2006.08.09 The Great Squirrel Flood of GenCon 2006

 

A rather long thread of a recollection of one of Kenny's failed business ideas from "back in the day" (i.e. 20 years ago): I'll save you the slightly disjointed read from Ken Burnside:

"In 2005. I give a seminar on this technology at GAMA Trade Show (the old name of GAMA Expo). Marcus King and Ken Whitman are sitting in the audience as I explain the benefits. Steve Cole is also in the audience and nodding along. (ADB had already adopted this process by then.) But basically, by buying the equipment we did, you could make soft-cover RPG books with black-and-white interiors of good enough quality to sell through distribution (think of pre-2004 GURPS supplements) at a price that didn't cost you money.

The d20 glut was raging then...

By 2006, Ken Whitman had somehow lined up the funding to get the higher end version of this equipment; it had to have been a lease. This was four blocky things the size of dishwashers that linked like LEGOs that could take two files (cover and interior) and spit out perfect-bound books. Ken's business model was to go to conventions and print your RPG book while you waited and hand it to you hot off the press. No inventory, just load the equipment up on the moving truck he already owned, pay for electricity at the convention, buy paper in bulk from a distributor to cut costs.

For all of Ken's myriad faults, he has exactly the level of technical expertise to wheel the four-part gigantic printing and binding machines togehter.

He set this up at Origins 2006, and it kinda-sorta worked. He ran into a problem that people who buy books want to see the books before they buy. (editor's note: I remember seeing Ken's setup & spoke to him at his booth at this convention)

He packed the machinery and paper up on the truck and drove it to a parking lot halfway between Columbus and Indianapolis, where one of Marcus King's employees was waiting to drive him home. This means his business critical equipment is sitting in a locked truck. In another state.

In the 6 weeks between Origins and GenCon, he's taking book orders off of his website, and 'hustling' to line up more publishers for Convention Print On Demand. And his goal is to get to GenCon, print his backlog, ship them, bring his laptop with the updated files and have More Books to Sell.

Gather 'round, because this is where it gets *good*.

He's got two of those printing plants; this is about $400k of hardware. It's in a locked second-hand U-Haul truck. You know how some U-Haul trucks have a milky white skylight over the "above the cab" part of the back?

Ken's had that.

A squirrel managed to get through that skylight. And discovered 8 washing-machine sized parts of an expensive printing plant. And several dozen boxes of paper. This was a great place to have squirrel babies, store nuts, make nests, and nobody can eat you or your babies!

After being opened by squirrels, the skylight was no longer water-tight. There was a gigantic rainstorm the weekend before GenCon. Ken got driven out to where his locked truck was, saw that the lock was untouched, and never opened the back of the truck before driving to Indianapolis.

Ken gets to the Indiananapolis Convention Center late on Monday, goes and hangs out with the very early GenCon crews from the very big publishers. (And by 'hang out' I generally assume 'be in the same space with people who are actively avoiding him').

Tuesday morning comes. Ken takes his second-hand U-Haul to the marshalling area. Which isn't open yet. He waits. He waits longer. He's sitting in an un-airconditioned cab in August in Indianapolis. He gets out, he tries to find someone who can let him get to the freight area of the ICC. A day earlier than anyone else.

Around 3 PM, he gets told to get out of the marshalling yard, and to come back no earlier than 5 AM on Wednesday. He drives out, goes to his _very_ offsite hotel and sleeps.

He still hasn't opened the back of that truck. It rains _again_ overnight. He also oversleeps.

We got to GenCon and got an early slot on the marshalling lot, and moved all of our booth stuff in and were setting it up. We took a short break.

Ken Whitman backs his U-Haul up to the freight docks, with all the freight doors wide open. It's about 1 PM, it's hot, it's sticky. Nobody's happy. (The vendor's hall for GenCon is a series of concrete floored ballrooms, and they don't run air conditioning on load-in from the freight docks. It's a muggy August day. A bunch of middle aged dorks are moving heavy pallets of books in a humid concrete box and setting up displays) We happened to have a clear line of sight from our booth as Ken finally opens the back of the truck.

Three things happen.

First, a flood of water comes over the lip of the back of the truck, splashing over Ken's feet in his shorts.

Second, Ken starts shouting "Fuck, fuck, fuck..."

Third, squirrels, unable to climb out of the truck since Ohio, scrambled out onto the freight dock and scattered for any place they could hide in the concrete jungle of the Indiana Convention Center. They came charging IN at first, saw people moving and dashed the crawlspaces of the airwalls.

Ken pleaded for people to help him unload his truck. Nobody did. He used his pallet jack to unload the truck, but has to manually stack cartons of soggy paper, since it wasn't palletized.

He gets yelled at by ICC staff for taking far too long unloading his truck.

Eventually, he gets it unloaded, and then leaves his stuff at his booth while he goes and moves his truck to where it'll be the entire con.

He returns...with mournful desperation...assembles both of his printing stations. He opens the paper drawers. There's tanding water in them. And squirrel scat. And we hear Ken say "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...."

Lots of people hear this; it's a concrete box, Ken has become the Schadenfreude Entertainer of the Hour. Then Ken discovers the electrical hasn't been hooked up, and trudges over to Geo Fern to get it turned on. There's an argument of some sort. Ken goes to the Titan Games booth and pleads with Marcus King, they go back to Geo Fern and I presume Marcus pays for Ken's electircal hookup.

While this is happening, some squirrels with babies come out of his waterlogged paper supply, see way too many people and bolt, trying to find any way out. Ken comes back, plugs in his two printing stations, and runs a diagnostic.

Friend, if I told you that very high end dye sublimation printers with lots of onboard electronics don't like having water damage and squirrels living in them, would you be surprised? Ken Whitman apparently was.

Ken Whitman pulls out his cell phone and calls his service rep. In Michigan. Who rightfully says "We don't make service calls out of state, but let me see if we can find another vendor in Indianapolis..." Ken is mordantly unhappy. And desperate. His service rep finds an Indianapolis vendor.

So, these service techs have manuals for the printer models they service. Service tech shows up on Thursday morning at 8 AM. Dealer's hall opens at 10 AM. Ken somehow manages to convince GenCon to let the service tech in two hours early.

He's still there when the rest of us are allowed in at 9 AM.

Ken is arguing with the service tech. Both "head ends" of his printing stations are open and partially disassembled. The service tech is at a loss for words. He doesn't have the parts to fix this, he's not sure it *can* be fixed, and is gobmacked at this entire mess. Ken is threatening to sue.

The service tech, who doesn't work for the company providing Ken's contract, and is out here as an intra-company emergency favor, just looks at him, packs up his tools and cases, walks over to an ICC staffer so they can escort him from the vendor hall, and leaves.

Through the rest of the convention, Ken sits in his booth on a stool, next to two $200k printers that are totaled, surrounded by cartons of waterlogged and squirrel-chewed paper, with tables full of his promotional materials. He can't even load up his truck to leave before Sunday.

Meanwhile, the squirrels have taken to staying in the airwall gaps and coming out at night to forage for food. We (and several other vendors) discover that squirrels will chew books. So all books go back in boxes at night, inconveniencing everyone else in the hall.

I have no idea how Ken survived that financial debacle.

Remember, he had an outstanding backlog of books to print at the show and ship from the gap between Origins and GenCon. Plus the cost of the booth. Plus the cost of electricity. Plus the financial hit of his leased printers being waterlogged."

There's a bit more back & forth with other posters, with several remembering the "Great Squirrel Flood of 2006" and the OP adds one more salient observation:

"By that time, Ken had screwed over everyone who'd been in business with him, through somewhere north of 20 failed businesses. The fact that *nobody was willing to help him* when he needed help unloading his truck? Yeah. That's a *big* tell in the games industry."

2026.05.14 I Don't Think That Word Means What Kenny Thinks it Means....

Checking in today with Kenny's AI-fest that is the Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons Facebook Page, and I'm once again amazed at the breadth of Ken "Whit" Whitman's mastery of the English language.

He's claiming that his AI articles are fact-checked, and now advertising them as such. At the time of this post he has three articles not only marked as "fact-checked" but also as being viewable on YouTube. Sounds like a good idea, but it's straight-up misleading and, well frankly, pure unadulterated bullshit.

See, Kenny isn't actually fact-checking these articles...no. What he is doing is allegedly allowing people to let him know when there is an inaccuracy in his AI slop. Sure, he does technically state, "someone looked at it before it reached you" .....but did someone really?

1. So what we have here is Kenny saying "someone" is looking at the AI article, slapping a "Fact Checked Badge" on it, and if anyone notices some incorrect information, please "tell us". There are so many questions:
2. Who is this someone, presumably.....Kenny?
3. Is there actually a "someone", or are you just saying this to get people off your case? Is this another "The physical books should ship this week", or maybe "Pencil Dice are in full swing production". Oh....there the classic, "DVDs will ship in August" Honestly this list could go on and on....
4. So if we find something incorrect, exactly how do we "tell you"? What's the method for correction here?

WE'RE ADDING A FACT-CHECKED BADGE TO OUR COVERAGE — HERE'S WHAT THAT ACTUALLY MEANS

You may have noticed something new on our articles. That Fact Checked badge in the corner is not decoration. It is a commitment, and we want to be straight with you about what it means — including the part that is a little uncomfortable to say out loud.

HOW OUR CONTENT GETS MADE

We use AI-assisted writing tools to help produce our coverage, and we are not going to bury that in a footnote. AI lets us cover more designers, more games, and more of the history and craft behind this hobby than we could produce any other way. That part is genuinely useful.

The problem is that AI also gets things wrong in ways that are easy to miss if nobody is checking — and for a while, we were moving fast enough that not everyone was checking as carefully as they should have been. It conflates credits. It misremembers release dates. It can generate a title that sounds completely plausible and does not exist.

For coverage of real designers and real games — people who have spent years or decades building something — that is not a mistake we are willing to shrug off. So before anything publishes under our name, it goes through a structured editorial review. Sources get checked. Credits get verified. Anything that cannot be confirmed gets cut, softened, or flagged.

That is what the badge means. Not that a machine wrote it perfectly. That someone looked at it before it reached you.

SLOWING DOWN ON PURPOSE

We are also pulling back on pace. For a while, speed felt like the point. It was not. Going forward, we are limiting ourselves to four articles a day so each piece has real time for source checking, credit verification, and editorial review before it earns the Fact Checked badge. That means fewer posts. It should also mean better ones.

WHY WE'RE TELLING YOU THIS

Honestly? Because not telling you felt worse.

The tabletop RPG community is small enough that reputations travel fast and corrections travel slow. A wrong credit on a designer profile does not just make us look sloppy — it misrepresents someone's career to the people who care most about it. We have seen that happen at other outlets. We watched it happen and thought we were different. We do not want to find out we were wrong about that.

AI-assisted content with real editorial review is how we cover this hobby at the scale we want without cutting corners on accuracy. The Fact Checked badge is how we hold ourselves to it. If we are not willing to put it on a piece, we probably know something still needs checking.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

If you spot something off, tell us. A credit we got wrong, a date that does not match, a title that needs correction — send us the source or correction if you have it. The review process catches most things. It does not catch everything, and we are not pretending otherwise. Reader corrections are part of how this actually works.

We want this coverage to earn your trust — not ask for it upfront and hope you do not look too closely.

The badge is us trying to mean what we say.

In the end, what we have here is some nebulous promises from Kenny that don't actually address the issues that these "icons" have been expressing about these articles. Slapping a label on a cover graphic feels like a band-aid designed to mislead third-parties to think that grievances are being addressed while giving people a means to make corrections....not that anyone will even know when/if corrections have been made or if the content is correct to begin with.

It seems to me this post and these labels are intentionally misleading. Might as well slap a label on the graphics that says, "Now with facts!" .....and by the way "someone looked at it before it reached you" is a much lower bar that "fact-checked". I really don't think Ken understands the difference.

2026.05.13 Kenny "Whitwashing" How He Could Fix His Own Mistakes for $$$

As one would expect, there is some more back & forth between industry folks and Ken "Whit" Whitman. So far my favorite thing has been that someone coined a new word to describe Ken's omission of his own name off of the contributions for 4 Pillar Games: "Whitwashing"

On James Lowder's Facebook page we've seen Kenny returning to an old trope: offering to take (anybody's) to fix/solve a problem he created. OK, "trope" might be a bit too strong of a word, but the first thing that came to mind is when Kenny wanted a couple hundred bucks for a hard drive to cough up his KoDT:LAS footage....IIRC he was legally obligated (as in part of his contract, as referenced by the D-Team) to turn over that footage to begin with.

On a related note, he has offered to work on getting those files if he gets a new contract (i.e.....consideration) for doing so.

Then there is the time he said he'd do an interview for $500.

So.....maybe trope is an appropriate word!.....

...anyway on to this particular example of said trope:

"My idea was to put two button buttons one if somebody would volunteer to write about somebody

The second one was to ask for a donation of $100 and $95 of that would go to pay somebody to write them

The only reason it’s not $100 is there’s a 3% surcharge using a credit card

I’d be willing to make the damn thing nonprofit where everyone has to see where the money went. I’m OK with.

It’s something that would have to be done for love which is the thing I did with the AI.

I am 60 years old. I’m trying to help. I have no agenda.

Now the reason that it’s $100, which is probably gonna be far below word count for most of you, is that if we don’t keep it inexpensive than only the popular people are gonna be written about. And how is that fair?"

There it is! "Pay me some money to fix the problem I created" I like the touch where he's form yet another organization to "see where money went". Sounds just like having a "money guy: to monitor spending for his various Kickstarters......see how well that went?

The Whitwashing is that he "wrote" the original articles using AI (again without using his name!) and has claimed that if he was to do the articles manually they would cost a metric shit-ton of money. This is laughable for a couple of reasons. 1st is thinking he's a desirable source of knowledge about the gaming industry. We literally have historians, people trained to do appropriate research, working on these things already. A quick search of Amazon (or your favorite bookseller) can net you professional recollections. 

I don't know about you, but I don't want to watch an AI video or read a banal overview of "Loe Zacchii", for example. Even with Kenny's panache for bad grammar, absent punctuation, and atrocious spelling, if he put in a honest effort, the end results might have been not only respectful, but entertaining and of some value. In the commentary on his Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons page, he has an outline how he could possibly use AI to assist an honest effort. Instead he's trading effort for quantity and accuracy, but for the low, low price of $100 he can be persuaded to fix the entries....

Interesting how fixing the problem will cost $100 but according to him, doing it correctly the 1st time would cost $70 (6 to 8 hours of labor for $10/hr). I'm using his numbers.....but of course Kenny likes the odd math....if the AI does the research it'd take him 6-8 hours to write, but if he has to do everything "from scratch" writing would only take 4 hours?

"If I was to give you an honest answer. I've done 600 of these and a matter of two months.. let's assume that I wanted to do each of these by hand and let's assume that my time spent doing it is $10 an hour. What are we talking here 24,000 $28,000. I ain't nobody gonna pay for that. That's why I'm just making nice little AI things that don't say anything bad about nobody 🙂....Research, my three AI’s scan over 300 websites and a matter of 45 minutes to 60 minutes

If I had to do that, I would say that would would say that that would take me 40 hours

And then they actually write it from scratch another good four hours

So 44 hours per person

—-

If you have the AI research it and then you just wrote the paper yourself

6 to 8 hours

—-

The way that I do it is, I haven’t research it and write it and then I go through every bit of it for fact, checking and like all the people that are on this website, I personally know or have met 80% of them

So it’s not like I’m some fanboy doing it"

2026.05.12 A Surreal Meta Moment: Ken Whitman on EN World on Ken Whitman on 4 Pillar Games

In a way-too-meta moment, we have Kenny's Website (as a major contributor if not owner) 4 Pillar Games referencing EN World referencing Kenny's AI-driven articles on 4 Four Pillar Games, with a side shout-out to this blog.

It's a tad bit trippy, but at least EN World has actual posts, whereas Kenny's "post" is just a top level skim of the 1st two sentences and the lead-in graphic from EN World.

Personally I love the EN World's article byline: Unauthorized, weird, and unintentionally laughable bios with AI-created 'photos'.

The EN World article mentions a now-missing storefront and the site hasn't been cached at https://web.archive.org/ but we did poke around the html a bit and found traces of the storefront. It's been at least a decade since I'm done any coding/html work, so there is likely plenty still there I'm not finding on a cursory look.

Now we could see that maybe this snippet of code was an inactive bit ported over from another site used as a template, but not likely. The fact there is an actual webpage for store checkout leads me to believe that isn't the case.

Hmmm.......so evidently Kenny was using Easy Digital Downloads to serve as his storefront:

So it looks like the 4 Pillar Games is feeding in RSS "news", adding Kenny's AI "content" as a funnel to bring people in for the now-removed PDF/Digital gamestore. The building blocks are all here and it isn't a big leap of logic to come to this conclusion.

2026.05.12 Edit:

Another article in the vein of the EN World post (www.tabletopsentinel.com)

2026.05.11 Kenny is Triple Dipping on AI Content and Upsetting a Few Folks

By the looks of it we have Kenny Triple-Dipping on AI generated content. We've just went over the Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons Facebook page and the Most Influential Game Designers Of All Time YouTube channel and I think we've logically proved that Kenny is the idiot mastermind behind both of them:

• Kenny promoted the YouTube on his Facebook page with broken posts that were for videos that hadn't been published yet!
• The Facebook page (listed above) had graphics for the YouTube channel a month before said channel became active!

Spelling it out: The pre-publicity for the YouTube channel puts that as his, and then the Facebook page pre-publishing the YouTube graphics a month early pushes that ownership forward.

Now evidently there is another outlet for this AI content: www.4pillargames.com

There could be someone else, in addition to Kenny, behind this site, but the heavy (I mean HEAVY) overlap of content/graphics pretty much nails it down as Kenny's work. Taking a look at the domain.....looks just like his other websites (WhoIs info):

Seriously...what are the odds of every website we have looked at recently in regards to Ken "Whit" Whitman are hosted by the exact same Registrar and Registrar Contact?!

It might take some time to figure out who actually owns the site, but right now fingers point to Kenny, and some people are not happy about it.

For those of you who have been following, or been caught up in/affected by, the Four Pillars uproar regarding the game designer biographies and company histories that have been generated by AI with not entirely accurate results, plus the responses that some designers have received back from the site that have been less than polite.

Many of the posts have also appeared, although often with slightly different wording on the Facebook group “Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons”, which is run by Ken “Whit” Whitman - who has a rather controversial background in his own right.

Metadata from the Four Pillars site show Ken Whitman also authored the content there.

The only names publicly linked with running the site were of industry veterans Don Perrin, Tony Lee and Reece Wardrip. 

Tony and Don have both resigned from Four Pillars as it was not what they had planned for the site, expected, or had the chance to approve. It seems they have both been taken by surprise at the affair and it is probably safe to say that Reece is in the same situation.

It’s safe to say they sound pretty appalled about the situation and have no idea how anyone could think of getting away with doing it. 

I’m sorry to have seen them get tied up in this, but glad they’ve taken immediate steps to remove themselves from the situation.

Mr. Abranson isn't the only one...

Haven't looked this young in 20 years.

• Gave no legal permission to use my likeness in this image.

• Gave no legal permission to use trademarked logos placed on incorrect product images & layouts shown here.

• Them Fate Dice are jank, yo.

• Contemplating legal action.

• Enjoy, motherfucker.

2026.05.12 Edit:

I thought this would be more appropriate as an edit/attachment vs. a separate post. The interwebs are blowing up today with reactions and you can read some of the "iconographized" personalities' commentary at other sites, so no need to document that since I doubt those sites will be scrubbed, like Kenny likes to do with sites under his control.

That's not even opinion, but experience & fact. You can see examples on some of our previous posts where we linked to Ken Whitman-controlled content that is now.....just gone.

We're even more confident that Ken "Whit" Whitman is behind the 4 Pillar Games website because of this recent Facebook post from Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons (emphasis is ours):  

Over the past several Weeks, Four Pillar Games has been working to build a living historical archive celebrating the people, games, companies, artists, and creators who helped shape tabletop gaming over the last fifty-plus years.

Our goal has always been simple: to share the history, passion, creativity, and fandom of this industry with the fans and readers who love these games as much as we do.

Recently, a small number of creators and companies have expressed concerns about being included on the site because they disagree with the use of AI-assisted tools within our editorial workflow. We understand that not everyone will agree with the use of emerging technologies, and we respect that people have strong opinions on the subject.

At the same time, it is difficult for us to understand the idea that tabletop history should simply go undocumented because disagreement exists over the tools used to help organize and present that history.

From the beginning, we have explained that this project is intended to function as a living historical archive focused on publicly documented tabletop gaming history and public-facing creators within the hobby. Our intent has never been to attack, ridicule, exploit, or diminish anyone. In fact, every profile on the site was created as a celebration of the people who helped build this industry.

Many creators have responded positively to the project. Designers and industry veterans such as Lisa Stevens and Sam Lewis have publicly engaged with the site, interacted with readers, and expressed appreciation for the effort being made to preserve and celebrate tabletop gaming history.

That spirit of shared enthusiasm is what this website is ultimately about.

We love tabletop gaming. We love the people who built it. And we believe the stories, games, creators, and history of this hobby deserve to be remembered, preserved, and shared with future generations of fans.

For that reason, while we remain fully open to factual corrections, clarifications, historical additions, and respectful collaboration, we do not intend to remove publicly documented historical profiles solely because someone disagrees with the tools or methods used to help create them.

Our hope is that, over time, this project becomes something the community can help shape together — a living archive built from shared passion for the hobby we all care about.

Here we have a post on a Facebook page we've logically proven as belonging to Kenny talking about the 4 Pillar Games site and content there......stating ownership with his choice of first-person plural personal pronoun.

As an aside, he misspelled the name of his own website: classic Kenny! Also, we literally have historians writing about our hobby and they have standards, use 1st person sources, and generally know what they are doing. Your AI-driven drivel is none of that and actually detracts from "documented tabletop gaming history"

My favorite part isn't in the comments, which are overwhelmingly in favor of Kenny (no surprise there), presumably because they don't know his history and because he blocks opposition where able, but in the "share" portion for the post:

The current Chaosium management has asked in no uncertain terms that the profiles of Greg Stafford, Lynn Willis, and Steve Perrin -- all three of whom have passed away -- be removed, noting among other objections that the photos used of the three are AI-modified versions of photos of the late founders in which Chaosium asserts copyright.

Fyi.

I did reach out to an old friend (who has an entry), all formal-like, asking for his take on this recent event:

Mr. Blackburn,

I am writing regarding the AI-driven article about you recently published at https://www.4pillargames.com/aricles/most-influential-tabletop-game-designers/Icon-jolly-blackburn/.

There are similar articles featuring both you and Kenzer & Company. Based on the timing of cross-promotions between his YouTube channel and Facebook pages, as well as the wholesale reuse of graphics and text, I am certain Mr. Whitman is behind this content. Furthermore, these sites share the same registrar, which seems beyond coincidence.

I am reaching out to see if you have any commentary regarding your entry that you would like to share with Not Another Dime.

Best regards,

Christopher Stogdill

Not Another Dime (for Ken Whitman)

His response:

It most definitely IS Ken Whitman. Ken being Ken. Back in the 90’s when he was attempting to do his Games Industry trade magazine (blanking on the name) he was doing the same sort of “most influential people in the gaming industry” pieces. (Which ironically he saw fit to include me for some reason). My guess, in light of Ken’s recent attempt to gain a seat on the board of GAMA and realizing everyone remembers who he is and the damage he did, that this is Ken’s attempt to flatter or reconnect with personalities in the gamer industry he knew before his failed kickstarter projects. If you notice, most of those being profiled would be considered old guard (i.e. contemporaries of Ken back in the day). It’s only my guess/opinion but this just seems like more of the same behavior Ken has always demonstrated. That and the fact it’s lazy - he’s embraced A.I. tech whole hog and seems to be basing his new business venture entirely upon it.

*btw “Mr.” Blackburn…?  heh.

Jolly Blackburn

Kenzer and Company

Editor-in-Chief 

Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine

---------------------------------------------------------

Twitter: http://twitter.com/Jollybgood

Website: www.kenzerco.com