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| Early September 2006. Hand-drawn and colored during our final camping trip of the summer at Lake Evergreen outside of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois where we lived and worked at that time. The area was also a favorite destination for our bicycle club the McLean County Wheelers, typically about a 33-35 mile ride there and back. |
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| The second version from just 10 days or so later in mid-September 2006. Created using Microsoft Paint with pasted in compass rose and text entered manually later with Word. |
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| The most recent version of the map, finalized at the start of June 2026. |
A question was posed by one Der Alte Fritz (Hi, Jim!) in yesterday's comments, asking how I created the map for my semi-fictitious campaign area. Well, since you asked. . .
The short answer is through repeated attempts and experimentation with various AIs since late May or early June of 2025. I began with Ninja -- I read online that it was good for image creation. Not sure I agree. -- but moved more recently to Claude (my preferred AI), a bit of Gemini, a dash of Chat GPT, and finally back to Claude during the final week of May this year to finish up.
The most frustrating part of the lengthy process has been that artificial intelligence is great at adding one detail while screwing up two or three others that one might wish to remain untouched. It can be, and often is, a truly maddening experience. You look over the latest version of your desired image and think to yourself,
"Ah! Looks good! Couldn't have done better myself had I genuine graphic designer skills."
And then your eyes scan another part of the map, with which you were already happy in a previous version, only to find that your AI of choice took liberties in the meantime and changed or omitted a particular detail.
"Blue language!!!"
I am quite certain the cats learned a few new words, hissed quietly to myself, during those instances of frustrated surprise and consternation. Like all good felines, Gunnlaug and her brother Onyx are always listening. If cats could only speak the way humans do, what might they say to, or about us? My suspicion is that cats would be quite frank, and even brutal in their assessment of humans and our actions of late. An interesting topic for possible discussion but perhaps one better left for another time.
I'll leave it at that.
Back to the topic at hand. The trick with artificial intelligence and map-making or revision seems to be requesting only a single change or addition at a time while also telling the AI, in no uncertain terms, NOT to mess with anything else. And yet there are times when it will still produce something less than desired. It's kind of dimwitted in a way. At least for now.
In the end, I added the last few details manually in my preferred online photograph editor of choice, Fotor, which gave results I can live with in the most recent version of the campaign area map that was shared a few days ago and included above for your easy reference.
If memory serves, the main things I have tried to get AI to do during the last year or so were the following tasks, fairly easy on the surface, or so it would seem:
* Make the map look like an aged document from the mid-1700s. Accomplished in fairly short order last year.
* Change the title text in the upper left corner to something akin to old Germanic Fraktur script. I had less luck with the text on the rest of the map as I recall and finally gave up. If Fotor offers Fraktur font, I have yet to find it among the various options available.
* Superimpose a faint overlay of hexagons. One of the last steps at the tail end of May this year. Again, a frustrating experience that took many attempts and repeated/revised prompting for Claude to nail down.
There might well have been additional changes and features I asked the various AIs consulted to apply during the last 13 months or so, but those were the big three. That said, it took a long time and repeated prompts get here, interrupted by quite a few months of inactivity on my part during the academic year. There are probably more skilled users of artificial intelligence at this point for image creation and manipulation out there -- In life there are always smarter, faster, more skilled, and better informed practitioners of almost anything under the sun. A sobering thought. -- and if you want something totally random the technology works reasonably well with even cursory prompting.
In hindsight, though, it might have been worth enlisting the help of an actual human graphic designer like one-time Battlegames editor Henry Hyde for example. I have no idea what his rates are, but paying someone who actually knows what he is doing when it comes to computer assisted design would have been faster and infinitely less frustrating I think. Just my two cents worth.
So, that's the long and the short of it with how I developed my map over almost 20 years. And what a long, strange trip it's been. With apologies to the late Jerry Garcia.
There are those, I'm sure, who will say they prefer the original hand-drawn map from September 2006. It does have a certain amateurish charm about it, harkening back to the similar imaginary cartography of my D&D infused high school days of the early 1980s. But the more recent version is nice in its own way. Slicker and certainly more in line with what I envisioned during those heady, early days of the Grand Duchy of Stollen project way back when.
Ok, I've got some hussars to basecoat, but another mug of coffee first!
-- Stokes
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