Yeah, I've been involved peripherally in a number of discussions elsewhere online lately regarding the use of AI art, including specifically that generated by Midjourney, because a lot of people - primarily artists - have become increasingly concerned about the direction this stuff is taking, most especially how the so-called AI systems are using artworks available online to generate their final images.

The matter is incredibly complex, and much of it remains uncertain, notably how copyright laws in various places pertain to AI-generated artworks, largely because they have never been legally tested this way (a couple of practicing US lawyers posted some very helpful discussions regarding the US situation a little while ago on one of the Discords I'm on, which were very enlightening in this regard).

I can do no better to help inform anyone here as to the current situation, than suggest those interested should read this blog posting from Dec 8th this year, by Jon Hodgson, a British "real" artist, RPG and game designer, who runs a company called Handiwork Games (which is where the blog is). Jon used Midjourney to generate much of the artwork in a new RPG he published this year, so he knows exactly what he's talking about from the genuine artist's perspective. He's also decided that any reprint of said RPG will have all the Midjourney artwork removed, to be replaced with his own, or other artists', real art, and he will not be using Midjourney, or other AI-generated artworks, again.

Personally, I've become very cautious about using any AI-generated artwork now, and would not do so in anything that wasn't purely for my own use.

Having been tasked with constructing a Solar System for the Community Atlas world of Nibirum, only a few things were clearly in-place at the outset. Expressed preferences, coupled with the nature of Nibirum as depicted in the surface maps and descriptions of the world itself so far, showed Nibirum to be an Earth-like planet in size and nature, including with seasonal effects and climatic zones, illuminated by a single Sol-type Sun. As noted before, I'd opted for a simplified 360-day year for the planet more or less from the start too. One, probably Luna-type Moon, was preferred at least (Quenten), although perhaps with one or more additional moons (Dogtag). I assumed impressive astronomical phenomena like solar and lunar eclipses would be required additionally, to provide Nibirum with extra flavour and reality. The solar eclipse factor gave a first physical parameter beyond the planet, since Earth-type total solar eclipses could only happen if one of Nibirum's moons had the same apparent size as its Sun.

The "multiple moons" question led me back to an idea I've played with previously in RPG settings, a variable effect or object usually seen in one part of the sky, when visible at all, which can become a convenient plot-device or subject of game-omen lore. I settled on a group of small cometary objects loosely "trapped" around the leading (L4) Lagrange point on Nibirum's orbit. The L4 and L5 Lagrange points on a body's orbit are gravitationally stable points where relatively small objects can become caught for very long periods (centuries to millennia). Their own pre-existing space-motions mean the objects usually continue to orbit about that stable point, so are not necessarily fixed in one spot. Each point lies more or less at 60° from the Sun as seen from the main body - such as a planet - forming one apex of a conveniently equilateral triangle, with the planet and Sun at the other two apices. This means, handily, that the planet's distance from its Sun is the same as the distance to either of these two Lagrange points. One lies 60° ahead of the Sun as seen from, say, Nibirum, the other 60° behind the Sun. Thus objects around Nibirum's leading Lagrange point would be visible close to the ecliptic in the morning sky before sunrise. So these little comets quickly became the Phoenix Asteroids Dawn Heralds.

Leaving the L5, trailing, Lagrange point empty - at least of anything visible from the surface of Nibirum - opens the door to scholarly speculation on the planet by those seeking symmetry. So maybe the misty stars of the Dawn Heralds shine showing the approaching richness (or otherwise) of the magical-mystical potential into which Nibirum will soon be moving (for a 360-day year, 60° = 60 days on Nibirum). That there is no equivalent group of Dusk Heralds could suggest that potential has been exhausted by the passage of the magical world of Nibirum, and will take much time - most of a year, say - to recover.

However, fitting a second, much smaller moon into the trailing Lagrange point on the orbit of Nibirum's main Moon seemed an ideal reworked symmetry, which also gave the planet more than one natural satellite. (The Lagrange point geometry is the same for the lunar orbit. Just substitute "Nibirum" for "Sun", and "main Moon" for "Nibirum" and "the planet" in the earlier description.) Thus was born the Red Moon, always faithfully following the larger White Moon around the sky. Not quite Gloranthan, though with names ultimately inspired by that fantasy world, via the old "White Bear, Red Moon" board wargame name, later revised as "Dragon Pass". Still more perfectly, and following from typical Earthly precedents of similar celestial behaviour, this can also be called the Dog Moon. So naturally, another name for the White Moon had to be the Q Moon (only from Nibirum's southern hemisphere, however, and then only by societies that recognise the significance of the apparent pattern forming said letter on the lunar disc).

Then 'twas time to see what else lay beyond Nibirum. There are of course numerous random solar system generators available for RPG use. Given the experimental nature of the whole Night Sky for Nibirum concept, I decided on one I've had for a while, but never used this way before, Galactic Baroque's "Instant Universe" (available for purchase via DriveThru RPG). This proved interesting, if not quite so straightforward, rapid, or complete as its name might imply.

Needing a Sol-like Sun, and given there is some scholarly debate still as to whether Earth's Sun is spectral type G2 or G4, I went with a class G3 sun of standard stellar type for Nibirum. That means it has sunspots from time to time, and a solar wind able to produce polar and sometimes mid-latitude aurorae, just as we see from Earth. At one solar mass, it seemed sensible to also go with a similar size to our Sun, thus Nibirum's Sun has a diameter of 1,400,000 kilometres (Sol's is 1,392,530 km; if you want miles, divide by 1.6).

Dicing on the Instant Universe tables provided the System with seven planets, their distances from the Sun, masses, sizes, natural satellites and so forth. Some of these features were slightly reworked or rounded-off to give a Solar System a little less mathematically-challenging for GMs to work with, and a few parameters not given by Instant Universe were added. The obvious place to fit Nibirum into this scheme was as the third planet outwards from the Sun, because that had a rounded distance of 130 million km, not far from Earth's own circa 150 million km.

Next came a series of calculations to find out what of all this could be seen from Nibirum. The Sun has an angular size of 0.62° from the planet (Sol is about 0.5° as seen from Earth), so that decided what minimum angular size the Q Moon needed to be to produce total eclipses for Nibirum. A diameter of 2,130 km at 200,000 km from Nibirum did the trick, with an option (just like for Earth) to have the lunar orbit's centre be slightly offset from Nibirum's centre, so the lunar disc can be sometimes a little too small to completely block the Sun, producing not-quite-total annular eclipses occasionally. Random rolls came up with a Dog Moon size of 350 km, so showing a tiny, faint, red disc about 0.1° in diameter as seen from the planet. The human eye can resolve objects as small as roughly 0.07°, so this is quite near that limit. No other planet appears as anything other than a bright to extremely brilliant star to the unaided eye from Nibirum.

I wanted the Dawn Heralds to be quite easily visible sometimes from the planet, despite no individual object within them being brighter than a 3rd magnitude star - and that only very occasionally. So I decided on them appearing as a somewhat nebulous patch, with at most a few brighter (4th or 5th magnitude) star-like points within, which collectively should be roughly 0.5° to 1.5° across as seen from Nibirum. This equates to a physical cross-sectional area of around 1 to 3½ million km or so, an actual size easily achievable by one quite modest comet of the kind visible from Earth. Such an angular size is similar to that of the Earth-visible Pleiades star cluster of 9 or 10 mostly 4th and 5th magnitude stars in the constellation of Taurus the Bull, about 1° east-west by 0.7° north-south. Despite the relative faintness of its stars (only one is 3rd magnitude), this cluster is a surprisingly easy object for the unaided eye in even quite strong twilight. The proximity of the stars to one another seems to make it easier to spot than just their brightnesses alone might indicate, so the Dawn Heralds can have a similar ability to "tickle" the vision of Nibirese morning sky-watchers.

Choosing what to depict on maps from all this, and how to do so, was somewhat more of a challenge. As I don't have Cosmographer installed, mapping came down to a choice between two main Annuals, CA 22 (October 2008) Star Systems or CA 80 (August 2013) HighSpace Star Systems. CA80 has a greater range of planet symbol options, and I needed two ringed planets, but in the end, CA22 just won out, as despite it having no ringed planet symbols, it did have the option for dynamic lighting effects on its planetary discs. Moreover, CA22's Mapping Guide includes a short tutorial on creating your own planet symbols with said dynamic lighting.

Thus with help from the GIMP (with which I freely confess I am a veritable novice), and still more from the Great and Powerful Monsen (who kindly allowed me to extract from his rotating-world graphics, and provided new, FT-generated, north and south polar views of Nibirum for the purpose), I constructed a small group of dynamic-lighting Nibirum planet symbols for use with the Atlas, one set showing six views of just the world, the other half-dozen onto which I GIMP-added some airbrushed white cloudy shapes, to make it look a little more homely.

[Image_10639]

After further deliberation, I decided on one chart to show the relative sizes and orbital distances of the planets, and a set of maps to show the satellites and features for each planet.

The relative-scale Solar System chart:

[Image_10640]

The five planet and satellite description maps:

[Image_10641]

[Image_10642]

[Image_10643]

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Many of the details provided on these maps (collected with some further notes in a PDF to accompany them in the Atlas) cannot be discerned from Nibirum. However, I decided to preserve everything that had been randomly rolled or otherwise chosen, partly for the sake of completeness, partly because in some fantasy settings, there are ways of travelling to other planets - the classic sailing ships of the stars in some earlier incarnations of D&D, for instance. It seemed thus a useful adjunct to include this information for any who might wish to explore the Nibirum system more fully.

After that, I constructed some extra charts to help RPG GMs especially keep track of what's visible, where and when in Nibirum's night sky, starting with those Moons.

Scalebars are fine in the Atlas.

You can change the font in any symbols like this in your map by making a new symbol with your preferred font in.

Select the symbol in Symbol Manager (in the Symbols drop-down menu), and Clone it, giving it a new name (this is very important, so you don't overwrite the original symbol).

Then, still in Symbol Manager, select your cloned symbol and click to Edit it. Draw your editing pane and then make whatever changes you wish - all the usual CC3+ tools are available to work on the symbol.

Once you're happy with the new version, click the cross box in the top right corner of the editing pane to dismiss it, and you'll get a terrifying message like this:

Despite the terror, click "Yes" - it's fine to do so with the cloned image.

Then your revised scalebar will be available to use in that map only.

Map The Second is...

Hex 403, Bruga's Hold:

A logging hamlet on the upper Swirl River, among the woods of the southwestern Siljan Hills, this is a rather isolated, frontier-style settlement, with trails leading-off to logging camps, or former ones (the trails southeast of the river crossing were where much of the timber for the settlement originated, for instance). Markets here aren't common, but the open space is handy for storing piles of fresh timber prior to sending it off down-river, or overland by trail southwards. The self-styled Queen's tough, if not as young as she was, and her extended family keeps most things more-or-less in-check here, though her nieces at The Corner Daughters have a tendency to accuse those they dislike of theft, something that works best with outsiders. The grandiose apothecary's shop-name was a random choice (it does look outwardly like a small temple), which seemed too apt to waste - see the notes above on the Crystal Cathedral - while "Merry Wares" became something of a running joke, as it cropped up randomly twice more in different settlements in this set for quite different places. I retained that too, as GMs can decide if it's at all significant.

On the original map, I started out with the woods rather denser than they are now. That looked much too dominant, and would have been unrealistic so near the settlement, so, much like the original loggers here, I had to thin them out somewhat. The mapping style makes use of both tree and bush symbols, and a bitmap tree fill drawing tool, which in combination for the densest areas here help give the woods a particularly 3D feel, although the symbols have to be applied judiciously to better hide the edges of the bitmap-fill segments. Of course, I had to delete and redraw all the first areas of the fill, as they were far too large, and it took a little experimenting to get the sizes right after that, in combination with the individual scatter of trees and bushes. Luckily, I had a fair idea of how best to achieve all this, as - although it was using a somewhat different style, and in colour - I have done quite a bit of woodland mapping for the Atlas before, for those who remember the extensive mapping series for the Faerie City of Embra - like the Wooded Places maps.

Yeah, this is really big! Presumably going for a wall-hanging poster-sized version if it's to be printed-out, I'd imagine, or all that intricate detail is going to be lost!

Congratulations on getting the borders to work with the dash and double-dot arrangement with no issues. These things are ever a nightmare in CC3, I know. (And on the more detailed view, all the other dashed lines as well!)

On the easy-to-view Forum version, I'm losing the knotwork corner details in the mountains especially - the colour's too similar. Maybe try a glow of some kind, or maybe a different shadow to pull-up the decorative elements?

The "Khorsar" label right beside the "Arduin" cartouche is very distracting; one or other would benefit from moving further away.

The surrounding nation/area labels aren't as clear as they might be in places, ironically including the Khorsar one, particularly where they overlie the mountains. Again, maybe a glow or shadow would help.

Is there a particular reason why only the Ozharen border has been colour-highlighted? That name-label might be tweaked slightly too, as the "O" is currently a little too near the map border overall.

The scalebar and compass rose are partly buried below the lower-left corner decoration currently, and the North point of the compass rose is obscuring part of the "Talafar" label.

On the more detailed Gallery view (and also on the Forum view version), the watercourses maybe aren't as clear as they could be, notably again in the mountains, plus in the woods at times. In places, they also seem to be impossibly narrow, to the point of almost vanishing, between far broader stretches, which looks odd, if perhaps required as a quirk by the commissioner (given how common these features seem to be). Several lakes appear rather too angular as well, though again this could be simply a required quirk, as they too are pretty frequently-seen.

The City Cliffs symbols in The Great Rift area could perhaps use some tweaking, as they look rather too angular in places, compared with how nicely curving they are in others. This could be worth considering too in that Devil's Footprint crater.

In the lower right corner, there's a tiny label that I think reads "Gast Water" which is too close to the corner decoration. The "Maragore" label could be moved lower, to fit within the border lines better, and the "Barbarian Hobbit Tribes" label it's currently partly obscuring should probably be moved as well, and perhaps set-up on two text lines, not just the one, to shorten it to fit with the moved Maragore label.

That's what I spotted easily in a quick check, at least, though obviously many of the smaller details can't be viewed properly even using the Gallery version.

Good luck!

That 22-foot Roman Empire map is the Peutinger Table, aka Tabula Peutingeriana, and the Wikipedia page includes a high-res complete image of the whole - may take a while to load, however, as the full-size JPG is about 15 MB. This is the direct link to that Wikimedia image.

Halfway point, or map five of the ten, if you prefer, is reached via Hex 1105, Osalin Village:

One interesting aspect for me as mapper with this sub-project was how readily the places each developed their own character, partly a result of their broader map setting, partly thanks to whatever features the Shadowdark random tables had come up with. In this case, there was the chance to map an unusually extensive area of burials, an aspect which truly defines the settlement, given that the area occupied by the dead is greater than that of the living village. Everything there was placed individually, to make sure things were never too neatly-ordered, although it's perhaps best not to peer too closely at what some of the repurposed symbols involved as the grave markers actually are! What's important at this map-view is the shape, texture and the shadows (or equivalent effects - there are some "Solid 10" shapes with variant Lighted Bevels in places, for instance). While time-consuming, it was rather satisfying to see the whole area growing in a more or less organic manner.

I'd already decided there might be hints of connections with a couple of the barrow-fields in hexes some way from the settlement on the Whispering Wastes area map, so adding a few more Solid 10 bevelled shapes for a few barrows closer-by seemed simply a natural adjunct. What was perhaps more surprising was the random tables provided by-chance an undertaker, properties hinting further at the ancientness, not to say weirdness, of the setting here, haunted warehouses and a little old temple suitable for hosting celebrations for the deceased (and anyone else at other times, of course). I've mentioned before, there are times when you start to wonder just how "random" these things really are! All I needed to add was a mill, a few contours and those barrow-shapes.

Onward now to the second half of the ten!

Might want to tweak the angle of the seating a little for the rows nearest the outer walls; otherwise, patron complaints about stiff necks can be expected!

Will there be upper levels too?

As Sue suggested, something to help the bars look more vertical probably would be helpful.

Maybe think of reducing the intensity of the shadows overall, given they don't really work with the light sources in the dungeon.

Some of the shadows - for the buckets and smaller round table - are also perhaps too large for what they are. The buckets probably shouldn't be casting the same length of shadow as the rack and dissecting table, for instance.

Well this is weird, as I've just dropped-by the Forum here following a lengthy discussion on one of my Discords with someone about the old Chaosium versions of the "Stormbringer" RPG, a few minutes ago!

Not sure if it'll help with your spires query, but I had to draw my own shadows of not dissimilar form for one of my Atlas maps a while back, the Thalassan Castle Ruins. The FCW might give you a further pointer or two, perhaps. Or perhaps not! Good luck, regardless 😁