A little light reading

I bought the first ten books in the second Wizard / Icon series of Fighting Fantasy reissues.

I've really enjoyed playing through them. Yes I cheat.

I never really got into playing 'proper' D&D with dice and journals etc. I was always more interested in actually reading and imagining the world that the words created. Stopping to throw dice and write / erase stuff just ruined the whole illusion and flow for me personally.

I've learned a lot though, there are some very interesting game mechanics that have given me lots of ideas to make my books better.

So I bought some more ;)

Unfortunately decent copies of some of the books are getting hard to find or are astronomical in price.

Howl of the Werewolf, a book which seems almost universally liked goes for silly money and Curse of the Mummy is also pretty pricey (both were written by Jonathan Green).

As you can see I've bought some of the first series books too, so I'll keep trying to complete the set as best I can before starting to buy random Original Series books that have good reviews or interesting mechanics.

Comments

Making book covers with Stable Diffusion

I made a short video explaining how to use Stable Diffusion to create ebook and print covers I used Krita to edit the photos but pretty much any image editor would do, you just need to be able to make selections and erase. Here are the steps - Step One Go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion or https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo and enter a prompt for the image you want. For this tutorial, I wanted a space scene so used the following prompts to create four separate images that I would edit together. "Lunar lander in space realistic" "Astronaut tabletop miniatures realistic" "Star field with galaxy realistic" (this gave me two images with prints hanging in a gallery, so maybe try different words) "Realistic lunar base with stars in background" Use the guidance scale at the bottom (if available) to tweak the settings. I normally try to keep it between one and nine but experiment and see what you come up with. After anyt

Just a quick update

Two more stages finished on my current gamebook. The Lake - An opportunity to earn some money and go for a little swim - if you dare. The Mountains - Two deadly adversaries. Will you prevail? Just two more to go!

Using Stable Diffusion to create simple illustrations for print

I made a short video explaining how to use Stable Diffusion to create illustrations for print books. I used Krita to edit the photos but pretty much any image editor would do, you just need to be able to make selections and erase. Here are the steps - Step One Go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion or https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo and enter a prompt for the image you want. For this tutorial, I put "monsters black and white hand drawn illustrations". Use the guidance scale at the bottom (if available) to tweak the settings. I normally try to keep it between one and nine but experiment and see what you come up with. After anything between 30 seconds and a minute, you should get your generated pictures. If you don't get anything you like, keep trying! Add more keywords and move the guidance scale until you get something you are happy with. When you are done just right click or hold the image to download it. It gave me a image filled with h

Martyn Cruise, Author

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