and more than a dozen other categories. I hear this “Black Ballad” setting is really awesome….https://www.critawards.org/#about
