Ken’s friend, Jenn, has joined our D&D group these last few months. Every time I use AI to produce a prop image or flesh out a story read-aloud she calls it “killing kittens”. “Oh I see we’ve killed a few more kittens.” I think we’re acknowledging that at the pace we chew through story, it wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Nonetheless, it’s playfully hurtful.

Anyway, I gathered all of the scenarios I built and documented, and digitized all of the session logs Kristen has hand-scribed, and collected all of the digital conversations I’ve had with the players over the last ~4 years (nearly 100 game sessions!) and killed many kittens to turn them into a book. Actually, five books, each over 100,000 words. I’ve murdered baskets full of kittens toward broad edits to the text over the last two days. Next is a truly manual pass (no furry murder, just trees to get paper to take notes on) for details I want to clarify or rearrange or embellish. Book one is currently 614 pages. I fed it to ElevenReader - a thing that grinds up kittens to fuel synthetic voices that read long texts aloud - and I’ve been listening to it in free time. It’s actually wonderful; the exact kind of adventure story I would want to buy and listen to.

But nobody wants it because my hands are soiled with kitten blood. Alas.