I recently produced a roleplaying game and released it onto DriveThruRPG. The game is called Rogues Conclave and you can download it for free if you want to give it a try. It is a swashbuckling adventure game where people tell tall tales with their friends. It also would not have been practical without generative AI.
Why did I need to use generative AI? Well I am not good at painting or drawing. For a small “pay what you want” side project, I could not afford to pay an artist to produce the volume and quality of art even a small roleplaying game requires. Therefore over the years various small projects I have had in mind have languished for want of suitable art assets. However now that generative AI exists for images, such projects become more practical.
To create the artwork I made use of AUTOMATIC1111’s Stable Diffusion WebUI project. I wanted a consistent but non-controversial art style. Therefore, I was careful to reference only historical artists whose work is out of copyright in my prompts. I also chose to specify that each image should be presented in a frame. I did this to avoid difficulties with integrating the art into the game.
As art for a roleplaying game, my requirements for the images was fairly relaxed. I had to tweak some prompts and reject images which contained unusual artifacts. Even then, I only had to produce perhaps 100 images over all. This gave me a large enough pool from which to select the ten to twenty images I required for the game. Some images required a little work in GIMP to make them useable, but this was not generally complicated or time consuming. I also used image to image generative AI to turn some plain circles and squares into more flavourful shapes to use on character sheets.
I also made use of some Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT). I used these, to generate lists of terms, sea terms and other things of this nature. Generally I found these lists were not suitable to be used as is. However, they did provide me with suitable inspiration to allow for more rapid completion of the game.
Here is the cover of the finished game. If you would like to view or play it, you can find it on DriveThruRPG. It is free and open source with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license
