Beyond Prompts: AI-assisted Worldbuilding for Epic Storytelling

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the My Machine and Me newsletter, where we explore the art and science of AI-assisted creation. In this series, I’ll share insights, techniques, and examples from my journey of worldbuilding with the help of generative AI. Today, we’ll dive into how creating rich fictional universes leads to better AI-generated imagery than simple prompting.

The Worldbuilding Advantage

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan

Compelling AI-assisted imagery takes more than just clever prompts—you need a world. Many approach AI image generation like a vending machine: input prompt, receive generic image. This often leads to superficial, disconnected outputs that lack originality and depth.

By first establishing a detailed fictional setting, complete with its own internal rules, history, and visual style, and applying those to our prompts, the resulting images become significantly richer. They aren’t just visually appealing; they’re interconnected, imbued with context, and possess a sense of authenticity, even when depicting fantastical subjects.

Example: Veyna Stormcall

Let me demonstrate with an example character: Veyna Stormcall.

This character was generated from an extensive profile (shown later) with some refinements through reprompting. The level of detail might seem excessive—even cheesy—but this richness helps the image generator create something truly unique and consistent.

As a comparison, here’s what Copilot produced using the same backend image generator but without access to the full worldbuilding documents:

While interesting and potentially useful as a starting point for a different world, it doesn’t capture the specific essence of Veyna within her established universe. But that’s okay: the style and profile are the important parts; the style for visuals and storytelling, the profile for details. The universe applied to it fills in the details, fitting the profile to aspects of worldbuilding.

Character Profile: Veyna Stormcall

Get this character as a 4K wallpaper: ​​My Machine and Me - Veyna Stormcall.jpg​​

Personality & Traits

• Fiercely Independent – Veyna does not bow to fate, choosing instead to forge her own path like a gust of wind through the mountains.
• Charismatic & Unpredictable – Her presence is electric, drawing people in with a natural charm, but she is as changeable as the sky itself.
• Fearless Skyfarer – She thrives in danger, treating every risk like a challenge meant to be conquered.
• Wanderer of the Expanse – No home binds her; the sky itself is her only true domain.
• Reckless, Yet Unyielding – She may charge headfirst into the storm, but she has never once been struck down.

Appearance & Attire

Veyna Stormcall stands tall, her presence as untamed as the winds that follow her. Her storm-kissed skin glows faintly with an azure shimmer, tracing veins of raw energy beneath her flesh. Her silver-white hair is in constant motion, shifting as if caught in unseen currents. Her eyes, crackling with arcs of blue lightning, seem to reflect the distant storms of the world above.

She wears a Tempestcloak, woven from wind-charged silk that billows and changes hues depending on the sky’s mood. Strapped to her waist is a Skyfarer’s Harness, a blend of reinforced leather and lightweight metal that allows her to navigate high-altitude currents. Her boots, embedded with Gale Runes, leave no footprints—only faint whorls of air in their wake.

Signature Accessories:

• Stormwake Spear – A weapon forged from sky-iron, crackling with stored energy, capable of channeling lightning when thrown.
• Windcaller’s Bracers – Ancient armguards that allow her to shift air currents, redirecting incoming projectiles or guiding her leaps across impossible distances.
• The Eye of the Maelstrom – A crystalline shard said to be taken from the heart of a living storm, pulsing with knowledge only the winds can whisper.

Personality & Traits

• Fiercely Independent – Veyna does not bow to fate, choosing instead to forge her own path like a gust of wind through the mountains.
• Charismatic & Unpredictable – Her presence is electric, drawing people in with a natural charm, but she is as changeable as the sky itself.
• Fearless Skyfarer – She thrives in danger, treating every risk like a challenge meant to be conquered.
• Wanderer of the Expanse – No home binds her; the sky itself is her only true domain.
• Reckless, Yet Unyielding – She may charge headfirst into the storm, but she has never once been struck down.

Background & Role in the World

Born amid the Thundering Awakening, when the floating city of Zephrandra was nearly torn apart by an unnatural storm, Veyna was marked by the elements from the moment she took her first breath. The elders of the Galeforged Pact saw her as a child of destiny, but she rejected their chains of prophecy, choosing instead to carve her own legend.

Now, she roams the Stormward Isles, navigating the skybridges and lost ruins hidden within the clouds, seeking the forgotten wisdom of the First Skyborn. Though many believe her heart belongs to the winds alone, there are whispers that she is searching for something—or someone—that was lost to the tempest long ago.

Current Goal & Conflict

A strange phenomenon has emerged in the Horizon’s Rift—a stretch of sky where no wind blows, and even the most seasoned skyfarers fear to tread. Rumors speak of a Stormbound Titan, an entity that once shaped the heavens but was locked away when the Spiral first turned. Veyna, ever drawn to the impossible, knows she must be the first to uncover its truth. But to do so, she may have to face the one storm she cannot outrun—her own past.

What’s Next

My approach to AI-assisted worldbuilding emphasizes both rigorous exploration and creative vision, recognizing the power of systematic thinking alongside imaginative artistry to achieve these results.

Here’s my workflow:

1. Establish foundational principles for the fictional world.
2. Explore logical consequences and possibilities arising from these principles in collaboration with the machine.
3. Capture moments of discovery and emergent phenomena, prioritizing exploration over predetermined outcomes.
4. Build on previous insights, creating a continuous evolution.
5. Allow organic growth through ongoing interaction and experimentation.
6. Embrace impermanence, recognizing that these created worlds are flexible and transformative.

Six is just how I do it for this project. Other worlds have something closer to a canon, but the non-deterministic nature of these machines means you’ll struggle for complete consistency. Building change and ephemerality into this world’s lore was a creative way to get past that while I study new ways of prompting in pursuit of consistency.

In future newsletters, I’ll expand on this process in more detail, sharing specific techniques, challenges, and discoveries from my ongoing explorations. We’ll dive deeper into:

• Creating consistent visual languages for your worlds
• Developing character backstories that translate into compelling images
• Troubleshooting when your AI misinterprets your world
• Applying worldbuilding to creating flexible prompts that allow for creative surprises

Until then, some prompts you can use to great effect.

Most of these work best on the big cloud chatbot LLMs. Smaller local LLMs have less to work with, and can’t retrieve internet sources without some technical work.

• “Assemble a list of experts on [topic]. Create an amalgam of the way they cover their topics, known issues relating to those topics, and best practices for correcting them. Write a summary of that amalgam.”
  • “Expand please” until you’re happy with the detail, then: “Fact check please. Cite your sources.”
  • I asked ChatGPT’s 4o model about archery, asked for an expansion, then told it to fact check, but it kept repeating the response. o-3-mini, what you get on the free ChatGPT when you press the Reason button, did better by actually citing sources like the USA Archery coaching guidelines rather than just repeating the internet source. That’s something you can verify yourself, and isn’t at risk of being a “citation of a bad citation,” where one source cites another, but that cited source was wrong.
  • Most people won’t notice most inaccuracies, but given the way we’re doing this, it’s about as easy to get it right as it is to wing it.
• “Choreograph a scene involving [character] doing [action].” Add details to taste. This is great for action scenes since it gives you lots of detail to work with.
• “Storyboard a scene involving [character] doing [thing].” Add details to taste. This is great for most scenes for the same reason.
• For either, you can use steps (choreography) or panels (storyboard) to generate images or generate little bits of flash fiction to explore those parts in detail. You’ve ​seen​ the storyboard process if you follow me on Bluesky.
• “Summarize previous prompt and response at the end of each new one. Goal: avoid losing important details as they leave the context window.”
  • Telling it what to do and why gives the LLM more guidance on what to summarize and how. Keeping it short spares tokens, the number “context window” refers to.
  • Letting the machine forget a little and infer missing details can lead to interesting places.
• Two step prompt:
  • ”List the major subgenres of [main genre of your world].” Do the same with subgenres if you want to go deeper. You probably know the depths if you’re into a genre, but you probably don’t recall all of them offhand. Going down into subgenres makes for better worldbuilding.
  • ”Give me a list of key details for worldbuilding in [subgenre].”
  • ”Help me develop a world in this genre interactively. Ask me questions.”
    • LLMs can be too focused. They tend to follow a worldbuilding thread until you take it back to the start: “Summarize my answers. Provide the [subgenre] key worldbuilding detail list. Let’s build the next detail with my answers so far in mind.”

Reply to this email to let me know if anything was wrong or unclear, if you had some ideas, or if you just want to say hello.