Iavas Sûl

[Necron 99]

Using the Tolkien dictionary, I've settled on a name for the town that occupies the area known as the Autumn Harbor, Iavas Sûl (ih-ah-vas sool), which in the Sindarin language translates to "autumn wind".

Aside from the name itself, I also did some exploring into an online application called MidJourney. The MJ application is a lab experiment which uses AI (artificial intelligence) to create digital images based on the textual input of a user. You can test out the beta functionality for free, but are only given a short number of uses before you have to pay to use the service on a monthly basis.

Anyhoo, I decided to try out the MJ application and see what it could produce based on my own descriptions. I'm actually pretty impressed with what it did. All of the images below, the AI created based on my descriptions of things I related to my setting.

Starting off I gave the input for: medieval, fantasy, village, autumn, harbor. The AI created the following two images:

I then put in a description for: shire, hobbit, storm, hill, menhir.

After that, I tried another take on the Autumn Harbor by using: medieval, fantasy, village, autumn, sunset, mountain, coast.

And finally, I decided to try out something for an adventure idea, by using the input: medieval, fantasy, wizard, tower, hill, autumn, storm

I'm blown away as to how cool this artwork and imagery turns out. You can create some amazing stuff just by giving the AI descriptions via words or phrases. If/when I decide to pursue fleshing out either setting or adventures, I definitely would like to use this application to create some visuals to show off, either online or printed and in-person to help flesh out things.

[Ancalagon]

Cool, man. Go ahead and pursue the setting and adventures!

[Necron 99]

And it's done.

After a week of putting together my small campaign setting, I've finally finished it up. I've set the location for the Autumn Harbor within the setting The Bay of Spirits, a setting designed by writer and artist, Randy Musseau of Roan Studio (thebayofspirits.ca). I ran across his setting on Drivethru RPG years ago and have since been enthralled with it, especially since it was created with AD&D in mind.

At one point, back before the forums were lost, I had posted about the setting in a thread, but it no longer exists. In my search for a setting in which to place my locale, I circled back and finally decided this is where I wanted to run future adventures.

As for the setting guide, even though the BoS setting has a few of its own deities, I wanted a larger pantheon and decided to just use the ones from Greyhawk, since they cover pretty much every aspect. I included a lot of info from his supplements as background and history for this guide, along with some of the maps and artwork he sells in supplements, since his stuff is designed for one's own personal use. Other artwork in the PDF were images I created using the MidJourney AI application. I gave it descriptions and let it do all the work. The names and descriptions of months and festivals for the calendar were a hodgepodge, taken either from various sources or creations of my own. Locations and businesses within Iavas Sûl were also a mix of "Bay" supplement info in addition to ideas of my own creation. All in all, I'm really happy with this and hope to use it for running my own AD&D homebrew adventures or a campaign at some point down the road.

The PDF ended up being just under 3mb.

Iavas Sûl: Tales from the Autumn Harbor Campaign Guide

Iavas Sûl.pdf

[Ancalagon]

Alright, alriiiiight! Looking forward to reading this soon.

[Ancalagon]

Soooooooooo... you running something in Iavas Sûl for Gary Con, right?

Into the Wilds, from the last page of the pdf, sounds like a great intro adventure title....

[Necron 99]

Soooooooooo... you running something in Iavas Sûl for Gary Con, right?

Into the Wilds, from the last page of the pdf, sounds like a great intro adventure title....

Haha, I would like to run something for the setting and I do have a general outline for an adventure that's been brewing in the back of my mind, most of the summer. The title of the adventure is "Crows in the Pine"; funny enough about the title, I was out walking early one morning here in the neighborhood and there's a short stretch of road with trees on either side that separates my section of the subdivision from the main section. As I'm walking that short stretch of road, I hear a "caw" and out from above my head, flies a crow which glides across the road and lands in the top of a pine tree on the other side, where he's joined by another crow and the two start making some noise. Out of nowhere I thought to myself, "crows in the pine"...that would make for a cool outdoor adventure title. So as I walked the rest of the way home, I started brainstorming some ideas for why an adventure would be related to some crows and a pine tree, then viola, some gears started turning and sparks started flashing and I had this cool little idea for making it happen.

So yeah, while I have the bullet points, I still need to nail down specifics to make it playable plus do all the other work involved. If all goes well, then I'll submit and have it ready to go.

[Necron 99]

This is a weather chart from Randy Musseau's Guide to the Hinterlands PDF that I'll be using for my adventures, Anc had asked about it. Single page, simple and easy to use, rolling d10 + the month modifier for that season (1, 2, or 3).

Weather.pdf

[Ancalagon]

Thanks for posting. I read over it and noticed, "The Bay of Spirits is a northern Temperate Region with long, cold Winters and short, hot Summers" and thought that sounds just like Nebraska. Heh.

[grodog]

Using the Tolkien dictionary, I've settled on a name for the town that occupies the area known as the Autumn Harbor, Iavas Sûl (ih-ah-vas sool), which in the Sindarin language translates to "autumn wind".

Nice! Are you using any particular JRRT dictionary, Jay?

I've mined the Silmarillion heavily for my elvish names (most recently for drowic ones, in fact ), and have used a few online resources, but am not aware of any good (and official?) Tolkien dictionaries.

I'm blown away as to how cool this artwork and imagery turns out. You can create some amazing stuff just by giving the AI descriptions via words or phrases. If/when I decide to pursue fleshing out either setting or adventures, I definitely would like to use this application to create some visuals to show off, either online or printed and in-person to help flesh out things.

The did look good!

FWIW, if this would be useful: if you want to iterate on some of these images, you can feed the output back in as input, and get it to build out from that baseline. Someone did this on FB recently expanding the breadth of the image for Tramp's pseudo dragon illustration, with interesting results.

Allan.

[Necron 99]

Nice! Are you using any particular JRRT dictionary, Jay?

I've mined the Silmarillion heavily for my elvish names (most recently for drowic ones, in fact ), and have used a few online resources, but am not aware of any good (and official?) Tolkien dictionaries.

The one I primarily use is the MERP #2210 Adventure Guidebook II, ICE did a really nice job of creating an Elvish dictionary and glossary that I've used for reference since I first learned about MERP back in the 90s.

The did look good!

FWIW, if this would be useful: if you want to iterate on some of these images, you can feed the output back in as input, and get it to build out from that baseline. Someone did this on FB recently expanding the breadth of the image for Tramp's pseudo dragon illustration, with interesting results.

Allan.

This particular program has some built in functionality like that. The first time you feed the AI it generates four small samples. Under each of the samples are two options, one allows the user to either focus and enhance that particular sample into a more refined image, the other option tells the system to generate another set of four samples based on that selected sample. It's pretty cool.