The stuff between the numbered rooms, in the same 1974 two-ink screen print: the blast door from inside, the stair, the exchange, the laundry, washroom, stores, water gallery, cloakroom, kitchen, chapel, workshop, library, barber's corner, mushroom beds, play space, a family cabin, battery room, ventilation gallery, haulage incline and the memorial garden. All twenty ride in the adventure's plate list as 21-40. Six were regenerated for daylight or the wrong century, and so_27 needed three attempts: 'changing room' is this scenario's blocked phrase. Both lessons are in the art sheet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
24 KiB
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.
v1.0 (16 September 2026) reused every plate. The rewrite kept the site, the people and the art; only the uses below changed. Mr Smith must never be drawn — a face is the one thing the case says nobody can recall — and no prompt for him belongs in this sheet.
v1.1 added thirteen blueprint scenes of the underground, art/maps/bh-*.webp. They are
drawn, not generated, by tools/bellhouse-plans.mjs (white line on blueprint blue, Courier
lettering, pencil amendments in yellow, north to the left as on the section). Edit the
script, run it with --check (doors on shared walls, swings clear, furniture inside its
room, every room reachable), then --render. No prompt belongs here for them.
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:
- 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.
- "Flat pale cream ground instead of sky." Asking for "no sky" produces a sky.
- 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.
Plates — art/scenes/
All thirty-nine are generated, as art/scenes/so_NN_<stem>.webp — the nineteen listed
here and below, and the twenty v1.2 texture plates in their own table further down.
| 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 3, the soot edge (the file keeps its old name) |
so_04_adit.webp |
Act One — the adit mouth, backfilled; the crossing is above it |
so_05_corridor.webp |
Act Two — arrival below |
so_06_control_room.webp |
Act Two / Three — the bulletin, Centre's file, the studio |
so_07_registry.webp |
Act Two — the Establishment, and the thing counting in the stacks |
so_08_creche.webp |
Act Two — the school, the drawings, the intercom |
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 3:2Note: 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 3:2The 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.
Interiors added in v1.1 — so_09 to so_19
One plate for every underground location that had none, so the table can be shown the
room the blueprint describes. Same shared prefix, --ar 3:2. Rooms are shown empty or
nearly so, for the creche's reason: a crowd makes a count load-bearing.
| File | Location | Prompt tail |
|---|---|---|
so_09_lobby |
6 · Lobby and Enquiries | …an underground government reception lobby from 1974, a long enquiries counter with a telephone and a brass bell, rows of wooden benches, a round steel blast door standing shut at the far end, polished linoleum, one mild man in a cardigan behind the counter looking up |
so_10_sickbay |
9 · Sick bay | …a small underground hospital ward from 1974, iron-framed beds in two rows under warm lamps, a folding screen beside one bed, an enamel jug and glass on a bedside locker, calm and scrubbed, no patients visible |
so_11_pipe_room |
11 · Pipe room | …a cramped underground mail room from 1974, a polished brass pneumatic tube running down the wall from the ceiling to a small delivery hatch, a message capsule lying in a wire tray below it, wooden sorting pigeonholes, a single desk lamp, nobody present |
so_12_plant |
12 · Plant floor | …an underground boiler house from 1974 under a low concrete ceiling with no windows, a huge riveted coal-fired boiler with round pressure gauges and a glowing firebox door, two diesel generators, pipes and ducting overhead, caged electric lamps, a coal barrow and shovel, nobody present |
so_13_vigil |
13 · Vigil hall | …a large plain assembly hall cut into rock deep underground, long rows of stacking chairs facing a low platform with a lectern, a long blank wooden board above the platform, loudspeakers on the rock walls, warm light, empty |
so_14_tunnels |
14 · Coal roads | …an old unlined coal mine road underground turned into a vegetable garden, long raised beds under rows of hanging lamps, a timber-propped roof, round water tanks, hens in a wire run, nobody present |
so_15_sump |
15 · The Sump | …a short painted brick corridor deep underground from 1962 with a row of small rooms behind heavy iron doors with little barred windows, a plain wooden desk with a closed ledger, a single hanging light bulb, clean and dry, nobody present |
so_16_dormitory |
16 · Dormitories | …a long underground dormitory hall from 1974, rows of iron double bunks with folded grey blankets, a knitted blanket and a small stuffed bear on one bunk, steel lockers, a washing line strung between bunks, warm and lived in, nobody present |
so_17_canteen |
17 · Canteen | …a large underground works canteen from 1974, long formica tables with bentwood chairs, a serving hatch with steel urns and stacked trays, steam rising from a tea urn, warm and ready, nobody present |
so_18_estate |
18 · The Estate | …an old coal mine road deep underground lined on both sides with small homemade houses built of timber and plywood, each with a painted front door and a lamp, washing hung across the road, a child's tricycle by a doorstep, doors ajar, warm and crowded with belongings, nobody visible |
so_19_studio |
7 · The studio | …a small windowless radio studio from 1962 with acoustic tiles, a large grey reel-to-reel tape machine standing on the desk with two big spools of tape, a heavy old microphone on a desk stand, a squat iron safe with a dial in the corner, a single desk lamp, nobody present |
Texture plates added in v1.2 — so_20 to so_39
Twenty more of the underground, for the same reason as the interiors: the Seat is a
place people live in, and the table believes that faster from a picture of a laundry
than from a paragraph saying so. Same shared prefix, --ar 3:2, same rule — rooms empty
or nearly so, no count anywhere load-bearing. None of these is a location in its own
right on the Locations table; they are the stuff between the numbered rooms, and the GM
shows them while the players walk.
| File | Show it for | Prompt tail |
|---|---|---|
so_20_blastdoor |
The blast door, from inside | …a huge round steel blast door seen from inside a painted concrete lobby deep underground, the door shut and its locking wheel centred, a painted stripe across the floor in front of it, a hand lamp hanging on a hook beside it, nobody present |
so_21_stair |
The stair down from the adit | …a long straight concrete stairway descending inside a rock-cut shaft, a steel handrail down one side, caged electric lamps at intervals throwing pools of light, the bottom of the flight lost in shadow, nobody present |
so_22_exchange |
The telephone exchange | …a small underground telephone exchange from 1974, a tall cord switchboard with rows of sockets and hanging patch leads, an operator's wooden chair pushed back, a headset resting on its hook, one desk lamp, nobody present |
so_23_laundry |
The laundry | …an underground laundry room from 1974 deep below ground with no windows, two large copper washing coppers with wooden lids, a hand-cranked mangle beside a stone sink, wet sheets hanging from a wooden drying rack hauled up to the low concrete ceiling, painted brick walls, caged lamps, steam in the air, nobody present |
so_24_washroom |
The washroom | …an underground washroom from 1974, a long row of white enamel basins along a painted brick wall, a shelf of shaving brushes and tin mugs above them, a rolled towel on a rail, a wet tiled floor, nobody present |
so_25_store |
Stores | …an underground dry goods store from 1974, deep wooden shelves stacked with identical plain tins and sacks, brass scales on a counter, a closed ledger beside them, a single caged lamp, nobody present |
so_26_water |
The water gallery | …a water gallery inside a rock chamber deep underground with a low rough ceiling, no sky and no horizon, three tall riveted steel tanks standing against the rock face, pipes and stopcocks along the wall, a tin cup on a chain at a brass tap, caged lamps overhead, nobody present |
so_27_lobbykit |
The changing lobby | …an underground cloakroom from 1974 with no windows, a long row of oilskin coats hanging on iron pegs down a painted brick wall, a rack of wellington boots beneath them, a long wooden bench, a mop and bucket in the corner, a caged lamp, nobody present |
so_28_kitchen |
The kitchen behind the canteen | …an underground institutional kitchen from 1974, huge steel stock pots on a coal range, a hand-cranked potato peeling machine, ladles and colanders hanging above a scrubbed table, trays stacked ready, nobody present |
so_29_chapel |
The chapel, mid-service | …a tiny chapel inside a painted concrete room deep underground with a low ceiling and no windows, eight wooden chairs facing a plain table with a cloth and a simple wooden cross, a paper flower in a jam jar, one caged electric lamp, no people |
so_30_workshop |
The fitters' workshop | …an underground fitters workshop from 1974 with no windows and no daylight, a painted rock wall behind the bench, a belt-driven lathe, a heavy bench with a vice and a shadow board of hand tools, a half-repaired electric motor in pieces on newspaper, caged lamps overhead, nobody present |
so_31_library |
The library | …a small underground lending library from 1974, shelves of worn hardbacks with faded spines, a rack of magazines all from the same year, one armchair worn into a shape, a reading lamp, nobody present |
so_32_barber |
The barber's corner | …a barbers corner in an underground corridor from 1974, one chair facing a mirror screwed to painted brick, hand clippers and a leather strop on a shelf, a sheet folded over the chair back, hair swept into a neat pile, nobody present |
so_33_mushroom |
The mushroom gallery | …a close view of mushroom growing beds in a disused mine gallery underground, tiered timber trays of dark compost in the foreground crowded with pale mushrooms, low lamps hung close above the trays, timber props and damp rock behind, nobody present |
so_34_playspace |
The play space | …a rock alcove underground made into a childrens play space in 1974, hopscotch squares chalked on the concrete floor, a skipping rope coiled in a corner, home-made wooden toys in a crate, a rope swing hanging from a roof beam, no children present |
so_35_cabin |
A family cabin on the Estate | …a family cabin built along an underground roadway in 1974, a plywood partition with a blanket hung for a door, two bunks made up with quilts, a shelf holding a wind-up clock and framed photographs, a paraffin lamp, nobody present |
so_36_battery |
The battery room | …an underground battery room from 1974, long wooden racks of large glass accumulator cells in rows, lead links between them, insulated matting on the floor, one dim bulkhead lamp, nobody present |
so_37_vent |
The ventilation gallery | …an underground ventilation gallery from 1974, an enormous steel fan in a circular duct seen end on, louvred shutters and square filter frames stacked beside it, ducting running away into the dark, nobody present |
so_38_incline |
The haulage incline | …an underground haulage incline inside a rock tunnel with a timbered roof close overhead and no sky, narrow-gauge rails rising away into darkness, a small steel tub standing on the rails held by a chain, a rope drum and brake wheel in the foreground, caged lamps, nobody present |
so_39_rest |
The memorial garden | …a small rock alcove deep underground kept as a memorial garden, rows of plain unmarked wooden markers, paper flowers in jam jars, a swept floor, one warm lamp above, nobody present |
Rejected and regenerated in v1.2, all for the same two faults. Daylight, and the wrong century. The laundry came back as a modern launderette; the water gallery, the chapel and the haulage incline came back outdoors under open sky; the workshop had a glazed wall of daylight behind the bench — the fault that sank the first plant floor, and worth restating: nobody below can see the sky, so no plate may show one. The mushroom gallery came back a handsome empty gallery with no mushrooms in it. Each was re-prompted with the fault named — no windows, no sky and no horizon, a close view of the trays — and all six then rendered.
The chapel came back as a service in progress, a congregation seated under a great
painted sun in a vaulted chamber, instead of the eight empty chairs that were asked for.
Kept, and it is the best plate in the set: a roomful of people who have not seen the sky
since 1974, sitting under a painted one. The crowd is safe here because no count in the
scenario rests on it. The Vigil hall (so_13) stays the empty room with the blank board.
so_27 took three attempts and is the v1.2 blocked prompt. Changing room is the
suspect — the wording that finally ran calls it a cloakroom and drops the shower entirely.
Same lesson as Joan's portrait: when a job dies silently, reword, do not blame the account.
The blast door plate came back open, a round portal with the corridor beyond it, rather than shut with its wheel centred. Kept: it is the better picture of the way in, and the shut door is already the Lobby blueprint's job. Caption it the door, from the inside and nothing contradicts the fiction.
The Vigil hall's board is blank on purpose. It is the roll of honour, and the 1974 list of the dead has no names on it. If a render puts lettering on it, regenerate.
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 |
…a British hill farmer, a woman of sixty-seven in an old oilskin coat and headscarf, weathered face, holding a broom, patient and wry | Signed for a stranger's parcel once and cannot picture his face |
so_ruth_cotter |
…a British woman of twenty-four in a knitted cardigan, heavily pregnant, one hand resting on her belly, tired and a little exasperated, looking straight at the viewer | Would like people to stop calling her baby the thousandth |
so_nell_teague |
…a British girl of nine in a hand-knitted jumper holding a wax crayon, eyes half closed as if humming to herself, content and far away | Hums a tune at tea that her father does not like |
so_ogden |
…a mild British man of about sixty in a cardigan and tie, holding a pen over a blank form, polite and entirely at a loss | Has no form for visitors |
Portraits are all --ar 2:3. Mr Bewley and Mr Prosser reuse their THROUGH TRAIN
portraits (tt_bewley.svg, tt_prosser.svg).
Every portrait now exists. Joan Wetherlaw's never rendered in v1.0, and the notes then
blamed exhausted fast hours. That was wrong: the prompt was being refused. Midjourney
declines a blocked prompt in a reply the bridge cannot see, so mj-gen waits out its full
30 minutes and exits 0 with no file. The account was fine; other prompts in the same session
returned in 40 seconds. The same happened to the Sump in v1.1.
- Proven: "bare" (in "one bare bulb") blocks a prompt. "a single hanging light bulb" renders.
- Joan's old prompt was blocked by one of "waxed", "yard brush" or "unimpressed". The reworded prompt above renders.
- Before blaming the account, look at the channel. If Midjourney posted nothing at all for the job, reword the prompt.
Rejected and regenerated in v1.1: the pipe room (an empty stage with no tube), the plant floor twice (a railway tunnel with a number on it, then a boiler house with a skylight — nobody below can see the sky), and the studio (a modern hi-fi with no tape machine).
Not generated — draw these
The Bellhouse section drawing. A cutaway of the site with the Seat's locations
numbered, and a key below the drawing. Issue 2 (v1.0) relabels the key for the rewrite and
lists three pit-gallery locations as not drawn. Issue 3 (v1.1) adds the dormitories (16)
and the canteen and cabins (17) on Level 2, and draws the pit galleries as a third level —
the Vigil hall (13), the coal roads (14), the Sump (15) and the Estate (18) — with the incline
from the plant floor. The key runs in number order. Re-render with
rsvg-convert -w 2400 -h 1700 then cwebp -q 88. 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.