The Acorn Cauldron

Beginner · 5 min read

The Acorn Cauldron turns your spreadsheet data into unique card art. Write one recipe, and every card in your deck gets its own illustration based on the data in that row — a different creature for each monster card, a different landscape for each location, a different portrait for each character.

Think of it as prototyping art. The Cauldron gives you placeholder illustrations you can playtest with right now, so you can see how your game feels with real imagery instead of blank rectangles. When your game is ready for production, commission an artist to replace the placeholders with professional work. Until then, every card gets a face.

How It Works

The Acorn Cauldron is a five-step wizard. Each step builds on the last, like assembling a recipe before you cook.

1. Style — Pick an art style that applies to your whole deck. Classic Fantasy, Watercolor, Comic Book, Pixel Art, Art Nouveau, and more. The style you choose here seasons every image the Cauldron produces, so your cards look like they belong together.
2. Ingredients — This is where the magic happens. Your spreadsheet columns are ingredients: click or drag them into the recipe editor as blue pills. Add prompt fragments from the built-in library (130+ proven templates across Characters, Creatures, Locations, Sci-Fi, Horror, Nature, and more). Any free text you type between the pills stays the same for every card — only the pill values change per row.
3. Season — Choose a mood for the whole batch: Dramatic, Serene, Ethereal, Whimsical, and others. Review the negative prompt (things you want the AI to avoid) and tweak it if needed.
4. Cauldron — Pick your AI model. Each cauldron trades speed, cost, and quality differently. (More on this below.)
5. Serve — Preview the assembled prompt for any card in your deck, generate a single test image to check the recipe, or batch-generate art for every card at once.

Writing Good Recipes

The recipe is the heart of the Cauldron. A well-written recipe produces better art with less fiddling. Here are the key principles:

• Use descriptive language, not keywords. "A fearsome dragon perched on a rocky peak, wings spread wide against a stormy sky" works far better than "dragon, rock, fire, wings."
• Use {{Column}} pills for the parts that change per card. If your spreadsheet has a Name column and a Type column, drop those pills into the recipe so each card gets its own subject.
• Keep static text for the parts that stay consistent. Pose, framing, detail level, and composition should be the same across the deck. That consistency is what makes your cards look like a set.
• Raid the Prompt Fragments pantry. The built-in library has 130+ proven templates organized by theme — Characters, Creatures, Locations, Items, Actions, Horror, Sci-Fi, Nature. Drag them into your recipe as starting points and customize from there.
• Start with a starter recipe. The Cauldron includes pre-built recipes for common card types: Character Portrait, Creature, Location, Item, and Action. Pick the closest one and tweak it rather than starting from scratch.

Choosing the Right Cauldron

Each cauldron (AI model) has different strengths. Pick the one that fits your workflow:

• Community — Free. Uses volunteer GPUs via AI Horde, so wait times range from 10 seconds to several minutes depending on demand. Generates one card at a time. Great for testing recipes when you are still experimenting.
• Standard — ~1 second. Fast enough for rapid iteration and batch placeholders. Good default for most prototyping work.
• Premium — Phoenix — ~5 seconds. Can render readable text inside images and keep characters consistent across cards. Best for hero cards or text-heavy art.
• Premium — Lucid — ~5–20 seconds. Widest style range and strongest prompt adherence, with 18 built-in style presets. Best for polished final art or cover art where a single image needs to shine.

Tips for Board Game Card Art

• Leave room for text. The Card Layout prompt fragments are designed to place the subject with space for title bars, stat boxes, and flavor text overlays. Use them.
• Pick one style and stick with it. Consistency across a deck matters more than any single image looking spectacular. A unified watercolor deck feels more professional than a mix of stunning but mismatched styles.
• Test one card, then batch the rest. Generate 3–4 variations of a key card to dial in framing, color palette, and composition. Once you are happy, batch-generate the full deck in one go.
• Art generates at your element's exact dimensions. No wasted pixels, no awkward cropping. The Cauldron reads the size of your image element and requests art at that exact resolution.