The most prestigious tabletop roleplaying award is within your grasp and you might not have ever even heard of it. What is it?

An ENNIE.

Founded by some of the same people behind GenCon and EN World (although EN World is no longer associated with the award), the ENNIEs are an award ceremony for tabletop products, publishers, and creators that’s been going strong since 2002.

World Anvil’s ENNIE Journey

One random day in 2019 our good friend Andi, Community Coordinator, and one of the first Anvilites ever, told us about this little awards ceremony we should apply to. It’s called the ENNIES.

Don’t tell anyone, but at the time we’ve never even heard of the ENNIES before. But if Andi says we should check something out, we check it out.

So we filled in the application and sent off our product to the judges. The hard part was picking which tier to pick. Even though World Anvil is a full suite of tools, we could only pick a single offering to submit. Grandmaster it is! Submit.

Hold up! What do you mean if there are enough submissions in your category that the entire category is removed from the awards? Oh no. Time to freak out.

No! Time to make our friends over at DungeonFog apply as well. And they did!

With a little luck, a few others applied in our category and we’re good to go.

Fast forward a bit and we get the fateful email… We’re Nominated! We made the cut! In our excitement to get the votes rolling in we released a borked video telling everyone to give us only 1 vote instead of 5… Not off to a great start.

We pushed out another video as quickly as we could. Crisis averted. Shortlist achieved! We might actually have a chance at winning the darn thing. That’s nuts!

Now it’s time to book a last minute flight to Indianapolis. Get diverted through New York around a terrible storm. Stay at an emergency hotel. Then attend our first ever big gaming convention, and maybe win an award for Best Digital Aid or Accessory.

Sitting in the crowd when it got to our category, they announced that our friends DungeonFog had won silver. Till, the CEO, had asked me to accept the award on his behalf, which I did after first clarifying that “This is not mine”!

Shuffling off the stage to find our seat and suddenly Hammer Time by MC Hammer starts blaring over the loudspeaker. Why? Because that’s the song we picked to play if we won. Wait? We won?

WE WON!

Naturally, when we took the stage again, still holding DungeonFog’s silver award, this time saying “This IS mine!”.

You Should Totally Apply Next Year!

There’s no harm in submitting your work, and it only takes some minutes to complete the submission form. If you’re interested in the TTRPG space, there’s more than likely a category that you fit into. 

Of course, being able to boast one of their beautiful awards will be a great credit to your writing and worlds, but even having the ENNIE Nominated tag on your work will help raise eyebrows and turn heads.

As a World Anvil user, there’s no doubt in our mind that you’re not producing an amazing product that will improve the TTRPG space. Applying to an ENNIE is only a few clicks away, and that’s just a few clicks that could guarantee you a prestigious award to apply to your work in 2023.

What It Takes to Win an ENNIE

Step 1. Make a great product.

While anyone can submit their work to be considered for an ENNIE, only the best works and products are selected by the judges for nomination.

Step 2. Build an audience.

Luckily, since the ENNIEs have historically encouraged and favored indie and niche publishers, you don’t need that big of an audience to take home the prize.

So put your marketing hat on. Get your message out there. Find your people. Build your audience.

Making a great product is not enough to achieve success in this world. You also need to be good at marketing. You may be an amazing storyteller, but you have to think about how to tell the story of your story to the masses.

Step 3. Activate Your Tribe

Call your tribe to action. What action? Go vote! For you.

Sage Wisdom

If achieving success in your writing or work is a serious goal of yours, then participating in awards and competitions is a great stepping stone towards that success, and we can help you get there.

One of the lesser known but most impactful benefits of becoming a World Anvil Sage is our monetization and marketing support, and ‘Sage Seminars’.

Sage Seminars are monthly events exclusively for those subscribed to our ‘professional’ tier where we go into great detail about all sorts of essential topics and strategies for achieving success in the world of writing and worldbuilding.