Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 9/17/2023

1. Cities Without Number
2. Fabula Ultima Atlas: High Fantasy
3. Cyberpunk RED: Danger Gal Dossier
4. Traveller: Mysteries of the Ancients
5. Star Trek Adventures: Animated Series Supplemental Guide

Top News Stories

Terraforming Mars Makers Defend Siding With Skynet: As reported on Dicebreaker, publisher Stronghold Games has made a commitment to continue using ‘AI’/machine-learning tools to illustrate their most recent project, a Kickstarter project to provide expansionary material for the popular board game. There are some mealy-mouthed statements about how Stronghold didn’t try to use other artists’ creations to fuel their project or ask/not ask for consent to use said creations, no, that would be up to the tools Stronghold has been using, go check their policies. 

There is a particularly sour tang to this one since Kickstarter is in the mix, as the $1.4 million campaign is another example of a big creator using crowdfunding when they probably don’t have to, pushing the ‘sucking oxygen out of the room that small creators need’ button that tends to agitate many.

We only made it a month and change after WotC ate dirt over their own ‘AI’ art issues…

Discussion of the Week

Speaking of eating dirt, on the video game side of the world everyone is angry at Unity, and redditors at /rpg are comparing Unity’s train wreck to the OGL debacle at the start of the year. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, by any means – in order to behave precisely like Unity, WotC would have to do something like charge you twenty cents every time you take your books back off the shelf – but the basic behavior of breaking trust with the community has people pondering and grumbling. They’re not the only ones, and the fact that WotC’s own Magic Arena actually runs on Unity has some breaking out the satire.

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