The 2025 Ennie Nominations were recently announced and to my shock and surprise a book that I worked on as a layout artis, Uncle Ernie’s A.R.M. Summer Catalog, was nominated for “Best Monster/Adversary”.
The parts I worked on in particular were the template layout for each individual monster showing off their stats and details. The image above is an early version of the template I made for them. The book is a catalog of monsters you can buy in the Battlelords universe. For the design, I stuck with a more or less contemporary sci-fi look, but also tried to make some of it look like it was displayed on an older computer.
I also worked on some of the templates for a few of the fake ads found in the book, along with a few of the pretend sales badges and what not that they wanted to make it look like a catalog. They took that stuff, altered it to fit their needs, and then added, art, writing and whatever other pages they needed. They put the book on Kickstarter and you can buy it today.
As an aside: When Uncle Ernie’s was on Kickstarter it didn’t fund until the very last day. I was sweating bullets, it was the first freelance gig I’ve gotten in tabletop game design and I was super anxious of it not getting funding. But it did! And now it’s been nominated for an Ennie.
I’m not listed on the nomination, so * technically * I’m not nominated for an Ennie myself. The category would imply that it’s the monster or monsters nominated, but it lists the whole book and not a particular monster or monsters, so it’s kind of in a weird grey area. Still, I can’t help but think that if I had done a bad job and it had looked like garbage, it wouldn’t have gotten a nomination in the first place. I’m sure the judges look at a lot of books and it’s only natural to dismiss something that looks atrocious.
The Ennies are a pretty big deal in the world of tabletop game publishing. As far as I can tell it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest award to get. Being associated with a book that is nominated is a pretty big deal for me. I wrote a while back with some thoughts on design and I hit upon the topic that I never expected to win any kind of awards and how to deal with that as I continued making stuff. I’m still not expecting to ever win an award, but it does feel cool to be associated with a book that has a nomination, even if I’m not technically one of the nominees.
Anyway, I’m not sure what this means besides the fact I’ll keep bringing up the fact that I worked on an Ennie nominated book for the rest of eternity. You gotta latch on to any kind of validation or social approval that you can get.
As far as future layout work, I think I’d like to do some more freelance layout design for tabletop role playing games, but it’s not something I’m actively pursuing at the moment. I have so much work with my own games that I’m pretty much full up and stressed out enough as it is. Still, if the right thing came along I would seriously consider it.
Anyway, congrats to 23rd Century Productions (the makers of Battlelords) on their Ennie nomination. It was a pleasure working with them.