If you thought yesterday’s edition was way too long deep into some stinky, weeds, today’s episode is for you!

Using Midjourney and DALL-E to generate Dungeons and Dragons Battle Maps

It works well enough, I think, given how cool they look. The scaling is obviously not perfect, but it’s fine. I just did some basic prompts, with the only difference being a stream or not and “flat” or isomoprhic. With a combination of using seeds (for consistency and style) and figuring out really good prompts, I think it’d work well.

As ever, DALL-E seems to default to some cheesy cartoon style, while Midjourney defaults to MCU epicness. I’m sure this could be tuned, but I dislike DALL-E’s style for sure.

Another good test would be upload classic Dungeons and Dragon maps as seeds/inspiration and see what happens. Also, zooming out would be interesting. Here’s a 2x zoom out I did:

The idea here would be that you could make very large maps that you could then zoom back into for actual battle maps. The fully zoomed out one could be a full, big map hex. The problem with the above, I think is that you’ll end up zooming out of the picture. Witness, using the last one above:

Finally, here is something interesting. In Midjourney, the prompts tend to be descriptive of the picture. In DALL-E you can just write something and say “make a picture of that.” So, I took a newer description of my D&D setting (here’s an older version) and asked DALL-E to make a map for it:

That’s promising! It even got real text on there, which Midjourney doesn’t do. With these maps, it would be especially good at places you were just making up on the fly. I have a very specific idea of what this map should look like because I’ve - uh, you know: hobby! - thought about it a lot. But if I just wanted to make something up with no preconceived idea, these would all be great.

So, you could image using the ChatDM to help come up with adventures and, along the way, come up with maps and stuff. I’ve used Midjourney in the past to make pictures of custom magic items which was great.

Wastebook

• “Jiffle is now live for Explore.”

• My friends, The Capitalists.

• “It’s ok - we can filter you out.”

• “DevOps World in New Jersey”

Relative to your interests

• Apple introduces new Apple Pencil, bringing more value and choice to the lineup - Much cheaper then the previous ones, but lacks a couple of features as the expensive one.

• The Developer Platform - Pretty good overview of all the platform stuff, including marketing and product-think.

• Crafting Effective Problem Statements: A Game-Changer

Logoff

I don’t know what it is, but this whole thing just seems so cool to me:

I mean, I love the actual song. The part at the end where he’s all like “we’ll discuss it further” kind of jolts you out of the song, but, whatever.

But I think it’s also some vague nostalgia I have for 70s and 80s culture. There’s a tired Gen-X thing where you’re like “hey, man, back in my day, before the Internet, we all stewed in the culture artifacts since the 1940s. Those people were still alive - so many World War Two movies and Bugs Bunny pretending to be Groucho Marx.” At some point, my parents must have been really into Yacht Rock style music - or maybe it was just on the radio all the time and I heard it. That song came out as year before I was born, so it’s not like I was watching it climb the charts: it must have been radio play in the 80s and my parents playings it. (My dad listened to a lot of Heart and Stevie Nicks on the 45 minute commute to Georgetown when he picked me up in Austin for my weekends with him - we ate sausage wrapped in tortillas on a stick and he, in true 80s style, drank a tall boy in a brown paper bag as we inched through traffic.)

By modern standards, those guys look hella grubby and, if it weren’t for the sun glasses, you’d assume they were taxi drivers, dock workers/teamsters (maybe that blue collar thing was the goal!) - especially Michael McDonald’s little gut just chilled there, down to the belly button. It’s like the ancestors of the Benji Hughes look.