Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief, Wolfgang Baur, is here to give you some insight on the state of the industry!
Both as the Kobold Press CEO and as a game designer, I’m pleased to say that Kobold Press’s policy on AI is simple and direct: We don’t use generative AI art, we don’t use AI to generate text for our game design, and we don’t believe that AI is magical pixie dust that makes your tabletop games better.
The term AI is simply everywhere in the news right now. It’s in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s baked into new US Department of Defense drones. It’s rejecting health insurance claims, creating phony travel guides, and judging unemployment insurance in Nevada.
In many of those cases, it is clearly doing the job worse than humans do. It’s not the right tool for every job. Given its error rates in health care such as medical imaging, it’s barely the right tool for any job.
We should be skeptical about AI snake oil. It’s not useless, but it’s also not miraculous. And in some places, it simply doesn’t belong at all.
Your Brain is the Generator
The staff at Kobold Press doesn’t think AI belongs in generating art, roleplaying, or storytelling. Making your game your own is the heart of the RPG hobby: creating your world, your character, and your story with friends. Frankly, we’ve seen LLM text prompts work ok for chatbots. But we play RPGs to play with our friends, not software.
The Kobold policy against AI has been in place since the rise of Midjourney and similar tools in 2022. We looked at them, learned that they were trained on images that ripped off working artists and violated their copyrights, and rejected them as unethical tools that require theft from creatives.
Art director Marc Radle and the entire creative team are incredibly proud of the artists and cartographers who produce the amazing images, characters, creatures, maps, and scenes published by Kobold Press. We believe in their talent and their vision, and we plan to continue hiring artists to create Kobold Press covers, maps, and interior art to the highest possible standard. No AI-generated art or maps are permitted in our game books.
For game design, we hold the same position. Kobold Press believes in empowering players and game masters with tools (such as the upcoming Encounter Builder tool) that enable your game to run well.
But the emphasis is on your game, not a machine-generated GM or a set of prompts for a design built on LLM training on clear infringement of existing work. The spark of every GM’s creativity doesn’t glow any brighter with AI. None of our game design is generated with AI, and we aim to keep it that way.
Kobold Press believes that tabletop is about fueling everyone to do their own creation and have the joy of making something unique to them. Tabletop games connect players with original stories, and we aim to use human designed, developed, and playtested materials to strengthen every home game. It should always be fun and entertaining to host your own game nights. AI is not required to run your game, and it is not required to design it.
If you support Kobold Press in this policy, please feel free to sign below in support.
Signees
Beth Ball
Grove Guardian Press (D&D Duet)
Jean-Yves Boulais
Petra Alanis
Roxane Lapa
Collin Worster
Thomas Limp
Daniel Trujillo
Gabin Olivier
Ben McFarland
Jay Kilian
Todd Stigliano
Kevin Fox
Matthew Rhine
Douglas Hayes
Vedder Press
Peter Beketov
Thomas Barclay
Sarah Conner's Shotgun (for dealing with AIs)
rob blumenberg
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Clayton Thomson
Robert Ahrens
Alvin Loi
Jason Nyquist
World Tree
Amy Crittenden
Jonathan Ball
DnD Duet
Isaac Stephanus
Mark Hurley
Narrow Seas Fabrications
Scott McNeil
Faith Elisabeth Lilley
World Tree LLC
R P Davis
Kabouter Games
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RPG Familiar
Bryan Newlun
Constantine Belegris
Em M
Artist, writer, and Forever DM who believes human creativity is worth fighting for
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The Arwyrm Adventuring Party &Hunt Igbane Demon Slayers
Jacob Vardy
JKV Games
Wess Tester
TS Luikart
Cubicle 7
David Brideau
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Jeffrey Stricker
Andrew Newhook
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Darren West
Studio 404 Games
Mike Gehrke
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Jason King
Matthias Esch
Delta Starfire
Sam Littell
Ash Hames
Joshua Davis
Jade Davies
John C Park
Robin Fjärem
Lindsay Belton
Ivan Compagnoni
Michael Parman
Michael Hansen
Jennifer Bruce
Red Fox Illustration
Jarrod Camiré
Michael Miller
The Arcane Gearsmith
Lillen Art
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D.D. O'Brien
Cort Carpenter
Trevor Deslatte
Keith Hershey jr.
Ominous Glow Games
Thomas Jones
Morgan V
Adverse Reactions
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DrunkardsAndDragons.com
Chris Martin
Unstabletop
Jay Newman
Andrew Durston
The Campaign Nook
Robert Bridges
Stephen Allain
Ulf Hässelbäck
Darrell Ottery
Eclectic Games
Christopher Larkin
David Rempel
Rempelstiltskin Productions LLC
David Mathews
Linda Buth
Gary Francisco
Nicholas Monitto
Kevin Heath
John Payne
Julien Pirou
Empyreal Media Productions
Amund Christensen
Golden Age comics and Collectibles
Jeff Tinevez
youtube.com/itsNket
Kenneth Smith
Hannah Dietrich
Cave Gaming LLC
Brandon Dietrich
Cave Gaming LLC
William Kramer
Philippe Marcil
Alex Mewett
Kain Hernandez
Caleb Benson
Steven Lithway
BDL Heating and Cooling