Old School Gamers is built and run by one person. That fact shapes everything here, including where AI fits and where it does not.
The short version
- This is a free, non-commercial site. Nothing on it is for sale, and the AI-assisted parts are no exception. I am not charging anyone for AI-generated anything.
- AI is a tool that makes a one-person project possible. It is not the point of the project. The point is an open, useful reference and a set of free tools for old-school tabletop play.
- Where AI-generated content appears, it is labeled there or disclosed on this page.
- Generated art is the bottom of the pile, not the destination. Public-domain, freely-licensed, and contributed work always outranks it, and replaces it.
Why AI at all
The bestiary covers hundreds of creatures across several rule systems. One person cannot hand-draw or commission hundreds of illustrations, and a wall of blank entries serves nobody. So the gaps are filled with generated art, clearly marked, while better art goes in around it.
I would rather ship an honest placeholder than an empty page or a paywall.
Where the art is headed
The replacement plan does not depend on anyone but me: I'm replacing these with public-domain or freely-licensed art as I work through the catalog, and user contributions under CC-BY-SA are welcome. The mythic monsters -- dragons, basilisks, griffins -- have centuries of real engravings and bestiary plates to draw from, and those go in with full attribution as I get to them.
The standing rule is precedence, not a deadline:
- Public-domain, freely-licensed, or contributed art always replaces a generated image. No exceptions, no judgment calls in the machine's favor.
- Some invented monsters -- the oozes, the golems, the things no sixteenth-century engraver ever drew -- have no historical art to find. For those, a labeled generated image may simply stay until someone draws one. That is the honest version of "placeholder."
Have a public-domain plate, your own art, or a stronger illustration for a creature? Get in touch and I will put it in, with full credit. You can also add or improve a creature, its lore, or its stat blocks through the contribution guide.
What AI does not do here
- It does not write the stat blocks. Those come from real, attributed sources -- OSRIC and Basic Fantasy content under the Open Game License, credited on each creature page and in the Open Game License notices.
- It does not outrank people. Anything a human contributes takes precedence over a generated stand-in, and replaces it.
- It is never sold, upsold, or used to lock content behind a subscription.
The other places AI shows up
The art is not the only use, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of fine print this page exists to avoid:
- The NPC, encounter, and character tools have optional AI helpers -- portraits, descriptions, flavor text. They are off until you ask, and the output is yours to take or leave. Use them as inspiration, or don't use them at all; it's up to you.
- The illustrations on the featured campaign chronicles are generated, made to match each session's events.
- Some of the featured session chronicles are AI-written as well -- drafted from the real session's audio recording, in close collaboration with the player whose character tells the story. The sessions, the dice, and the decisions are all real; the machine's contribution is turning hours of table audio into prose in the character's voice.
- There will be other uses over time -- this is a one-person project and AI is part of how it gets built, including some of the code behind it. The rules above travel with it: free, disclosed, and never outranking a person's work.
The bottom line
The site is free and a solo dev can only do so much. AI fills the gaps that would otherwise be blank pages; it is labeled where it stands in for art, it never touches the rules content, and the moment something better exists -- found in an archive, commissioned, or contributed -- it loses its spot. If that is the kind of project you want to point your readers at, or help build, I would like to hear from you.