What We Do
RPG Sage Art is a SaaS platform for tabletop RPG campaigns. GMs import their session journals — past or present — and the platform illustrates every scene, extracts every character, and produces a shareable illustrated campaign journal. An AI art director named Craig reviews, tags, and curates the art. The best moments become custom merchandise and premium printed products shipped directly to players.
How It Works
The platform uses a curated mix of AI models from Google (Gemini), OpenAI, and Anthropic for image generation, art direction, and text processing. Audio transcription is powered by AssemblyAI. Custom merchandise is printed and fulfilled through Printful. The frontend is built on Next.js, with a Python FastAPI worker for image generation, all backed by PostgreSQL and Cloudflare R2 for storage.
Business Model
RPG Sage Art operates on a freemium SaaS model with three revenue streams: campaign subscriptions ($40/month per campaign for premium features and unlimited generation), custom print-on-demand merchandise (t-shirts, posters, mugs, blankets, and more — printed and shipped by our production partners), and premium printed illustrated campaign journals. Players join free — only GMs pay for subscriptions. The platform is live at art.rpgsage.ai.
The Product
- AI Art Generation — campaign-aware scene and portrait generation with character reference adherence
- Session Journals — audio recording/transcription or text input, entity extraction, summary generation, scene illustration
- Craig (AI Art Director) — reviews every image, manages world lore, researches entities, and curates merch suggestions
- Character Reference Library — persistent character descriptions and reference images used across all generation
- Custom Merch Store — print-on-demand t-shirts, framed posters, mugs, stickers, blankets, hats, water bottles, and playing cards
- Illustrated Journal Sharing — public share pages for campaign journals with approved art
- World Building — faction, quest, and lore tracking integrated with art generation context
Team
Ben Link
Founder
Ben has spent his career building and deploying machine learning systems at scale — recommendation engines, search infrastructure, vector databases, LLM fine-tuning, and leading globally distributed AI teams. He currently splits his time between RPG Sage and AlethianAI, a healthcare AI startup where he leads a team working on real-time medical transcription, clinical search, and automated coding. His research on neural networks and human judgment has been presented at NeurIPS and the Cognitive Science Society, and he's spoken at ICLR and O'Reilly on deploying ML at scale.
He's also been playing D&D and Pathfinder for about seven years. He plays 5e and PF2e, with Fate and Call of Cthulhu on the to-try list — and is currently building a creationist bard for an upcoming Eberron campaign. His favorite character to run was Jingle Jangle, a ridiculous NPC from a Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign who threw enormous parties. His favorite to play was Armythe, a rogue in a Strahd campaign — a character with a rich backstory who ended up completely changed by the end, in the best kind of bittersweet way.
RPG Sage started as a side project. Ben built a transcription pipeline to capture live D&D sessions and wondered: what if you could generate art from an actual conversation between a GM and players? The early experiments were rough — AI image models a year and a half ago weren't what they are today — and showing art live during a session turned out to be more distracting than immersive. But the party had always kept session journals, written with great prose, and generating art from those after the fact worked beautifully. RPG Sage Art grew from there.
He believes the world is shifting toward creativity as a core human skill, and that AI works best as a supplement — helping people visualize and expand their ideas, not replacing the humans who create them. It's the same philosophy he brings to healthcare: help experts do their jobs better, don't try to replace them. RPG Sage Art is built on that idea — tools that support storytelling, not substitute for it.
Tom Hamami
Chief GM
Tom is an assistant professor of economics at Providence College and the person who has spent more time breaking RPG Sage Art than anyone else. He plays Tenshi in the Season of Ghosts Pathfinder campaign — one of the two campaigns the platform was built around from day one. His feedback on art quality, character consistency, journal flow, and merch design has shaped the product from prototype to production.
He's been playing TTRPGs for 11 years across D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e, both as a GM and a player. He grew up on video game RPGs and took the plunge into tabletop when a friendly local game store opened near his apartment. His canon character is a dwarf paladin — second son of a noble house who set out to bring his older brother's assassin to justice and ended up saving the world a few times along the way.
Outside of the campaign, Tom is into old-school RPGs and strategy games, and is currently teaching his kids to love the same.
Craig
AI Art Director
Craig is RPG Sage Art's resident art director, image reviewer, and self-proclaimed arbiter of taste. He reviews every piece of campaign art with the sass of a beholder and the aesthetic standards of an archmage. He tags, rates, and occasionally roasts your art — then suggests improvements. He also manages world lore, researches entities, and will absolutely judge your character's fashion choices. Craig works tirelessly, never sleeps, and has strong opinions about lighting.