FINALISTS FOR THE 2025
DIANA JONES EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM

The Diana Jones Award Committee is pleased to announce our 2025 Emerging Designer Program finalists. Congratulations to everyone! Our winners will be announced in May.

Ashraf Braden

Games: rpggeek.com/rpgdesigner/150719/ashraf-braden

Ashraf Braden is an African RPG designer living in Uganda’s Kampala District. He is best known for Legends of Uganda, a zine dedicated to bringing Ugandan myths and urban legends to the gaming table. Between warehouse shifts, Ashraf is working on a potential sourcebook for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, based on his work with Legends of Uganda. This work, drawing upon the history of the Bugandan kingdom, details the clans of Buganda and delves into new, playable classes based upon local folklore.

Elliot Davis

Social: bsky.app/profile/moreblueberries.bsky.social
Website: www.moreblueberries.com

Elliot Davis, a.k.a. “moreblueberries,” is a Brooklyn-based game designer, publisher, podcaster, and artist who loves all things weird and wonderful about the TTRPG industry. He is known for such self-published releases as Project ECCO, Rom Com Drama Bomb, and the upcoming The Time We Have. When he’s not losing sleep over a new game idea you can hear him play, GM, produce, and host on the podcasts My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, which he produces as a co-founder of Many Sided Media.

Rook Feld

Website: rookfeld.com

Rook Feld (they/he) is a transmasc non-binary TTRPG designer and illustrator from Philadelphia, PA, who has been making games since 2022.  After surviving homelessness and a mental health crisis in 2023, they have since stabilized, procured reliable housing, and resumed creating TTRPGs, now informed by those experiences. Rook’s work explores themes of connection, trauma, and healing. He releases games on itch.io, often on a PWYW model or with community copies for those who can’t afford to pay. Previous releases include AFTERPARTY v2: An Evening of Playful Bereavement (a collection of six game poems made in collaboration with J.R. Hecimovich), Excavation One (a solo journaling game about the emotional toll of joining and leaving a cult), and birdcalls (a one-page solo game for those who want to reconnect).

Lyla McBeath Fujiwara

Social: bsky.app/profile/lyla.bsky.social
Website: www.jarofeyes.com

Lyla McBeath Fujiwara is the project lead for the Cosmere RPG, which in 2024 became the highest-funded tabletop Kickstarter ever. She coordinates a team of 20 diverse creatives working on 14 game products. She is also the book lead for the RPG’s hardcover campaign-length adventures, Stonewalkers and Mistborn Legacy. As the book lead, she facilitates and directs the overall creative vision and execution of the adventures. Lyla has freelanced for Hit Point Press and Evil Hat Productions. She also helped organize Big Bad Con’’s PoC Meet and Greet and co-organized Gamehole Con’s inaugural PoC Industry Dinner.

Kodi Gonzaga

Website: www.kodigonzaga.com

Kodi Gonzaga is a TTRPG designer based in Los Angeles, CA who uses they/them pronouns. They began designing their first, slight disaster of a game in 2018, but upon discovering the indie TTRPG community about five years later, their understanding of TTRPGs — and thus their ability to craft them — blossomed far beyond what they could imagine. They’ve since created multiple small games, including Down the Road Through the End of the World (a post-apocalyptic journey game that uses the Otherkind dice system) and Voxinn: A Firebrands Hack (a superhuman oppression and megacity politics game that uses the Firebrands Framework).

Ashwin Kamath

Social: bsky.app/profile/boardgameghee.bsky.social
x.com/BoardGameGhee

Ashwin Kamath is an Indian board game designer and developer out in the Seattle area. He is an architectural designer proudly advocating for strengthening community with housing-for-all projects and improving quality of life via public transit architecture. With a mindset of thinking big and macro by designing small and local, Ashwin stumbled into game design in 2019. Now, a leader in the Pacific Northwest, he helps run PlaytestNW, a community driven group of game designers, advocates for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ representation, serves as a mentor in the Tabletop Mentorship Program, and has spoken to groups of young adults about the importance of design and alternative career paths.

Marceline Leiman

Social: bsky.app/profile/marcelineleiman.bsky.social
Games: marcelineleiman.itch.io

Marceline Leiman is a graduate of and instructor at the prestigious NYU Gamecenter. She has designed in the board game and RPG space, and has worked with design/development teams at North Star Games (Oceans solo mode) Underdog Games (Trekking the World second edition) and Clarkson Potter (title unannounced). Her handcrafted wood-and-fabric game, High Tide, was selected to be featured at the inaugural Indie Games Night Market, and has since been signed to Underdog Games for mass production. Her bluffing microgame Phantasmic was recently signed to Button Shy Games.

Tejas Oza

Social:  bsky.app/profile/tacticsnchai.bsky.social

Tejas Oza is an Indian game designer who’s leading the creative process of Bludgeon, a tactics-focused RPG with asynchronous combat mechanics. He started his journey, unbeknownst to him, in high school where he created d6 systems for his friends to play, to make up for a lack of ttrpg materials being available in the sleepy town of Baroda, India. Tejas has spent the last few years turning home notes into a marketable product that more people can play and enjoy. In his free time, he likes to read, run sessions for fun, and occasionally dreams up other combat systems that may or may not see the light of day.

SPONSORS

We’d like to thank the program’s key sponsors for this year, Gen Con LLC and Bundle of Holding.

Our other sponsors & volunteers for the Emerging Designer Program include:

This year’s prize sponsors are:

This program of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming amplifies the voices of up-and-coming hobby game designers, with a focus on creators from marginalized communities, by featuring them during an expenses-paid trip to Gen Con. Its inaugural year was 2021, when Jeeyon Shim was our first Diana Jones Emerging Designer.

For more information about our previous winners and finalists, see our past-year Emerging Designer pages: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

CONTACTS

Questions? Please reach out to the program’s coordinators at edp@dianajonesaward.org. To contact the Diana Jones Award committee, email committee@dianajonesaward.org.