Indie RPG Awards

The Indie RPG Awards were an annual, peer-voted set of prizes recognizing independently created and published tabletop role-playing games and supplements.¹¹⁴ They were begun in 2002 to celebrate the drive and passion of designers who wrote and published their own works with minimal outside financial or labor support.¹¹⁴ The awards presented prizes to indie games from 2002 onward, with the final round covering games released in 2018.¹¹⁴

The awards took as their premise that self-published RPGs are often hard to find: when printed, game stores rarely stocked them unless they were special-ordered, and their designers had to rely on the Internet to make their works known or to sell them electronically.¹ Such games, the organizers argued, slipped under the radar of vote-driven mainstream awards such as the Origins Awards?, the Pen & Paper Awards, and the ENnie Awards?, and the Indie RPG Awards were meant to direct recognition toward works that might otherwise receive none.¹⁴ The organizers framed the prize as complementary rather than oppositional to the commercial RPG industry, filling a niche not covered by awards like the ENnies and the Origins Awards.⁴ A stated grievance was that many game awards listed only the company that produced a winning product and not the people who designed and wrote it, leaving independent creators unrecognized where they held no copyright or control over their work.⁴

Definition and eligibility

The awards defined “indie” as short for “independent,” meaning independently created and owned, and treated independence as a spectrum rather than a fixed line.⁴ At one end sat a fully non-independent game, in which designers submitted a manuscript and surrendered all rights and control; at the other, a fully independent game in which the same people handled art, layout, printing, and distribution.⁴ In practice most games fell between these poles — creators might use a generic print-on-demand publisher such as Lulu.com or a distributor such as RPGNow — and the organizers preferred to err toward including more games in the indie category.⁴ To be eligible, a game had to meet the indie definition, be produced or brought to market between January 1 and December 31 of the award year, and be released in English, since the pool of voters were generally English speakers.⁴ The organizers noted that many excellent RPGs were released in other languages, but held that English-speaking voters could not adequately review and compare works they could not read.⁴

Games submitted for consideration were reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with the organizers acknowledging that the definitions were neither black-and-white nor air-tight and that grey-area cases would inevitably arise.⁴ A recurring concern in the eligibility rules was originality of design: second editions of earlier games and minor PDF revisions did not count, though a complete overhaul of the rules or an edition adding more than 50 percent new material could be considered.⁴ A creator could register up to two full games plus two supplements for the supplement-oriented sub-awards.⁴

Awards and voting

There was one central prize — Independent RPG of the Year — supported by a number of sub-awards, including a Free RPG of the Year for no-cost releases; free and commercial games competed on equal footing for the main award.⁴ A People’s Choice Award, decided by popular vote, existed alongside the peer categories in some years.³ All other awards were voted on only by peers — established designers who had released two or more indie RPGs over two or more years — a restriction meant to level the playing field against the popular-vote model of other awards.³⁴ The organizers had themselves invited many designers onto the voter list, and prospective voters who met the qualifications could request to be added.⁴

Voting used a weighted system: each voter cast a five-point, a three-point, and a one-point vote in each category, and the highest point total won, with runners-up receiving special recognition.⁴ The organizers relied on a large “research gap” between registration in May and voting in the first week of August, and on a pool of roughly 100 designers “pulling in 100 different directions,” to keep the results fair and free of any single agenda.¹⁴ Because the peer voters came from many different backgrounds, the organizers argued, no single following — whether a game sold at RPGNow, discussed on RPGNet, or popular on Story Games — gained an advantage.⁴ Final results were presented live at Gen Con Indy? and posted to the awards website at the same time.¹³

The 2006 ceremony illustrates the awards’ scope and their overlap with the wider hobby: that year’s Indie Game of the Year race was described as very tight, with contenders including Spirit of the Century, Burning Empires, Don’t Rest Your Head, A Thousand and One Nights, Shock: Social Science Fiction, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, and Agon, among others.¹³ Several of these games were simultaneously recognized elsewhere — Spirit of the Century took a silver ENnie for Best Rules and the Ogre’s Choice Award for Best Roleplaying Game, while Burning Empires won Roleplaying Game of the Year at the Origins Awards.¹³

Community and legacy

The awards were closely associated with the indie tabletop community that gathered around discussion sites such as The Forge? and Story Games, where much of the indie design activity of the period took place.¹⁴ The organizers stated that the awards were not affiliated with The Forge or any other single website.⁴ Over their run the prize passed between at least two hosts, the organizers referring to games invited to the voter list by both themselves and a predecessor.⁴

The awards were hosted at rpg-awards.com and later indie-rpg-awards.com, with a site built in XHTML and PHP.³¹ A 2020 update on the awards website reported that the awards were on hiatus after collecting their last set of prizes for games released in 2018, with the possibility of restarting after reorganization; the archives preserved every award from 2002 to 2018.¹² The niche the Indie RPG Awards occupied has since been taken up by other prizes for independent tabletop design, among them the Indie Groundbreaker Awards?, presented by the Indie Game Developer Network? to recognize innovation, diversity, and design excellence across LARPs, tabletop RPGs, and other analog games.⁹