A new website claiming to honour the "most influential tabletop game icons" has run into the buzzsaw of the people it is meant to honour. 4 Pillar Games, fronted by Ken Whitman (a figure with a long history of controversial tabletop projects), launched a directory of TTRPG designers, artists and publishers earlier this month. The bios and portraits turned out to be straight-up AI-generated, factual errors and all.
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Set up your group for freeWithin hours of the site going public on 11 May, two of its three listed leaders had walked. Veteran designer Don Perrin (Chairman) and writer Tony Lee (Editor) both resigned, with Lee telling EN World the content "was not at all what he and Don had planned, expected, or even had a chance to approve." Cam Banks, the designer behind Cortex Prime, posted on Bluesky calling it "a colossally lazy and insulting thing to do to people." Chaosium's Lynne Hardy asked for her bio to be pulled and was brushed off.
The deeper issue isn't just that the bios read like AI slurry. It's that they're packed with wrong dates, invented credits and weird half-truths of the kind generative models love to confabulate. Once that text exists on a "directory" site, it can get scraped into Wikipedia edits or news articles, doing reputational damage by way of plausible-sounding nonsense.
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Start organising for freeWhitman has so far refused to take profiles down. He says the site is "open to factual corrections", but designers keep pointing out that the simplest correction is to not make stuff up about real people in the first place.
For an industry that lives and dies on credit and credibility, this one is worth keeping an eye on, especially if you spot a designer you know being misquoted.
Sources: Tabletop Sentinel | EN World
