In the last few days, a slew of TTRPG and board game designers have led an online charge against 4 Pillar Games (4PG), a website publishing bizarre GenAI-assisted biographies of tabletop game creators, including clearly AI-altered photos of several deceased game designers.
According to 4PG's unlinked but still accessible Terms of Service page, it's an "independent tabletop gaming publication, editorial platform, and historical archive", and it claims all its content is subject to human review and approval. But a wave of tabletop game makers, large and small, have spoken out online against the site, criticizing its articles and especially its AI image use.
Notably, Michael O'Brien, Vice President of Call of Cthulhu publisher Chaosium, posted 4PG's evidently AI-generated images of Greg Stafford, Lynn Willis, and Steve Perrin: three celebrated game designers who worked with Chaosium for many years, who are all now deceased. O'Brien's Bluesky thread from Tuesday calls 4 Pillar's images "AI slop" and describes them as "disconcerting, glass-eyed simulacrums" of his late industry colleagues.
In the thread, O'Brien shares the original images 4PG's AI-assisted creations appear to have drawn from, including his own photo of RuneQuest creator Perrin with Stafford at Gen Con 2018. 4PG's image features that exact shot of Perrin, but with a host of clear signs of genAI alteration, most obviously garbled text on the convention badge. "Greg, Lynn and Steve are no longer around to object, but I can," reads one of O'Brien's posts.
The images (which are still online at time of writing) were published in 4PG's "Top Influential Tabletop Game Icons" section, a very long list of game designer biographies which the site describes as a "directory for the top influential tabletop icons of all time". That section exists alongside a similar list of company biographies, and an RSS feed of tabletop news articles from various outlets (which now links to at least two fresh articles covering the backlash against 4PG).
But many of the living game designers 4PG graced with biographies - including Wingspan creator Elizabeth Hargrave, Undaunted co-creator David Thompson, and prolific TTRPG designer Cam Banks - have spoken out strongly against the site. Banks called its whole approach "lazy and disrespectful", while Thompson suggested he may consider legal action over its use of his likeness.
As first reported by ENWorld on Tuesday with fulsome examples, the text of 4PG's biography articles is riddled with negative parallelisms - repetitive, formulaic 'it's not X, but it's Y' phrases - which are a recognized tell-tale sign of GenAI authorship. In a Bluesky thread Tuesday, Hargrave described 4PG's biographies, including hers, as "laughably BAD", pointing to "nonsense phrases like 'the birds were the math,' 'the research is not a costume,' and 'Hargrave did not simply remake Wingspan.'"
In sharing their own Rascal News report on 4PG, investigative journalist Lin Codega said "the ramifications of hallucinatory LLM 'histories' threaten to erode truth and destroy the historical record". Rascal also shared, with permission, webchats between several game designers and 4PG that showed 4PG flatly refusing to remove their biographies and likenesses from the site on request, instead requesting the designers themselves submit corrections.
Because 4PG's biography articles list no authors, it's currently impossible to pinpoint exactly who's responsible for creating and uploading the pages - but insofar as the site has a human team behind it, it appears to have collapsed after the online backlash in the last few days.
A now removed 'About' page on the 4PG website listed its team as including Reece Wardrip as CEO, Don Perrin as Chairman, and Tony Lee as Editor - but Perrin and Lee have now both publicly resigned and distanced themselves from the project.
While his name is not listed openly on the site, and he has not publicly said he's involved, it appears game designer Ken Whitman is a fourth 'pillar', as the site's metadata (shown whenever an article link is shared via external platforms) includes the title "Ken Whitman Games".
Wargamer has reached out directly to Whitman via Facebook for comment on the site, its AI images, his personal involvement, and the backlash from designers. We will update this story if we receive a response.
4 Pillar Games itself has no public contact details, but in an attempt to explore its side of the story, we turned to the closest thing it has to a public face: the 'Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons' (MTTGI) Facebook page. This page has no listed owners or operators, but has been rapidly posting the full texts and AI-doctored images of all 4PG's biography articles since April 21, and has this week posted impassioned defences of 4PG as if it is the site.
On Tuesday, May 11, MTTGI posted a lengthy rebuttal to the site's critics, clearly written as if from the site's operators, which unlike the page's usual posts does not seem to appear on the 4PG site itself. In that post - titled "Why some designers object to our archive" - MTTGI says it's open to "factual corrections, clarifications, historical additions, and respectful collaboration", but will not take down its bio articles "solely because someone disagrees with the tools or methods used to help create them".
"A small number of creators and companies have expressed concerns about being included on the site because they disagree with the use of AI-assisted tools within our editorial workflow," the statement concedes. "We understand that not everyone will agree with the use of emerging technologies," it says, "and we respect that people have strong opinions on the subject".
But "At the same time, it is difficult for us to understand the idea that tabletop history should simply go undocumented because disagreement exists over the tools used to help organize and present that history."
Several prominent tabletop game designers have taken issue with 4PG presenting its site as historical documentation, however. In a response to that MTTGI post, Cyberpunk Red's James Gray said "if the purpose here is to document history, then I would ask you to follow the same standards I would ask for any writer of history based in recent decades."
"1. List your sources at the end of the article, with specific annotations. Let us know where your facts come from.
2. Credit the original photographers whose work is used in the headers.
3. Run each article by the subject or their estate to check for comments and accuracy."
"Three standards of research and fact-based writing I would expect from anyone seeking to preserve history. Without them, it isn't preservation because it isn't verifiable or ethical."
MTTGI responded: "that sounds reasonable," adding "we are working on some standards now, thank you".
Wargamer attempted to reach out to 4PG for comment via the MTTGI page. Like Rascal's Lin Codega, we received a string of bizarre responses from someone who identified themselves only as an anonymous "intern".
They fiercely defended 4PG's operations, extolled the virtues and inevitable growth of AI-made media, and claimed the site was protected by the principle of Fair Use and the 1st Amendment right to free speech - but refused to explain their own, or the page's, affiliation to 4PG.
Later on Tuesday, MTTGI shared another post suggesting that it could "Let the Community Help Rewrite the Archive" by adding buttons to biography posts, allowing site visitors to "submit corrections", volunteer their own work to rewrite the AI drafts, or "help fund a paid writer or editor to rebuild the profile properly".
"The Idea is that we start a fresh website with No Ai at all, and we post finihed [sic] article there!" reads MTTGI's comment on that post. The page has not yet elaborated on that proposed crowdsourcing effort, and no reference to it has been published on the 4PG website.
We're investigating further, and will continue to cover this story as it unfolds. In the meantime, here are links to Chaosium's own obituaries of Steve Perrin, Greg Stafford, and Lynn Willis.