Saturday, June 4, 2011

Three Castles Award Winner

As many of you know, this year marks the first year that the fine folks at the North Texas RPG Con are giving out the Three Castles Award. The Award
was conceived by Robert Kuntz and with the able assistance of Douglas Rhea forwarded as an award to be presented to designers of the highest merit for outstanding work in the industry of Role Playing Game design. Only one such award can be given annually. And due to the exacting guidelines used for determining what qualifies as an exemplary design, only those designs that match or exceed the guidelines can qualify to be awarded. If no entry meets these criteria, no award is achieved for that year.
The nominees for the inaugural year of the award were:
This year's judges were:
  • Dennis Sustare
  • Paul Jaquays
  • Steve Winter
  • Tim Kask
  • Rob Kuntz
Doug Rhea gave me permission to announce the winner of this year's award on my blog shortly after it it was revealed at NTRPGCon this evening, so it is with great pleasure that I inform the wider old school community that the 2011 winner of the first ever Three Dragons Award is Michael Curtis for his work on The Dungeon Alphabet

Congratulations to Michael on his well-deserved award!

22 comments:

  1. Congratulations Micheal and thanks for letting us know James.

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  2. Old school, new school, Dungeon Alphabet is awesome! Mazel tov, Michael!

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  3. Well deserved win in a tough field.

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  4. A worthy winner in a field of worthies. Congratulations, Michael!

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  5. Congratulations Michael!

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  6. It's a very awesome book and the award is well deserved!

    - Ark

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  7. My memory must be lousy, because I thought this award was intended to be anti-OSR (Raggi in particular).

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  8. Congrats to Michael! What an amazing field of competitors, too!

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  9. A well deserved award, I must say!

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  10. I was hoping JB would win, so I could ride on his coat-tails, but the Dungeon Alphabet is a very deserved winner. Congratulations to Michael!

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  11. Dungeon Alphabet totally deserved it; good for MC.

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  12. Frankly, all five of those products deserved it -- they are all "must-haves" as far as I'm concerned. But the DUNGEON ALPHABET is a concise, highly inspirational "classic" and Michael Curtis is highly deserving of this honor. Kudos to MC and to all the nominees!

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  13. My memory must be lousy, because I thought this award was intended to be anti-OSR (Raggi in particular).

    I think what you're remembering is that Kuntz and Kask both had an online tussle with Raggi and, to a lesser degree, with the whole notion of an old school renaissance. The award itself is independent of its judges (and its judges are rotated), so whatever their feelings might or might not be, it's not reflective of what the award is about.

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  14. The Dungeon Alphabet is a great book!

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  15. Add my voice to the chorus. Great book!

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  16. James: Fair enough, I guess this blog read to me as "No to D&D-clone work, yes to this award".

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  17. I must be the only one, but I found the Dungeon Alphabet totally useless. Of all the OSR products I have bought, this is the only one I have sold after one week. :(

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  18. Congrats to Michael, this was truly a well deserved win. We at the NTRPG Con were proud to have this work as our inaugural winner of the Three Castles award.

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  19. Kudos to Michael, and to the other four nominees for also producing wonderful products, and to Rob Kuntz and Douglas Rhea for conceiving and executing this award. This is a good development all around.

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  20. Really? I see this as a total crock. Kuntz is a never-was (three castles, eh?), and Rhea is a dumb-ass richie with no self-esteem who's decided to buy himself a convention. How is this significant? And I'm with Antonio, the winning entry is next to useless.

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  21. dhowarth, you're out of line. Think whatever you want about the award, its winner, and its sponsor, but express your opinion like a grownup.

    Steve

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