RingBRP/docs/scenarios/STANDING_ORDER_ART.md

STANDING ORDER — Artwork Prompt Sheet

Generation prompts for every plate and portrait in STANDING ORDER. Kept here so regeneration is possible; per house convention the prompt is part of the document.

mj-gen "<prompt>" --out <dir> --name <stem> --upscale 1

What already exists and needs nothing. The six declared pregens have portraits in art/portraits/pc_<key>.webp. The three creatures — the census, the overwriter and the quarantine unit — are bestiary entries and their prompts live in BESTIARY_ART.md, not here. Everything in this sheet is new work.

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Art direction for this scenario

House base style is ink sketch / pencil illustration — hand-drawn, single-weight line, sparse wash, negative space, never photorealistic. STANDING ORDER adds one line:

Civil defence, 1974. A two-ink screen print in black and faded civil-defence orange on newsprint white. Coarse halftone, flat pale cream ground instead of sky, the register very slightly off. Everything is drawn as though it were a plate from a public information booklet about what to do afterwards — including the things that are fine, and including the people who are alive.

That last clause is the conceit. Bellhouse is not a ruin and nobody in it is a ghost. Drawing a warm corridor full of civil servants in the visual language of a leaflet about nuclear attack is the whole scenario in one image: the end of the world, rendered as guidance.

Why this and not CLEAN GROUND's dyeline blue-grey drawing office: that case is a survey, filed in 1962 by draughtsmen. This one is a broadcast to the public, printed in 1974 by a government that expected to be obeyed. Different department, different press.

The three rules that make these prompts work

Learned the hard way across Day One, OPEN DAY and LAST ADMISSION, and they are in ~/.claude/skills/rpg/references/lessons.md:

1. Say "two-ink screen print" and name both inks. Palette drift and hallucinated signage are the same failure — a naturalistic prompt lets the model reach for a reference photograph, and reference photographs have shop fronts on them.
2. "Flat pale cream ground instead of sky." Asking for "no sky" produces a sky.
3. Never make a count load-bearing in generated art. Midjourney cannot count. The nineteen children, the three signatures in the visitor book and the sixty-one born below are all handout and text facts. No plate is allowed to contradict them.

Known artifact, accepted

Midjourney puts faint edition lettering in the lower margins of the screen-print prompts — pencil-scale marks that read as a printmaker's annotation. Four attempts at suppressing it with "no text / no lettering" did not remove it on this style. It is accepted here because it reads as part of the print rather than as signage, and because it contradicts nothing. If a plate ever grows legible lettering that says something, regenerate it — a picture that contradicts a clue is worse than no picture.

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Plates — art/scenes/

All eight are generated, as art/scenes/so_NN_<stem>.webp.

File	Where it is used
so_01_cover.webp	Cover plate
so_02_wetherlaw.webp	Act One — the farmyard
so_03_ash_edge.webp	Act One — clue 2, the surveyed line
so_04_adit.webp	Act One — the service adit portal
so_05_corridor.webp	Act Two — arrival below
so_06_control_room.webp	Act Two / Three — the broadcast and the signing
so_07_registry.webp	Act Two — the stacks, and the thing counting in them
so_08_creche.webp	Act Two — the school, and the cost of ending 1

Shared prefix. Every plate prompt begins with this and it is not optional:

1974 British civil defence public information booklet illustration, two-ink screen print in black and faded civil-defence orange on newsprint white, hand-drawn single-weight ink line, coarse halftone dot texture, flat pale cream ground instead of sky, no text, no lettering, no signage, not photorealistic

so_cover

…open moorland under a flat cream sky, a straight line of pale grit running across the heather from edge to edge and turning a precise right angle, a low concrete structure half-buried in the distance, nobody present --ar 3:2

so_wetherlaw

…a small stone hill farm yard, fine pale dust drifted into the corners and against the wall like the tide left it, a yard brush leaning where somebody put it down, no people, no shops, no signage --ar 3:2

so_ash_edge

…a field of moorland heather seen low and level, a hard straight boundary of pale grit crossing the whole frame and turning ninety degrees, the ground beyond it very slightly paler, no fence, no wall, no people --ar 3:2

so_04_adit

…a low painted concrete portal set into open moorland heather, a dark circular opening under a heavy cantilevered slab, fine pale grit settling over the heather like milled dust, no people --ar 3:2

Note: prompted as a mushroom ventilation head and returned as an adit portal. Kept and re-captioned rather than regenerated, because it is a better adit than the vent head would have been. If a true ROC-post mushroom vent is ever wanted, prompt it as "a low circular concrete mushroom vent the height of a man's knee" — the word "mushroom" alone produced a monument.

so_corridor

…a warm underground government corridor from 1974, painted brick, linoleum floor, pipework along the ceiling, a noticeboard with papers pinned to it seen from too far away to read, one woman in a cardigan walking away from the viewer, ordinary and unhurried --ar 3:2

so_control_room

…an underground regional government control room from 1974, a large wall map of an English region covered in pins, a long desk with a single folder squared to its edge, a tannoy microphone, several people standing quietly along the back wall, warm and orderly, nothing damaged --ar 3:2

so_registry

…deep rows of underground archive shelving, fifty years of identical buff files, a clerk's desk at the near end with a squared sheet of paper and a pencil on it, the far end of the rows unlit, no figure visible in the dark --ar 3:2

so_creche

…an underground schoolroom from 1974, small chairs, an old atlas open on a low table, children's crayon drawings of a blue sky pinned in a row along the wall, warm light, no children present --ar 3:2

The empty room is deliberate. Kit Marlow's drawings of a sky she has never seen do the work; children in the frame would make it sentimental and would also make a count load-bearing.

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Portraits — art/portraits/

Shared prefix. Portraits drop the halftone a little so a face reads at thumbnail size:

1974 British civil defence booklet portrait plate, two-ink screen print in black and faded civil-defence orange on newsprint white, hand-drawn single-weight ink line, plain flat cream background, head and shoulders, no text, no lettering, not photorealistic

Stem	Prompt tail	Essence it must carry
so_sowerby	…a courteous British man of sixty-one in a 1970s suit and department lanyard, tired and very neatly turned out, looking slightly past the viewer	Has done his duty for 52 years and needs it to have been worth doing
so_pennyfeather	…a British woman of fifty-two in a cardigan, spectacles pushed up, holding a sheet of squared paper, patient and entirely certain	Has already done the sum and is waiting to be asked
so_larkhall	…a British woman of forty-four in a white coat over a jumper, curious rather than kind, head tilted as though mid-question	Has never had a patient with sunlight in their history
so_marlow	…a very old British woman of one hundred and one in a hospital bed, eyes open and entirely lucid, ashamed rather than confused	Filed a war to save a fortnight
so_teague	…a heavy-set British man of thirty-eight in a plain 1970s police-style uniform without insignia, jaw set, not angry, holding himself very still	Has decided the surface is a lie because the alternative is unbearable
so_kit_marlow	…a British girl of seventeen in a hand-me-down jumper, holding a rolled sheet of paper, hopeful and a little defiant	Has drawn the sky four thousand times from one photograph
so_joan_wetherlaw	⚠ NOT GENERATED — see below …a British farming woman of sixty-seven in a waxed coat, weathered, holding a yard brush, unimpressed and patient	Has been right for four years and has stopped telling anyone

⚠ Joan Wetherlaw's portrait does not exist. Six of the seven portraits are on disk as art/portraits/so_<name>.webp; hers is the one that never rendered.

Three attempts, all stalled: two ran the bridge's full 1800-second window and reported timed out waiting for grid, and a third with deliberately reworded prompt text stalled the same way. It is not the prompt and it is not deduplication — the reword was a genuinely new match key and it hung too. The thirteen generations before it all returned in about forty-five seconds, and everything submitted after roughly 21:20 hung, which is consistent with the Midjourney account's fast GPU hours running out partway through the batch and later jobs dropping into the relax queue.

To finish it: re-run the prompt above when the quota has reset. Nothing else in the scenario depends on it — Joan is an Act One NPC and the act does not need her face — and mj-gen exits 0 on a timeout, so check for the file rather than trusting the exit code.

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Not generated — draw these

The Bellhouse section drawing. A cutaway of the site with the seven Act Two locations numbered, and a key below the drawing. This must be hand-built SVG and must not be prompted. Midjourney will not hold legible text or accurate geography, and this drawing's whole job is labels. Two rules from AFTERIMAGE v3.1: numbered callouts with a key beneath rather than labels sprayed across the plan, and the drawing says only what the site says — it shows where the rooms are and nothing about the sum, which is Act Two's work.

Hand out the section the moment they come through the blast door. A player-facing plan is a turn-taking device: it lets the table split itself into stations instead of one person narrating a corridor.