Chaosium removed more than 40 community titles from sale this month because staff suspected AI wrote them. The company’s list of warning signs includes flawless spelling and the em dash.
Michael O’Brien posted the update on October 22, signed by the Community Content Ambassador Team. The purge hit the DriveThruRPG programs for Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Pendragon and Age of Vikings, including the Miskatonic Repository and the Jonstown Compendium. Chaosium says it combines staff judgment with “multiple AI detection tools.” It names no creators and no titles, and Tabletop Sentinel found no appeals process described. Future work from the affected creators comes down too.
The tell list reads like a profile of a careful human writer. It includes “Absolutely perfect grammar and spelling, zero typos,” uniform formatting with many lists and tables, a breathless present-tense style, and “If not this, then that” syntax. The post also says “Em dashes, it’s always the em dashes.” Tabletop Sentinel reports Chaosium says none of these signs proves AI use alone. One sign is more concrete: O’Brien described a new author who publishes one or more scenarios a day, a pace that deserves scrutiny.
The advice to creators goes past detection. “Just don’t use AI” covers ideas, rules checks, stat blocks, revision, layout, blurbs and covers. The post tells creators to turn off AI writing assistants, autocorrect suggestions included. A rule that bars a spell-check suggestion polices workflow. It does not protect art.
The detection method has a record. On the EN World thread, a poster named overgeeked wrote: “This does not fill me with confidence they’re going to avoid false positives.” Another, Cadence, argued that any statistical test with real power produces false positives, so demanding none means rejecting AI screening altogether. Elsewhere, Substack’s rollout of the Pangram detector drew a backlash this summer. Pangram’s CEO puts its false positive rate near one in 10,000. The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong wrote the tool “does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood.” Writer Mack Collier answered: “I’m not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process.”
Most EN World posters backed Chaosium, and some called for naming offenders. One predicted that buying RPG adventures will seem outdated within a few years as players generate their own. In the pages Fandom Pulse reviewed, no creator came forward to say Chaosium wrongly pulled a title. Chaosium has not named any, so none can contest it.
The purge follows Chaosium’s early October rename of Shub-Niggurath to Shub-Gorath in its Old Ones Origins board game, covered here. In June 2020 the company tweeted that it “stands with all those working to end racism, fascism and inequality.” It now polices prose style the same way it polices names.
Should a publisher be allowed to treat clean spelling as evidence?
So we're banning autocorrect, spell checkers, and heck, why not grammarly? I wonder what the logical conclusion of this purity spiral will be?