A Brief Introduction to this Page's Purpose

Not Another Dime! is dedicated to documenting the assorted, and sometimes wild, details of Mr. Ken Whitman's business dealings within the Role Playing Game (RPG) industry. This place is NOT intended to be a medium of discussion about Mr. Whitman, pro or con, but instead be a "jumping off" point to enable the reader to make their own informed decision about Mr. Whitman's history and business character. (Editor's Note: After years of this documentation, we simply cannot be anything BUT "con" when it comes to Mr. Whitman)

Whenever possible, links to the original source material will be provided, but in many cases that information may have been deleted or secured behind restricted-access (like a private Facebook page) accounts.

Anything posted here is the opinion of the retrospective author and any content shown is to be considered "fair use" and posted for educational purposes only.

Note to authors: Please begin each post with the original date of the event being documented in the format of YYYY.MM.DD (i.e. If the event being recorded happened on March 15th, 2015 and today's date was August 8th, 2018 the beginning of the post's title would be 2015.03.15 and not 2018.08.08) so readers can use the Chronology page to find specific information. Please use appropriate tags when possible for the same reason.

Note to contributors: If you have some valid data to send, screenshots, links to other Ken Whitman stories, etc., please feel free to send a gmail to notanotherdimeblog. We'll look into it and post if appropriate.

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Whit Whitman's Need for Self Promotion Shouldn't be Surprising, but There it is!

Whit Whitman's Need for Self Promotion Shouldn't be Surprising, but There it is!
Kenny's insatiable need for self promotion knows no bounds. One of his Facebook pages (Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons) is heavy AI-laden prose about some of the people behind the RPG industry and of course he had to make a post for himself.

I'm thinking Mr. Whitman may try to deny his involvement with that page but his recent posts are commenting on multiple entries (sometimes more than one a day) and that page follows his page....literally one of only a few (14 as of this post) they do follow:

Whit Whitman FB Followers Excerpt

There's also the striking similarity between this Facebook page and the YouTube channel we mentioned recently Sure that might not be enough, but wait...there's more!

See The Facebook page posted these two pictures on March 14th:

May 14, 2026 Posts

Hmm.....you know what didn't exist on March 14th, 2026? The YouTube channel the pictures are for!

YouTube Channel Created April 13, 2026

Last we checked, April 13, 2026 comes after May 14th, 2026. It seems that Kenny not only has problems with spelling (Loe Zocchii....really?), but with dates/calendars as well!

Wow.....just....wow!

Shout out to Isaac who commented on the Facebook page, which is why I took a quick look at it.



Kenny's Self-Promotion Facebook Post


THE ENTREPRENEUR WHO ROLLED THE DICE FIRST

Ken "Whit" Whitman did not build his tabletop career like a man protecting one perfect system.

He built it like a man looking for the next door.

Role-playing games. Licensed card games. Magazines. Art books. Print services. Film projects. Companies that appeared, moved fast, changed shape, and gave way to the next thing. Whitman spent a quarter century in and around tabletop publishing, but the throughline was never one rules engine or one famous line.

The throughline was launch energy.

He saw openings early. Sometimes too early. A comic license could become a game table. Fantasy art could become a collector book. Dice could become more than randomizers. Production, printing, and distribution were not just machinery after the design was done. They were part of the creative act.

That instinct took him everywhere.

It also made his career difficult to summarize cleanly.

THE KENTUCKY LAUNCH

Whitman was born in 1967 at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and grew up in Brandenburg. Before the game companies, before the film work, before the long list of ventures, he was a young graphic designer trying to get a post-apocalyptic RPG into the world.

That game was Mutazoids, published through Whit Productions in 1989.

Mutazoids was not a quiet debut. It leaned into mutation, survival, ruined-world danger, and moral chaos. The world felt unstable by design. Rick Swan, reviewing the game in The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games, recognized that energy and praised the game as an impressively chaotic RPG environment.

That is a useful phrase because it catches both sides of the early work.

The game had heat.

Whitman followed it with a City Sourcebook in 1992 and a revised second edition the same year. That matters. A first edition can be raw enthusiasm. A second edition means the designer went back in, looked at the machine, and tried to make it stronger. Mutazoids was not a one-page idea tossed into the market. It was a world he returned to, expanded, and reworked.

For a few years, that could have been the path.

Then the path split.

THE LICENSE INSTINCT

Whitman kept moving into licensed and creator-owned properties.

Whit Publications brought out Ralph Bakshi's Wizards and WWF: The Basic Adventure Game. Imperium Games, co-founded with Marc Miller, helped bring Traveller 4th Edition to print, with Whitman contributing system development and writing the psionics rules. Archangel Entertainment later published Groo: The Game, based on Sergio Aragones's comic character, along with other game material.

That mix says a lot about Whitman's eye.

He was interested in games, but he was also interested in properties. Worlds that already had an audience. Characters that already carried a tone. Artists and writers whose work could be turned into something playable, collectible, or sellable.

That instinct was not rare by the late 1990s, but Whitman got there early enough to make it part of his identity. He kept looking for bridges between fandoms: comics to card games, fantasy art to collector books, role-playing settings to revived product lines.

Sometimes he was the designer.

Sometimes he was the developer.

Often, he was the person trying to make the project exist at all.

THE DICE NOBODY NOTICED

Groo: The Game is the design people should probably talk about more.

On the surface, it was a licensed card game built around a beloved comic idiot with a sword. Sergio Aragones brought the character and the world. Whitman brought a mechanism that reached beyond the license.

Players rolled custom dice each turn, and those dice did not simply decide success or failure. They became resources: labor, grain, gold. Players spent those results to play building cards and move toward victory. Unused resources could pass to opponents, creating pressure around timing, waste, and denial.

That sounds familiar now because modern tabletop games use dice that way all the time.

In 1997, it was not familiar.

Most dice in hobby games still acted like judges. They answered questions. Did you hit? How much damage? How far did you move? Did the thief open the lock?

Groo treated dice as an economy.

The roll did not only resolve the turn. It created the turn.

That was a real design idea. Gary Gygax reportedly praised the game. Steve Jackson Games later brought it back into print. Some designers noticed the shared-dice and resource tension in it. But the larger dice-placement and roll-and-write wave arrived years later without making Groo the standard origin story.

That is the strange part.

Whitman had put a useful idea on the table before the table was ready to call it important.

THE MAGAZINE AND THE MACHINE

If Groo shows Whitman as a designer, Games Unplugged shows him as an industry builder.

The magazine ran for thirty-four issues through Dynasty Presentations. It belonged to a period when tabletop coverage still depended heavily on print: ads, reviews, interviews, product news, retailer attention, and the strange glue that held a hobby together before social media swallowed most of that function.

Running a magazine is not like designing a card game. The work is rhythm. Deadlines. Layout. Distribution. Ad sales. Editorial judgment. The next issue is always arriving too soon. The previous issue is already old.

Whitman lived in that kind of pressure.

He also helped publish lines and products where the design credit belonged to other people. Dark Conspiracy 2nd Edition is the cleanest example. Lester W. Smith designed the system, but Whitman's Dynasty Presentations helped keep the line in motion through player books, referee material, screens, and adventures.

That distinction matters.

Publishing is not the same as rules design, but tabletop games do not reach players on rules alone. They need art, printing, shipping, money, schedules, licenses, and somebody willing to push the whole thing from manuscript to object.

Whitman often worked in that zone.

Not the clean white space of theory.

The messy room where products become real.

THE ART BOOK YEARS

After the game-company stretch, Whitman spent years connected to fantasy art production, especially through Larry Elmore's company.

That chapter fits the larger pattern. Elmore already had the audience. The paintings already mattered. Whitman's role was to help turn that body of work into products fans could own: art books, collector pieces, and campaigns that treated fantasy illustration as the main event rather than decoration around a game.

That was not a small shift.

Tabletop publishing has always depended on artists, but the industry has not always treated art as the thing being sold. Whitman understood that for many fans, the image was the memory. A dragon on a box. A fighter in a cave. A character on a calendar. The art was not secondary to the game experience. It was often the first emotional contact.

That understanding connects Whitman to the larger fantasy-gaming ecosystem even when he was not writing rules.

He knew how to package desire.

That sounds crass until you remember that publishing is partly the art of recognizing what people already love and giving it a physical form.

THE COST OF MOVING FAST

The same pattern that made Whitman's career interesting also made it unstable.

Whit Productions. Whit Publications. Imperium Games. Archangel Entertainment. Dynasty Presentations. Rapid POD. Sidekick Printing. D20 Entertainment. Other ventures around film and production.

Again and again, he launched.

Some designers spend decades refining one game. Some publishers build one company and hold the line. Whitman moved differently. He saw an opening, built toward it, and then moved toward the next opening.

That gave his career unusual range. It also left less depth than the strongest design careers in this series. Mutazoids had a real second pass. Groo had a genuinely clever mechanical idea. Traveller, Dark Conspiracy, SnarfQuest, Games Unplugged, and the Elmore projects all show industry range. But there is no single Whitman system that became a long-lived design school. No one game became the center of the career.

Later, the D20 Entertainment Kickstarter period damaged his public standing. Projects like Deck Dice, Pencil Dice, Knights of the Dinner Table, and Traveller became controversial after fulfillment problems. For many tabletop fans, that is the last chapter they remember.

It has to be said plainly.

It is also not the only chapter.

WHAT HE ACTUALLY BUILT

Ken Whitman did not invent licensed tabletop gaming. He did not create the roll-and-write movement. He did not build a single rules engine that other designers spent decades extending.

That is the honest boundary.

What he built was a career of production and launch.

He built Mutazoids, then went back and revised it. He built Groo around a dice-as-resources idea before that language became common. He helped develop Traveller 4th Edition material. He published licensed games and revived lines. He kept Dark Conspiracy products moving. He ran a nationally distributed tabletop magazine. He helped turn fantasy art into collector products. He built print and production services around the needs of small publishers and creators.

The pattern is not refinement.

The pattern is ignition.

Whitman saw a thing and wanted to get it moving. A game. A license. A magazine. An art book. A film. A company. The excitement was always in the start, in the first push that turns an idea into an object other people can touch.

That instinct can create real work.

It can also outrun the follow-through.

Both are part of the story.

WHERE TO FIND HIM

Whitman is not currently a public tabletop-game publisher in the way he was during the Mutazoids, Groo, Games Unplugged, or D20 Entertainment years.

His public work now appears mostly under the name Whit Whitman, in independent film and film education. Current public profiles connect him to Little Monsters Entertainment and the School of Cinematic Arts in Kentucky. Recent film credits include Unnatural, a horror Western released in 2024, along with other micro-budget film projects listed under his Whit Whitman profile.

That move is less surprising than it looks.

Film is another launch machine. Scripts. Crews. Locations. Cameras. Posters. Distribution. A film set is a temporary company built around a story, held together just long enough to make the thing real.

Whitman has been doing versions of that for most of his life.

Tabletop was the first arena. Mutazoids was the first door. Groo was the dice roll people should have watched more closely. Games Unplugged was the magazine rack. The art books were the collector shelf. The film work is the latest version of the same impulse. You can currently purchase Groo the Game from Steve Jackson Games.

See the opening. Build the project.

Then roll the dice.

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

2026.04.22 Looks Like Kenny is Trying to Profit Over a Influential Gamer's Death (Again)

2026.04.22 Looks Like Kenny is Trying to Profit Over a Influential Gamer's Death (Again)
Complete opinion here, but putting out an AI-generated video on Lou Zocchi not even a week after his death seems a little opportunistic, and just wrong. When coupled with that email promoting Ken "Whit" Whitman's ability to produce Tim Kask for conventions a couple weeks after his death.....

...and yes, Ken has made the claim that he didn't send that promotional/marketing email. A claim we do not buy for one second. 

With this most recent video, Kenny couldn't even be bothered to spell the man's name correctly! It's "Zocchi" NOT "Zacchii".


Lou Zocchi, NOT Lou Zacchii!

Now I'm sure that Kenny will probably try to say he isn't behind the  "Most Influential Game Designers Of All Time" channel, but it's got his fingerprints all over it. Misspelled title, AI galore, and promoted on his page.

If that isn't enough, let's look a little closer to Kenny's personal Facebook page:

Kenny Tries to Self-Promote but Shows Some Ineptitude

Looks like he messed up the post because the graphics don't come up and when you click on it, it should take you to the appropriate YouTube video, but as of the time of this post it does not. Please note that Kenny pushed out notification to the Dave Arneson video on April 13th. While I couldn't link straight to the video I was able to go to the "Most Influential Game Designers Of All Time" YouTube channel page and find that video "Dave Arneson: The Spark Before the System" There's that favorite AI buzzword: "system"!

Most Influential Game Designers Of All Time

I took a screen shot of that page and according to this that video went up "1 day ago" and has a whopping 8 views. I just have one question: How can Ken "Whit" Whitman promote a YouTube video on Facebook more than a week before it is posted on YouTube?!

This bit, coupled with the heavy AI.....again if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck......

2026.05.10 Edit: I was so focused on the lead-in graphic for the video I didn't even notice he ALSO misspelled the man's name in the title! "Loe Zocchii"! Both misspellings are still up two weeks later....

2026.04.22 Kenny is Double-Dipping into AI Game "Mastery"

2026.04.22 Kenny is Double-Dipping into AI Game "Mastery"
We've already mentioned how Ken "Whit" Whitman is using AI to produce videos professing to help make you "A great game master" but he's also taking that heavy AI content and pushing it in book form over at DriveThruRPG.

So far the content between the two isn't as consistent as one would expect and when I start seeing the words "system" and "protocol" used prominently, my 1st thought is that it's AI generated content. If this wasn't bad enough, there's this gem on the DTRPG page:

Publisher’s Note

This pay-what-you-want release helps Whit complete remaining Kickstarter obligations while putting this book into more GMs’ hands.

Give Kenny more money so he can continue to kick the Kickstarter can down the road

Sure Kenny, sure.....like all of the extra money you've gotten in the past went to the appropriate project.

He's also made a couple of updates on the Deck Dice Kickstarter page. We don't have the exact posts, well not both of them fully at least, but here goes:

Deck Dice Update


"Here is a gift while you wait. I have prototype of cards. I plan to ship by June."


Deck Dice Update Clarification
"This isn't a business move. No upsell. No funnel. No mailing list. No follow-up ask. This is me giving something back. That's it. Why now? Because I've spent a lot of years building, pushing, and if I'm being honest-not always leaving things better than I found them. This is a small step in the other direction."

Seems like a LOT of understatement!

Now we do not know what this "gift" is, but we have to presume, based off of this new DTRPG offering and some Kickstarter comments, that he's giving away free copies of his "book".

Someone doesn't believe in Kenny?! SHOCKER

 "Nice, so 11 years past his ETA for the deck of cards which still have not been delivered, but he ships us a propaganda PDF about himself. I didn't see a chapter in there about how to rip off KS backers?"


Can you say "AI Cover"?

No, this doesn't look like flagrant self-promotion at all......

Friday, April 17, 2026

2026.04.14 Kenny is Branching off to AI Youtube Videos

2026.04.14 Kenny is Branching off to AI Youtube Videos
This week we received and email about Kenny. Evidently he is taking his one-man Facebook show "on the road" and creating AI laden Youtube videos about his "Whitman Method".

The entire video is AI content, both graphically and narration. At some point we have to wonder if the content behind the content is also AI generated as well. Since Ken Whitman, or Whit Whitman for the purposes of these videos, has been professing his expertise in creating....what was it(?).....AI Cognitive Engines, it would be a natural conclusion that these videos are actually 100% AI. After watching the 1st "episode" I definitely noticed words and phrases that I hear regularly in AI generated content, but that is just my experience.

Might not be 100% AI, but if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck.....I'm going to assume it's a duck, even if it's a coot.

2026.04.14 Email Contact

Now we're not going to link to the videos directly because then you might click on them, and you might watch them, and then at some point we'd be contributing in some minor fashion to Youtube income for Kenny and it's bad enough that this post/blog is probably seen as advertising for Ken/Whit Whitman already.....

Friday, April 10, 2026

2026.04.07 Ken Whitman Vs. Erik (Tenkar) Suit Dismissed

2026.04.07 Ken Whitman Vs. Erik (Tenkar) Suit Dismissed
NAD got word the other day that the Kentucky Lawsuit Ken Whitman filed against Erik (Tenkar) has been dismissed due to jurisdiction issues. Of course we do not have access to the court paperwork, so we cannot verify this information, but it was discussed briefly in yesterday's "The Vlog of Many Things: Free Speech in Gaming", so that should be good enough.

We did a quick search of the appropriate Kentucky Website and did see the only active action regarding Ken Whitman is his ongoing (as of our check) suit brought on by Wyckoff Film Company LLC.