Catalyst Game Labs, publisher of the BattleTech and Shadowrun tabletop lines, has laid off editor-at-large Jennifer Brozek. Brozek announced the cut Wednesday on her website and on Bluesky.

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“Blog: Life Plot Twist. I’ve been laid off from CGL and I’m having complicated feelings around the situation,” she wrote on Bluesky. The post links to her website entry, which opens: “Here’s the lede: I’ve been laid off from Catalyst Game Labs as an Editor-at-large.”

Brozek has written for Catalyst since her 2014 BattleTech novel The Nellus Academy Incident, which won a Scribe Award. Her Rogue Academy trilogy followed, running from Iron Dawn in 2019 to Crimson Night in 2021. Her Shadowrun credits include the 2015 novella DocWagon 19, the 2021 novella See How She Runs, and the young-adult novel Auditions, which also won a Scribe Award. In a November 2024 podcast interview she described Augment, a Shadowrun magazine, and Shadowrun Through the Decades, an anthology marking the line’s 35th anniversary. Her footprint at Catalyst is larger in Shadowrun than in BattleTech.

Catalyst cut an editorial position, and that usually means the fiction line is shrinking. Publishers rarely lay off editors while sales are climbing, which points to trouble in Catalyst’s sales department. Fandom Pulse found no indication of other layoffs at Catalyst at this time and is monitoring the situation closely.

The layoff follows a run of decisions that cost the company goodwill with its audience. BattleTech author Blaine Pardoe says Catalyst suspended his new publications in July 2022 over online activity it said did not fit its publishing vision. In 2024 the company rereleased the anthology The Corps with an Amazon listing that named every contributor except Pardoe, though his story is printed in the book. This month a Catalyst “Mechtober” graphic listing BattleTech authors left him off again. Pardoe responded: “So, I guess I wasn’t a BattleTech writer? Thirty-plus years of content says otherwise.” Meanwhile Catalyst put out BattleTech Romance: Hungry Like Wolves by Christina F. York as a Valentine’s Day release. Fandom Pulse’s view is that Shadowrun has drifted the same direction as BattleTech under Catalyst.

It is of note that Brozek, like many other activist authors, moved to BlueSky from X to attempt to virtue signal that she’s not with the people over on X, who are the normal people in society.

Late last month, Brozek posted on Bluesky, unprompted to attack the author of this article: “Just loved being lumped into her “evil league of evil.” She’s now in the same category as JDA for me. All she wants is attention and she will attack people to do it.”

Belle is another activist woman who worked with the Gencon Writer’s Symposium befor getting unceremoniously removed. Ironically, it seems like Brozek here is invoking “JDA” as some kind of virtue signal on BlueSky for attention as she makes these comments, as many aspiring creators who don’t make enough money in this industry to survive do.

If Catalyst is cutting editors from its fiction department, what does that say about how its books are selling?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast told the union organizing the Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering tabletop teams on October 13 that they do not intend to voluntarily recognize it, which sends the workers to a National Labor Relations Board election. United Wizards of the Coast-CWA announced the decision on X the next morning. The organizers say the refusal puts years of work at risk and alienates longtime D&D fans, and original D&D designer Robert J. Kuntz answered them with a pointed question about who changed the game in the first place.

“It Doesn’t Intend to Voluntarily Recognize” the D&D or Studio X Units

The union’s post on X, timestamped 8:01 a.m. on October 14, read: “Yesterday, Wizards informed us that it doesn’t intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote. We remain committed to creating a workplace focused on wellness, transparency, and collaboration by winning our coming election.”

The organizers framed the decision as a threat to what they have built. They said: “We’ve worked very hard helping make D&D reflect our values. All we’re asking for is the job security necessary to make sure AI doesn’t change it back.”

The deadline for voluntary recognition was 5 p.m. PT on October 13. The workers had already filed an NLRB election petition, which they said they would withdraw if the company agreed to recognition. A union needs a majority of the votes cast, 50 percent plus one, to force Wizards to bargain in good faith. The union’s post is the only account of Wizards’ answer in what has been published so far, and Wizards has not issued its own wording.

How the Drive Began

On October 6 the D&D team, which includes D&D Beyond, and Studio X, the unit behind tabletop Magic and Duel Masters, told leadership they intended to unionize with the Communications Workers of America. Both groups joined United Wizards of the Coast-CWA, the union the Magic: The Gathering Arena developers formed in April. That unit has more than 100 workers and won its NLRB election in June, making it the first union at Wizards. The new teams said they had a public supermajority of employees behind them.

The D&D letter lists demands that include layoff protections, a ban on mandatory unpaid overtime, and an enforceable AI policy that keeps the games made by people. It also asks for a written remote work policy, wages that keep pace with inflation, healthcare changes, and access to financial information for the bargaining committee. The most unusual item is ownership of personal work. The D&D team wrote: “Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro can claim ownership.”

Senior D&D designer Joey Haeck said the team is organizing “because scared workers are neither happy nor productive.” Principal game designer James Wyatt posted: “this has been a long, long time coming!” The Studio X team wrote: “We are stewards of our games, nurturers of families and communities.”

Record Profits, Repeated Layoffs and a Fight Over AI

Wizards supplied almost half of Hasbro’s $4.7 billion in 2025 revenue and posted a record operating profit of more than $1 billion. Hasbro cut about 1,900 jobs across two rounds in 2023, including Wizards staff, and about 30 developers, roughly 90 percent of the team on the scrapped Sigil virtual tabletop, followed in March 2025. Another 150 or so jobs went three months later, D&D staff among them. John Hight left as Wizards president on September 1, and CEO Chris Cocks is overseeing the division directly.

AI is the issue the organizers keep returning to. In September 2024 Cocks said Hasbro was using AI “significantly and liberally internally.” In a March 2026 interview he said Wizards’ games do not use AI in their pipelines and that he sees AI “only making the quality of the creative we have better.” The union’s petition says: “Leadership has pushed for LLMs and generative AI usage, disregarding our team’s preferences.”

The Arena fight set the pattern. Wizards missed the union’s May 1 deadline for recognition, and the union says Wizards hired Fisher Phillips, a firm it describes as a union avoidance firm. Employees received daily emails and letters at home saying that under a union “all the benefits and perks you currently enjoy would be on the bargaining table” and that workers “could end up with more, the same or less.”

The game the organizers say they shaped has changed a great deal under Wizards’ watch. The 2023 OGL fight nearly cost Wizards the third-party community before Hasbro backed down. The company revised how it describes the game’s peoples and monsters starting in 2020, and the 2024 rulebooks replaced “race” with “species.”

Kuntz Fires Back

Robert J. Kuntz, an early D&D designer who worked alongside Gary Gygax, replied on X: “Are not these the same persons whom under WotC’s policies helped ruin D&D?”

He has been critical of the game’s direction for some time. In December 2024 he called its path “a fitful, tragic ride” and said he would discuss “the descent of D&D AND the gradual ostracizing of Gary and myself from the equation.”

On the ENWorld forum, members were resigned. One wrote, “Not surprised, but still disappointed.” Another wrote, “Not again, WotC.” Wizards also declined voluntary recognition of the Arena union in May.

If the organizers say they spent years remaking D&D and Kuntz says that remaking is what went wrong, can a union formed by the people who rewrote the game win over the fans it says it wants to protect, or does the vote only deepen the split between the staff and the players who left?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Fantasy Flight Games is renaming an Ancient One in Arkham Horror: Remastered, and the explanation runs shorter than the new name. The announcement came the same week another Lovecraft publisher did the same thing to one of the most famous names in the Mythos. The update never says who the monster used to be, never mentions H.P. Lovecraft and never says why the change was made. Longtime players can work out the first part on their own. But when you see the name it gets even more ridiculous.

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Wizards of the Coast has until October 13 to answer a letter aimed at the division that carries Hasbro. On Tuesday, the teams behind Dungeons & Dragons, D&D Beyond and tabletop Magic: The Gathering told company leadership they are forming a union. The Magic Arena team did the same in April and won its election in June. The new letters come with a deadline, a long list of demands and informing Wizards that they’re the ones who creat proift for the company.

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What the D&D Letter Demands

The D&D team’s letter, dated Tuesday, October 6, lists eleven reasons for organizing under the Communications Workers of America. The team says it has “a public supermajority of employees” behind it. The points:

• Layoff protections. Employees “live in fear of suddenly losing their jobs,” the letter says, and want protections strong enough to build long-term careers.

• AI language in the contract. The letter credits Wizards with resisting Hasbro’s push for AI tools and says the company “kept AI out of our games.” The team wants that locked into a contract.

• A written remote work policy. The company’s return-to-office rules have left workers unsure whether their current living situation works for their jobs. The letter cites unpaid commutes and rising costs of living.

• Fiscal transparency. Once the union is recognized, its bargaining committee could request financial information and more insight into company finances.

• Limits on crunch. The letter describes mandatory unpaid overtime on some teams and says workloads have grown without matching headcount.

• Defined career paths. Workers want clear role definitions, raises and promotions.

• Wages that track the cost of living. Many staff, the letter says, bring home less each month after inflation than when they were hired.

• Support for working parents. The team wants fewer hurdles in the company’s day care policies and more flexibility.

• Easier healthcare. The letter asks for less red tape on claims and reasonable deductibles and co-pays, and states that “No WOTC employee should have to turn to GoFundMe in a medical emergency.”

• Ownership of work made at home. The letter says Hasbro can claim anything an employee creates in free time with personal resources, and asks that it belong to the employee.

• Stewardship of the game. “Short term, profit-driven decisions may be lucrative,” the letter says, but the team wants products that grow D&D sustainably.

The letter also asks Hasbro and Wizards to publicly stay neutral toward “all Hasbro employees and unionization efforts, present and future.” If leadership agrees to voluntary recognition in principle before 5 p.m. Pacific on October 13, the union will withdraw its National Labor Relations Board election petition and set up a third-party card check. If leadership does not agree, the election goes forward.

Studio X Points to the Profit Numbers

The Studio X letter covers the workers behind tabletop Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters. It opens with a claim about money: the studio is “responsible for back-to-back billion dollar years and a vast majority of Hasbro’s profit.” The demands track the D&D list almost point for point, from pay and healthcare to AI protection and ownership of work made outside the office. The letter sets the same October 13 deadline and asks leadership to sign a labor neutrality agreement.

The numbers behind the claim are public. Hasbro reported that its Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming segment earned about $1.0 billion in operating profit on $2.2 billion in revenue in 2025, up 59% and 45% from the year before. In the second quarter of 2026, Magic revenue reached $545.3 million, up 32% and the first time the game topped $500 million in a quarter. The segment’s operating margin that quarter was 40.7%.

How the Arena Union Got Here

The Arena team’s letter went out April 27. It asked for voluntary recognition by May 1, International Workers’ Day, and named seven issues: layoff protections, remote work, AI, workload, career progression, ownership of free-time work and stewardship of the game. Wizards did not agree. The company said a fair, democratic vote was the right path forward, and the election took place June 2.

Organizers said management ran a counter-campaign after the April announcement. They pointed to a letter from Wizards president John Hight warning that benefits could end up with “more, the same or less” than workers have now. The union announced its win on June 23. More than 100 Arena employees were in the unit, and the union says its focus has moved to a contract. The union says the Arena team helped prepare Tuesday’s announcement.

Layoffs Keep Piling Up

The letters did not come out of nowhere. Hasbro cut about 1,100 jobs across the company in December 2023, roughly a fifth of its workforce, and about 100 of those were at Wizards. In March 2025, around 30 employees on the Sigil project lost their jobs. That was the year Magic set a sales record of $1.72 billion. Game producer Xib Vaine described the mood afterward as “a sword of Damocles just looming over us.”

The cuts have not stopped. On September 29, D&D community manager LaTia Jacquise and Magic social media marketing manager Jordan Hopkins announced they had been let go. Hopkins called it part of “a greater restructure.” Wizards had not commented publicly when the news broke.

The video game side is shrinking too. Hasbro took a $56 million impairment charge in the second quarter over canceled digital projects scheduled for 2028 and beyond. The company plans to cut digital spending by at least 25% by 2028 and move more development to outside partners and lower-cost regions such as Montreal. Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said the money will go where he sees “the clearest upside.”

Wizards Is Searching for a President

John Hight announced on July 27 that he is stepping down as Wizards president, effective September 1, after about two years in the job. His predecessor, Cynthia Williams, resigned in April 2024 after roughly two years. Hasbro said Hight’s exit and the impairment charge were “in no way connected,” and Wizards said “there is no change to the strength of the Wizards business.”

No successor has been named. Wizards is running an internal and external search, and Cocks, who ran Wizards from 2016 to 2022, is overseeing the division directly. D&D leadership reports to him on a temporary basis. Cocks has called himself an “AI bull,” so the union’s AI demands now land on the desk of the executive who has pushed AI hardest.

The rest of the picture is unsettled. D&D veterans Christopher Perkins and Jeremy Crawford left the team in April 2025. Hasbro disclosed $10.8 million in costs from an unauthorized network access incident in March 2026. Remote Arena staff were told to relocate to the Renton office or resign. A division with a vacant president’s chair and three union drives is not a calm place to negotiate from.

Why a Union Complicates Hasbro’s Math

Hasbro needs Wizards more than Wizards needs Hasbro, and the financial statements show it. Hasbro posted a net loss of $322.4 million in 2025 after a $1.02 billion goodwill impairment in its Consumer Products segment, which lost $942.6 million at the operating level. Wizards earned $1.0 billion. The profit holding the parent company up comes from the one group of workers now organizing.

The letters ask for things that cost money or take options away from management. Layoff protections remove the tool Hasbro used in 2023 when sales fell. Raises that keep pace with inflation add payroll, and so do healthcare and day care changes. Crunch limits tied to headcount require more hires. Remote work rules limit what managers can require. A seat at the table for financial disclosure gives a bargaining committee a look at the books. AI language in a contract takes a cost-cutting tool away from an executive who has championed it. All of that arrives while Hasbro is trying to cut digital spending by a quarter.

The union’s answer is the profit itself. A segment running a 40.7% operating margin has room, and Studio X makes that case before it lists a single demand. The risk for Hasbro is the timing. A contract fight is starting while the company has no Wizards president, an unfinished digital strategy and a Consumer Products segment that lost money in 2025. A union cannot change how much Hasbro depends on Magic. A contract can change what it costs to run it.

If a division running a 40% margin cannot promise its workers job security today, what will Hasbro agree to put in writing once a union can ask to see the books?

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Sign up for the Ayla Rin: Gateway to Doom Crowdfund, coming soon for great cosmic comic books with a cover by legendary Green Lantern artist, Ethan Van Sciver:

Chaosium is changing the name of Shub-Niggurath, H.P. Lovecraft’s Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, to “Shub-Gorath” in its upcoming board game Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins. The publisher announced the change in a Gamefound backer update dated October 2, and the reaction from inside the hobby has been sharp.

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Space King, a YouTube cartoon from two British animators, asked Kickstarter for $50,000 on August 30 to fund a board game. Studio Flashgitz funded the goal in six minutes. Twenty-seven days later the campaign closed on a total that dwarfed the ask, from a studio that had never shipped a physical product. Games Workshop has reason to pay attention, and it goes back two years to a fan content crackdown that sent these animators to build a universe from scratch.

Two Animators and a Crackdown

Flashgitz is Tom Hinchliffe and Don Greger. They built their YouTube following on Warhammer 40,000 fan animation, including videos that sent Black Templars against a community of Slaaneshi hedonists in fluffy animal costumes.

Then Games Workshop tightened its fan content rules and steered animation toward its Warhammer+ platform. Many fan creators deleted their work or stopped posting for fear of legal action.

Hinchliffe and Greger answered with something they could keep. Space King is an original, creator-owned universe: a grim human empire ruled by an absent, worshipped Space King, and four Psycho Warriors named Captain, Bryce, Hatemonger and Chestnut who fight alien forces and each other. The duo reportedly turned down a network offer to hold onto the IP. A network-owned Space King could not have run a crowdfunding campaign or manufactured miniatures, so that decision paid off the day the campaign opened.

The Launch

Flashgitz announced the game on August 8 on its Tom and Don channel. About 18,000 people followed the Kickstarter page before launch, and Kickstarter notifies followers the moment a campaign goes live. The studio released Space King 5: War World the same day the campaign opened, so the audience arrived at peak attention. Hinchliffe and Greger planned that timing, and it worked.

More than 5,400 backers pledged on day one. The campaign passed $2 million in under 24 hours, roughly 40 times its goal. By September 1 it stood at $2,780,478 from 7,386 backers, and Kickstarter had tagged it a Project We Love. All 18 stretch goals unlocked, each one adding content to a lore book as funding climbed.

What a $370 Average Pledge Buys

The average pledge ran about $370. Casual board game campaigns typically land between $30 and $60 per backer. The base Recruit tier costs $99. Above it sit the Psycho Warrior set at $299, Super Psycho Warrior at $699, Psycho Monster at $1,199 and Globulus Maximus at $7,777. Fifteen slots that let backers appear as a character in the show sold out at nearly $8,000 each.

The game seats two to four players in a semi-cooperative format with five scenarios. A Command Deck controls the enemies and an Event Deck adds complications. Everyone fights the aliens, but only one player wins Space King’s favor, so backstabbing is part of the rules.

The miniatures drive the pricing. Psycho Warriors stand about 50mm, standard aliens 36mm and bosses 109mm, all pre-assembled PVC with no clippers or glue required. Games Workshop sells polystyrene kits on sprues at 28 to 32mm, and buyers assemble them. Flashgitz aimed at the hobbyist who already spends $100 to $400 on a box of plastic, and that hobbyist showed up.

The Final Count

The campaign closed September 25 at $9,670,639.

Kickstarter’s 5 percent fee and payment processing of roughly 3 to 5 percent take between $770,000 and $970,000 of that, and the rest funds manufacturing and fulfillment. Two animators did this without a publisher, a license or a network. They kept the characters, the audience and the margin.

Games Workshop reported £659.7 million in revenue for the year ended May 31, 2026, up 6.8 percent. Flashgitz just took nearly $10 million of the same hobbyist wallet, one crowdfunding campaign at a time. These are the independent creators Fandom Pulse backs: owners of their own IP who went straight to their fans and let the market decide.

Games Workshop Answers

On August 20, ten days before launch, Games Workshop filed an opposition with the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board against Flashgitz TX LLC’s application to register FLASHGITZ for tabletop games, since Games Workshop already uses the name Flash Gitz. The Space King tabletop application was filed in February 2026.

On October 2, Games Workshop released an animation styled like Dumb Ways to Die to promote its upcoming Space Marines codex. It shows super-soldiers meeting grim ends. Fans on X compared it to Space King and called it rushed.

The Fulfillment Risk

Backers should expect boxes in December 2027, with retail copies no earlier than early 2028. Flashgitz has no manufacturing record at this scale. Across all categories, about 84 percent of Kickstarter projects deliver late, by an average of 4.3 months, and roughly 9 percent never deliver. Observers have called the December 2027 date optimistic for a first-time manufacturer, though the molds appear to be in production already.

If Flashgitz delivers on schedule in December 2027, what does a publisher still offer a creator with an audience this size?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

Wizards of the Coast laid off its Dungeons & Dragons community manager and its Magic: The Gathering social media marketing manager this week, according to Wargamer, as part of what one of the two described as “a bigger corporate restructure.”

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The Kickstarter campaign for The Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit has raised more than $1.2 million on the strength of the license alone. Backers are also arguing over something that has little to do with miniatures or dice: the game’s art depicts Aragorn, heir of Isildur and King of Gondor, as a black man. It’s a race-swap play we’ve all seen before and it’s getting beyond tired.

The publisher’s answers on this, given in its comments and on its Discord, show how the company dismisses its own audience, much like usual.

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Fantasy Flight Games has been retooling its website, and many of its “Living Card Games” pages, or LCGs, that made the company famous are getting removed or trimmed down, and a long-time writer for Legend of the Five Rings is not happy about it.

In the 2010s, “Living Card Games” became a staple of the board and card game industry, following up on the Collectible Card Game craze of the 1990s that spawned hits like Magic: The Gathering. Fantasy Flight Games made its name off of it, with incredible games like Android: Netrunner, A Game of Thrones LCG, and Lord of the Rings LCG. As they had so many licensed properties, they knew they needed a staple that they owned if they wanted the company to grow and survive, and so they purchased the Legend of the Five Rings property from Alderac Entertainment Group.

L5R thrived for years as both a popular RPG and collectible card game, unique in that it had a living story environment that continued as it went along, with input from the players and fans making it feel like one could make a difference in the story direction, something almost no other game offered. It featured a magical samurai world that appealed to a lot of Japan enthusiasts.

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Somebody closed up Alias’s chainmail, and nobody will say who. Hachette Partworks’ new 2026 reissue of the Dungeons & Dragons novel Azure Bonds alters the 1988 cover painting, and neither the publisher nor Wizards of the Coast, which owns D&D, has explained who made the call or why. The one person with a right to an opinion had stayed quiet until this week. Clyde Caldwell painted that cover, and what he told a fan journalist changed the tone of the whole story.

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The Side-by-Side Nobody Asked For

The reissue is part of Hachette Partworks’ D&D Novels Collection, a hardcover series that ships two books a month. On September 24, the D&D blogger NewbieDM posted a comparison of the original Azure Bonds cover and the new one. The Adventurous Dad and Daughters blog documented the same change that day.

The 2026 cover keeps the composition, with a little cropping and a shift in levels. It loses the open neckline on Alias’s armor. The blog’s author said his daughters preferred the revised image and called it interesting that publishers thought tastes had changed enough to revise it. Nobody involved in the decision has described it in those terms or any others.

The painting had been touched once before. Jeff Grubb, who wrote the book with Kate Novak, asked Caldwell to make Alias’s tattoo all blue and her hair a little redder before the cover went to print. That revision went through the artist. Whether anyone asked Caldwell this time is the question the public record cannot answer.

What Caldwell Said

Then the DaveCon account got him on the phone. Before releasing the message on the Nerdcognito podcast, DaveCon said, “I talked to Clyde Caldwell today about the altering of his art and he is decidedly not happy.”

Caldwell’s message to DaveCon reads in full:

I was actually surprised that they reused my old art for that one. One reason that I retired when I did was that the publishing industry, especially the book publishers, were all getting too politically correct for me. When I visited the Frazetta museum quite a few years back, I was surprised to learn that publishers back in the 70s were complaining that Frazetta’s females were too sexy. Frazetta has always been my favorite fantasy artist, and his work was a huge inspiration to me. I guess fantasy art just isn’t what it used to be.

All the best,

Clyde

Caldwell left TSR in 1992 to freelance and is now retired in Wisconsin. His TSR work includes the 1990 Ravenloft boxed set cover and the cover of Dragon Magazine issue 172. A Kickstarter for his art book, The Art of Clyde Caldwell Legacy Anthology, closed in April. His letter says he retired partly because book publishing had become too politically correct for him. Then the same politics reached back and altered the painting he left behind.

A Record Six Years in the Making

Fans did not need the Caldwell statement to see where this fits. In July 2020, Wizards added a legacy content disclaimer to older TSR titles sold through the DMs Guild. The notice said some older material reflected ethnic, racial and gender prejudice that was commonplace at the time, and that “These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.” The addition followed a Twitter post from Asians Represent podcast co-host Daniel Kwan criticizing the treatment of Asian cultures in Oriental Adventures. Wizards kept selling the books and attached the moral verdict to every one of them.

Kyle Brink became the face of the attitude behind it. In February 2023 he was quoted saying, “People like me can’t leave the hobby fast enough.” That same January, Wizards had dropped its planned OGL 1.2 license after community resistance. According to Axios, 88 percent of the 15,000 people who had submitted feedback said they would not publish under the new terms, and Brink said the volume and direction of the feedback forced the company to act. Fandom Pulse reported in July 2024 that Brink was out at Wizards.

The Gygax controversy came next. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 is a Wizards-published history. Senior designer Jason Tondro wrote in the preface, “Some language in the first iteration of D&D presents a moral quandary.” Jon Peterson’s foreword described the original game as created for and sold to a wargaming community that was almost exclusively white, middle-class men. Fandom Pulse reported that Tondro’s writing called Gary Gygax misogynistic. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz responded that the book’s treatment of him and his colleagues was “slanderous.” A company built on the work of Gygax, Dave Arneson and Kuntz had published a book cataloguing their moral failings.

The 2024 core rulebooks followed. Fandom Pulse reported that the Dungeon Master’s Guide imported the safe-space practices of the BDSM fetish community, including a signal where a player crosses their arms in an X and the DM must stop the game. The Player’s Handbook filled its art with BIPOC and female characters at a ratio above five to one against white male characters. One playable race lost its slavery-tied history entirely, and official art showed a family of orcs as Mexican immigrants. Elon Musk publicly asked how much Hasbro would cost, a question Fandom Pulse covered.

Dark Sun Arrived First

Only weeks before the Azure Bonds edit surfaced, Wizards confirmed at Gen Con 2026 that Dark Sun is returning for D&D 5.5E, with a 2027 release and a Season of Survival launching in February 2027. Dark Sun was a 1991 TSR setting designed by Timothy Brown and Troy Denning, and its look owes much to the artist Brom. Wizards had said previously that it would not revive the setting because the content was problematic.

Executive producer Greg Bilsland told TTRPG Insider the team invested more deeply in sensitivity readers for Dark Sun than for other settings. He said a setting does not need slavery to be oppressive, and pointed to the city of Urik, where the leadership presses people into military service and pushes the poor to give up their freedom to survive. The original lore includes slavery, genocide and torture, and the new version is being built around a different kind of oppression.

The Fan Response

Nerdcognito, the podcast that read Caldwell’s statement, answered with a call to action for fans: “ICYMI: Wizards of the Coast is still TALKING a good game, but their ACTIONS... Censorship, sensitivity readers, and destruction of lore... tell a different tale. The latest example: One of these things is not like the other.

Not a single GP more, until crap like this STOPS.”

Caldwell’s letter ties the Azure Bonds edit to a history older than Wizards. He says publishers in the 1970s were already complaining that Frank Frazetta’s women were too sexy. The paperback covers that built the TSR look came from that era of fantasy painting, and Hachette is now reworking one of them 38 years after it first shipped.

Every item above has a defender who says it is a small adjustment. A disclaimer is a paragraph. A closed neckline is a crop. A conscription system is a plot device. Fans keep a longer ledger, and it now has a living artist’s name on the latest entry.

Hachette plans to ship two novels a month from a catalog full of covers painted in the same era as Azure Bonds. If Wizards will not say who approved the edit to Caldwell’s painting, what happens to the next cover?

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After a long road from manuscript to finished book, Sons of Heaven, a new old-school science-fiction tabletop role-playing game from Mad Scribe Games, is preparing for release. The finished files have gone to the printer, and the team is currently awaiting proof copies of the more than 300-page game.

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Written by RPGPundit, with editing, layout, formatting, and art direction by Chris Miller, Sons of Heaven combines the familiar mechanics of classic fantasy role-playing games with a sprawling space-opera setting built around fallen civilizations, alien empires, frontier worlds, ancient technology, and humanity’s struggle to reclaim its place among the stars.

For longtime tabletop gamers, one of the game’s biggest advantages may be its familiarity. Sons of Heaven uses an old-school D20 system designed to be broadly compatible with the Basic/Expert tradition of Dungeons & Dragons and related old-school games. Players who have spent years rolling twenty-sided dice in fantasy campaigns should therefore find much of the game’s mechanical language immediately recognizable.

“One thing I really like about the game is that you don’t have to learn some completely alien rules system just because you’re playing science fiction,” said Miller. “If you’ve played old-school D&D, a lot of this is going to feel very natural. You can concentrate on learning the setting and having fun instead of spending three sessions trying to figure out how the game works.”

The Bronze Age Collapse - Among the Stars

Mechanically, Sons of Heaven may have its roots in old-school fantasy gaming, but its setting looks considerably farther afield.

RPGPundit, an academic historian with a longstanding interest in history, religion, mythology, and esoteric traditions, describes Sons of Heaven as, in part, a science-fiction interpretation of the collapse of the Bronze Age.

Instead of ruined kingdoms separated by mountains and seas, however, Sons of Heaven presents the remnants of a once-great interstellar civilization scattered across the galaxy.

For 9,000 years, the Human Confederation united mankind across the stars. That civilization was finally shattered by the 13th Machine War. Countless worlds were devastated, billions died, and the political order that had held humanity together disappeared.

What remains is a dangerous galactic frontier filled with ruined colonies, alien occupiers, pirates, Reavers, lost technology, forgotten worlds, and relics of an age when humanity commanded an empire spanning the stars.

Players are not simply spectators to that decline. They enter the setting at a moment when the future is still undecided.

They can explore lost worlds, recover ancient technology, fight the Sauri occupiers, trade along dangerous frontier routes, hunt legendary treasures, battle Reavers, build alliances, or search for the prophesied Son of Heaven who may someday restore mankind to greatness.

RPGPundit characterizes the game’s genre as Space Opera: enormous in scope, filled with exploration, warfare, strange civilizations, adventure, and mythic themes. Although recognizable genre conventions are present, considerable effort went into making the setting its own universe rather than simply reproducing the appearance or assumptions of established science-fiction franchises.

“I was actually a little skeptical when Pundit first started talking about doing science fiction,” Miller said. “He’s a historian, and he’s done a lot with historical settings for D&D. Science fiction seemed like a pretty big departure. Boy, was I wrong. I think he knocked this one out of the park.”

The setting also incorporates ideas drawn from mythology, history, and comparative religion. Some of Joseph Campbell’s ideas can be found beneath the surface, alongside both subtle and not-so-subtle echoes of Christian parables and recurring themes familiar from ancient myth.

The result is science fiction that looks toward the future while drawing much of its inspiration from humanity’s distant past.

A Long Road to Publication

Getting Sons of Heaven from manuscript to finished book proved considerably more difficult than originally anticipated.

The game had initially been expected much earlier in 2026, but artwork became one of the project’s largest obstacles.

Given the controversy surrounding generative AI in the tabletop industry, the original intention was to source human-created artwork wherever practical. For a small independent publisher producing an illustrated book of more than 300 pages, however, the economics quickly became difficult.

“People sometimes underestimate just how expensive a heavily illustrated RPG can be for a small publisher,” Miller said. “A good individual piece can cost hundreds of dollars, and professional cover art can easily run into the thousands. Once you start talking about filling a 300-page book, you’re potentially looking at tens of thousands of dollars and a very long production schedule.”

Miller had encountered that problem before. His first published RPG, Ankur - Kingdom of the Gods, cost more than $25,000 to produce, with roughly 90 percent of the production budget going toward artwork.

“That experience definitely changed the way I look at publishing,” he said. “Independent publishers don’t have unlimited budgets. The artist understandably needs to get paid for the work, usually before the publisher has made a dime from the book. Meanwhile, the publisher and authors can spend months or years working on something without knowing whether they’re even going to break even.”

Miller’s perspective on the issue is complicated by the fact that he has an art background himself.

“I don’t hate artists. I used to be one,” he said. “I was an art major in community college back in the ‘90s. I’ve been the starving artist. I understand that side of the argument. But I also understand what it’s like trying to produce a professional-looking book as a tiny publisher with limited time and limited money.”

Eventually, the realities of the project’s budget and schedule led to the decision to use AI-generated imagery.

That did not immediately solve the problem.

Miller spent months experimenting with Midjourney but struggled to produce artwork that he felt was good enough for the finished book. The project stalled, and the prospects for completing the necessary illustrations began to look increasingly uncertain.

Then newer generations of both ChatGPT’s and Midjourney’s image-generation technology became available.

“The difference was dramatic,” Miller said. “Suddenly I was getting results where I thought, ‘Okay, this might actually work.’ The results were stellar… pardon the pun.”

Miller upgraded to a premium AI plan and began producing the illustrations needed for the book. But better technology did not eliminate the workload.

With more than 300 pages to design and illustrate, generating suitable images became a substantial project in itself.

Teaching AI to Imagine a Different Future

One challenge was particularly important: Sons of Heaven needed its own visual identity.

RPGPundit wanted the game to evoke the enormous scale and excitement of classic space opera without directly copying the visual vocabulary of major science-fiction properties. That requirement made AI-assisted illustration considerably more complicated.

“When you tell an AI that you want something to look like space opera, it has a huge amount of existing pop culture influencing what it thinks that means,” Miller explained. “If you’re not careful, you can wind up with something that starts looking suspiciously familiar. We didn’t want Star Wars. We didn’t want Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or Buck Rogers. We wanted Sons of Heaven.”

The solution was increasingly elaborate prompt construction.

Rather than asking for the style of a particular artist or franchise, Miller began breaking visual styles down into their individual components: lighting, composition, materials, brushwork, color palettes, perspective, anatomy, surface texture, costume construction, environmental details, and other characteristics.

“The trick I eventually learned was that you have to describe what makes a style work rather than simply naming the style,” he said. “You describe the techniques. You describe the lighting. You describe the texture, composition, colors, materials, and how the image should be staged. Some of my prompts ended up six paragraphs long. A really complicated prompt could take me an hour to put together.”

That process had to be repeated across the book.

Miller sees the experience as another part of a continuing education in independent publishing. He is self-taught in layout and graphic design and has now been working in publishing for nearly a decade.

“I still feel like a novice sometimes,” he said. “There’s always something new to learn, and every book shows you something you could have done better on the last one. But I can also see the improvement from project to project. I think this is my best book to date.”

Production suffered another setback when Miller developed pneumonia, putting him out of commission for roughly a month. After recovering, he began an extended push to finish the project, frequently spending eight to twelve hours a day on the book for weeks at a time.

The result is now finally at the printer.

AI Art and the Reality of Indie Publishing

The use of AI-generated artwork will inevitably be controversial, particularly in the tabletop gaming community, where debates surrounding generative AI have become increasingly heated.

Miller does not expect Sons of Heaven to settle that argument.

Instead, he sees the project as an example of why independent creators are increasingly experimenting with the technology.

“For a small publisher, AI can be a godsend,” he said. “That doesn’t mean human artists don’t have value. Of course they do. But if you’re trying to produce hundreds of pages of illustrated material, the traditional approach can turn a book into a two- or three-year project costing tens of thousands of dollars. That’s simply outside the reach of a lot of independent creators.”

Miller believes AI will continue to change the economics of publishing regardless of where individual creators stand on the technology.

“Like it or not, AI is here, and I think it’s going to change the way a lot of businesses operate,” he said. “We’re still figuring out what that means. For this particular project, it allowed us to make the book we wanted to make at a scale we could actually afford.”

Old-School Gaming in a New Galaxy

Ultimately, however, Sons of Heaven is intended to be judged at the gaming table rather than by the tools used to produce it.

The game is aimed particularly at players who enjoy old-school role-playing but want to venture beyond traditional fantasy without abandoning familiar mechanics.

That includes the Grognards who may already have a favorite game, and may not be interested in learning an entirely new rules engine just to experiment with science fiction.

“I know a lot of longtime gamers have one or two systems they love, and that’s what they play,” Miller said. “I’m the same way. That’s why I think Sons of Heaven has an advantage. If you’re already comfortable with old-school D&D, you’re not starting from zero.”

Nor does the game necessarily require abandoning an existing fantasy campaign.

“Even if you aren’t looking to start a permanent science-fiction campaign, I think this could be a great game to keep on the shelf for one-shots or for those weeks between your regular campaigns,” Miller said. “You already understand the basic language of the rules. Grab some players, make a crew, and go see what’s waiting on the next planet.”

For Miller, the project also represents the broader value of independent tabletop publishing at a time when many longtime fans have become frustrated with the direction of large entertainment companies.

“We’re trying to be the change we want to see in the hobby,” he said. “Independent creators can take chances that giant companies sometimes can’t, or won’t. But if people want alternatives, those alternatives have to be supported. The little guys only get to keep making games if people are willing to give those games a chance.”

And after months of setbacks, experimentation, illness, long workdays, and hundreds of pages of production, Miller is eager to finally put Sons of Heaven into players’ hands.

“I know I probably sound like a car salesman when I talk about it,” he said, “but I’m genuinely enthusiastic about this setting. I’m proud of the work I’ve done on the book, and I really do think it’s worth playing.”

The game’s back-cover copy offers perhaps the best introduction to the universe players will soon be able to explore:

The Human Confederation is dead.

For 9,000 years it united mankind across the stars. Then came the 13th Machine War. Worlds burned. Empires fell. Billions perished. Today, the last survivors struggle to endure among ruined colonies, alien conquerors, ruthless pirates, and the forgotten relics of a civilization that once spanned the galaxy.

In Sons of Heaven, you decide humanity’s future. Explore lost worlds, recover ancient technology, battle the Sauri occupiers, outwit Reavers, trade on the frontier, hunt legendary treasures, or seek the prophesied Son of Heaven who may restore mankind to greatness. Every jump into hyperspace could uncover fortune, forge alliances, or awaken dangers best left forgotten.

Gather your crew. Plot your course. Reclaim the stars!

Sons of Heaven is out and ready for action.

You can get the book on DriveThruRPG.

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Gen Con owner and Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison announced this week that he is abandoning video production entirely rather than use artificial intelligence or compete against companies that do. Adkison, who built his fortune commercializing Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons for three decades, canceled every film production he had planned for the next two years.

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“I’ve decided to get out of the video production business,” Adkison wrote in a Facebook post. “I had several film productions planned for later this year and next year, but I’ve cancelled them.”

Adkison did not claim AI produces inferior work. He said the opposite.

“I’ve seen firsthand what AI can do in the world of video production and it’s really amazing,” he wrote. “Like, stunningly good, and the cost comparison is pennies on the dollar.” He went further, conceding that even his own objections may not hold up: “I’m not saying that I buy into all the fears about AI, I feel like a lot of it is overhyped. But, even if it’s only a quarter as bad as people are saying it could be, I don’t want to be a part of it.”

The man walking away from AI video is the same man who spent his career building revenue models around collectible card packs and licensed tabletop IP. Adkison founded Wizards of the Coast in the early 1990s and served as CEO until his resignation took effect at the end of 2000. Under his leadership Wizards created Magic: The Gathering, a game whose business model runs on randomized card packs and scarcity-driven collecting, and acquired TSR, bringing Dungeons & Dragons and Gen Con into the company’s hands. Adkison sold Wizards to Hasbro in January 2001, then bought Gen Con from Hasbro in May 2002 and has owned it since, stepping back from day-to-day management to sit on its board.

Adkison’s explanation is not that AI fails to deliver. It is that he does not want the argument.

“As I get older, I place an increasingly higher value on peace of mind,” he wrote. He said making content without AI “would certainly be the easier path in terms of keeping people happy who are dear friends,” but that competing against AI-assisted rivals while refusing to use it himself struck him as pointless: “I just can’t get excited about spending a lot of money on video production, knowing that I’d be competing in a market where competitors can make content that’s just as good, or better, at a fraction of the cost. That’s just dumb.”

He closed the post with an apology aimed in two directions at once. “I’m sorry for those for disappointing the people who were upset that I was going to use AI, and I’m sorry for disappointing the people who are now upset that I’m not willing to compete against AI.”

That closing line is the real story. Adkison is not describing a principled break with the technology, and throwing a fit like a lot of other creators are who take this stance. He is describing a retreat from a fight he decided was not worth the social cost, dressed in the language of conscience. He said the fears are overhyped, that the results are stunningly good, and the cost savings are real. Then he quit anyway because using AI would upset people he knows personally, and not using it means losing to competitors who will.

The Gen Con founder built an empire on being willing to make the hard commercial call. Randomized card packs. Corporate acquisitions. IP consolidation under Hasbro. This time, faced with a technology he admits works and admits saves money, he folded to friend-group pressure and called it peace of mind.

Does Adkison’s retreat set a precedent other legacy tabletop and hobby figures will follow, or will the cost gap he himself flagged pull his competitors past him regardless of what he decides to do?

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Hasbro has confirmed that attackers accessed the personal and financial information of an undisclosed number of employees, filing data breach notification letters with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office on August 28. The letters state that affected information varied by individual but could include names, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, national ID numbers, and financial account information.

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Wizards of the Coast has no president right now. John Hight stepped down from the role effective September 1, moving into a one-year advisory position under a “Transitional Advisory Services Agreement” first disclosed in a July 27 SEC filing. Rather than naming an interim replacement, Hasbro confirmed to Polygon that “the Wizards leadership team will report directly to CEO Chris Cocks” while the company runs what it calls “a thorough search process” for Hight’s permanent successor.

This isn’t Cocks’ first time running the company. He served as president of Wizards of the Coast from 2016 to 2022 before moving up to CEO of parent company Hasbro, a position he’s held ever since. In effect, he’s back in the seat he already occupied, just with a different title stacked on top of it. The presidency itself hasn’t been stable since he left it: Cynthia Williams took over in 2022 and resigned in April 2024 after roughly two years; Hight succeeded her in July 2024 and lasted almost exactly the same length of time.

Hasbro insists nothing about this signals trouble for the games themselves. A company statement tied to the announcement said Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons “continue to perform incredibly well” and that the company’s 2027 video game slate, including titles called Exodus and Warlock, “remains on track.” The numbers back at least part of that up: Magic: The Gathering generated $545.3 million in revenue last quarter, the first time the brand has crossed $500 million in a single quarter, accounting for roughly 48% of Hasbro’s entire $1.14 billion in quarterly revenue.

The reason this leadership vacuum matters isn’t abstract. Cocks has been on the record for years pushing two specific directions for these games that a meaningful chunk of the fanbase actively distrusts, and he now has no internal executive layer between himself and the day-to-day decisions on both games while Hasbro searches for a permanent hire.

The first is Universes Beyond, the licensing initiative that puts outside IP, Warcraft, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender, directly inside D&D and Magic products. Cocks has called Universes Beyond crossovers “probably the most successful new player adoption program that we’ve ever done,” and the numbers support his enthusiasm: Magic’s Final Fantasy set became the best-selling release in the game’s history in 2025, pushing prior crossover sets with Lord of the Rings and Avatar into second and third place. On the D&D side, Wizards announced Universes Beyond at Gen Con 2026, kicking off with a World of Warcraft-themed expansion arriving November 17 and a Star Wars crossover called Season of Rebellion following in 2027. Two weeks ago, Hasbro posted three new senior job listings, a Creative Lead, a Creative Manager, and a Principal Game Designer, all attached specifically to the Universes Beyond line, with salary bands starting above $100,000. Wizards’ own creative leadership, Dan Ayoub and product architect Laura Hohman, have publicly framed this hiring as additive rather than a resource shift away from core D&D content, telling GameSpot the company has “been hiring on top of our additional staff to support these” crossovers and confirming outside studio partnerships to keep classic settings like Ravenloft, Eberron, and the Forgotten Realms in active development alongside it.

Whether that promise holds is exactly the concern driving fan anxiety, because Magic: The Gathering already lived through this exact trajectory. Universes Beyond started on the Magic side in 2021 as a supplementary program and has since grown to the point where crossover sets now regularly outsell the game’s own original settings. If D&D follows the same curve, and its own Universes Beyond hiring push suggests real institutional weight is going behind it, it’s not unreasonable for longtime players to worry the flagship tabletop game could gradually shift toward being a licensing platform for other people’s franchises rather than sustaining its own settings as the priority.

The second flashpoint is AI. Cocks has called himself an “AI bull” in multiple interviews over the past two years, telling Goldman Sachs in September 2024 that “there’s not a single person” among the 30 to 40 people he regularly plays D&D with who doesn’t use AI in some form for campaign or character development, and that this was “a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.” In a March 2025 Semafor interview, he described running a Scooby-Doo-themed home campaign built around an “incredibly elaborate” PowerPoint presentation, and reiterated that AI is “supercharging fandom” in ways he considers “just net good for the brand.” Those comments sit uncomfortably next to Wizards’ own public position distancing the company from AI use in officially published D&D content, a distinction the company has had to draw repeatedly as Cocks keeps bringing the subject back up on his own.

None of this means D&D or Magic are collapsing tomorrow. Both games are financially healthy by every number Hasbro has released, and Wizards’ creative leadership has gone on record specifically to reassure fans that Universes Beyond isn’t displacing core development. But a company with no permanent president, run on an interim basis by an executive who has spent two years publicly advocating for exactly the two directions, AI integration and expanding licensed crossover content, that much of the hobby’s base is most wary of, is a legitimate reason for that base to be paying closer attention than usual to what gets announced next.

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NEXT: Lanterns’ Writer and DC’s Podcast Host Are Now Openly Arguing the Franchise Is Sexist and Racist

Monte Cook Games pulled its own promotional video this week after fans caught it using AI-generated footage, an unusually pointed embarrassment for a company that has built its entire public identity around opposing exactly that.

The video, titled “The Joy of RPGs,” went up on MCG’s YouTube and social channels celebrating what the studio called the transformational fun of tabletop gaming. Viewers quickly spotted several b-roll clips that looked AI-generated, including a shot of a child holding a character sheet covered in nonsense text, the kind of garbled lettering that’s become a dead giveaway for generative image tools. After social media pushback, MCG pulled the video and replaced it with a version scrubbed of the offending footage.

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The Standard They Set For Themselves

Monte Cook Games’ official “Core Values” page includes a direct statement on the subject: “Generating imagery or text through a trained algorithm (’AI’ or machine learning-derived art or writing) is the exact opposite of inspiration, vision, and passion. If a game or other product doesn’t express something that comes from the mind and heart of a creative human, it’s not the kind of thing we want to publish. In fact, it’s a betrayal of the values expressed here.”

That’s pretty harsh language. “Betrayal” is a strong word for a company to put on its own website, and it’s the word that made this week’s controversy land as hard as it did.

MCG’s response leaned on distance rather than direct fault: the studio said the footage originally came from a segment it contributed to a PBS documentary series, All Access with Andy Garcia, and that an outside production company built the promotional video around that footage without MCG fully vetting what went into it. That’s a plausible explanation for how it happened, and it goes to show that most people don’t see AI content when it’s produced, it’s just another part of the content out there. The impact is the same, however, that MCG’s own name and values page were attached to a video containing the exact content those values explicitly call a betrayal, and it took public backlash rather than internal review to catch it.

A Company Defined By Its Stated Values

Monte Cook Games has spent over a decade building its brand around values commitments, not just on AI but broadly. Co-founder Shanna Germain has described the company’s mission in interviews as putting “diversity, inclusivity and truth at the forefront” of everything from product design to hiring, telling one outlet that “our games give players tools to encourage individuality without shame” and that the company deliberately writes gay, gender-neutral, and non-white characters into its fiction as standard practice, not exception. The company’s public credo states it welcomes people “from all walks of life, all genders and orientations, all religions and cultures, and all ethnicities” in its products, its events, and the spaces it builds. This is a studio that has consistently positioned its values statements as core to its identity and its marketing, not incidental footnotes.

That’s why this particular slip matters more than it would for a studio that never made the pledge in the first place. A company that treats moral positioning as a central brand pillar, and uses words like “betrayal” to describe the thing it now has to explain away, sets a much higher bar for itself to clear. When a studio spends years telling its audience it’s different, better, more principled than the industry around it, the audience remembers that framing the moment the studio’s own product doesn’t live up to it.

What Happened Here

Once the AI content was flagged, the company moved fast: pulled the video, swapped it for a cleaner cut, and posted a public explanation rather than staying silent or deleting the controversy quietly. That’s a better response than plenty of companies manage. But “we didn’t fully check what an outside vendor put in our own promotional video” is still an admission that the values page didn’t function as an actual filter before publication, only as a talking point after the fact.

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NEXT: The 2026 Hugo Awards Prove Once Again The Sad Puppies Were Right All Along

Robert J. Kuntz spent his teenage years three blocks from Gary Gygax’s house. He became Gygax’s co-Dungeon Master, played the character Robilar in the campaign that would become D&D’s founding myth, and was the first player to survive Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors. In a new Bleeding Fool interview, the last major living original creator of Dungeons & Dragons accuses Wizards of the Coast and its in-house historian of running a coordinated campaign to paint the game’s founders as bigots. He backs it with a list of named grievances, a documented legal dispute, and a threat to sue. And it arrives at the tail end of nearly two years of Wizards controversies this outlet has tracked one by one.

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Dark Sun is coming back to Dungeons & Dragons, and Wizards of the Coast wants fans to know the setting’s most notorious feature is getting cut. The 30-plus-year-old post-apocalyptic setting, teased at the GenCon 2026 keynote and slated for two full books plus a modified Player’s Handbook in early 2027, built its reputation on a world so brutal that slavery, genocide, and torture were baked into its lore rather than sanitized around the edges. According to the designers now handling it, that reputation is exactly the problem.

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Gen Con has hired Camilla Cleghorn, a longtime on-camera presenter for The Dice Tower and a key organizer behind its Dice Tower East convention, as its new head of events, putting her in charge of planning and running the thousands of events that make up tabletop’s largest annual gathering. The hire lands less than a week after this year’s Gen Con closed with a record 74,000 attendees, extending a growth streak that’s run from 70,000 in 2023 to nearly 72,000 in 2025.

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Gen Con has now sold out before its doors even opened for three consecutive years, and it’s pushing up against the hard physical limits of the Indiana Convention Center. The show is set for a major expansion tied to its 60th anniversary next year: an additional 143,500 square feet of floor space, roughly two and a half football fields, plus 800 new hotel rooms coming online with a new Signia by Hilton property. Cleghorn told BoardGameWire the real challenge isn’t finding room for more attendees, it’s making sure communication and support systems scale at the same pace as the convention’s footprint.

Cleghorn’s departure from The Dice Tower carries its own weight in the hobby. She’s spent years as a visible face for the channel’s 360,000-plus YouTube subscribers, reviewing games and helping build Dice Tower East into its own successful regional show, alongside running the outlet’s annual crowdfunding campaigns. She called leaving “bittersweet” in a Facebook post to fans, thanking Dice Tower founder Tom Vasel and the team for opportunities she said she never imagined having. Vasel, for his part, kept his on-air reaction light, joking about Gen Con’s “thievery” in a recent Dice Tower News episode before wishing her well and confirming she’d still make occasional appearances on the channel around her new job.

The move also means Gen Con’s longtime director of events, Derek Guder, is shifting into what Cleghorn described as an “adjacent role” at the company, with the two continuing to work together through the transition.

She posted to Facebook, “I’m incredibly grateful to have been a part of The Dice Tower’s journey over the last several years, and I’ll always be thankful to Tom, the DT team, and all of you for giving me opportunities I never imagined I’d have.”

She then spoke with BoardGameWire, “One of the things I value most about my time with The Dice Tower is that I’ve had the opportunity to experience the hobby from a lot of different perspectives: publishers, designers, content creators, convention attendees, and the people working behind the scenes to make events happen.

“It’s taught me that each group has different needs, but ultimately they all want a great experience and clear communication.”

Cleghorn also said, “The timing also felt right for me personally and professionally. I’m incredibly proud of my time with The Dice Tower and everything I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of there, and I’m excited to take what I’ve learned into this next chapter.”

Tom Vasel seemed to minimize the impact to his channel saying, “You’ll still see here occasionally here on The Dice Tower but she’ll be really busy working for Gen Con.”

Pulling a well-known reviewer and convention organizer out of independent media and into a leadership seat at the industry’s biggest show is a meaningful signal about how tightly board game media and the convention circuit have become intertwined. Cleghorn’s background gives her a rare vantage point spanning publishers, designers, content creators, and the attendees actually filling the halls, exactly the kind of cross-perspective Gen Con will need if it’s serious about scaling past a venue it’s already outgrown.

Does hiring straight out of board game media signal Gen Con finally taking creator and community input seriously at a leadership level, or is this simply the safest, lowest-risk hire available for a show that can’t afford to stumble during its biggest expansion yet?

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NEXT: Paizo Cuts Ties With Archives of Nethys, Longtime Free Pathfinder Rules Site, Amid Deeper Financial Trouble

Paizo has formally ended its eight-year commercial partnership with Archives of Nethys, the volunteer-run digital reference site that’s served as the de facto free rulebook for Pathfinder and Starfinder players since 2018. The split took effect July 24, and while both sides frame it as an amicable parting, the timing lines up with a rougher stretch for Paizo than the official statements let on.

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The partnership worked simply: Paizo sent Archives of Nethys early PDFs of new rulebooks and gave the site exclusive access to official artwork beyond what its standard Community Use Policy allows. In exchange, Archives of Nethys was supposed to generate royalties back to Paizo through that expanded access. According to both parties’ public statements, those royalties never materialized in eight years of operation. Archives of Nethys has always run ad-free and paywall-free, funded through donations and covering only its own server and search costs, and the site’s operators have said turning it into a real revenue source would undercut the openness that made it useful in t

he first place.

Money wasn’t the whole story, though. Paizo also pointed to what it called ongoing confusion over its artwork policy, noting that once assets appeared on Archives of Nethys under the special licensing terms, other unaffiliated sites routinely copied and reused them, creating extra legal and licensing headaches for Paizo’s team to chase down. Ending the formal partnership lets Paizo draw a cleaner line around what art is and isn’t fair game across the wider fan-site ecosystem, even if it costs the flagship reference site its early access and its art library in the process.

The bigger context is where this gets more interesting. Paizo has been absorbing real financial damage this year from Diamond Comics’ collapse, which reportedly left roughly $10 million of Paizo’s physical inventory stranded in a warehouse with no distributor to move it. That fallout forced Paizo to cut its organized play program and lay off staff in early June, just weeks before the Archives of Nethys decision became public. A licensing partnership that never paid for itself is an easy target to cut when a company is already trimming costs elsewhere, whether or not that’s the full explanation Paizo is offering publicly

.

Archives of Nethys isn’t disappearing. It continues operating under Paizo’s standard Community Use Policy, meaning the actual rules text for Pathfinder and Starfinder remains free and accessible. What changes is the polish: official artwork gets stripped out, updates arrive later since the site no longer gets books ahead of release, and players wanting day-one digital integration may increasingly look toward paid alternatives like Demiplane instead. For a hobby that has spent years positioning itself as the open, community-friendly alternative to D&D Beyond’s paywalled ecosystem, watching that openness quietly erode under financial pressure is the part worth sitting with.

Does an industry built on open community goodwill hold that model together when the money gets tight, or is Archives of Nethys the first sign that free tabletop resources are heading toward the same paywalled future as everything else?

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