With a big year of releases ahead of us, we wanted to take some time to make our stance on art clear. Specifically where it comes from.
Day 20 will not use procedurally generated (AI) artwork for its products.
We believe that art is not only a beautiful part of TTRPGs and gaming in general, but is an essential part of the hobby. It creates a shared language of color and shape that allows us all to disappear into the stories we tell around a table with friends. It evokes the essential feelings and powers of a game in ways that written word can't. This is why we have always tried to deliver art with our products so that you, the customer, have a richer experience.
AI art, as it currently stands, is made through exploitation of human artists for its data sets. It is not a "cheap alternative", but theft by proxy. Doubly so when we consider that the time, effort, and money used to acquire artwork could have gone to a human, whose creative talents and labor deserve to be validated and who, frankly, has bills to pay just like we do. Just as we would not want our customers to be sharing our work as their own or for free (in the case of our products that aren't already free), we do not want to take away potential earnings from the humans that make our hobby as amazing as it is.
While the statement is focused on future products, we have also gone back through our catalogue and removed the small portion of AI artwork that was used in previous releases. Blight Caller, our Crafting Rules, and Way of the Hidden Realm have all been re-released with new artwork from properly licensed, human sources.
However, in the vein of full transparency there is one exception to our art policy: The Figment. This exception is for two reasons:
The procedurally generated nature of the art matches the intended aesthetic of this monster.
Most importantly, this project is available for free (pay what you want) and any profits we make from it will be put towards the commissioning of human-made artwork for future projects.
We appreciate the complexity of this issue and hope you understand our decision.
Fresh Coat of Paint
Art is not the only thing we have changed in the past few weeks. We also did an extensive read-through of our existing catalogue of work to bring older projects in line with our current standards. Older stat blocks that used separate blocks for each Tier have been converted to use our new table-based Dynamic Challenge Format for Monsters. We've also upgraded the layout methods used under-the-hood to produce our PDFs, which entailed some minor tweaks to formatting that should hopefully provide a more consistent look & feel across our products.
New Versions; New Discounts!
In celebration of the newly re-released, re-art'ed, and re-tooled projects, we're offering discount codes for all of the affected works! If you didn't make a purchase because of AI art before, we hope this is a meaningful apology. Or if you're a brand new customer, what better way to start than by saving a couple of bucks!
Here's the full list of updated products along with links to their 20% off discounted versions. These sales will run throughout February, so grab them while they're here!
Crafting System (no discount code; it's already free!)