The Culture: Illustration Is This Easy Now

One other thing that you need to realize is that we now have a powerful tool for folks who have problems visualizing what they read.

This is the description of Deijah Thoris from A Princess of Mars:

The prisoner was a slender, girlish figure, not unlike the Earth women in form, but far more beautiful. Her face was oval and exquisitely beautiful, her features finely chiseled and exquisite. Her great lustrous eyes were of a deep, rich, liquid brown, shaded by long, curling lashes, and her coal-black hair, waving in a loose yet becoming coiffure, was confined by a jeweled diadem. Her skin was a light reddish copper, which glowed with the crimson flush of her cheeks and the ruby of her lips. She was entirely naked except for the highly wrought ornaments of gold and precious stones which she wore, and her figure was perfectly symmetrical.

Copy and past that into a Grok chat. You will get a photorealistic head-and-shoulder shot (because Grok auto-censors nudity in chat-generated images; Imagine will do topless, but not full body nude).

Let's say that you want to take the opportunity that Princess is now Public Domain to put out a Light Novel version with all-new illustrations.

First, how it can look (SFW version):

This is the prompt I used in Imagine (not the chat; you need to use the Grok site or mobile app for this):

1990s anime OVA style (Record of Lodoss War + early Berserk Golden Age + Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth). A slender, girlish figure, not unlike the Earth women in form, but far more beautiful. Her face was oval and exquisitely beautiful, her features finely chiseled and exquisite. Her great lustrous eyes were of a deep, rich, liquid brown, shaded by long, curling lashes, and her coal-black hair, waving in a loose yet becoming coiffure, was confined by a jeweled diadem. Her skin was a light reddish copper, which glowed with the crimson flush of her cheeks and the ruby of her lips. She was entirely naked except for the highly wrought ornaments of gold and precious stones which she wore, and her figure was perfectly symmetrical. Ethereal fantasy atmosphere, dramatic rim lighting, clean sharp line art, cel-shaded with soft airbrush. masterpiece 8k. --ar 9:16 --stylize 350 --v 6

Imagine generates a lot of variations; this one is the one I post in public-facing forums because it is Safe For Work. You can do the same with any description in a book.

Want a better idea of how Conan looks like in a story? Feed it into Grok. What Amon Hen looked like? Same. Is this foolproof? No; like any LLM, it can only work with what data it is trained upon, so very old, very rare, and very new work may escape its ability to generate a depiction.

Which means that as you learn how to use language to describe what you want the reader to see, you can create powerful illustrations; as you learn the language of art direction, that power multiplies. Talk in chat with the LLM you use--Grok does this very well--to learn how to do the more technical elements that I've shown above; this is the first widget that you can talk to and it will teach you how to use it in real time. You can do everything I'm doing; I've gone from flailing about like a rube to where I am now in a few weeks I turn out this sort of thing casually now, sometimes posting them to Twitter as shitposts.

That's why my Substack articles now have illustrations included almost all the time. This is why I am confident that BRODUM will look amazing; I've become familiar with the tool, and I develop towards mastery with each day. You can make counters for wargames, card art for CCGs, wraparound images for paperback/hardcover books or boxed sets, and more.

This is going to totally wreck what remains of the commercial viability of Tabletop gaming; when rolling your own is this easy, why pay someone else to do it?