One of the reasons for creating One Man [RPG] is to be useful to other DMs —or GMs. Obviously, let us not deceive ourselves: I am here for the business, of course. That is a fundamental part of it, since, like many others, I want to be able to make a living from one of my passions —from writing itself, that is not possible— without losing sight of quality, and while giving as much as I possibly can. But there is also something educational in all this.

I teach writing workshops because I love writing fiction, and I love being of help to others. I can guarantee that the money I make from these workshops is ridiculous, and sometimes it does not even cover the self-employed contribution in my country, Spain, where the fiscal mistreatment of entrepreneurs is completely aberrant. I have even taught workshops while losing money, for an entire year. So, is there any doubt that there is vocation and a desire to help in me?

As I was saying, one of the reasons for creating this project is to be useful. To share ideas and advice treasured over years —30 already— of reading, running, and playing role-playing games. And it is in this exhaustive labor, which I also hope will help me gain some visibility, that I am investing a disproportionately high number of hours.

I will not lie to you: I thought it would not take this long. But it is also true that, when I first thought about creating advice and free material, I was not planning to go into such depth. I thought that bringing out what I already had written, or what was already circling in my mind, would be faster, and I also thought the publication schedule would be more spaced out. But in the end, thanks to my obsessions with excess, excellence, and (hyperplanning), everything always stretches out, and I end up trying to encompass more than I am capable of.

In any case, I continue creating materials and sharing them because I enjoy it, and because I believe in collaborative work. But I will also have to pay attention to finally releasing Heroes and Foes —the Kickstarter page is approved and waiting— and to bringing out the rest of the VoidBorn books, for which much material is already written. Otherwise, the delay will mean that the number of projects will continue accumulating, threatening to devour me in the most tempestuous nightmares.

Let us be clear: there is an enormous amount of content with no quality whatsoever being poured daily onto every social network and onto the internet in general, and of course that is bad. And I do not believe it is bad in a moral or ethical sense —that is not my concern, and in the end such things are nothing but idiocies— but because it works against the interests of serious, committed creators who use AI to complement our creative processes.

AI tools are enhancers of human abilities, and especially of creation —to keep the conversation focused. Those of us who are responsible toward our work and our craft, and who are committed to quality and effort, are the ones harmed by the avalanche of garbage content, because the consumer, anesthetized by the vast stream of crap, develops an allergic reaction to anything that has AI involved somewhere in its process. And that is not fair at all.

Another consequence of this hyper-reaction against AI in creative environments can be seen clearly on Reddit —fine, we already know people there are a bit stupid and have nothing better to do than live their parallel lives in their favorite thread—, a place where more and more communities have allowed themselves to be bent by pressure from haters into banning any content related to AI, and even the people who share or argue in favor of AI. A ridiculous and puerile madness in which the only ones harmed are us.

I suppose the solution lies in opening new spaces where AI is not forbidden, and watching those other places languish as the years go by.

The Tradition of Art and Artificial Intelligence

It seems that, like a virus, the idea has been spreading that the use of generative AI is unethical or inappropriate, as if this made any real sense. There are people who have gone from indifference —or even from looking favorably upon the arrival of this set of new technologies— to seeing them as something malevolent or immoral, adopting the anti-AI slogan as a pseudo-religious mantra that, they believe, places them on a higher moral plane, as if they were fighting against some form of injustice. Of course, this is not the case, but a small number of people fall into the web of lies spun by those interested in not losing their business.

It is therefore vital to tear down that lie about the theft of artists’ intellectual property, because it reveals a lack of deep knowledge about art and the tradition of art that is intolerable in anyone who calls themselves an artist. Perhaps calling oneself an artist is part of the problem, but we will go deeper later into the relationship between the artist’s ego and the ominous lack of humility shown by some of them, because the main problem that articulates this virus of hatred toward so-called AI art —I do not believe that what an AI generates can be called art— has nothing to do, at least initially, with intellectual property, but with money, as I stated at the beginning.

The main issue here is that there are individuals who, taking advantage of a widespread need, have trained certain skills in order to monetize them. Put that way, this is no different from any other job or occupation, such as working as a translator. In this way, these people, with that skill, sell their services to others, thereby establishing their business model. But they lose sight of something fundamental: they are no longer in the realm of art, but in the marketplace: the law of supply and demand. These people sell artistic products, and are therefore subject to competition, and those competitors may lower the cost of their services, make use of technologies that make them more productive, or copy their products to some extent.

Burger King and McDonald’s have been doing this for six or seven decades; and it is not a useless comparison, because just as they do not produce food but food products —it is not about nourishing people, it is about getting them to buy and eat by appealing to gluttony— artists who sell their art make artistic products. Those who create their works without the intention of monetizing them, however, can indeed be said to be making art, because art is created out of passion, necessity, to calm the mind or heal the soul; it is a pleasure, not a business. The moment you charge for what you do, you turn it into a product, especially if we consider that this execution does not arise from one’s own will, nor from desire, nor from inspiration: an artist who works on commission is a mercenary, like someone who makes a custom cake, renovates a home, or tunes a car. And all of them —like the translator— use their trained skill in order to monetize it, with the risk that their competitors may do it better or cheaper, or that one day they may be replaced by machines or artificial intelligences capable of translating texts without human intervention: this is called progress.

The fact that humans no longer need to study languages in order to understand messages in other tongues, or to watch YouTube videos that were previously inaccessible to them, is an advantage. Is it not also an advantage that each person can create their own illustrations? It is not an advantage for those who charge for it, because it affects their modus vivendi, but for the rest of humanity, for those who want or need images, it is highly positive. A true artist will continue creating their art and enjoying it forever. That is a value no one can take away from them. However, what can indeed be taken away is what they use to obtain money, as with any other job: you can lose it at any moment, or it may stop being as profitable if market circumstances change.

And so, these people, annoyed because their business model is collapsing, suddenly spread this false idea of intellectual property theft. A few fall prey to this spell and repeat these slogans endlessly, as if they were a divine mantra, or a truth written on the tablets of the law. They fall prey to their ignorance —and perhaps to their ego— and dedicate themselves to feeding hatred toward users of generative AI, to promoting brigades aimed at changing subreddit rules, harassing people on networks like Facebook or the former Twitter, even, sadly, falsely accusing artists of using generative AI when they have not done so, because their perfect detection radar simply failed.

But do you know what? It turns out that a generative AI does the same thing we humans have been doing for at least some five thousand years: recycling everything that came before.

This is where the concept of the tradition of art comes fully into play. Octavio Paz said that trying to escape tradition is useless, but that it is a phenomenon that always happens as part of tradition. Let us demolish this with one definitive and simple blow: what would H. R. Giger have done if he had been born 1,000 years ago? Can you imagine Tolkien living before the entire cultural heritage of medieval Europe? Before Chrétien de Troyes? Do you think The Lord of the Rings would exist? And without that work, do you think Dungeons & Dragons would exist?

No artist could have done anything if all the creators who preceded them had not existed, creators from whom they stole —consciously and unconsciously, and this is important— everything they know today and everything that, through a great deal of practice —training— they managed to consolidate in a particular way. In the Middle Ages, in poetry and painting, masters were always copied, because that was the only way to learn.

But it is not only a matter of making conscious copies of previous material, or of the effort required to master the hand so that it does what you want it to do. We ignore the fact that, from the moment we are born, we are being exposed to reality, and therefore to countless works of art, each one of them gathering countless centuries of cultural heritage. But beyond that, there is another crucial fact: before an artist or writer has the conscious thought or impulse to create something, this very exposure to hundreds or thousands of works has been impacting and, in some way, educating their brain, redirecting it in a particular direction. So, in addition to that passive, unconscious learning, we must emphasize a fundamental point: having consumed certain works is perhaps what has motivated you to do what you do.

Perhaps Lovecraft would never have written anything if he had not read Poe, Bierce, Chambers, Dunsany, Machen, Shelley, and others, because those works would not have nourished him and awakened his interest in creating.

And it is at this point that ignorance is intensified by a lack of humility, a broken ego, and the need to stand out or be recognized. To be an artist, regardless of your art, is to become a living homage to tradition. It is an honor to be able to integrate all those influences into new works that exist only because of the works from which they were nourished. Learning from others or copying their works is a privilege to be grateful for, because nothing you do as an artist truly belongs to you —only an insignificant minimal fraction related to your personality, tastes, or style. The rest belongs to all the millions of your predecessors from every corner of the world, as well as to the increasingly close dialogue among arts that feed back into one another: literature, cinema, painting, photography, comics, and so on.

So artists train and learn from their tradition —or from other artistic traditions they consume— reusing and retreading previous works, and that is fine; but when generative AI does it, it is wrong? It is somewhat absurd, incoherent, or, what is most likely: malicious. We would return to economic interest as the true focus of this momentary fever against AI, and the circle would close.

But perhaps it would be sensible to propose that every artist pay royalties to every other artist from whom they learned —stole, copied, were inspired by— something, just to be fair. But of course, the training dataset of an AI is somewhere and can be verified, whereas there is still no technology capable of scrutinizing and mapping the human brain in order to show how works of art leave an imprint, an inspiration, a lesson, a burst of creativity that pushes you to create something, and what exactly you are copying. Who knows, perhaps one day it will be possible and we will be in for a great surprise. But if we add to this impossibility of knowing the specific source, or the fundamental influence of those works on our own, an enormous lack of perspective and humility, and probably an unhealthy ego…

The irony is that the anti-AI crusade is doomed to fail. There have been reactionary movements against many technologies in the past. Today we do not question factory machines, the printing press, or computers, just as people will not question AI a few years from now. Photographers became intense about computer photo editing; portraitists rebelled against photography —they even spread the idea that photographic cameras captured the human soul. The printing press and the typewriter were received as assaults on the art of handwriting, and Plato criticized writing, saying that it was bad for memory and the mind. In some of these cases, people said: “No, this time it is different.”

And yet here we are, creating without end.

My girlfriend says I have Asperger’s. Obviously, that is not the case, but I suppose this is not a matter of black and white. ChatGPT says I show some traits of inattentive ADHD and Asperger’s. I know ChatGPT is not the most reliable authority in the world when it comes to psychology —or anything else— but hey, it has also saved lives.

This is not a matter of life, nor even of psychology, but of how to face creation. Perhaps I do have some neurodivergent traits, perhaps only in a small percentage, and maybe that changes everything, and what I am about to say is not universally useful for everyone. Still, it is always better to say it, just in case.

A friend told me that hyperfocus is a trait of ADHD. People who can spend hours doing something while forgetting to eat or sleep. I do not forget those things, although at times I do lose track of time, especially when writing fiction. There is, however, something that happens to me, and I do not know whether it is hyperfocus, but it appears with shades of obsession. I am capable of becoming absorbed in a task for hours, days, weeks, and devoting all my usable time to it.

It has happened to me with countless things: certain video games; tutorials on how to build your own electric guitar; visiting every page of the discounts section of an online store selling something that interests me —role-playing games, Warhammer miniatures, terrain—, making tables with all of it, sorting them and classifying them according to criteria such as immediacy, interest, or price… and the vast majority of those occupations were not particularly constructive beyond providing an interesting escape from reality.

That, which may seem like a great defect, I nevertheless believe is an enormous virtue if one knows how to redirect it. And that is something I have managed to achieve over the years, especially in order to push One Man [RPG] forward. Some of the tasks to which I have devoted my time obsessively have been: constantly thinking about and revising the entire publication plan; running innumerable tests with Midjourney until finding the necessary style or styles; consuming all the available material on YouTube about digital marketing, SEO, personal branding, and sales… and connecting this with another anomaly that had rarely appeared before with such intensity as it has now: hyperplanning.

I do not know whether this even exists as a concept, but for me it consists of the capacity —or disorder— that forces me to create structured creation and publication plans stretching years into the future. Publication order, names, hours and thousands of words for various future new settings, covers and interior layout design, planning —types, cycles, order, themes— for 5e-Free, a future Patreon… Obviously, all this entails a deviation, or an extension of the time I should have devoted to immediate tasks, but at least it is a form of productive procrastination. Time spent structuring and producing elements that will be of great use in the future.

And what is the key to all this? For me, perseverance and hard work are two fundamental elements for making progress in my project. Clearly, not in the way I should, or at least not in the most direct and fastest way, but I think that, as compensation for the delay, I may be able to achieve better results than if I had acted with greater immediacy.

The mental image I have is that of a spring being compressed more and more. When the force oppressing it is released, it will travel farther, or with greater force, than it would with normal compression.

It is also a consolation.

Today is a noteworthy day.

The High Commission for Artistic Creation has turned its gaze upon this small project of mine, and after what I can only assume was a rigorous, severe, and entirely necessary inspection, I have been informed that One Man [RPG] has been granted the Promptforged Machine-Assisted Honorific Seal.

I am deeply moved by this unexpected distinction.

After months of work across every corner of the project — writing, design, layout, website building, SEO, digital marketing, video editing, and whatever other suspicious disciplines have been required along the way — it is enormously satisfying to see one’s labor acknowledged, pointed at, and ceremonially rewarded in some form.

Even if only for one small area of the whole process.

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I will be honest and direct: this is a mess. Being an indie creator —I suppose that is what I am, although this is only an assumption I make about myself, and I do not know how true it actually is— involves many things, especially if you decide to do everything yourself. In my case, furthermore, just to make clear how stupid I am, it occurred to me to reflect this in the brand name itself, so that I could no longer —even if I wanted to— bring anyone else into this madness.

But this decision, both procedural and related to branding, was not made at random: it is a declaration of intent. Of course, there is an enormous number of people doing this very same thing, and in fact many of them have been doing it for far longer than I have, so that does not make me someone special, but merely one more among many. Still, since every individual learning process is unique and non-transferable, today it is my turn to share a little of what I have learned with whoever wants to “listen.”

As I was saying, this is a mess. Being alone means doing many things, not so much in quantity —although that too— but in variety. I am only a writer, and as for design, I know what I need in order to get by on my own. My lack of formal training in this area leads me to spend an enormous amount of time refining whatever I consider necessary in each case. Beyond these two spheres, everything is more or less terra incognita. I have had to learn how to handle WordPress and plugins; I have had to learn digital marketing —especially SEO/GEO—; I have had to learn how to understand the dissemination of my content on social media —YouTube in particular—; I have had to learn how to work with Midjourney in order to extract what I need from it —it is not as easy as pressing a button, and I think I have already surpassed 30k images in tests and trial and error—; I have had to learn some video editing and assembly; I have had to understand how Kickstarter, DriveThru, and Meta’s Andromeda work; and I have ended up exhausted from having to learn so many things while writing Heroes and Foes, and while constantly building and reviewing —and expanding— both my brand strategy, my publications for VoidBorn and future settings/games, and my content marketing strategy —a world in itself— for my website.

These are not easy times for me, due to personal and family matters, and I am writing this with Heroes and Foes finished months ago, with a brutal publication delay, and with a strategic plan that does not stop growing as a result of my excess and my obsession in the pursuit of excellence. I have been working flat out on this for a year and a half, but the work had begun several years earlier, in intermittent sallies and outbreaks of excessive creativity. During this time, I have also stopped doing “what I had to do” for certain periods in order to expand the plan with a mass of ideas for future manuals and settings —inside and outside 5e— and, worse still, in order to escape from reality by endlessly creating things that will not see the light of day for years, according to the publication calendar —or rather, publication order— that I am creating with such exhaustive detail, and expanding without end.

I have more than 400 pages written for 6 different settings. 14 covers, and a very extensive amount of generated images, some as guiding ideas, and others almost final, for many projects that are not VoidBorn, and for others that do not even have anything to do with 5e.

Although I acknowledge that this loss of focus has occasionally got out of hand —given the personal circumstances I mentioned— I am also grateful for these creative disconnections, both in writing and in visual identity. Besides soothing certain pains of the soul, they have served —even if it may not seem so— to “move forward.” In some way, I now have a great deal of material that will allow me to advance more quickly, or to finish some of those projects much sooner, when their time comes. This —although it might seem like it— is not stupid consolation, but a reality; one that is also a form of productive procrastination, but undoubtedly of infinitely greater value than unproductive procrastination.

If there is one thing that 11 years —and around 300 short stories— of narrative writing have taught me, it is that one must be benevolent with oneself, and that creative matter is surrounded by a certain caprice. Although it is ductile, it is also unpredictable, and therefore sometimes one must step away in order to return, some time later, to the place where one left off.

The path of creation is also a path of ego and self-esteem construction. It is essential not to sabotage yourself, and not to believe yourself to be the best. Learning never ends, and one must persevere in order to materialize results.

If you find yourself in the middle of the storm of your own creative process, with a project still taking shape: take heart. Effort and perseverance is one of the precepts of my karate dojo’s dojo kun. Make them your own.

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It is somewhat difficult for me to define the purpose of this space on my website. It is a strange mixture of design diary, thoughts, pseudo-essays, and reflections both on role-playing games and on my experience or perception of this general whole, as well as on my experience within this creative experience.

Field Notes may not be the best name. It may not even be something anyone gives a shit about, and there may be a deliberate ambiguity in the usefulness of these articles. None of that matters to me. I simply do what I believe I must do, and since a good part of the content published here is free and intended to bring value to the community, I reserve the right to say here, in an eminently personal way, whatever I consider needs to be said, probably mixing an elevated and intellectual tone with more mundane and foul-mouthed forms of expression.

Here, One Man [RPG] is not speaking. Francisco is speaking. I am speaking. And therefore I will show myself in the most heterogeneous cyclothymia that characterizes me as a thinking being: excessively critical, polemical, and with ideas of my own that are far too clear. Without this being an obstacle —of course— to undertaking new and daily forms of learning of every kind.

Remember that the path of learning and enrichment is infinite. Abandon the ego, be humble, and never stop learning.

Discover 50 Roleplay-focused Characters or NPCs