RingBRP/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_ART.md

CLEAN GROUND — Artwork Prompt Sheet

Generation prompts for every plate and portrait in CG-005 · Clean Ground. Kept here so regeneration is possible; per house convention the prompt is part of the document.

Generate with the Midjourney bridge:

mj-gen "<prompt>"

What already exists, and needs nothing. The six declared pregens have portraits in art/portraits/pc_<key>.webp — Ashcroft, Bhattacharya, Renshaw, Braithwaite, Pollard and Okonkwo, all verified on disk. The hollow man and the understudy are bestiary creatures with existing plates (art/portraits/hollow_man.svg, the_understudy.svg) 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. CLEAN GROUND adds one line:

Ministry drawing office, 1962. Pencil field-survey hand, drawing-office linework, dyeline blue-grey wash, buff file-card grain, ruled margins and a corner reference box. Everything is drawn as though it were a sheet pulled out of the file — including the present day, and including the far side.

That last clause is the conceit and the whole scenario is in it. The valley over there is not a place; it is a filed document, authorised in 1962 and never cancelled. So it is drawn on the same paper, in the same hand, with the same ruled margin as the Registry corridor — because administratively it is the same sheet. A GM does not have to explain that and a player will not consciously notice it. It does the work anyway.

Present-day people are composed as personnel-file photographs: square-on, plain ground, slightly too much headroom, clipped to a buff folder corner. They are modern British civil servants and rural Northumbrians in ordinary modern dress — the framing is 1962 filing, not the clothes.

Style tokens

Append the matching token to every prompt. Repeat it verbatim so the set stays coherent.

Token	Text
[BASE]	hand-drawn ink and pencil illustration, single-weight line work, sparse dyeline blue-grey wash, heavy negative space, 1962 Ministry drawing-office survey hand, buff file-card grain, ruled margin, not photorealistic
[FILE]	[BASE] + composed square-on like a 1962 personnel record card, plain ground --style raw --s 250 --ar 1:1 --no photography, photorealism
[FIELD]	[BASE] + composed square-on like a 1962 field-survey record, plain ground --style raw --s 250 --ar 1:1 --no photography, photorealism
[PLATE]	[BASE] + --style raw --s 300 --ar 3:2 --no photography, photorealism

⚠ --ar 1:1 for portraits, not 2:3, and the repo is the authority on this. This sheet first said 2:3, copying THROUGH TRAIN's tokens. Every raster portrait in art/portraits is 512×512 — all sixteen of them — and every scene plate in art/scenes is 1024×682, across all three scenarios that have them. Foundry wants a square portrait. Checked before generating rather than after, which is the only reason seventeen files are not the wrong shape.

And the word photograph came out of the tokens. The conceit is that the framing is a 1962 file record, but leaving photograph in the prompt fights --no photography and pulls the generation straight to photorealism — the house gotcha, written down after it bit the Day One prompts. "Composed square-on like a 1962 personnel record card" gets the framing without the word.

Adjust the --v flag to whatever Midjourney version you are on; the prompts are written to work without one.

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A · NPC portraits

Files: art/portraits/cg_<key>.webp. Bureau and present-day people use [FILE]; the people of the column, who have been on the far side since 1962, use [FIELD].

ID	NPC	Prompt
cg_ivy	Ivy Hetherington, 78	waist-up portrait of a white British woman of 78, outdoors, weathered and entirely upright, grey hair under a headscarf, a coat mended more than once and mended well, both hands held open and visible in front of her where they can be seen, level unhurried gaze meeting the viewer squarely, a small hand-ruled almanac book under one arm, sixty-four years of walking in the set of the shoulders, not frail and not a saint, [FIELD]
cg_corrigan	Dean Corrigan (deceased)	waist-up portrait of a white British man of about forty in forestry clearance kit, high-vis over a work fleece, chainsaw gloves tucked in a pocket, ordinary and slightly impatient expression, photographed for a contractor's ID card two weeks before he died, entirely unremarkable, a man with no idea he is the first item in a case file, [FILE]
cg_swinburne	Margaret Swinburne	waist-up portrait of a white British hill farmer of about sixty, short practical hair, quilted jacket and a collarless shirt, standing in her own yard, jaw set, an empty dog lead wound twice round one fist, grief converted entirely into refusing to be fobbed off, [FILE]
cg_teasdale	Ray Teasdale	waist-up portrait of a white British clearance foreman of about fifty, hard hat held under one arm, high-vis, three days of stubble and the grey skin of a man who has not slept properly in a fortnight, looking slightly past the viewer's shoulder, mouth open a fraction as though about to say the same sentence again, [FILE]
cg_prichard	Sgt Aled Prichard	waist-up portrait of a Welsh British man of about thirty-five in plain dark Bureau field dress, neat, squared away, an excellent service record in the posture, a lanyard and a laminated cordon pass, calm and competent and completely unaware that his file is the reason he was chosen, [FILE]
cg_clerk	Registry clerk (unnamed)	waist-up portrait of a British civil servant of indeterminate middle age behind a Registry counter, cardigan under a jacket, lanyard, one hand flat on a closed buff folder they are not going to open, polite and immovable and faintly apologetic, a person who knows exactly one sentence more than they are cleared to say, [FILE]

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B · Scene plates

Files: art/scenes/cg_<nn>_<name>.webp. All use [PLATE].

ID	Where used	Prompt
cg_01_stump	Cover plate	the sawn stump of an enormous boundary oak on an open Northumbrian moor at dusk, fresh cut face pale against dark heather, brash and sawdust still around it, the felled trunk dragged aside, drystone wall running past, and the air directly above the stump very slightly out of register with the air around it as though two sheets of the same drawing were laid down a half-millimetre apart, no figures, enormous grey sky, [PLATE]
cg_02_registry	Act One, Registry	a drab British government Registry corridor, a wooden counter with a hinged flap, buff folders stacked in wire trays, a card index cabinet, a wall clock, floor polish and strip lighting, a 1962 filing reference still stencilled on one cabinet drawer, entirely ordinary and quietly enormous, nobody in shot, [PLATE]
cg_03_sikehead	Act One, the farm	a Northumbrian hill farm yard in thin daylight, quad bike and baler twine, a stone byre, wet fell rising behind, an empty dog bed under the porch overhang and a feed bowl that has not been moved, the gate to the open march standing open at the far end of the yard, [PLATE]
cg_04_crossing	Act Two, the crossing	the same moor and the same drystone wall and the same tree line, and every living thing gone from it, the whole valley grey under a fine dust that lifts where boots go through it, no birds, no sheep, no movement, four small figures walking into frame at the bottom edge for scale, the grey is not snow and must not read as snow, [PLATE]
cg_05_column	Act Two, first contact	forty-odd people coming over the shoulder of a grey hill in a single line, walking at the pace of the slowest, the old at the front and children in the middle, handcarts and bundles, sixty years of mending in the clothes, six figures at the very back not quite keeping up and not drawn any differently from the rest, one woman a half-step forward of the line with both hands held open and visible, [PLATE]
cg_06_rest	Act Two, the line's rest	a column of refugees sat down in grey heather to rest, in family groups, boots off, a child asleep against a bundle, water shared from a tin, an old man already beginning to stand because he always does at this point, unhurried and domestic, the ordinariness is the whole point, [PLATE]
cg_07_depot	Act Three, the depot	the interior of a small buried 1962 government depot lit by torchlight, corrugated arch roof, shelving of sealed tins and folded canvas, a steel document safe standing open, dust undisturbed for sixty years except where somebody has just walked, a single buff folder laid flat on a bench under a torch beam, [PLATE]
cg_08_swap	Act Three, the swap	a grey hillside, a column of people standing off at a distance, and at close range one figure reaching toward an agent the way a man reaches for a coat he is certain is his — and stopped, mid-reach, with nothing at all behind its face for a half second, the agents' hands going to their sides, nobody has fired yet, [PLATE]
cg_09_seam	Act Three, the northern seam (cut by default)	the southern edge of a grey valley seen from above at dusk, a party of small figures walking north along the fell, and the same drystone wall and the same tree line arriving again ahead of them, drawn identically, the drawing repeating rather than the landscape, an hour gone and no memory of turning round, [PLATE]
cg_10_cordon	Act Four, the cordon	a Bureau cordon on the real side at night, a Land Rover with its door open, a tape line and two poles, a folding table with a lamp and a clipboard on it, thermos and radio, the moor black beyond the lamplight, one figure standing at the edge of the light with their back to us, [PLATE]
cg_11_close	The Close, cancellation	the sawn oak stump at dusk with an old woman standing beside it in her mended coat, one Bureau agent opposite her with a buff folder and a pen, a form part-completed on the flat of the stump, nothing supernatural in frame at all, the whole valley waiting on a signature, [PLATE]

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Notes

• ⚠ The far side is drawn on the same paper as the near side. Same hand, same margin, same grain. The valley is a filed document and the art should never treat it as another world — no colour shift, no dreamlike softening, no border between the halves. If a plate comes back looking like a fantasy realm, reroll it: that is the wrong scenario.
• Nothing glows and nothing is translucent. There are no spectres here. Where the wrongness shows — cg_01_stump, cg_09_seam — it is the drawing that is out of register or repeating, not the light.
• ⚠ The six at the back are never singled out. In cg_05_column they are one item in a line of forty and are drawn exactly like everybody else. The text says do not name them and do not linger on them; a plate that picks them out with shadow or posture tells the players in Act Two what they are supposed to work out in Act Three.
• Nobody in the column is lit as a victim. No hollow cheeks, no outstretched hands, no wretchedness. They are walking people who have organised themselves well for sixty years and are kind to their own. Ivy in particular is neither frail nor saintly — she is the most competent person in the scenario.
• The understudy is never drawn as a monster. It passed every test the party had. If it appears in a plate at all it is cg_08_swap, where the horror is a half-second of nothing behind an ordinary face, not teeth.
• ⚠ cg_04_crossing is the hard one, and seven attempts did not beat the first. The plate has to be grey and dead and empty, and the generator will give you any two. What each failure taught, so nobody repeats them:
  • Naming a thing to exclude it puts it in. The first prompt said "no birds, no sheep, no movement" and "the grey is dust and not snow", and came back with livestock grazing on the hillside. Both negations summoned what they forbade. Say what IS there.
  • Steering off snow steers into summer. Remove the snow language and the moor comes back green, gold and alive, which is worse — the valley reads as healthy.
  • A long --no list stalls the job. Four consecutive prompts with ten or more exclusions never produced a grid at all; the same prompt with four exclusions returned in two minutes. Keep --no short and do the steering in the prompt.
  • Filter words that cost a full 30-minute timeout each: wound (as in a lead wound round a fist), dead ground, lifeless, smothered, shot (even in "nobody in shot"). A job that produces no grid at all is almost always one of these, not a queue problem — the decline is an ephemeral reply the poller cannot see.
• The grey is not snow. It is dust, it lifts, and it is on their hands now.
• Do not draw the almanac's pages. H03a and H03b are print handouts whose whole trick is that the two sheets are identical, and check-handouts holds that. An illustrated version would compete with the thing the players are actually holding.
• Keep alternates in an archive folder; portraits feed the NPC sheets.

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