Comprehensive Generative Image Style Bible

This document defines the visual canon for Apocalyptica Arcanum. It is intended to guide generative image models, illustrators, designers, mapmakers, token artists, and anyone producing visual material for the setting. The purpose is not simply to evoke a vague steampunk mood. The purpose is to preserve the specific visual identity of the world across all outputs.

Apocalyptica Arcanum is not generic fantasy, generic gothic horror, or generic steampunk. It is a late-19th-century alternate Earth transformed by The Meteor, where industrial civilization, supernatural contamination, religious upheaval, frontier survival, and speculative technology all coexist in a single visual language.

All images for the setting should feel like they belong to the same historical reality.

A Pinterest board with reference images can be found here

At its core, the setting is:

Industrial Gothic Arcane Catastrophe

It combines five primary ingredients:

The baseline world is rooted in the 1880s to early 1900s. Clothing, architecture, machines, transportation, print culture, and material design all begin from this historical foundation.

This is an alternate Earth after The Meteor. The world still contains recognizably historical cities, bridges, cathedrals, rail stations, ports, boulevards, and monuments, but they have been transformed, scarred, repurposed, flooded, frozen, overgrown, or spiritually corrupted.

Civilization did not collapse into medieval fantasy. It kept building. Rail, canals, workshops, laboratories, airships, factories, ports, vaults, and corporate systems continue to function. The world is damaged but still industrial.

Shardisite is the visual and metaphysical hinge of the setting. It is a resource, a pollutant, a power source, a religious problem, a scientific obsession, and a source of mutation. Its presence changes architecture, ritual, politics, warfare, and visual tone.

Cathedrals can house relics, laboratories, engines, rituals, and archives. Science is not cleanly secular. Religion is not passive. Horror is not isolated from modernity. All three occupy the same visual world.

The baseline technological band is late 19th century, with selective speculative extensions.

Visual technology should begin from:

• steam locomotives
• gas lamps
• brass instruments
• telegraph-era mechanics
• iron bridges
• masonry infrastructure
• black powder and early repeating firearms
• leather industrial gear
• coal, smoke, pressure, and riveted metal

Speculative advancement is allowed only when it feels like an outgrowth of this world. Advanced technology should still look:

• mechanical
• heavy
• riveted
• pressure-driven
• hand-built
• dangerous
• material

Nothing should feel sleek, digital, minimalist, plastic, chrome-futurist, or post-war modern unless a very specific exception is being made.

The world is not powered by invisible convenience. It is powered by machinery, heat, pressure, fuel, labor, shardisite, and risk.

The dominant architectural language is drawn from:

• Victorian London
• Haussmann Paris
• Gothic ecclesiastical structures
• industrial-era rail architecture
• canal and dock districts
• stone civic institutions
• overcrowded late-19th-century city blocks

Core architectural features include:

• stone masonry
• soot-darkened facades
• wrought iron railings
• gas lamps
• tall narrow windows
• clock towers
• cathedrals
• arches
• bridges
• elevated rail
• industrial towers
• canal embankments
• flooded lower districts
• stacked walkways and skybridges

Cities should feel dense, vertical, damp, old, and inhabited.

Many cities in the reference set are not horizontally planned in a modern way. They are layered and vertically entangled. Use:

• elevated walkways
• enclosed bridges between buildings
• steep stairways
• terraces
• stacked balconies
• hanging platforms
• multiple circulation levels
• sunless alley canyons

The city should often feel like it grew upward and inward under pressure.

Cathedrals are essential to the setting. They should feel monumental, political, and spiritually charged. Common elements:

• gothic spires
• stained glass
• nave halls
• transepts
• vaulted ceilings
• long aisles
• reliquaries
• altars
• candle groupings
• stone saints, angels, or sacred figures
• ritual platforms

Cathedrals are not background dressing. They are power centers.

The old world persists in altered form. Use:

• partially ruined monuments
• flooded lower quarters
• overgrown bridgework
• broken towers
• abandoned stations
• frozen landmarks
• collapsed mansions
• repurposed civic buildings
• laboratories inside churches
• archives inside vaults

The world should feel like it built over its trauma, not that it erased it.

Rail is foundational. It appears in stations, bridges, elevated tracks, ruined frontiers, and urban cores. Rail imagery should include:

• black locomotives
• smoke plumes
• iron rail bridges
• wet tracks
• covered terminals
• narrow corridors of movement through the city
• rail integrated into elevated urban architecture

Trains should look heavy and lived-in, not luxurious unless specifically depicting elite transport.

Water infrastructure is a major part of the world. Use:

• canal streets
• port districts
• industrial barges
• small workboats
• flooded alleys
• decaying docks
• stone embankments
• sewer channels
• reflective black water
• damp lower levels of cities

Waterways should feel practical, dirty, and embedded in everyday urban life.

Airships are canonical to the aesthetic. They should feel like the industrial age’s answer to imperial mobility, commerce, spectacle, and war. Approved visual traits:

• cigar-shaped dirigibles
• metal or reinforced envelope structures
• riveted hulls
• exposed gondolas
• heavy suspension systems
• docking platforms
• urban aerial traffic
• merchant, military, and racing variants

Airships should look imposing, engineered, and period-appropriate. Avoid cartoon whimsy unless intentionally making in-world poster art.

Factories, refineries, foundries, and energy sites should include:

• pistons
• pressure chambers
• exposed piping
• turbines
• boilers
• crane systems
• chain hoists
• smoke vents
• gear trains
• furnace glow
• iron catwalks

Industrial interiors should feel hot, loud, dangerous, and physical.

Shardisite is one of the strongest anchors in the setting and must remain visually consistent.

It should appear as:

• emerald to blue-green crystalline material
• translucent or semi-translucent
• internally luminous
• particulate or veined with inner light
• capable of dust, chips, shards, chunks, or refined pieces
• capable of casting colored reflections on nearby surfaces

It should read as both beautiful and hazardous. It should strikingly stand out in whatever context its in.

In its “refined” form, shardisite always appears as a faceted crystal or a cut gemstone. In its “raw” form it appears uncut and partially fused with stone or other earthy substrate.

Use the shardisite palette carefully. It should remain distinctive. Primary tones:

• emerald green
• blue-green
• cold spectral mint
• toxic luminous green in contaminated settings

Do not casually assign this glow to unrelated magic systems. Its overuse weakens the identity of shardisite.

Shardisite may appear in:

• vials
• laboratory vessels
• reliquaries
• scales and assay equipment
• engines
• vault chambers
• arcane apparatus
• ritual altars
• power cores
• contaminated growths
• fuel systems
• corporate research tables

When used in machinery, it should look unstable, experimental, and dangerous rather than cleanly domesticated.

Religion in this world is visually serious, public, and politically embedded. Sacred imagery should feel institutional, not whimsical.

Use:

• cathedrals
• stained glass narratives
• candlelight
• altars
• reliquaries
• sacred statuary
• confessionals
• ritual garments
• icon panels
• long aisles and polished stone
• chapels and side sanctums

Divine imagery should feel old, formal, and potent.

Choir-associated spaces should emphasize:

• grandeur
• reverence
• architecture of hierarchy
• warm gold and stained-glass light
• sacred order
• high ritual
• intense iconography

Even when beautiful, these spaces should still feel heavy with institutional authority.

This is the primary exception to the normal color palette as each angel of the choir has its own distinct and striking contrast to the world.

Forbidden cultic or undercroft spaces should emphasize:

• underground chambers
• skulls
• reliquary remains
• candles in clusters
• ritual tables
• stone pillars
• organic corruption
• blood-dark residues
• secret altars
• old bones
• collapsed chapel spaces

These spaces should feel intimate, secretive, transgressive, and old.

The laboratory aesthetic is central to the setting and must not become generic sci-fi.

Approved laboratory elements:

• tiled or stone floors
• old cabinets
• books and ledgers
• brass instruments
• pressure vessels
• chemical glassware
• specimen jars
• scales
• steel examination tables
• hand-built machinery
• arcane inscriptions integrated into devices
• cables and fluid lines
• incubation tanks
• suspended bodies or specimens in extreme cases

Everything should feel like Victorian science pushed too far.

Mutation, experimentation, and bio-industrial horror are canonical visual elements. Use:

• partial skeletal exposure
• malformed anatomy
• shardisite corruption
• tentacular intrusion
• vat-grown bodies
• preserved specimens
• surgical-industrial apparatus
• subtly inhuman traits where appropriate

Avoid generic zombie aesthetics unless intentionally depicting a very specific creature. Horror in this setting should often feel engineered, contaminated, or metaphysically altered, not merely undead.

The setting supports multiple environmental archetypes, but they must still belong to the same historical-industrial world.

Traits:

• cathedral skylines
• rail bridges
• clock towers
• boulevards
• canals
• gaslight
• fog
• soot-dark masonry

Traits:

• boats instead of carts
• lower floors lost to water
• damp brick
• hanging walkways
• industrial towers rising from canals
• yellow lamplight on black water

Traits:

• weathered timber
• rail spurs
• mud, cold, rot
• small depots
• survival over ornament
• remnants of industrial ambition

Traits:

• fur-lined clothing
• isolated patrols
• frozen monuments
• snowbound infrastructure
• skeletal remains of old cities
• bleak horizons
• expedition imagery

Traits:

• terraced architecture
• suspension bridges
• precarious walkways
• deep ravines
• mist
• adaptation to severe terrain

Traits:

• drowned masonry
• dead trees
• moss
• skeletal towers
• waterlogged ruins
• invasive growth
• silence and rot

Culturally distinct but still mechanically entangled cities. These should preserve:

• local materials and silhouettes
• vertical density
• layered circulation
• improvised expansion
• mechanical integration