Judging the One Page Dungeon Contest

Thanks to everyone who submitted an One Page Dungeon Contest entry.  I've really enjoyed reading them. Although some weren't my style, I can't recall one I'd consider "bad".  Some made me laugh, others inspired my creativity, more than a few made me jealous of author's artistic, writing, and adventure crafting skills.  But, in reading them I feel I've "leveled" up those skills.  Which was my hope when I volunteered to be a judge. Thanks.


The first step in selecting who gets all this fabulous One Page Dungeon Contest Loot is for each judge to nominate 20 entries as "best" in 20 categories.  It was very hard to trim down to only 20 entries.  Much easier to come up with categories, I had about 27.  I'm holding off on revealing my twenty 1PD picks until the contest is over.  Here's my list of twenty categories.

1. Fit Into the Most Categories
2. Place I Most Want to Visit
3. Most Accomplished In Under 100k File Size
4. Wildest Wilderness
5. Coolest Cityness
6. Sexiest Sci-fi
7. Best Non-Fantasy
8. Best Non-Dungeon
9. Tastiest Treasure
10. Best Back Story
11. Most Makes me Want to Listen to Very Loud Heavy Metal
12. Best Cartography/Art
13. Best Map
14. Pulpiest
15. Flavorfullest
16. Cthuluest
17. Left me Wanting More
18. Most Ready/Inspiring for Expansion
19. One I Most Want to Run
20. Most likely to be Really Cool if I Understood it Better

I'm fairly open minded about what constitutes a One Page Dungeon.  Pretty much anything.  But, I draw the line at stuffing in more than crap loads of text by using a tiny ass "6pt" font.  Sorry, the couple of entries like that I barely skimmed before tossing into the ain't gettin nominated by me pile.  It was just too hard to read them, the fun plummeted to zero. If it's no fun to read your entry it has failed in my book.
I am saddened by the relative dearth of Sword & Planet, Mutagenic Future, and Carcossan/Algolian/Fomalhautesque Sword & Lasers styled entries.  On the other hand there were several entries that stretched the 1PD concept, which I'm all sorts of in favor of.  Deane Beman's "Escape from the Dragon's Lair" is an entire game. "Laboratory of the Asmodean Techno-Mage" is a page full of awesome Peter Mullen Art. Michael Hutchinson created a location with "Zombies Maties" that works across multiple genere.  Couple "Victorian/Horror", few sci-fi, few defying easy categorization the entries were heavily "fantasy" focus.  BTW you can view all the 1PDC entries on the One Page Dungeon Contest Page.


Even sadder, no one notices/acted on the obvious monkey clue in my original one page dungeon contest post. Their loss, could've had easy guranteed #1 spot, jk, kind of.  ;)