Runes and AI art

Runes are the currency for every AI action in Skryrún. Every tier gets AI tools — the only difference between tiers is how many Runes you get each month.

TierRunes per month
📜 Chronicler Chronicler25
⚔️ Weaver+ Weaver100
👑 Runekeeper Runekeeper600

Your balance shows in the GM toolbar. It resets on your subscription's renewal date, and you can buy one-off Rune packs if a big prep session runs you dry.

What things cost

ActionRunes
Ask Runekeeper a question about an entity1
Generate a stat block1
Generate a skill check1
Off-script improvisation prompt1
Generate an improvised NPC2
Generate lore for an entity2
"I'm stuck" prompt3
AI world import3
Generate an imagefrom 3, by quality and size

Image generation is priced by what it actually costs to produce — a quick draft is cheap, a large high-detail image is not. That's why the quality picker exists rather than one flat price: you choose "more images" or "better images" and the cost tracks the choice honestly.

💡Tip

If a generation fails, its Runes are refunded. You are never charged for an image that didn't arrive.

Generating artwork

Generate portraits, banners, emblems, and cover art for entities, worlds, and campaigns from the entity editor or the world settings.

Ask for three and you get three genuinely different takes rather than one idea drawn three times. When one is close, More like this keeps that idea and draws it again.

Quality

QualityUse for
DraftQuick and cheap — for trying compositions
StandardThe usual choice — good at card and portrait size. The default
BestMost detail. Worth it for art you will display large
⚠️Warning

A Best-quality wide image can cost more Runes than a Chronicler's entire monthly allowance. That's deliberate — the option prices itself rather than being hidden from you.

Making art that looks like your world

Four world settings shape every image generated in that world. Set them once, in world settings, and stop re-describing your world in every prompt.

Default Art Style

The rendering style — painterly, woodcut, ink, and so on. It describes a look.

Style Reference

An image from your vault that every generation is asked to match. Where the style setting describes a look, this one holds it: pick a portrait you were happy with and later images follow its rendering instead of reinterpreting a written description each time.

World Premise

The one rule that makes your world unlike others of its genre — usually what things are made of, people included. "Everyone and everything is made of food — people of hard candy, cheese and caramel, armour of hardened sugar, castles of gingerbread."

Genre still sets silhouettes, dress, and social register. The premise decides the substance, and reshapes bodies to match rather than recolouring ordinary ones.

Never Depict

A standing rule for every image in the world — "no halos, no plate armour, no visible firearms" — applied last, so nothing else can bring back what you ruled out.

Keep it short. A long list weakens every other instruction in the prompt.

💡Tip

Your world's genre and tone already do a lot of the work: genre shapes colour and costume, tone sets mood and light. Set those before reaching for a longer prompt.

Where generated art goes

Generated images land in your vault — your personal library, across all your worlds — and can be used as an entity portrait, a world banner, a campaign cover, or a map token. Saved marketplace artwork doesn't count against your storage.

Troubleshooting

An image failed and I don't know why. The actual reason is shown rather than a generic error — usually a content rule or a transient provider failure. Runes for a failed generation are refunded.

Every portrait looks like the same person. Set a Style Reference after you have one you like, not before. Without one, each generation reinterprets your style description from scratch — which is what produces variety, and occasionally sameness when the description is very specific.

Species or deity portraits look like costumed mannequins. Add a World Premise, or give the entity more to work with in its own description — a trade, a life, a place they belong.

I ran out of Runes mid-prep. Buy a one-off Rune pack, or wait for your renewal date. Nothing else is gated; only the AI actions above spend Runes.

See also