When you’re making art, sometimes there is nothing inside the marble chunk. Sometimes, though, the little chips and pieces are fascinating, though, and I really do like me some AI art castoffs for inspiration.

I’m cobbling together a sample playset for both Alastrina and Flonk so I can do some playtesting on it next week, and I wanted to show off Alastrina’s Desperate Plea movesets. Her attack cards feature her bonking things with her holy staff, and that’s fine, but when she’s doing divine magic, it is not her doing the magic, it is the gods she invokes. The thing is, I never defined a pantheon for Alastrina; I kinda just made up the Cellestopian Order on the fly and purposefully ignored the names of the gods. Which was a very helpful lazy step because not having a preconceived notion of what the gods would look like, I got to basically say “Stable Diffusion, make me a thing!” and explore the pieces it created for me.

Some of these are really good, and really fed into the creativity of the kinds of art I’d want to see in the cards. Alastrina is fair skinned; the normal association would be “cool, lets slap some white angels into her magic, boom!” and nobody would be surprised at all. So having what appears to be a gold Yaksha, a voodoo spirit, and a Druidic tree rising up like a phoenix from its roots — I’m down! So maybe those are canon to the Cellestopian order now, why not?

I share these because they very clearly were in some pretty sweet art batches. I didn’t end up settling on these particular images, but I still love them as inspiration for what did come up.

(Gentle reminder: Alastrina’s powers come from her prayer; the more prayer beads (japa) she builds up, the more she can do. These are her japa burning Desperate Pleas, which spend all those beads for strong, one time effects)

So I ended up going with a blinged out monk, greedily clutching at a hoard like a dragon. I love his expression, it’s like “yeah, you had all these, hunh? Yoink.”

That multiple armed wight or whatever that is at the bottom has a “oh.. oh I’m in for it now, aren’t I?” bug eyed expression.

Seriously, this is so fun. Hopefully the game play is as fun as the designing is shaping up.