This is a Marketing problem pretending to be a Literary problem.
Our host is not yet aware--nevermind accepting--that Genres Are Fake And Gay.
"Fantasy" is not real--Hilary Lane blew that one open--because it's the flipside of "Science Fiction" not being real (h/t JD Cowan). What he's complaining about is generations of incompetence at Marketing a Product to Prospective Consumers.
You need Ad Men sorting this shit out, because that's what this is- a failure to sell.
Until you accept this, you will continue to flounder.
This is going to play out the same way that mass-manufactured goods trumped the local craftsman.
Normies want The Same, But Different. They want books, movies, music, etc. that are clearly within strict boundaries, but vary within those boundaries like shades of color in paint--Maroon vs. Raspberry, even though both are Red--and as we've seen in physical goods the capacity to churn out mass quantities of the same thing with quality equal to what a human craftsman can make on average always wins in competition.
Book sales prove it, supported by Kindle Unlimited page reads.
This is what the refusniks have to contend with: the Revealed Preferences of Normies have consistently shown that they prefer the mass product over the handcrafted one because, when given the choice, they choose the former over 80% of the time- usually over 90%. The hysteria over AI is just that; when they get the blind test, they choose the bot.
You won't fix this by banning it; the savvy will just lie, the cunning will go where the bots aren't banned and do it there, and you still lose because the bot masters can and will Zerg rush you to win- which is already happening. Full industrialization of literature is here, like it or not.
The only consolation to be had is that achieving the full power of this technology still requires real skill, acumen, and mastery of the craft. You need the eye, if not the hand, to make the most of what this offers. That D&D app that Jon Del Arroz made can be vibe-coded to Minimal Viable Product status, but it still needs a competent coder to go from Viable to Finished.
Most people Thing That Works and as cheap as they can get it. They don't want, and will not buy, a hand-crafted version of what is mass-manufactured and available at Walmart- just ask all the axe and knife-makers.
And the human writers that stand after AI culls the weak? They are going to be those properly conversant with the Old Masters- they are exactly the highly-skilled, well-read, and knowledge-possesed masters who can make the most of this technology.
Which is not most of those whining about it- especially in OldPub.
I look forward to see you drowned by superior bot-manufactured work, because that means we're closer to the literary analogs of Art Nouveau and Art Deco- two styles that cannot exist without mass industrialization and output.
The technology now exists for the ambitious and the skilled to make one-man publishers of themselves. Videos (and channels) like this show you how by demonstrating the tools and their use.
This is a growing field. If you're still thinking about what Chat GPT could do six months ago, you are already out of date and wrong about everything. It is now possible for one man to draft, revise, edit, polish, and finish manuscripts at a speed which OldPub cannot match. That same man can do this multiple times per week, each one with a unique authorial voice, and yet each one will 100% hit the Revealed Preferences of the readers of that specific Product Category. He can do this while devising the covers himself, formatting the books himself, making the audiobooks himself, and even automating all of the PR work to his email list (usually via Substack) and uploading to the storefronts he uses in addition to his own author site(s).
He can, if he wants to, get to a point where he can drop a novel a week per pen-name because readers read in series and read in binges. If he wanted to space out releases he can do that too, usually by format (ebook, audio, paperback, hardcover and usually in that order).
This shift requires a different set of skills. Being a copymonkey is not enough anymore; you have to have business management skills, especially the full Public Relations suite (which includes Advertising and Marketing), which means your job is now Project Management- you're the Producer, the Publisher, and not just the grunt shitting out copy.
Jason vibe-coded Story Hacker. He's no programmer, and yet he delivered a valuable specialist tool that he offers to his members. Expect more of this going forward, especially if the pressure to cut the balls off the big models continues and thus forces the development of specialist LLMs that lack such neutering.
And if you think this doesn't apply to non-fiction work, you are already very wrong; Advertising is already wholly taken over by LLM-powered campaigns, which means Marketing already is, and as such it is already happening that other forms of non-fiction are now being done by LLM-powered production workflows overseen by human management.
Now all that needs to be done is to bring the costs down so that those with the time, but not the money, can fully exploit this potential.
Jon Del Arroz made it plain: you have to be public-facing to succeed now, which means you can't be a copymonkey- you have to be The Man In Command.
The big reason anti-AI people hate it is because they suck and the robot does what people want better, faster, and cheaper.
The authors I know who actually make a living doing it (and don't beg for their sustainance or have a patron covering their bills; I mean "does this as their 9-5" and lives off the proceeds entirely) embraced AI.
They don't just prompt a LLM. They use multiple LLMs, they tooled up an entire automation chain using those LLMs, they added agents to those automation chains to do other things (cover generation, manuscript formatting, uploading to storefronts, etc.), and through this industrialization of the process they not only can establish and sustain a unique voice but can accelerate their pace of publishing from X/Year to X/Month- an entire 12 book series per year easily, and possible to do so per quarter, per pen name.
Revealed Preferences Are Revealed, folks. They want a very specific experience from every specific product label in media; they reward with time and money those that deliver exactly what they want on the nose 100% of the time. Robots can do this far better than all but the best human writers. The lower 80% are the losers here; the upper 20% are the ones that still have a career w/o patronage of any kind.
Every author is a factory now. Factories take time to tool up, but once that's done they can mass-produce identical widgets wicked-fast and deliver them to market faster. You ain't going to John Henry your way out of this, and you ain't going to strangle it with regulation either- not when the globe is available and China doesn't give a shit about your faggot rules. Adapt or die.
We've had two Braunstein scenarios published so far that serve as perfect campaign launch vehicles.
"But they only work for Muh Fantasy!" got defeated by UMBROS, which is based in Burroughs' Pellucidar (i.e. a Lost World, complete with guns).
Now the goalposts will shift to "You can't go big time with this."
That too is wrong.
I talked about this earlier this year at the Clubhouse.
Got delayed due to Government fuckery, but this past week I cleared that out and the outline I've got ready will start being used.
You can go big. Very big. Now being written.
Same deal when it's ready: Free in PDF, at-cost in POD. Aiming for something like BROZER in length: enough to get you going, but not enough to be a substitute for playing.
I'm not a Dolemwood guy. Don't see the point of it.
But it's worth it get a passing familiarity because then you can easily follow along such articles to find and appreciate things like this:
The Duke’s player’s intention for this Braunstein was supposed to be a ducal summit to redraw borders. Instead, the capital was invaded, the Duchess was kidnapped, Baron Hogwarsh was murdered by a (star) man wearing his face, a senior Church official died in the streets, and half the great powers of Brackenwold watched it happen. Whatever this setting was before this, it is not that anymore.
Hie over to Substack if you're not already there, find the Bros and their friends (including myself), and read along.
This guy didn't realize it, but he proved that "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" ARE FAKE GENRES!
TLDR: All that changes are the trappings and the setting. The narrative structure is IDENTICAL so they play out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY!
This is why Andre Norton and Leigh Brackett can write "science fiction" that is really "fantasy" with a bare whiff of justification for the tale's telling: they are both doing Fantastic Adventure fiction, same as Burroughs, Meritt, Moorcock, Howard, Smith, and everyone else in Appendix N.
It's also why Shadowrun is just D&D With Chrome & Guns; changing the trappings and the setting didn't change the substance of gameplay one damned bit.
Dune (and its knockoffs, 40K and Fading Suns) is just a resetting of The Sabers of Paradise (go look that one up).
Star Wars (the original) is The Hidden Fortress plus The Dambusters.
Never, ever mistake a Product Category for a Genre; the former is a Brand Name thing, while the latter is all about narrative structure- seeming vs. substance.
"Fantasy" does not exist. "Science Fiction" does not exist. There are other fake genres; they also do not exist.
Sunday saw Jeffro go on with the Superversive crew.
Winning Secrets is going to be a world-shaking book, first in Tabletop and then--because Tabletop exercises stupidly-outsized cultural influence globally via Dungeons & Dragons--into other culture-shaping media, where it is not out of line to conceive of Jeffro being a hidden pillar in the future culture to come by the end of the century as Gygax and Arneson was for the 20th (and preserved that of the 19th via Appendix N).
This not being a Gaming show, we get to see Jeffro talk about the intellectual and spiritual side of the hobby.
You want the other side of the matter? You'll get it here.
Daddy Warpig explains why Normies can't find good new fiction in Barnes & Noble anymore.
About 10 years ago, the Big 5 Publishers and Agents/Agencies who serve them stopped accepting NEW Straight White Male authors. None of them, no more.
Since then, Epic Fantasy has become Romantasy, Urban Fantasy has become Paranormal Romance and just look at what Gengineered… pic.twitter.com/dDYmFt6xHJ
That's three Druids operating a speedy message network via pigeons gathered, corralled, trained, and deployed via Druid magics and nature lore.
And this is Lavsac the Red, operating with the Wolfen.
Lavsac the Red leading his heavy cavalry in column out to support his Roman ally in the field. Is it true that he can ride three times faster than normal? pic.twitter.com/Y1e2RIpeZM
One other thing that you need to realize is that we now have a powerful tool for folks who have problems visualizing what they read.
This is the description of Deijah Thoris from A Princess of Mars:
The prisoner was a slender, girlish figure, not unlike the Earth women in form, but far more beautiful. Her face was oval and exquisitely beautiful, her features finely chiseled and exquisite. Her great lustrous eyes were of a deep, rich, liquid brown, shaded by long, curling lashes, and her coal-black hair, waving in a loose yet becoming coiffure, was confined by a jeweled diadem. Her skin was a light reddish copper, which glowed with the crimson flush of her cheeks and the ruby of her lips. She was entirely naked except for the highly wrought ornaments of gold and precious stones which she wore, and her figure was perfectly symmetrical.
Copy and past that into a Grok chat. You will get a photorealistic head-and-shoulder shot (because Grok auto-censors nudity in chat-generated images; Imagine will do topless, but not full body nude).
Let's say that you want to take the opportunity that Princess is now Public Domain to put out a Light Novel version with all-new illustrations.
First, how it can look (SFW version):
This is the prompt I used in Imagine (not the chat; you need to use the Grok site or mobile app for this):
1990s anime OVA style (Record of Lodoss War + early Berserk Golden Age + Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth). A slender, girlish figure, not unlike the Earth women in form, but far more beautiful. Her face was oval and exquisitely beautiful, her features finely chiseled and exquisite. Her great lustrous eyes were of a deep, rich, liquid brown, shaded by long, curling lashes, and her coal-black hair, waving in a loose yet becoming coiffure, was confined by a jeweled diadem. Her skin was a light reddish copper, which glowed with the crimson flush of her cheeks and the ruby of her lips. She was entirely naked except for the highly wrought ornaments of gold and precious stones which she wore, and her figure was perfectly symmetrical. Ethereal fantasy atmosphere, dramatic rim lighting, clean sharp line art, cel-shaded with soft airbrush. masterpiece 8k. --ar 9:16 --stylize 350 --v 6
Imagine generates a lot of variations; this one is the one I post in public-facing forums because it is Safe For Work. You can do the same with any description in a book.
Want a better idea of how Conan looks like in a story? Feed it into Grok. What Amon Hen looked like? Same. Is this foolproof? No; like any LLM, it can only work with what data it is trained upon, so very old, very rare, and very new work may escape its ability to generate a depiction.
Which means that as you learn how to use language to describe what you want the reader to see, you can create powerful illustrations; as you learn the language of art direction, that power multiplies. Talk in chat with the LLM you use--Grok does this very well--to learn how to do the more technical elements that I've shown above; this is the first widget that you can talk to and it will teach you how to use it in real time. You can do everything I'm doing; I've gone from flailing about like a rube to where I am now in a few weeks I turn out this sort of thing casually now, sometimes posting them to Twitter as shitposts.
That's why my Substack articles now have illustrations included almost all the time. This is why I am confident that BRODUM will look amazing; I've become familiar with the tool, and I develop towards mastery with each day. You can make counters for wargames, card art for CCGs, wraparound images for paperback/hardcover books or boxed sets, and more.
This is going to totally wreck what remains of the commercial viability of Tabletop gaming; when rolling your own is this easy, why pay someone else to do it?
Couple this with the tutorials that my pal Oliver Campbell does on Twitter for image generation in Grok.
Comics people that cry about a page a day will be outworked by someone that knows how to use AI to crank out entire issues PER DAY. https://t.co/1nPz5vvFTQ
I just threw this together quick to show (a) how fast this can be done, and (b) you can break the frame and add art style direction without any difficulty. This is scuffed (needs revision) but you see how easy it is to do this with Grok now. Illustrations are now doable entirely on your own if you can properly describe what you want to see.
This is why I am confident that I can deliver BRODUM as a solo project and still show-up a lot of established publishers all while spending nothing but time.
I'll look into Cowork; if that can further boost my output by reducing elimninating the time spent on bitchwork then I'll adopt it.
We are moving away from the value-add skillset being the gruntwork; we are moving towards the value-add being the Command Level skills, of project management and oversight- of being the Master managing and overseeing a team of appentices and assistants. The days of needing lots of human labor to design, publish, and promote Tabletop product (or any similar product; you better believe card games, board games, novels, comics, film/TV, and videogames will be similarly affected) is going to fade away over the next several years as this potential is recognized and realized- with the seismic shift in the economy and society that will come with that shift.
The Beast shows the value of competent technical writing.
DCC's a Collector's Purchase Choice because they write to be read, not to be used. They are incompetent at technical writing.
Look at that stuff. That's far too reliant on art style, trade dress, and other aesthetic elements to get attention and keep it long enough to get purchased. What Beast put out is that stripping that away reveals that DCC is not only incompetent at product design, they are incompetent at technical writing; it's a serious pain in the ass, moreso than using the original version, to use what they published at the table. It is only fun to read and show off the art.
This is the sort of publisher that needs to be run out of business and the hobby, and thanks to the collapse it's going to sooner than later becaue you can only coast off crowdfunding in a collapsing economy for so long. Meanwhile, people playing Real Games with procedures for easy emergent content generation are going to thrive because it's a Buy Once, Cry Once affair with no further expense (or upkeep) and that's how the hobby has to be going forward.
The following video came across my feed and hit something I've been talking about for years.
Set aside the conclusion. Focus on Tabletop applicability, both in terms of worldbuilding and in rules/content design. We, like the video presenter, shall take the perspective of an engineer here.
Remember Runequest? What's its big deal? That religion, in its full complexity, is made playable in a manner that players can comprehend in a manner analogus to the way that non-Christian religion actually works. Call of Cthulhu does something similar with how it presents Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmos via its rules.
This video explains how and why the human practice of religion works as it does, and it is far more applicable to non-Christian practice (something that is how things are in most Fantastic Adventure gaming play, at least in theory) than to Christianity due to specific elements of Christianity that make it the outlier in religions.
It also, without even addressing the hobby, shows why the Cleric (a) is not a generic priest and (b) why implicit cosmologies hard-coded into a game limit the scope of practical religion capable of being modelled in a game. There's a reason for why you can't have a proper representation of Christianity in Legend of the Five Rings/Legend of the Burning Sands: the rules regarding how the supernatural and sacred work get shattered by implementing Christianity into its setting.
The obvious conclusion is that this justifies other priest classes.
The obvious follow-on is that games will get the priest classes that the rules support via their mechanics and procedures.
The catch is that people will do this poorly and get shit results that don't deliver on the expectations; to do that you have to know the game you're designing for, which means you need to read the fucking manuals and then draw out the second and third-order effects of their rules and procedures. With that mastery in hand, your design will leverage those structural elements and emergent effects to fulfill the expectations that users will have.
There's a reason that I've made a draft adaptation of Palladium's Warlock O.C.C. to AD&D1e; it is to illustrate this very thing, because AD&D1e can support the concept, but those who don't read and study the game's manuals will fail to achieve the desired result. Shaman adaptations are likewise not just a variant Cleric.
The same applies to other games. Your priests need to reflect the mythos and cosmology that comprises their religious practices, and that needs to be coded into the rules so it is part of the experience of play.
I do not care about people using bots for commercial ends. Jon Del Arroz gets into why, sentiments I share.
The thing that naysayers don't want to admit is this: no cares about anything but the result.
Furthermore, the Culture Industry, and several segments within it individually (e.g. artists), have no one to blame but themselves for LLM-driven tools to be able to poach their positions as they are doing now.
"But the writing-"
Is trained on the metric tons of mid-as-fuck copy churned out by hand over the last several generations written by people. Fiction, non-fiction, technical, etc. it's there and it does the job required of it.
"But the art-"
Is exactly what it trained on, with the capacity for remixing.
"But folks can-"
LOLno, they can't. You have to fuck up really hard--that's a PEBKAC error, meaning HUMAN error--for anything bot-generated to be so obvious that Normies and similar mass audiences will notice, and even minor mistakes will be overlooked by all but the most obsessive or expert observer/reader. (No one's noticed the flaw in yesterday's cat pic, but I did because I know the subject matter, and I left it there because it's a comedy enhancement.)
This is why I don't care that Wizards of the Coast is using it. WOTC, for all its faults, still is more Mammon Mob than Molech Mass and they have to deal with all the retardery that too many "creatives" aligned their way are prone to doing.
Which leads to a few other things people don't want to admit that the bots are really good at delivering:
Folks want "The same, but different", which bots are fantastic at delivering. Revealed Preference shows this in the success of franchises and series over original IPs, and those IPs that do succeed do so by being "Like (X) but (Y)".
Tabletop, being wholly and utterly reliant on Network Effects for value generation, is all about "The same, but different". Too divergent? Commercial death, every single time. WOTC, not being run by total morons, can do basic pattern recognition over time and notice where the drop off is and hard stop there.
Players, especially the Current Edition cohort, are long-trained to see Conventional Play as a place for FanFic Fappery and--as The Second Story recently explained in detail--Fanfiction Ruins Everything.
The result is this: The reason for the bots being able to take over is because the people already made bots of themselves, so all that's happening is something that can do the same thing faster and with less cost/liability that we saw with automation in manufacturing and other forms of mechanization.
The consequence is that this is contributing to the collapse of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play, which is already non-viable commercially outside of WOTC (because all of you lying twats go cap-in-hand to Kickstarter/Indiegogo/etc. to beg for money; that's not a business, that's--at best--busking with extra steps).
Maybe you should consider that you're in the wrong business, that Tabletop's commercial viability isn't in pushing product, and that you should earn your sustainance elsewhere if you refuse (like OldPub) to adapt to the new reality and Do The Meme while it all burns down around you. WOTC is not, which is one of the reason they'll still be around when all else has fallen down.
And for the hobbyists? This is how you get tools that produce equal-quality work, at a fraction of the cost, so that you can compete within the Network and win.
Just look at what I did in minutes adapting the Colonial Viper to BattleTech with Grok. All I'll need to do is double-check the math.
The TLDR is that the reason for bot-takeover of a lot of media production is because it replaces the mass of mediocrities that struggle to do Good Enough by deadline to spec, and man are a lot of "creatives" showing their asses by objecting to this fact; they can be--and are already being--replaced by men who are not afraid of the tools but instead recognize first the reality of media production as a business and then recognize that the value they add is not in the grunt work of churning out bitchwork material but in the managerial end of project management and editorial oversight.
That describes most of the Tabletop people out there: mediocrities struggling to do Good Enough on time and to spec.
It is no surprise that those with the acumen necessary to lead projects from start to finish are increasingly embracing the tools that allow them to quickly reach the point where hands-on human intervention adds value to the final result. This reduces costs, reduces time to market, and increases quality while sifting out liabilities (usually in the form of dead weight, unreliable actors, or trouble-makers- the folks behind a lot of DEI/BRIDGE/SJW bullshit, as it happens).
If you want to know why I say that the future of the hobby is a return to an underground existence as a non-commercial hobby, shit like this is part of the reason why. There is no need to pay people for products when you have all the tools needed to generate what you want, when you want, how you want for free.
WHAT IS BEST INLIFE? AYE, THE THRILL OF THE FIGHT, RED MEAT AND DARK LIQUER,THELAUGHTER OF CHILDREN AND, TELLING TALES OF HEROES!
DERRING DO, AND BLOOD AND THUNDER, DASHING ROGUES AND HARDFIGHTING, HEROES, SEEKING GOLD AND GLORY, AND SPILLING AN OCEAN OF BLOOD AND GUTS ALONG THE WAY.
THE KIND OF SWORD & HEART POUND, PUTS A FIRE IN YOUR BELLY; AND BURNS A PLACE IN YOUR VERY SOUL.
IF THE LOVE FOR HEROIC FANTASY BEATS IN YOUR CHEST LIKE A BATTLEDRUM, THEN.JOIN US AS WE BLOOD AND THUNDER BACK TO THE FRONTLINES OF FANTASY!
BECOME A HERO.
BECOME A LEGEND.
BECOME... BATTLEBORN!
Take a look. See if you want in or not. I have nothing to do with this project and thus have no opinion; I am merely boosting the signal.
