The winners of the 2026 ENNIE awards for excellence in TTRPG design were revealed at GenCon on Saturday, and intriguingly, 2026 seems to be the year that fans voted for folk horror. It’s not even spooky season, but one in three of this year’s gold prizes were awarded to two folk-horror game lines, the D&D supplement ‘The Crooked Moon’ and the standalone ‘Dolmenwood’.
‘The Crooked Moon’ is a 600 page folk horror D&D campaign setting by Avantris Entertainment, which won the coveted Product of the Year and four other gold awards for its wider product line. Meanwhile ‘Dolmenwood’ is a folk-horror sandbox campaign by Exalted Funeral, based on the Old School Essentials rules, which landed three gold awards including ‘Best Setting’ and ‘Best Cartography’.
What’s more, the gold winner for Best Adventure – Short Form was yet another folk-horror affair, the self-contained RPG “Whispers of the Woods”. And the gold for Best Adventure – Long Form went to a supplement for the Scandinavian folk horror RPG Vaesen. This supplement, ‘City of my Nightmares’, only gets half-credit since it has an urban setting, but even after docking it some points the 2026 Ennies had a folk horror saturation level of 38%.
The other high performing title was Daggerheart, which won gold for Best Game and Best Rules, while its quickstart adventure landed gold in Best Free Game / Product. It also took the silver in Product of the Year. A solid win in two hotly contested categories.
It will be interesting to discover if the genuinely exciting D&D release schedule that Wizards of the Coast revealed at this year’s GenCon makes any headway at the ENNIES in 2027. D&D 5th edition fairly swept the awards in 2015, but since then the juggernaut of gaming hasn’t had a single nod (unless we count a silver for ‘Best Miniature Product’ for Wizkids’ licensed ‘Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures’ line in 2017).
Since the ENNIEs are a popular vote, they tend to reward products that have a lot of popular enthusiasm behind them, particularly products that perform well in crowdfunding campaigns. Still, it’s interesting to see the folk-horror theme unifying so many winners this year. Have you played any of this year’s gold winners? Do you have your own favorite folk horror RPG? Come and chat in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
