A week ago or so, a new game came out from the creator of Kill Six Billion Demons (one of my most favourite webcomics that you should all go to read right now): Magnagothica: Maleghast

It’s a great world-building and incidentally it’s an idea for a type of setting that I have been thinking to make myself for years, and now someone plucked it straight out of my mind and made a really great version of it which just oozes style!

I have been enamored with this game since I first saw it. It hits ALL my buttons! Heavy Metal, Fantasy, Aesthetics, Boardgames. Only thing it could have done more is include even more metal genres as I’m not too keen on the extreme stuff and I’d love to see styles on Power or Prog Metal etc. But nothing we can’t extend ourselves!

But ye, as I mentioned, I’ve been hyperfocusing on it a bit too much. First I created a lemmy community for it. Then I started extending the music playlists for each house. And lastly I wanted to find a way to be able to not only create my own warband, but also to give individual art to each of my units. And for this, I finally had some necessary skills and hardware. It was time to train my first LoRa!

It took me a good 3 days to figure out how things work, create the necessary datasets, experiment with creation and retry until I got the hang of it. It didn’t help that the original artwork was, let’s say, challenging to work with. But I think in the end I am very proud to have managed to make something which seems to be capable of following the style well enough to create leaders and units.

I’ve found the best use of this lora is for Leader illustrations. To create a leader simply use the “necromancer, leader” tokens in your prompt. For leaders I suggest you set your Lora strength between 0.5 and 0.8. Remember to mention which house you want the leader to be in. The LoRa is pretty decent at copying the style of each house.

To generate units, you can choose to either generate unit portraits styles, or full unit illustrations. You can try to replicate the maleghast style with the halftone, or put “halftone” in the negative prompt to get a more sharp result. Personally I prefer to avoid the halftone look and try to make them look more full. You can also use the name of the unit to try to lead the lora to draw something like that unit. You can also use “ghoul” for humanoid undead and “abomination” for more monstrous looking units. For units I suggest you use model strength between 0.3 and 0.6

You can check out the new LoRa on CivitAI, and as you’d expect you can also just try it out directly on the AI Horde!

Try it out and let me know what other uses you can find using this style. I think it has plenty of potential.