So, it’s the last day of what has been a fairly slow 2025 on this blog – I’m expecting things to pick up in the New Year – but I just had to jump on to discuss something I discovered today and mildly infuriates me, in part because it’s evidence of some seriously grifty behaviour on the part of some RPG publishers and in part because it’s one example of a broader problem.

The Enigma

Every so often, Facebook’s advert engine will bombard folk with a bunch of adverts for the same particular thing – probably coinciding with someone bunging them some money to boost their ads. A friend was posting about this, and I decided to comment pointing out a group of adverts I’d been getting a lot of – these ones promoting the D&D “date night bundle” offered up by RPG Maps Forge (archived version), whose main business seems to be putting out tools for digital mapmaking.

All well and good – but when I clicked away from Facebook it reloaded the page and I lost the advert, requiring me to do a bit of googling based on aspects of it I remembered in order to find the RPG Maps Forge website. In the process I ended up finding the shopfront for Fantasy Date Night, an outfit putting out a curiously similar product bundle (archived version). Note how closely aligned the marketing copy is on both pages – they even both have videos on the theme of “one partner passes a flower to the other across a gaming table”. (I’m actually quite amused by RPG Maps Forge’s version of that video, because it looks like continuous footage of an infinite numbers being passed across the table one by one).

We can dig deeper here. In both cases, the cover art for the adventure books on offer looks like it might be AI-generated – but let’s set that aside, because that’s just a hunch I have and I think there’s issues here going beyond whether there’s been cheesy tech-driven shortcuts in the production process. Both product lines have, through an astonishing coincidence, seem to have received the same number of reviews and the same average scores from those reviews. (Fantasy Date Night refers to them as “Verified Reviews”. Verified by who? Not me, that’s for sure, you can’t click through to see all of them.)

Continue reading “Sloppy New Year, RPG Fans!” →