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News Roundup: Land of Eem, Sutra of Pale Leaves Receive Awards at Origins 2026

Exalted Funeral's D&D-Meets-Muppets TTRPG Land of Eem was recognized as the top TTRPG game of 2026 by the Origins Awards, organized by GAMA.

Author

Christopher Hutton
June 21, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

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This week, we got a lot of awards news. The Origins Awards, hosted in Ohio, announced its tabletop roleplaying game winners this weekend. The Diana Jones also announced its nominees for 2026. D&D Beyond previewed a variety of interesting third-party D&D supplements. And finally, we interviewed the team behind an app that can help you create the right ambience for your table.

All of that and more in today’s issue!

Land of Eem, Sutra of Pale Leaves Featured in 2026 Origin Awards

Exalted Funeral’s Land of Eem and Chaosium’s Sutra of Pale Leaves were named the top products at the Origins Awards 2026.

The Origins Games Fair is one of the larger tabletop gaming conventions in the United States, and was hosted in Columbus, Ohio. One of the standout events is the Origins Awards, which recognizes outstanding games in the board game, card game and roleplaying game categories. The event is organized by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, which is a division of the tabletop advocacy-focused GAMA.

The organization announced the winners on Friday evening. While there were a number of winners, the two categories that TTRPG Insider was following is the top Roleplaying Game and the top Roleplaying Supplement,

The Land of Eem, Exalted Funeral’s lighthearted fantasy TTRPG that mixes traditional fantasy with Muppets vibes, was the top Roleplaying Game of the Year.

Land of Eem won the Origins Award for Roleplaying Game of the Year last night! Blown away and honored to win among a truly amazing list of finalists.

— Land of Eem (@landofeem.bsky.social)2026-06-20T14:23:18.566Z

The Sutra of Pale Leaves, Chaosium’s adaptation of The King in Yellow for a 1980s Japan-based series of adventures, was the Roleplaying Game Supplement of the Year. TTRPG Insider spoke to Chaosium about The Sutra of Pale Leaves back in June 2025.

Our Call of Cthulhu #TTRPG release The Sutra of Pale Leaves - Twin Suns Rising is the 2026 Origins Awards Roleplaying Game Supplement of the Year!

— Chaosium (@chaosium.bsky.social)2026-06-20T16:12:05.414Z

Congratulations to the winners! You can see the full list of nominees here.

Diana Jones Tabletop Gaming Award Finalists Announced

The Diana Jones Award committee is pleased to announce the finalists for its 2026 award. In alphabetical order, they are:

— The Diana Jones Award (@dianajonesaward.org)2026-06-18T19:36:46.461Z

The Diana Jones Award, an award for “excellence in tabletop gaming”, released its finalists for 2026.

  • •Mischief Toy Store, a games store in St. Paul, MN

  • Molly House, a board game by Jo Kelly with Cole Wehrle & Ricky Royal, from Wehrlegig Games

  • Price Johnson, a game company executive with Cephalofair Games

  • Rob Wieland, a game designer and journalist who passed away in October 2025.

  • Trench Crusade, a miniatures game by Mike Franchina, James Sherriff, and Tuomas Pirinen, from Factory Fortress

Wieland is the only candidate directly related to TTRPGs, although all the projects seem noteworthy in their own ways. Mischief, for example, was involved in advocacy work in Minnesota amid all the ICE-related news.

You can read more about the finalists here.

Other Stories from This Week

  • Warhammer Fantasy publisher Cubicle 7 announced that it is releasing an expansion for Sylvania, the vampire-infested region of the Warhammer setting.

  • The Cyberpunk Red sourcebook for Night City is officially available physical purchase. It also made its debut at Origins 2026.

  • New spell reference card decks are available for 5.5e

  • Free League announced preorders for Operation Leading Edge, its new cinematic adventure. oIt is also updating its Champion of the Gods campaign and finally releasing updated versions of its Colonial Marines Guide and Building Better Worlds to match the game’s updated ruleset from last year.

  • Rascal sat down with the Backerkit team and designers to see if the new collab-funding model is working as well as the crowdfunding platform claims.

  • Twenty-Sided Tavern was featured in Gayming Magazine.

  • The Smurfs TTRPG, which was crowdfunded last year, is sending its starter kit to retailers in July.

  • A writer at PC Gamer argues that there’s no such thing as the Matt Mercer Effect.

  • The Worlds Beyond Number graphic novel by Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii, and Lou Wilson (based on the AP of the same name) went live, and has already raised $1 million to date.

  • The Swedish fantasy TTRPG Ereb Altor is being adapted into English for the first time in history by Kult publisher Helmgast. The game will use the Dragonbane ruleset.

  • The

Vampire: the Masquerade, Floral Dragons and Eldritch Hunts: D&D Beyond Unveils Q3 Release Schedule

D&D Beyond has actively communicated its plans for future third-party releases this year. The website posted its plans for what will be released over the next three months.

The standout release appears to be Bound by Blood, a collaboration between White Wolf and Ghostfire Gaming to create a Kindred class. In other words, players will be able to play Vampire: the Masquerade in D&D 5.5e.

“Welcome to the World of Darkness with the new Kindred class for 5.5e,” The listing states. “A full vampire class powered by Blood Points, Disciplines, and the ever-clawing Beast inside! Included in this release is a heart-pounding Dark Ages adventure. We will be offering a pre-order of Bound By Blood in June, followed by a release in July.”

The White Wolf team later confirmed that this project is separate from the expected 6e release scheduled for GenCon this year.

It’s the latest project by a major TTRPG publisher that has decided to adapt some form of its contents into 5.5e as a separate endeavor from their major projects. Paizo announced last summer that it was adapting Abomination Vaults into a 5.5e campaign, while Chaosium created a Cthulhu-inspired expansion as well.

Want to see more reporting in the TTRPG space? Heard a scoop or a story you want covered? Let us know! Subscribe to TTRPG Insider and get exclusive interviews, trend pieces, speculation and coverage of D&D, mainstream publishers and the indie scene.

Q&A W/ Reverie, An App that Provides Easy-To-Create Musical Ambience

When it comes to a TTRPG experience, music is an integral part of making it more immersive. Having a solid music track in the background helps keep you in your setting, whether it is the dark future of a cyberpunk setting or a fantasy tavern.

However, that can sometimes get awkward when you’re struggling to capture a particular vibe or idea. A new app claims to offer new options for doing so. Reverie by Parallel Minds is a standalone app that can convert any MP3 into “long, evolving ambient and atmospheric beds” using 37 native DSP modules in the lineage of Paul Nasca's Paulstretch. It’s a tool that allows you to generate tracks that match an assortment of sounds and variety with ease. The songs themselves are also royalty-free, which makes them perfect for TTRPG streams or actual-play broadcasts.

I got to sit down to chat with Parallel Minds’ William Garrido about the app, how it works, and its benefits.

  1. Is Reverie specifically aimed at content creators or TTRPG folks, or is it more generalized in the market?
    It's general, honestly. Producers, film and game composers, sound designers, podcasters, content creators, all sorts. But I do think it fits tabletop really well in the right mood: horror beds, airy or spacey atmospheres, that tense low background you hear behind a true crime narrator. That kind of thing is exactly where it shines.

  2. How does it work? Is AI at all involved?
    No AI, and it's not laying other sounds on top of yours. It takes your own audio and reshapes it. The main trick is time-stretching: imagine taking a few seconds of sound and stretching it like elastic into several minutes, so the notes blur into a slow, evolving wash. The other way is a spectral freeze, where it grabs a single moment and holds it, like pausing on one frame and letting it ring out into a texture. That's why it doesn't really
    sound like the original: you're not hearing the tune anymore, you're hearing its color stretched or frozen into atmosphere. If you want to keep more of the original in there, just stretch it less.

  3. How can you say the output is royalty-free? Is it because of practices like Fair Use Law, or something else?
    Simple version: the moment you own the sound you put in, the ambiance that comes out is yours and royalty-free. It's not a Fair Use thing. Reverie just reshapes your own material, and we take no cut, no license, and no subscription on what you make. You can literally record your voice for a few seconds and turn it into a gorgeous ambiance, and it's 100%
    Yours to use anywhere. The only thing to keep in mind is that you should have the rights to whatever you feed in. If it's your own recording, you're completely clear.

  4. What does "37 native DSP modules in the lineage of Paul Nasca's Paulstretch" entail?
    DSP just means "digital signal processing", a fancy way of saying audio effects. The thing is, I coded all 37 of them myself for Reverie, and they run right on your machine, no internet, no AI. The time-stretching one is called Dreamtime, and it's built on research by a guy named Paul Nasca, who figured out how to stretch sound that far without it turning to mush. I took that idea and built everything else around it.

Disclosure: TTRPG Insider was provided a free copy of the software to test.

Reverie is available to try for free on their website.

Backerkit has continued to embrace the indie TTRPG scene, seeking ways to help fund new projects. The latest endeavor appears to be the Ennies Emporium, a 10-day event from July 6-16, where featured vendors recognized as nominees in 2025 will offer some of their products for sale. The Ennies are the top awards within the TTRPG space, and are usually announced at GenCon.

Backerkit previously hosted a similar market-style event in 2025, allowing creators to sell products in time for the holidays.

The 2026 Ennies nominees are expected to be announced on July 3, 2026.

That’s all for this week. Got other stories or scoops? Want to offer your two cents on our stories? Feel free to send us tips or emails at [email protected].