Blood Bowl creator Jervis Johnson agrees with Games Workshop's AI ban, says 'it allows you to be a bit lazy and not put in the effort'

A Bretonnian knight faces off against a Tomb King on the cover of Blood Bowl's third season edition — (Image credit: Games Workshop)

Jervis Johnson is a legend in the world of tabletop game design. During almost four decades spent at Games Workshop he created Blood Bowl and wrote the core rules for Advanced Heroquest, co-created Necromunda, and wrote significant chunks of Warhammer 40,000's second edition, Warhammer Fantasy Battle's fourth edition, multiple iterations of Age of Sigmar, and several of the Warhammer Quest board games.

Though retired from Games Workshop these days, Johnson still contributes to projects like the Godzilla TTRPG and DreadBall All Stars, a kind of full-contact sci-fi basketball in contrast to Blood Bowl's ultraviolent fantasy football. While discussing the latter with FRVR, the topic of Games Workshop's prohibition against AI in its design process came up.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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