Independent title Land of Eem recently secured a historic victory at the Origins Awards, taking home the Roleplaying Game of the Year title against major corporate competitors.
The whimsical sandbox game, which originated as a graphic novel world before evolving into a tabletop system, has quickly captivated the industry with its focus on creative problem-solving and accessible design.
Following this milestone achievement, creators Ben Costa and James Parks sat down to discuss the transition from linear storytelling to open-ended game design, their partnership with publisher Exalted Funeral, and how they balance high-stakes fantasy with lighthearted comedy.
Beating high-profile competitors like Daggerheart and the Cosmere roleplaying game to win Roleplaying Game of the Year at the Origins Awards is a historic milestone for independent publishing. What specific elements of Land of Eem do you believe resonated so deeply with the industry peers and retailers who voted for it over these major corporate titles?
Just being nominated alongside titles like those was a huge honor for us. We were stunned, genuinely, and we’re endlessly grateful to the industry professionals who voted for Land of Eem.
As for why, it’s hard to say. But we know Land of Eem comes from a personal place and maybe that comes through and resonates with people. The world was first built over a decade ago in our graphic novel series, Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo, and we grew the fanbase from there through Dungeoneer Adventures, our middle grade series with Simon and Schuster. That world had been brewing and expanding for years, and eventually it became a game because we are, at heart, huge TTRPG fans. We grew up playing D&D every weekend, and we always knew we wanted to make our own game.
Also, Land of Eem is built around creativity. The game rewards creative problem solving over defaulting to combat, which folks seem to really gravitate towards. The Bestiary treats creatures as people with their own motivations, not just adversaries. And even though the books are very accessible, and the vibe is fun and whimsical, there is also real depth. There are tons of factions, hundreds of locations, characters, and quests. A lot to sink your teeth into. The Mucklands Sandbox, a four hundred plus page setting that could feel overwhelming at a glance, is actually designed to work like a reference book, so people can dive in without a mountain of prep.
We’d also point to the team. Land of Eem was built by us alongside a small crew of talented artists, layout designers, editors, and a few guest writers who wrote supplemental adventures. It was an enormous amount of work for a small team, with the bulk of the thousand plus pages coming directly from the two of us. We think that scrappy, independent effort is part of what the voters recognized too.
The game originated from the world you built in your Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo graphic novels. How did you navigate the transition from a linear storytelling medium to an interactive, open-ended sandbox game without losing the distinct charm and humour of the original work?
We grew up playing tabletop games like second edition D&D, and we grew up making our own games, building characters, and worldbuilding right alongside writing stories, whether that was comics, short stories, or novels that never saw the light of day. Creating has always been part of how we think.
As we published Rickety Stitch and Dungeoneer Adventures, we realized the world itself, the Land of Eem, was becoming something we wanted to explore further. The game and its sandbox settings, like The Mucklands and the upcoming Underlands sandbox, gave us a place to flesh out everything that doesn’t fit into a character-driven story. There’s only so much you can fit into a novel, and not every character or world detail warrants real estate in a narrative. So having these big campaign settings to define more of the world and tell these micro-stories is hugely satisfying. In a real sense, the Land of Eem is now as much a character to us as Rickety Stitch or the cast of Dungeoneer Adventures. Inviting players and GMs to keep telling stories in that world was exciting, so we gave it a shot.
As for how we maintain the charm of our books and translate it into the game, we’re essentially adapting our own work, which is easy when we’re writing the setting books. It did take a bit of work in playtesting to capture the feel of our stories through the rules, but that’s how we landed on our D12 system. We knew it would be important to create a mechanic that facilitated these big highs and big lows of epic triumph and failure. Things going wrong, but with a sliver of hope, or things going mostly right except for that one pesky complication. Failure is central to any good story, and our characters are always failing at first, so we wanted our game to lean into failure. Those are always the most fun and memorable moments of gaming anyway.
Sandbox play can often overwhelm game masters and players with a paradox of choice. What specific rules or structures did you implement to ensure that sandbox exploration remains manageable and focused, especially for families and newcomers?
Emergent play has always mattered to us, where it’s less about GM prep and more about everyone discovering what happens at the table. And personally, because we’re busy creators and busy fathers, we don’t always have a lot of time to play. So building a sandbox that functions like an accessible reference book, one you can open and jump into without feeling overwhelmed, was a priority.
We also have an entire book of fifteen hundred random encounters, each tied to a specific region of the sandbox, with dangerous, perilous, and discovery encounters matched to that region’s terrain and current events. So when you explore the setting and decide where to go or what adventure to run, everything you encounter along the way feels like a natural extension of the direction you’ve chosen.
The goal was to fold all these pieces of immersive play together so that a GM could flip open any section and follow the whims of the players without having to read and prep everything in advance.
You describe the tone of the game as The Lord of the Rings meets The Muppets. High stakes and whimsical comedy can sometimes clash at the table; how do the game mechanics prevent the comedy from undermining the tension, or vice versa?
Great question. One thing about Land of Eem’s tone is that you shape it yourself. If you want a campaign full of hijinks, there are quests tagged for exactly that, and you can play through an entire campaign without ever fighting anything. If you want derring-do, or even doom and gloom peril, that’s available too, and it’s backed up by how genuinely dangerous the Land of Eem can be. There are creatures and fiends that would be a disaster to fight head on without preparation, which is part of why the game leans so hard into creativity.
That Lord of the Rings element comes from the fact that Frodo and Sam didn’t defeat Sauron in a final boss battle. They won through a clever plan, two hobbits sneaking a ring into a volcano. Land of Eem is about playing these colorful characters that would be probably right at home in the Shire, but instead they’re often thrust into peril.
Our inspirations, things like the Hobbit, the Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Adventure Time, and the Secret of NIMH, all share that same dichotomy of goofy and dangerous at once. That’s our favorite place to play in.
Land of Eem explicitly rewards creative problem-solving over excessive combat. How do the rules mechanicalise non-violent options or social conflict to ensure they feel just as engaging and robust as traditional tactical combat?
There’s a large set of creative abilities that allow players to bend a situation, make suggestions, define the world around them, or divert a conflict away from combat entirely. Parley is a good example. In Land of Eem, fighting is the last step, not the first. You can talk your way out of trouble, figure out what an adversary actually wants, and find out if the conflict is a misunderstanding or something else altogether.
That said, combat absolutely exists in the game, and there’s a full system for it. In one of our recent actual plays, after years of running Land of Eem, we had the biggest fight we’d ever run against a dragon and a lich, and it was a blast, a genuinely different feel from a normal session. But most of the time, it comes down to using your creative abilities to change the situation itself, whether that’s changing someone’s mind, understanding their real motivation, or using the environment to your advantage instead of a sword.
Having won an ENNIE for Best Bestiary, your creature design is clearly a standout feature. How do you approach designing monsters so that they prompt creative interactions rather than simply serving as obstacles to be defeated in combat?
We approach monsters the same way we approach NPCs: monsters are people. Each creature entry in the Bestiary includes not just combat stats, but social behavior, vulnerabilities, and how the creature acts when it’s winning versus when it’s beaten. That well rounded approach gives a GM far more to work with than a stat block and a damage number. Because so much of Land of Eem can happen outside of combat, it matters that adversaries feel like people, not just an obstacle.
However, there are also less sentient critters and creepers in the Bestiary that are often more straightforward. They might want to eat you or just functionally serve as more of an obstacle. But creative options are still on the table if your group can figure out a way to divert, distract, or dispatch them without combat.
There is an ongoing tension in the hobby between high-end, luxury physical box sets and affordable, accessible entry points. With both a free quickstart guide and a premium deluxe box set on the market, how do you navigate this economic spectrum as an independent studio?
We knew we wanted a deluxe box set that had everything you could possibly want to play. But the truth is, you can play Land of Eem with just the Core Rulebook. The Mucklands Sandbox provides all the details and quest content you could possibly want and saves GMs enormous prep time, and the Bestiary is an exhaustive catalog of adversaries. But you could fill in the campaign world yourself, and use the 25 adversaries in the Core Rulebook.
We also wanted a robust free quickstart guide, one that captures the vibe of the game, includes a free adventure, the basic rules, and pre-generated characters, so anyone can go to landofeem.com, download it, and start playing with friends immediately. We’re also in the early stages of planning a starter set now, a middle entry point that’s more robust than the quickstart but simpler than the full box. Between the quickstart, the starter set, the deluxe box, and individual products, people can choose whatever entry point fits them.
Independent creators face significant logistical challenges regarding physical production, printing costs, and retail distribution. In what way has your partnership with Exalted Funeral allowed you to overcome these industry hurdles while maintaining full creative independence?
Exalted Funeral has been a fantastic partner. They work with some of the best creators in the industry, and they manage production and distribution logistics along with a great online storefront covering their whole catalog. More than that, they genuinely understand and support Land of Eem, and that’s made the partnership work well for us.
Without their support, Land of Eem would have been a much smaller offering out of the gate. Early on, we were considering going digital only. But partnering with EF has allowed us to pursue our grand vision of really building out an entire sandbox world in detail.
Winning a major award often changes the trajectory of a game line. As you look toward supporting and expanding the game with long-term supplements, how do you plan to scale up production without losing the intimate, hand-drawn identity that characterises the core book?
The core of it is that we don’t outsource creative direction. We write the books, the rules, the sandboxes, and the supplements ourselves, the same way we’d write a Rickety Stitch or Dungeoneer Adventures book. We do partner with other writers on adventure modules, and we love bringing other creative minds into the world when it makes sense. But for the core rules, the big sandboxes, and player supplements, it’s always us.
On the art side, Ben is the visual anchor. He’s not just creating art, he’s art directing and personally involved in every piece that goes into a book. We work with longtime collaborators who already understand Land of Eem and help make it feel alive: artists like Sean Kiernan, Peter Simon, DC Stow, Justin Gerard, John Loren, and many others.
You have been building the world of Eem together for decades. How has your personal creative partnership evolved over this time, and how do you resolve disagreements when your individual visions for a rule or story element diverge?
We have been best friends since second grade. We’ve been playing tabletop games and making things together our whole lives, so we tend to be on the same wavelength about what we want to make. Real disagreements are rare. When they come up, it’s less about picking a side and more about finding another way to look at it. If one of us feels strongly about an idea, the other leans in to help make it work rather than arguing against it.
Beyond sales figures, award trophies, and critical acclaim, what does a successful session of Land of Eem look like to you when you see people playing it at a convention or online?
People laughing. People helping each other. Nothing feels more like Land of Eem than a table where everyone immediately wants to help each other pull off the big heist, save a friend from danger, or take down a terrible fiend. Collaboration is core to the game, and it’s built into character creation itself, through the relationships between PCs.
Seeing people have fun that way, seeing our Discord community buzzing with new games and hearing their hilarious and epic stories from weekends with family and friends, that’s the real motivator for us. We plan on making Land of Eem for the rest of our lives.
For creators who are inspired by your journey from graphic novels to award-winning roleplaying game designers, which independent project or creator in the community would you currently recommend people check out, and where is the best place for players to join your growing community?
We’re genuinely inspired by Dolmenwood and Old School Essentials, and by the design work behind Daggerheart and Dragonbane. Shadowdark is also fantastic. And JP Coovert’s zines and adventures are some of the best RPG material you can get your hands on—highly recommended!
We’d also point people toward Exalted Funeral generally. They work with an incredible range of award winning, inspiring independent creators, and it’s worth exploring their whole catalog.
As for finding us: landofeem.com has the free quickstart guide, pre-gen characters, maps, and free random generators for items, treasure, towns, taverns, and dungeons. Our Discord community is one of the friendliest and most helpful around, and it’s a great place to connect with other players. On YouTube we run actual plays and our own podcast, Wizards of Eem, where we talk game design and worldbuilding. Patreon supporters get access to an ongoing library of in-progress material: new classes, adventure sites, special NPCs and villains, additional profession abilities, magic items, and more. And of course, everything is available at exaltedfuneral.com or wherever TTRPGs are sold.
With a major industry award secured and a passionate community growing across Discord and Patreon, the future looks exceptionally bright for this independent title. Players eager to experience this unique blend of high stakes and whimsical comedy can download the free quickstart guide directly from the official website or explore the full range of physical books at Exalted Funeral.
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