The Oscars of painting little guys are the Golden Demon awards, handed out by Games Workshop at official miniature painting competitions. The entry guidelines for the 2024 Golden Demon awards contain a note in the FAQ section that wasn't present in the previous year's guidelines. In answer to the question, "Am I allowed to use Artificial Intelligence to generate any part of my entry?" it simply replies, "No."

This is presumably in response to controversy over the winning entry in the Single Miniature: Warhammer 40,000 category in 2023's Golden Demon awards, which was Neil Hollis's piece, Exodite. It was controversial not for the miniature itself, but for the jungle backdrop, which was printed with the assistance of the generative AI tool Midjourney.

In an episode of The Painting Phase on YouTube, Hollis defended his use of AI by pointing out how difficult it was, explaining that he "probably did 200 different prompts to get where I needed to be," and that "formulating it took a very long time." Which doesn't do much to defend his work from the actual criticism, which is that Midjourney uses stolen art. It's one of the AI tools subject to a class action lawsuit filed by artists based on their use of copyrighted art as training material. 

Hollis did bring up the topic during the interview, but only to mention that other generative AI art tools are trained on internal art libraries owned by the software's creators, not to explain why he used Midjourney instead. Replying to the critics who called his winning the award into question, he simply said, "The people that are angry on the internet are a certain type of person, and I think we call them virgins." I suspect it didn't help him win any fans online.

Meanwhile, the court case against Midjourney, which also incorporates claims against Stability AI and DeviantArt, recently reached a milestone with the judge ruling it could continue with some of the claims dismissed, though he allowed both copyright and trademark infringement claims to be made against Midjourney specifically.

Failbetter Games has announced that their Fallen London videogame world will soon come to the adjacent world of tabletop roleplaying. It'll be "a fully-fledged, custom tabletop roleplaying system for Fallen London, in a big book," says Failbetter. So prepare to explore the neath and its great big city, Fallen London, in 2025—and probably don't talk to any devils.

"In Fallen London: the Roleplaying Game, players create their own characters by drawing on the factions, archetypes, and settings of the city — cutthroats, socialites, radicals, academics, and other, stranger creatures. They are brought together by a shared ambition; a very nearly unachievable goal. Such ambitions may destroy or drive mad those who pursue them… or they may change London forever. The Heart, as they say, is Destiny’s engine," reads the official description.

"Fallen London is turning 15 in 2025 and this is our big anniversary project. We wouldn't have got here without you; we hope that this is a suitable anniversary present," said Failbetter in the announcement.

Failbetter says more information about Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game will be forthcoming on August 23, when they reveal the full project in a live stream on Johnny Chiodini's YouTube channel. That stream will include Chiodini, a streamer with an enthusiasm for tabletop, alongside representatives from Failbetter and the tabletop game's publisher.

The Fallen London tabletop RPG will be published by Magpie Games, an outfit that started as a pretty small indie RPG publisher but has really blown up over the years. They still do quite bespoke little indie games, but they're now well known as big-IP publishers. Their most successful game is the official tabletop RPG for Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was the most-funded tabletop roleplaying game of all time on Kickstarter at a total of about $10 million.

Fallen London is the ever-so-popular world of the eponymous free browser game that it's named for, started in 2010 and still going strong, where a strange alternate Victorian period plays out amid the lightless depths of a London stolen by bats and plopped into a metaphysical sinkhole that is, geographically, somewhere near Hell. It later became the setting of delightful doomed-ocean-captain simulator Sunless Sea in 2015 followed by equally-doomed-space-train-engineer simulator Sunless Skies in 2019. 

You can read the full announcement on Failbetter Games' website.

Critical Role's campaigns are like children: they seem nice, but I couldn't eat a whole one. I started watching both of its previous campaigns with the best of intentions, and a dozen or so episodes later I dropped out. Those four-hour weekly recordings are too much, especially when you sit through one devoted to a shopping trip and the next episode begins with someone saying, "I'd like to go back to that magic item shop."

Thankfully for me and the rest of the short-attention-span squad, there's now an official edited version. Critical Role Abridged takes those four-hour episodes, trims the fat, and reduces them down to manageable single-hour videos—or close to it. The longest one so far has been the debut, which stretched to a leisurely hour-twenty-three.

Removing the introductions, ads, table chatter, and combat waffling makes Critical Role move along at a much brisker clip. A few deep lore references that will only be appreciated by people who've watched previous seasons are also cut, as is a fair chunk of the dice-rolling. That's one part I miss—the gambling aspect of D&D is part of the fun, and while some are left in, the edits seem a bit eager to delete skill checks and damage rolls that would otherwise have me on the edge of my seat. Meanwhile, Matt Mercer's episode-one scene-setting and subsequent recaps seem like they could easily be pruned further. But on the whole, these edits do what they set out to and have kept me engaged.

In the absence of a full animated retelling like The Legend of Vox Machina, which is based on selected highlights of Critical Role's first campaign, this is the best way to catch up to campaign three. The only thing you're really missing if you start here are explanations for some of the in-jokes—episode two was recorded on Halloween, which they traditionally dress up for, this time cosplaying as each other. The edit leaves you wondering what the hell is going on, but that's often the way with their long-running in-jokes, like bursting into song whenever someone says "I'm making my way."

There are nine abridged episodes so far, though the unedited campaign is currently 97 episodes deep, so I suspect it'll take a year or so to catch up. You can join me over at the Critical Role Abridged playlist, and let's see if we make it more than 12 episodes in this time.

A new book from Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast chronicles the early history of the tabletop RPG, and therefore a vital step in the evolution of RPGs as a whole. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977 will release on June 18, 2024, and compiles a slew of documents from the development and release of the first tabletop RPG.

The first chapter of the book is a doozy for people who're interested in the formation of what an RPG is, detailing and providing documents from the two inspirations that combined to become Dungeons & Dragons: Dave Arneson's Blackmoor roleplaying wargame and Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren's wargame Chainmail. It's deeply cool to see what may well be images of one of the first real RPG character sheets, with its list of simple stats to draw from, or images of correspondence between the two as they consider combining their efforts.

The rest of the book follows into the future, with the 1973 draft of Dungeons & Dragons included, as well as the actual published Brown Box and White Box rules and then continues on, with hundreds more pages of the earliest supplements. It's neat too see the idea of what characters belong in an RPG expand, contract, and evolve. For example, the appearance of now-ubiquitous character classes like the thief. These are, simply put, the kind of historical documents that are completely lost to time or locked away in inaccessible private collections for much of gaming—and it's wonderful to see a company be properly committed to making them available.

The Making of Original D&D is curated by, and includes commentary from, pre-eminent Dungeons & Dragons historian Jon Peterson. Peterson's 2012 book Playing at the World is by far the most definitive and comprehensive history of games that simulate war and adventure, starting with chess and going through first professional, and then entertaining, wargames before ending with the development of roleplaying games. It's fascinating stuff if you're into the deep history of what later brought us many of the simulation-side aspects of videogames.

The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons will go on sale later this month, on June 18, 2024, and is a hefty collector's tome with glossy pages, heavy stock paper, and four separate cloth bookmark ribbons attached. It'll retail for an equally hefty $100.